WASHINGTON – The FBI is investigating whether an analyst for the Pentagon’s No. 3 official acted as a spy for Israel, giving the Jewish state classified materials about secret White House deliberations on Iran, federal law enforcement officials said Friday. No arrests have been made, the officials said. But another official said an arrest in the case could come next week. The officials refused to identify the Pentagon employee under investigation, but said the person works in the office of Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. Feith is a key aide to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Al-Qaida terrorists looking for a U.S. military target might try to attack a Veterans Affairs hospital rather than a base or other high-security installation, the FBI and Homeland Security Department warned in a new nationwide terrorism bulletin. Although U.S. authorities say there is no credible intelligence about a specific threat against VA hospitals, the bulletin said there have been persistent reports of suspicious activity at medical facilities throughout the United States.
A man was charged with felony arson for allegedly disregarding the risk of wildfire while using a riding lawn mower to cut dry grass on a hot day. A blaze sparked by the mower burned 11,000 acres and destroyed 86 homes. William Rupp, 44, is scheduled to be arraigned Monday in Redding on two felony arson charges. He faces a maximum of six years in prison if convicted. The fire broke out Aug. 11 and quickly spread through pine- and oak-covered hills south of Shasta Lake. Officials estimated firefighting costs would top $1.8 million.
A large percentage of the signatures that Ralph Nader’s campaign submitted to get on the Pennsylvania ballot appear to be invalid, his attorney told a court Friday in a concession that casts doubt on whether the independent will be a presidential choice in the battleground state. Lawyers for people sympathetic to Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry claimed in a lawsuit that more than 37,000 of the 47,000 signatures Nader supporters submitted in early August were either forged or flawed.
A federal judge in Chicago on Friday revoked the U.S. citizenship of a Romanian-born former member of the Nazi SS accused of serving as a concentration camp guard. The government accused Joseph Wittje, 84, of Bensenville, of hiding his membership in an SS Death’s Head battalion that guarded Sachsenhausen, a camp near Berlin where thousands were executed or died from starvation, disease and medical experiments. In his 1950 immigration papers, Wittje failed to disclose his membership in the SS, the Justice Department said.
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