NATIONAL BRIEFS

WASHINGTON STATE: A child tells about massacre

Little Robina took her seat wearing a deep-red head covering and a nervous smile. She giggled as any 7-year-old in the spotlight might. But when the questions began, what she recalled seemed impossibly dark: how she hid behind her father when the gunman came to their village that night, he fired, and how her father died, cursing in pain and anger. "I was standing behind my father," she testified simply, by video feed Saturday night from Afghanistan during a hearing for the soldier accused of killing 16 civilians, including nine children, in Kandahar province. "He shot my father." A bullet struck her in the leg, but she didn't realize it right away, she said. Her testimony came on the second overnight session of the preliminary hearing for Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, who prosecutors say slipped away from his base to attack two villages. The villagers' stories have been harrowing: torched bodies, boys cowering behind a curtain while others screamed "We are children! We are children!" Bales sat quietly throughout, betraying no reaction to what he heard.

VIRGINIA: Accused rapist can't explain

The accused East Coast Rapist says he doesn't know why he couldn't stop attacking women for nearly two decades. "They were objects," Aaron Thomas told The Washington Post in a series of telephone interviews from his jail cell in Prince William County in Virginia. Thomas said he doesn't think he is crazy, but he knows something is wrong with him. Thomas, 40, is expected to plead guilty this month for the Halloween abduction of three women in 2009 in Prince William County and for a Loudoun County rape in 2001. He faces the possibility of several life terms in prison. His father, a Washington police officer, committed suicide later. Family members described a troubled childhood.

MICHIGAN: Gunman killed in police HQ

A man killed Sunday in a shootout at a suburban Detroit police headquarters first tried to shoot an officer behind bulletproof glass before officers exchanged gunfire with him, police said. An officer was wounded in the shoulder in the shootout in Southfield, north of Detroit. The 64-year-old man had no known grievance with police.