Mexico City  - The dreaded Los Aztecas gang demonstrated this week that it can operate with impunity and kill at will, even within prison walls.

The gang was responsible for the deaths of 20 inmates in a prison in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a city that has become a bloody battleground for powerful drug cartels that fight each other and the authorities.

Geneva  - Two parents and their two teenage children were found Friday shot dead in an apartment in Geneva. Police said they were carrying out an investigation.

Zamboanga City, Philippines  - A broadcast journalist was wounded in an attack by unidentified gunmen in a southern Philippine city, a police report said Friday.

Nilo Libares had just left the compound of Radio Agong dxCC in Cagayan de Oro City, 810 kilometres south of Manila, on Thursday afternoon when two gunmen fired at him.

Colleagues immediately rushed the victim to a nearby hospital.

Davao City, Philippines  - A daughter of a senior communist rebel leader was found dead in the southern Philippines, a day after she was abducted by unidentified gunmen, a police report said Friday.

The body of Rebelyn Pitao, 20, was fished out of a river in Carmen town in Davao Del Norte province, 975 kilometres south of Manila, late Thursday.

Rebelyn was the daughter of Leoncio Pitao, also known as Commander Parago of the New People's Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines.

Wellington  - A New Zealander who served more than 12 years in prison for the murder of his parents and three siblings, and who was released on bail after a campaign declaring him innocent, went on trial again Friday on the same charges.

David Bain, 36, was freed in 2007 after the Privy Council in London - then New Zealand's highest court - ruled he had been the victim of "a substantial miscarriage of justice" when he was first tried in 1995 and sentenced to a minimum of 16 years in jail.

Rio de Janeiro  - The Catholic Church on Thursday excommunicated the mother of a 9-year-old girl who had an abortion after being raped by her stepfather.

Brazilian Archbishop Jose Gomes Sobrinho also excommunicated the doctors who performed the procedure ending the girl's pregnancy with twins.

Abortion is illegal in predominantly Catholic Brazil, but the law admits exceptions, allowing it in cases of rape and pregnancies that put the mother's life at risk.

According to the head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Olinda and Recife in northeastern Brazil, all the people involved in the termination of the pregnancy on Wednesday, had committed "a serious crime," more specifically "homicide against two innocent lives."