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Nineteen people were shot overnight in Chicago - more than a dozen of them in just half an hour - as the US city's gun violence epidemic continues. Thirteen of the victims were shot within a half-hour period, including eight in a drive-by shooting on a single street.

A disgruntled former women's accessories designer shot a former colleague to death Friday and then was killed in a shootout with police near the Empire State Building that left nine others wounded, officials said. The nine people wounded in the gunfire after 9 a.m. on the Fifth Avenue side of the building were expected to survive, police said.

Rodney King had been drinking and was on drugs when he plunged into a swimming pool and accidentally drowned in June, a coroner's report released Thursday concluded. The report confirmed a previous police conclusion that King died by accident, and the case will be closed, Rialto police Capt. Randy DeAnda said.

Her lies to the patients were meant to embarrass the suburban hospital for firing her, authorities said. They not only “devastated” the patients, they also got her arrested and charged with forgery. Michelle Morrison, 52, admitted she typed out the letters, telling the Alexian Brothers Behavioral Health Hospital patients that their electroshock therapy treatment did not work and that it was recommended that they undergo frontal lobotomies, according to Tandra Simonton, a spokeswoman with the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office.

John Lennon's killer was denied release from prison in his seventh appearance before a parole board, New York corrections officials said. Mark David Chapman, 57, was denied parole by a three-member board after a hearing Wednesday, the state Department of Corrections said Thursday. The transcript of his latest hearing wasn't immediately released.

LL Cool J plays a special agent on TV's "NCIS: Los Angeles" and now he's caught an actual bad guy. Los Angeles police say the rapper grabbed and held a burglary suspect at his Studio City home Wednesday morning.

Labour unrest in South Africa's platinum belt spread on Wednesday, raising concerns that anger over low wages and poor living conditions could generate fresh violence after 34 striking miners were shot dead by police last week.

An amended copy of the actress' death certificate was entered earlier this month and changes her death from being classified as accidental to undetermined.

In more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on conversations and cataloguing mosques, the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism investigation, the department acknowledged in court testimony unsealed late Monday. The Demographics Unit is at the heart of a police spying program, built with help from the CIA, which assembled databases on where Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Police infiltrated Muslim student groups, put informants in mosques, monitored sermons and catalogued every Muslim in New York who adopted new, Americanized surnames.

A drunken man viciously carved up a Brooklyn bodega clerk’s face Thursday after being told he couldn’t use food stamps to buy a $1.25 bottle of beer. “Sell it to me,” the suspect barked at Mutahar Murshed Ali, 34, in the Express Deli in Bushwick about 7:35 a.m. “Don’t get me mad.” Ali told the Daily News he held his ground, telling the enraged drunk he couldn’t buy the 22-ounce Colt 45 with a food stamp card. The suspect hurled a racial slur and then stormed out of the store, Ali said.