SAN DIEGO

Marine’s Facebook page may violate military political rule

Marine Sgt. Gary Stein first started a Facebook page called Armed Forces Tea Party Patriots to encourage service members to exercise their free speech rights. Then he declared that he wouldn’t follow orders from the commander in chief, President Obama.

While Stein softened his statement to say he wouldn’t follow “unlawful orders,” military observers say he may have gone too far.

The Marine Corps is now looking into whether he violated the military’s rules prohibiting political statements by those in uniform and broke its guidelines on what troops can and cannot say on social media.

Stein said his views are constitutionally protected.

RIVERSIDE, Calif.

Scores show up at meeting to back hunter who shot lion

Scores of hunters, fisherman and gun rights advocates showed up Wednesday at a board meeting in Riverside to support the Fish and Game Commission president who shot and killed a mountain lion.

The National Rifle Association had put out a nationwide alert calling for members to support Daniel Richards.

Richards came under blistering criticism late last month after a photo of him hugging a dead mountain lion appeared on a popular Southern California hunting website.

Richards shot the lion during a January hunting trip to the Flying B Ranch in Idaho. He later said that he tasted some of the cooked meat and said that it tasted like pork loin.

Hunting mountain lions is legal in the Idaho, but was outlawed by California voters in 1990.

DENVER

Twenty homicides may be linked to murderer who died

A man who died in prison in 1996 after being convicted of murdering three women also killed four others between 1979 and 1988 and might be responsible for as many as 20 homicides, authorities said.

Vincent Groves, a tall hulking athlete who played on a high school championship basketball team, strangled most of his victims, said Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey.

Groves was first convicted of second-degree murder in 1982 for killing Tammy Sue Woodrum, 17, and was released in 1987 on mandatory parole.

By using DNA from one of those murders, crime analysts have since linked Groves to the slayings of four other women.

BAGHDAD

Bomb blasts that kill 15 follow al-Qaida pattern

Attacks in Iraq killed 15 people on Wednesday, including 12 who died in a double bombing in Tal Afar in Nineveh province, a city that American officials once touted as an exemplar of counterinsurgency policy.

The attacks came just weeks ahead of a meeting of Arab League heads of state that is to be held for the first time in Baghdad later this month.

The Tal Afar bombing followed a familiar pattern often associated with al-Qaida in Iraq — an explosion followed by another a few minutes later, after rescuers had arrived to assist the victims of the first bomb.

KABUL, Afghanistan

Britain suffers worst single battlefield loss in six years

Britain, the United States’ staunchest ally in Afghanistan, has suffered its worst single battlefield loss in six years, testing a strained coalition’s commitment to ensure that Afghan security forces can take over the task of fighting the Taliban.

Six British troops were presumed dead after a massive blast destroyed their heavily armored vehicle in Helmand province, Western military officials said Wednesday. The fatalities mark a grim milestone, pushing

British deaths in the course of the 10-year war above 400 — a toll second only to American losses of more than 1,900 troops.

— From news service reports