Syrian rebels capture key town near Jordan border

Motive remains unclear in Newtown school shooting

Newtown Residents Upset About NRA Robocalls

FILE - In this Dec. 18, 2012 file photo, a police cruiser sits in the driveway and crime scene tape surrounds the home of Nancy Lanza in Newtown, Conn. Nancy Lanza was killed in the home by her son Adam Lanza before he forced his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn, killing 26 people. Search warrants released Thursday, March 28, 2013, revealed that an arsenal of weapons including guns, more than a thousand rounds of ammunition, a bayonet and several swords was seized in the Lanza home. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Newly released search warrants in theNewtown school shooting have revealed that gunman Adam Lanza's home was packed with weapons and ammunition, but the documents do not shed any new light on what could have driven him to massacre 20 children and six educators inside an elementary school.

Lanza left behind journals, which state police turned over to the FBI for analysis, but if investigators have any ideas about his motive, they aren't saying.

"Why is the big unanswered question," said Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan was among the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. "So I have to come to grips with the fact that I might never know why he did what he did. But knowing how he did it and what we could do to prevent someone else doing that, those are valuable lessons that we can learn."

Warrants released Thursday provide the most insight to date on the world of the 20-year-old gunman, a recluse who played violent video games in the Newtown home where he lived with his mother.

On the morning of Dec. 14, he took four guns but left behind firearms, knives and more than 1,600 rounds of ammunition at his spacious, colonial-style home.

He loaded the weapons into his car, drove to his former elementary school, and within five minutes of blasting his way into the building, he fired off 154 shots with a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle as he gunned down the first-graders and educators. He killed himself with a final shot from a Glock handgun.

The weapons used in the shooting had all apparently been purchased by Lanza's mother, according to prosecutor Stephen J. Sedensky III, who said in a statement accompanying the warrants that the gun locker was open when police arrived at the house and there was no sign it had been broken into. Lanza shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, in her bed before carrying out the massacre.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy expressed incredulity over the access that the troubled young man had to a cache of weapons.

"There are parts of this story that are unfathomable," he said. "How anyone would have maintained that household that way is difficult to understand."

Sedensky, the prosecutor overseeing the investigation, said Connecticut State Police, Newtown police and other state and federal agencies are still compiling reports and statements from witnesses and testing physical and digital evidence.

"No conclusions have been reached and no final determinations have been made," he wrote.

Investigators found weapons at the Lanza house including a 7-foot pole with a blade on one side and a spear on another, a metal bayonet, three samurai swords, a .323-caliber bolt-action rifle, a .22-caliber Savage Mark II rifle and a .22-caliber Volcanic starter pistol. A gun safe was found in Adam Lanza's bedroom along with a military-style uniform. Literature seized from the house included a news article on a 2008 shooting at Northern Illinois University and an NRA guide to pistol shooting.

On the day of the massacre, Lanza took two loaded handguns to the school along with the Bushmaster rifle that he used to kill all the victims inside the school. A fourth gun, a loaded 12-gauge Saiga shotgun, was found in the passenger compartment of the Honda Civic Lanza drove to the school with 70 shotgun rounds, according to a warrant.

Lanza went through six 30-round magazines for the Bushmaster, although half of them were not completely empty, and police said he had three other 30-round magazines in addition to one that was in the rifle.

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Associated Press writers Dave Collins, Michael Melia and Susan Haigh in Hartford contributed to this report.

China: Landslide buries 83 in Tibet gold mine area

BEIJING (AP) — No signs of life have been detected at a gold mining site in a mountainous area of Tibet more than 24 hours after a massive landslide buried 83 workers, Chinese state media said Saturday.

The state-run China Central Television said more than 2,000 rescuers have been dispatched to Lhasa's Maizhokunggar county to search for the buried.

About 2 million cubic meters (2.6 million cubic yards) of mud, rock and debris swept through the area as the workers were resting and covered an area measuring around 4 square kilometers (1.5 square miles), CCTV said.

The miners worked for a subsidiary of the China National Gold Group Corp., a state-owned enterprise and the country's largest gold producer. A woman who answered the call at its Beijing headquarters Saturday said she could not provide any information.

The disaster is likely to inflame critics of Chinese rule in Tibet who say Beijing's interests are driven by the region's mineral wealth and strategic position and come at the expense of the region's delicate ecosystem and Tibetans' Buddhist culture and traditional way of life.

The reports said at least two of the buried workers were Tibetan while most of the workers were believed to be ethnic Han Chinese, a reflection of how such large projects often create an influx of the majority ethnic group into the region.

The more than 2,000 police, firefighters, soldiers and medics deployed to the site, about 70 kilometers (45 miles) east of Lhasa, the regional capital, conducted searches armed with devices to detect signs of life and accompanied by sniffer dogs, reports said.

Around 30 excavators were also digging away at the site late Friday as temperatures fell to just below freezing.

The reports said the landslide was caused by a "natural disaster" but did not provide specifics. It was unclear why the first news reports of the landslide came out several hours after it occurred.

