When news of the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn broke in France, Emmanuel Pierrat remembered the young woman who came seeking legal advice about half a decade ago. She said she had had an encounter with Strauss-Kahn and, says the lawyer Pierrat, "wanted to know whether I thought what I heard would form the basis for a solid legal case against him." Pierrat says the news out of New York City last weekend was "something I had heard ...

The wife of a Colorado father at the center of the "balloon boy" saga told authorities that the giant helium balloon was specifically created for a hoax to draw media attention, according to court documents released Friday. Mayumi Heene told Larimer County investigators that she and her husband, Richard Heene, knew that their 6-year-old son Falcon was hiding at their Fort Collins home the entire time, even as police and military scrambled to search for the boy, according to the ...

The body of a small child found in a south Georgia landfill has been identified as that of a missing 7-year-old Florida girl, Clay County, Florida, Sheriff Rick Beseler said Thursday morning. John Bankhead of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation told CNN the state medical examiner will positively determine whether the body belongs to Somer Thompson, who went missing earlier this week. An autopsy will be conducted in Savannah, Georgia. The preliminary identification was based on the girl's clothing and ...

Authorities have closed all educational institutions across the county until at least the end of the week, following twin suicide bombings at an Islamic university on Tuesday. By Wednesday, the death toll from the attacks at Islamabad's International Islamic University had climbed to six. Twenty-nine others were wounded, said Naeem Iqbal of the Islamabad police. Watch more about the attacks Officials in the North West Frontier Province, Balochistan and Sindh shuttered their schools and colleges ...

It's just one thing after another for Richard and Mayumi Heene. They've caused such an uproar after last week's alleged balloon boy hoax that Lifetime won't air a re-run of their "Wife Swap" episode. Those who pay close attention to TV Guide would have noticed that the Heene family's first episode for the ABC reality show was scheduled to air on Lifetime on Thursday, October 29, at 2 p.m. ET. "It was on the schedule long before the incident," ...

Two back-to-back suicide bombings killed at least two and wounded 13 others at a university here Tuesday, authorities said. The explosion occurred at the International Islamic University in the Pakistani capital, said police official Bin Yamin. A man and a woman died in the blast, said Dr. Wasim Khawaja of the Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences. Among the wounded, four were in critical condition, said Altaf Hussein, another doctor. All the victims are between the ages ...

Federal authorities are moving to rein in the man dubbed "America's Toughest Sheriff" after complaints that immigration raids by his deputies amounted to unconstitutional roundups of Latinos. Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Maricopa County, Arizona, sheriff's department have had an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security since 2007 that allows his department to enforce federal immigration laws. But Arpaio says the federal agency is moving to revise the agreement to limit that power to checking the immigration status of ...

Disasters in Italy have a predictable chronology: after the calamity strikes, rescues are attempted, destiny is lamented and pledges are made to rebuild destroyed towns. And without fail, as the first victims are still being buried, a criminal investigation is opened. So it happened in April when a 6.3-magnitude earthquake hit the Abruzzo region near the central city of L'Aquila, killing 308 and sparking a judicial inquiry into the allegedly inadequate seismic standards of several of the destroyed buildings. A June explosion at a ...

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has shaken up a state commission that is probing whether a man executed in 2004 belonged on death row. Perry's move forces the commission to delay a scheduled hearing on the case. The governor acted two days before the commission was to hear from an expert who has cast doubt about the quality of the arson investigation that helped convict Cameron Todd Willingham of murder in the deaths of his three daughters in a fire at ...

Like most 14-year-old girls, Natalie Morton probably didn't spend too much time worrying about cervical cancer. But along with all of her female classmates at the Blue Coat Church of England school in Coventry, she received a vaccine on Sept. 28 designed to protect her from the disease. Within a few hours, she was dead. Amid the ensuing media bonanza, local health officials immediately announced a "full and urgent" investigation into Morton's death and ordered a batch of the vaccine to be withheld as ...