94 charged in Medicare fraud

94 charged in Medicare fraud

MIAMI

Elderly Russian immigrants lined up to take kickbacks from the back room of a Brooklyn clinic. Claims flooded in from Miami for HIV treatments that never occurred. One professional patient was named in nearly 4,000 false Medicare claims.

Authorities said busts carried out this week in Miami, New York City, Detroit, Houston and Baton Rouge, La., were the largest Medicare fraud take-down in history — part of a massive overhaul in the way federal officials are preventing and prosecuting the crimes.

In all, 94 people — including several doctors and nurses — were charged Friday in scams totaling $251 million.

28 die in hotel fire in Kurdish region

BAGHDAD

A fierce blaze at a hotel without fire escapes sent some desperate guests plunging to their deaths in a northern Iraqi oil boomtown, killing 28 people.

Half of those killed were foreigners, a reflection of the thousands of migrants who have flooded the Kurdish region in northern Iraq in recent years in search of economic opportunities.

The dead included people from Cambodia, Bangladesh, Canada, Australia, Ecuador, South Africa, Britain, Lebanon, Venezuela, Sri Lanka and one person who was believed to be a foreigner but did not have identification, the Kurdish government said.

‘Barefoot Bandit’ to return to Wash.

MIAMI

Without saying a word, the teenager accused in a two-year string of sometimes shoeless burglaries and other crimes that helped him gain international notoriety as the “Barefoot Bandit” agreed Friday to return to Washington state to face federal charges.

Hector Dopico, an assistant federal public defender temporarily representing 19-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, told a federal judge that Harris-Moore waived his right to a hearing on whether he should be transferred to Seattle. U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Dube said Harris-Moore would be handed over to the U.S. Marshals Service, which will handle his travel.

US seeks UN status for gay-rights group

UNITED NATIONS

The Obama administration and 14 members of the U.S. Congress are urging the U.N. Economic and Social Council to accredit the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission so it can work at the United Nations.

The U.S.-based organization, which has offices in South Africa, Argentina and the Philippines, has been trying since 2007 to get consultative status with the council, which serves as the main U.N. forum for discussing international economic and social issues.

Car bomb marks change in drug war

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico

A drug cartel has used a car bomb for the first time in Mexico’s decades-long fight against traffickers, setting a deadly trap against federal police in a city across the border from Texas, the mayor of Ciudad Juarez said Friday.

Mayor Jose Reyes said federal police have confirmed to him that a car bomb was used in the attack that killed three people Thursday.

It was the first time a drug cartel has used a bomb to attack Mexican security forces, marking an escalation in the country’s already raging drug war.

Federal police and paramedics were lured to the scene by a phone call reporting that shots were fired at a major intersection and a municipal police officer lay wounded at a major intersection, Reyes told The Associated Press.

As the paramedics were working on the wounded man, a parked car exploded, he said.

Associated Press