Criminal Investigation

A recruitment campaign to boost the Army National Guard and Reserve at a difficult time in Iraq and Afghanistan is the focus of a wide-ranging Pentagon fraud investigation, including allegations of kickback schemes involving military personnel, internal documents show. The alleged fraud involves programs that paid $2,000 bounties to soldiers or civilians who signed up as "recruiting assistants" and brought in new enlistees. Investigators have found evidence that recruiters for the Guard and...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A former Alaska Anchorage hockey player acknowledges he was hit by his former coach with a stick during practice, but he said that it didn't rise to the level of the abuse allegation being made by a former teammate. "I am not denying that there was an incident, but I will say in my opinion the story has been greatly exaggerated," Nick Haddad said Wednesday in an email to The Associated Press. "There was an incident with Coach (Dave) Shyiak and myself where he...

A Potomac group home for elderly adults has been shut down after the state began investigating reports that residents were being mistreated. In one instance, an employee of AAA Warmcare taped shut the mouth of a woman in her 80s with end-stage Alzheimer's disease, according a report by Maryland's Office of Health Care Quality . A witness, who is not identified in public documents, provided investigators with photographs, one showing the...

HONG KONG — Hong Kong's corruption watchdog has launched a criminal investigation of its former chief following complaints of excessive spending when giving tens of thousands of dollars in gifts to mainland Chinese and other officials. The Asian financial center's anticorruption agency and Department of Justice said Tuesday there was "sufficient basis" to open an investigation into allegations of possible bribery and misconduct by Timothy Tong. Tong was commissioner of the Independent...

AUSTIN — Hours after a paramedic in West, Tex., was taken into federal custody on Friday for unlawful possession of a "destructive device," the Texas Department of Public Safety and the McLennan County sheriff said they are launching a criminal investigation into the fertilizer plant explosion there last month that killed 14 people. But officials declined to draw a link between the arrest of the paramedic, 31-year-old Bryce Reed, and the disaster. "At this time authorities will not...

WACO, Texas — Texas law enforcement officials on Friday launched a criminal investigation into the massive fertilizer plant explosion that killed 14 people last month, after weeks of largely treating the blast as an industrial accident. The announcement came the same day federal agents said they found bomb-making materials belonging to a paramedic who helped evacuate residents the night of the explosion. Bryce Reed was arrested early Friday on a charge of possessing a destructive...

Federal investigators looking into disclosures of classified information about a cyberoperation that targeted Iran's nuclear program have increased pressure on current and former senior government officials suspected of involvement, according to people familiar with the investigation. The inquiry, which was started by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. last June , is examining leaks about a computer virus developed jointly by the United States and Israel that damaged nuclear centrifuges at...

MOSCOW — Vladislav Surkov, a longtime Kremlin strategist considered the architect of the tightly controlled political system created under President Vladimir Putin, resigned his post of deputy prime minister on Wednesday. His ouster followed an unusually public feud with investigators over a criminal investigation into Skolkovo, a government project to promote innovation modeled on Silicon Valley. Surkov was overseeing the ambitious project. A statement on the...

PRINCE McLEOD RAMS, age 15 1 / 2 months, was taken off life support after being declared brain-dead at 8:38 p.m. Oct. 21 at Inova Fairfax Hospital. A day earlier, paramedics had found him unresponsive, cold and without a pulse at his father's home in Manassas, where he had been on his fourth unsupervised visit permitted by Montgomery County Circuit Court amid a bitter custody battle. His mother had fiercely opposed unsupervised visits. "If anything happens to Prince, he can't say...

WEST, Texas — State and federal agents will release this week the findings of an investigation into a deadly explosion at a Texas fertilizer plant. The State Fire Marshal's Office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will announce their findings on Thursday. Investigators have spent nearly a month combing a 93-foot-wide crater to try to pinpoint what caused the fire and the massive blast at the West Fertilizer Co. last month that killed 14 people....

WACO, Texas — Texas law enforcement officials on Friday launched a criminal investigation into the massive fertilizer plant explosion that killed 14 people last month, after weeks of largely treating the blast as an industrial accident. The announcement came the same day federal agents said they found bomb-making materials belonging to a paramedic who helped evacuate residents the night of the explosion. Bryce Reed was arrested early Friday on a charge of...

AUSTIN — Hours after a paramedic in West, Tex., was taken into federal custody on Friday for unlawful possession of a "destructive device," the Texas Department of Public Safety and the McLennan County sheriff said they are launching a criminal investigation into the fertilizer plant explosion there last month that killed 14 people. But officials declined to draw a link between the arrest of the paramedic, 31-year-old Bryce Reed, and the disaster. "At this time...

MOSCOW — Vladislav Surkov, a longtime Kremlin strategist considered the architect of the tightly controlled political system created under President Vladimir Putin, resigned his post of deputy prime minister on Wednesday. His ouster followed an unusually public feud with investigators over a criminal investigation into Skolkovo, a government project to promote innovation modeled on Silicon Valley. Surkov was overseeing the ambitious project. A statement on the Kremlin website said...

I was considering giving up my gun a while back. Hadn't been to the shooting range in months. Target shooting, not self- defense, was why I bought the thing. But it was serving no purpose locked in a case, unloaded and hidden away. Then President Obama began coming up with the oddest ideas about keeping guns from "falling into the wrong hands. " Dangerous hands, irresponsible hands, he says. But the national gun control legislation set for debate in Congress would rely on a bureaucratic dragnet of " background...

ATLANTA — The former superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools and nearly three dozen other administrators, teachers, principals and other educators were indicted Friday in one of the nation's largest cheating scandals. Former Superintendent Beverly Hall faces charges including racketeering, false statements and theft. She retired just days before a state probe was released in 2011 and has previously denied the allegations. The indictment represents the first criminal charges in the investigation.