BALTIMORE — Federal prosecutors say 13 female correctional officers, seven inmates and five others with gang ties have been charged with plotting to smuggle drugs, cellphones and other contraband into the Baltimore jail and other corrections facilities.
An indictment unsealed Tuesday said the ring also involved sex between inmates and guards that led to four of the officers becoming pregnant by Tavon White, leader of a jailhouse gang called the Black Guerrilla Family. He is held at the Baltimore City Detention Center, awaiting trial on a charge of attempted murder.
The indictment claims the gang ran the scheme from inside the detention center and charges gang members and corrections officers with conspiracy, drug possession and distribution and money laundering.
A telephone call seeking comment from White's attorney was not immediately returned Tuesday.
CHICAGO -- Chicago police say a 15-year-old boy was found fatally shot in a backyard about four blocks from President Barack Obama's home on the city's South Side.
Cornelius German had been shot in the back and was found unresponsive at about 9:40 p.m. Monday in the 700 block of E. 50th Place.
Police Department spokesman John Mirabelli says German was a gang member but that the motive for the shooting was not yet certain.
German was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after he was found.
Obama's home is just blocks away in the Kenwood neighborhood.
Mirabelli says no one is in custody as of Tuesday morning.
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson underwent abdominal surgery Monday after sustaining injuries from a wrestling match earlier this month. The "Pain & Gain" movie star suffered a torn abdomen and abductor muscles, he said, from an April 7 match against WWE Champion John Cena, who was defending his title.
"Saw my Dr who had to push my intenseness back thru the tear in my abdomen. Kinda romantic. Surgery is next week. #BringItOn," he wrote.
Johnson's rep confirmed to E! News that the star had undergone an emergency hernia operation last night that caused him to miss the Los Angeles premiere of his new film. Director Michael Bay also wished him well from the red carpet: "Dwayne's hurt tonight. He was pushing it too hard. [He] needs to grow up and stop wrestling 300-pound men."
MONROVIA, Calif. -- Authorities lifted evacuation orders for some residents Saturday night as firefighters made advances on a brush fire in foothills east of Los Angeles, officials said.
About 200 homes were forced to evacuate earlier in the day after the blaze erupted in the San Gabriel Mountains, authorities said.
The fire was sparked by equipment used by a gardener working the backyard, said Jennifer McLain, a city spokeswoman. Flames spread to the hillside behind the residence, scorching about 175 acres and sending a huge smoke cloud that could be seen across the San Gabriel Valley.
The fire did not threaten homes, but authorities ordered evacuations as a precaution. They began lifting evacuation orders late Saturday after firefighters contained 50 percent of the blaze, and winds subsided.
Full containment was expected Sunday.
Fire Chief Chris Donovan said dry, thick brush on steep terrain made the fire difficult to contain.
More than 200 firefighters, aided by water-dropping helicopters and an air tanker, were battling the blaze.
One firefighter suffered a heat-related injury.
As the Monrovia fire burned, a four-acre brush fire ignited across town near Interstate 405, forcing the closure of southbound lanes for at least an hour and causing traffic to back up for miles. That fire has been contained
GRAFTON, Ill. -- The Mississippi River is topping out at some problematic spots, but there is growing concern that spring floods are far from over.
The river was at or near crest at several places Sunday between the Quad Cities and near St. Louis. Some towns in the approximate 100-mile stretch of river from Quincy, Ill., to Grafton, Ill., reached 10-12 feet above flood stage.
The good news was that most businesses and homes were high and dry, though hundreds of acres of farmland were under water, bridges were closed at Quincy and Louisiana, Mo., and countless roads were shutdown.
But river towns aren't yet in the clear: An inch or more of rain is in the forecast as well as continuing accumulation of snow to the north, especially in Minnesota and the Dakotas. Flood watchers along both the Missouri and Mississippi rivers know that once that snow – record levels in some cases – melts, a lot of it ends up in the big rivers.
The current flooding is bad enough. In scenic Grafton, a small tourist town 40 miles north of St. Louis, floodwater 3 inches deep seeped into the basement of Pam and Dennis Bick's home where they've lived for four decades.
"We have time to figure out what to do, where we would go and where we would put everything," Pam Bick, 57, said. "I don't want it to come up any more. But I can't stop it."
Rain last week started the whole mess, causing the Mississippi and many other rivers to surge in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. Flooding has now been blamed in three deaths – two at the same spot in Indiana and one in Missouri. In all three cases, vehicles were swept off the road in flash floods.
Spots south of St. Louis aren't expected to crest until late this week, and significant flooding is possible in places like Ste. Genevieve, Mo., Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Cairo, Ill.
Adding to concern is the forecast. National Weather Service meteorologist Julie Phillipson said an inch of rain is likely in many places Monday night into Tuesday, some places could receive more than that."That's not what we want to see when we have this kind of flooding, that's for sure," Phillipson said.
In La Grange, Mo., sandbags were holding back the murky Mississippi River water at City Hall, a bank and a handful of threatened homes, and the water was dropping. This flood was little more than an inconvenience, Lewis County emergency management director David Keith said.
"What we're worried about now is all that snow melt in North and South Dakota and Minnesota,"Keith said, referencing the state's mounds of April snow.