China's President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang ordered authorities to "spare no efforts" in their rescue work, Xinhua said.

Doctors at the local county hospital said they had been told to prepare to receive survivors but none had arrived. "We were ordered to make all efforts to receive the injured," said a doctor who gave only her surname, Ge, in the hospital's emergency section.

On Saturday morning, a hospital staff member who gave her surname of Wu said it had received no one from the landslide, dead or alive.

The Chinese government has been encouraging development of mining and other industries in long-isolated Tibet as a way to promote its economic growth and raise living standards. The region has abundant deposits of copper, chromium, bauxite and other precious minerals and metals and is one of fast-growing China's last frontiers.

Tibet remains among China's poorest regions despite producing a large share of its minerals. A key source of anti-Chinese anger is complaints by local residents that they get little of the wealth extracted by government companies, most of which flows to distant Beijing.

In 2008, unhappiness with Chinese rule spilled over into deadly riots that engulfed Lhasa and an anti-government uprising that swept many Tibetan communities. To quell the unrest, Beijing poured security forces into Tibetan areas and has kept them there since, giving the western China region the feel of a military garrison and further alienating many Tibetans.

In recent years, more than 100 Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protest the stifling security presence and call for greater religious freedom.

NKorea says it's in state of war with SKorea

South Korea's K-1 tanks take part in their military exercise in the border city between two Koreas, Paju, north of Seoul, South Korea, Friday, March 29, 2013. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un warned Friday that his rocket forces were ready "to settle accounts with the U.S.," unleashing a new round of bellicose rhetoric after U.S. nuclear-capable B-2 bombers dropped dummy munitions in joint military drills with South Korea. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

New Afghanistan Commander, Gen. Joseph Dunford: 'We're Here to Win'

In his first television interview since taking control of the international force in Afghanistan, Gen.Joseph Dunford told ABC News' Martha Raddatz that while he expects Afghanistan's insurgency to continue beyond the U.S. drawdown next year, he feels hopeful about the direction of the country.

"I'm very clear that we're here to win," said Dunford. "There are certain things that have to happen. We've got a complete security transition. ... We've got a complete political transition. I think successful elections in the spring of 2014 will be an extraordinary event in Afghanistan and really be a bellwether for the 10 years opportunity that will follow."

Dunford admitted that attacks on the force by Afghan colleagues, like the stabbing of 26-year-old Sgt. Michael C. Cable by a 10-year-old Afghan boy with whom he was working earlier this week, have "absolutely" had an impact on the force. Dunford called such "blue-on-green incidents" a significant threat.

"It's something I take very seriously as a commander, the lives of our young men and women," he said.

Last year, at least 62 coalition troops were killed by "insider attacks." As a result, Dunford said, the NATO coalition has increased training and counter-intelligence ability, including having armed men act as "guardian angels" present at meetings involving U.S. and coalition officials with their Afghan counterparts.

"This is not an area that we'll be complacent in, this is never an area where we'll say we've solved the insider threat problem," said Dunford. "Every day, we're focused on that, we take it serious and we put mitigation measures in place."

Similarly to his predecessor, Gen. John Allen, Dunford expressed cautious optimism about the future of Afghanistan after the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops next year. He said that the Afghan security forces have really taken the lead in protecting their country and are meeting all the benchmarks the Obama administration has set.

"When I look at the Afghan forces there are really three questions that I ask," he said. "One is: Can they assume the lead in 2013? ... And the answer is yes. The second question ... is: As I look to the elections of 2014, can they provide security? ... and the answer is yes. And the third question is: Can they affect full security transition at the end of 2014? And the answer is yes."

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The general maintained the biggest requirement for the Afghans' success will be a commitment by the U.S. and the international community to continue to support the country and its security forces. Just as The U.S. and its NATO allies have made clear to the rest of the world that the force will be drawing down in a year, the Taliban also knows, and it is poised to take advantage.

"We've seen some indication that the Taliban would like to be successful this year, particularly conducting high-profile attacks and assassinations of Afghan leaders to try to erode the will of the coalition, to try to address the confidence of the Afghan people," he told Raddatz.

The commander warned that a lack of confidence by the Afghan people in American and international support could be the greatest weapon for the extremists.

"Many people tell me they're more concerned about the uncertainty of the future than they are about the Taliban," said Dunford, adding that the Taliban "will attempt to feed those fears about the post-2014 environment."

Dunford said the U.S. does not expect that all violence will cease in Afghanistan by next year, but that the goal is to leave the country with a foundation for peace, and then follow up with advisory support.

"From my perspective, we'll still need to be in the four corners of the country post 2014," he said. "We'll still need to provide advice and assistance to the Afghan core level."

He said that, similarly to the situation in Iraq after the U.S. withdrawal, Afghanistan's ultimate success needs to be measured in years, not months.

"I see a great opportunity today for stability and security in Afghanistan 10 years from now," said Dunford. "But it is going to be a long-term process. ... What we are really trying to do by the end of 2014 is provide the Afghans with what I would describe as a 'decade of opportunity.' At that point, security and stability will be in their hands."