LA Times News

LA Times News

China seeks to halt Tibetan self-immolations

Posted: 05 Nov 2012 06:27 PM PST

Officials have tried power, persuasion, propaganda — and money — in a bid to prevent self-immolations by Tibetans protesting Chinese rule.

BEIJING — In the last three months, two of Thinlay Gyatso's relatives have set themselves on fire in protest against Chinese rule, and the 31-year-old Tibetan academic is still sorting out his conflicted emotions over their suicides.

Mothers from Central America search for missing kin in Mexico

Posted: 05 Nov 2012 07:37 PM PST

This year's bus caravan takes mothers, wives and sisters on a nearly 3,000-mile mission across Mexican states to look for missing Central American migrants.

SALTILLO, Mexico — The mothers knock on the doors of flophouses and morgues. They sift through pictures of prisoners and the dead. Clutching pictures of their own, some from long ago, they ask the same questions, over and over.

In Syria, small-town rebels are stuck in big-city Aleppo

Posted: 05 Nov 2012 05:16 PM PST

The outsiders, who entered Aleppo in July, have fought to a deadlock with government forces. Many residents of the once-prosperous city resent the fighters' presence.

ALEPPO, Syria — They are this ancient city's bedraggled warriors: plowmen and laborers, mechanics and carpenters who came from the countryside this summer to "liberate" this formerly freewheeling town attuned to the rhythms of commerce.