Forecasters said up to 6 inches of new snow were possible in the Black Hills area of South Dakota through Monday morning. But AccuWeather meteorologist Alan Reppert said it may stay cold long enough to the north to make for a gradual melt. Of greater concern, he said, is the Red River in North Dakota, which could see significant flooding in the coming weeks.
By Sunday, sandbagging had all but stopped in Clarksville, Mo., evidence of the confidence in the makeshift sandbag levee hurriedly erected to protect downtown. The river Sunday was about 10 feet above flood stage and expected to rise another foot before cresting Monday.
"We believe we'll have a successful conclusion," said Jo Anne Smiley, longtime mayor of the 442-resident hamlet.
In Grand Rapids, Mich., Mayor George Heartwell declared a state of emergency as the flooding Grand River poured into the basements of several hotels and other downtown buildings.
Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn declared at least 41 counties disaster areas from flooding. The Fox River in northern Illinois reached record levels, and several records were possible along the Illinois River.
Indiana officials were still determining if flooded communities like Kokomo, Tipton and Elwood will be eligible for disaster aid.
BOSTON — A doctor involved in treating the Boston Marathon bombing suspect who died in a gunbattle with police says he had injuries head to toe and all limbs intact when he arrived at the hospital.
Dr. David Schoenfeld said 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was unconscious and had so many penetrating wounds when he arrived at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center early Friday that it isn't clear which ones killed him, and a medical examiner will have to determine the cause of death.
The second bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was in serious condition at the same hospital after his capture Friday night. The FBI has not allowed hospital officials to say any more about his wounds or condition.
Schoenfeld lives in the Boston suburb of Watertown and heard explosions from the shootout between the two brothers and police early Friday. He called the hospital to alert staff they likely would be getting injured people, then rushed in to coordinate preparations.
"We had three or four trauma teams in different rooms set up and ready," unsure of whether they would be treating a bombing suspect, injured police or bystanders, Schoenfeld said.
The older Tsarnaev's clothes had been cut off by emergency responders at the scene, so if he had been wearing a vest with explosives, he wasn't by the time he arrived at the hospital, the doctor said.
"From head to toe, every region of his body had injuries," he said. "His legs and arms were intact – he wasn't blown into a million pieces" – but he lost a pulse and was in cardiac arrest, meaning his heart and circulation had stopped, so CPR, or cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, was started.
Schoenfeld did not address police's assertion that Tsarnaev was run over by a car driven by his brother as he fled the gunfire.
The doctor said he couldn't discuss specific treatments in the case except to say what is usually done in such circumstances, including putting a needle in the chest to relieve pressure that can damage blood vessels, and cutting open the chest and using rib-spreaders to let doctors drain blood in the sac around the heart that can put pressure on the heart and keep it from beating.
fter 15 minutes of unsuccessful treatment, doctors pronounced him dead."Once you've done all of those things ... if they don't respond there's really nothing you can do. You've exhausted the playbook," he said.
"We did everything we could" to try to save his life, Schoenfeld said.
How did the medical team react to treating the bombing suspect?
"There was some discussion in the emergency room about who it was. That discussion ended pretty quickly," Schoenfeld said. "It really doesn't matter who the person is. We're going to treat them as best we can."
* Tells Russian interviewer FBI was monitoring older son
* Both parents says Internet use was monitored (Adds father, details from mother)
By Timothy Heritage
MOSCOW, April 20 (Reuters) - One of the two ethnic Chechens suspected by U.S. officials of being behind the Boston Marathon bombings had been under FBI surveillance for at least three years, his mother said.
Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the English-language Russia Today state television station in a phone interview, a recording of which was obtained by Reuters, that she believed her sons were innocent and had been framed.
Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, was killed in a shootout with police and his 19-year-old brother Dzhokhar was captured after a day-long manhunt.
"He (Tamerlan) was 'controlled' by the FBI, like, for three to five years," she said, speaking in English and using the direct English translation of a word in Russian that means monitored.
"They knew what my son was doing, they knew what sites on the Internet he was going to," she said in what Russia Today described as a call from Makhachkala, where she lives in Russia's Dagestan region after returning from the United States.
Tsarnaeva echoed the boys' father, Anzor, who said on Friday that he believed they had been framed. Both suggested in separate interviews that the FBI had made no secret of the fact that at least one of the brothers was being watched.
"I do not believe that my sons could have planned and organised the terrorist act, because they knew U.S. national security services were keeping an eye on them," Anzor Tsarnaev told Russia's Channel One television.
"They (the security services) said 'We know what you eat, what you read on the Internet'," he said, without making clear how the security officers had made contact.
In her interview with Russia Today, Tsarnaeva suggested FBI officers had visited her home when she still lived in the United States and told her that Tamerlan "was really an extremist leader and that they were afraid of him."
"It is really, really a hard thing to hear. And being a mother, what I can say is that I am really sure, I am, like, 100 percent sure, that this is a set-up," she said.
She did not say whether the FBI had started to take an interest in Tamerlan although she also referred to the security services' interest in what Internet sites he visited.
U.S. government officials have said the brothers were not under surveillance as possible militants.
But the FBI said in a statement on Friday that in 2011 it interviewed Tamerlan at the request of a foreign government, which it did not identify.
It said the matter was closed because interviews with Tamerlan and family members "did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign".
The FBI statement was the first evidence that the family had come to security officials' attention after they emigrated to the United States from Dagestan about a decade ago.
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