Navy doctor pleads guilty to $2 million military scheme

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:43:58 GMT

SAN DIEGO -- A U.S. Navy doctor from Coronado pleaded guilty Tuesday to defrauding the military branch, prosecutors said.Dr. Michael Villarroel, 51, admitted that he and others conspired to defraud the Navy by faking or exaggerating injuries to obtain insurance payments intended to help service members recovering from traumatic injuries, Kelly Thornton with the Office of the United States Attorney Southern District of California stated in a news release."Participants in the scheme obtained about $2 million in payments from the Traumatic Servicemembers Groups Life Insurance (TSGLI) program which is funded by service members and the Navy. Villarroel personally obtained more than $180,000 in kickbacks," Thornton said.Villarroel, the tenth defendant to plead guilty to crimes committed under the scheme, says he signed off on applications for a share of the insurance payments, knowing the claimed injuries were false or exaggerated, according to officials. South American theft ring targe...

South Bay 'American Rescue Plan' resources set to combat domestic violence, housing and hunger

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:43:58 GMT

CHULA VISTA, Calif. - Leaders in the South Bay voted to use funding from the American Rescue Plan to help with a variety of issues in Chula Vista: domestic violence, hunger, and housing, all becoming major concerns for people following the pandemic. A green light along the dais Tuesday night could help boost resources for Chula Vista nonprofits and homeless shelters, all thanks to the American Rescue Plan. It's a move one resident tells FOX 5 is a necessity. The city noting while although the height of the pandemic has subsided, issues of housing, domestic violence and food insecurity continue to impact families at rates of pre pandemic levels. Chula Vista City Council approved Tuesday to allocate a total of $700,000 of its nearly $29 million funding given back in August of 2021 from the feds. “I'm happy to see that some of this money is going to the domestic violence program having been a victim of domestic violence in my first marriage..." one resident Delia Dominguez Cervantes sa...

38 dead in Mexico fire after guards didn’t let migrants out

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:43:58 GMT

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico (AP) — When smoke began billowing out of a migrant detention center in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Venezuelan migrant Viangly Infante Padrón was terrified because she knew her husband was still inside. The father of her three children had been picked up by immigration agents earlier in the day, part of a recent crackdown that netted 67 other migrants, many of whom were asking for handouts or washing car windows at stoplights in this city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.In moments of shock and horror, Infante Padrón recounted how she saw immigration agents rush out of the building after fire started late Monday. Later came the migrants’ bodies carried out on stretchers, wrapped in foil blankets. The toll: 38 dead in all and 28 seriously injured, victims of a blaze apparently set in protest by the detainees themselves.“I was desperate because I saw a dead body, a body, a body, and I didn’t see him anywhere,” Infante Padrón said of her husb...

China threatens retaliation if Tsai and McCarthy meet

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:43:58 GMT

BEIJING (AP) — China has threatened “resolute countermeasures” over a planned meeting between Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and Speaker of the United States House Speaker Kevin McCarthy during an upcoming visit in Los Angeles by the head of the self-governing island democracy. Diplomatic pressure against Taiwan has ramped up recently, with Beijing poaching its dwindling number of diplomatic allies while also sending military fighter jets flying toward the island on a near daily basis. Earlier this month, Honduras established diplomatic relations with China, leaving Taiwan with only 13 countries that recognize it as a sovereign state.Tsai is scheduled to transit through New York on March 30 before heading to Guatemala and Belize. On April 5, she’s expected to stop in Los Angeles on her way back to Taiwan, at which time the meeting with McCarthy is tentatively scheduled. Spokesperson for the Cabinet’s Taiwan Affairs Office Zhu Fenglian at a news conference Wednesday denounced Tsai’...

Pamela Smart, serving life, waits for chance to be heard

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:43:58 GMT

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — Vanessa Santiago first met Pamela Smart in 2003 as a fellow prison inmate in New York, working with her as a teacher’s aide and participating with her in an arts rehabilitation program. The two became close, and when Santiago, 43, was released from the maximum security Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in 2020, she continued to stay in touch with Smart and support her petition for a sentence reduction hearing.Smart, 55, has served over 30 years of a life-without-parole sentence for plotting with her teenage lover to kill her husband in 1990. She has exhausted all of her judicial appeal options. The New Hampshire Supreme Court is expected to release an opinion Wednesday on whether a state council that rejected her request for a sentence reduction hearing last year should reconsider it.The state attorney general’s office has opposed Smart’s commutation requests — there have been three denied by the council since 2005 — saying she has never accepted full re...

Nashville shooting highlights security at private schools

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:43:58 GMT

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — An alarm blared and lights flashed as a heavily armed assailant stalked the hallways of The Covenant School.Surveillance footage of the shooting Monday at the private Christian school in Nashville showed many familiar security measures, including the double set of locked glass doors the killer shot their way through before fatally shooting three children and three school employees. “It’s just next to impossible to stop someone with an AR-17 coming through the door,” said George Grant, a leader with the Nashville Presbytery, which is connected with the school. Grant said the presbytery doesn’t have a formal security program for its churches and schools but that members have worked together to share best practices and improve safety. Around the U.S., private schools generally do not face as many requirements as public schools for developing security plans. In Tennessee, laws requiring schools to develop and submit safety plans do not apply to private scho...

Gwyneth Paltrow’s ski collision trial continues with defense

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:43:58 GMT

PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Gwyneth Paltrow’s attorneys are expected to continue relying mostly on experts to mount their defense on Wednesday, the seventh day of the trial over her 2016 ski collision with a 76-year-old retired optometrist.The judge presiding over the trial in Park City has made it clear that he wants Paltrow’s defense team to rest their case by Thursday afternoon — in order to give the jury enough time to deliberate and come to a consensus.Terry Sanderson, the Utah man suing Paltrow, is asking for more than $300,000, saying that Paltrow’s recklessness on the slope caused the crash, leaving him with four broken ribs and years of post-concussion symptoms including confusion, memory loss and irritability. Paltrow has countersued for a symbolic $1 and attorney fees, alleging that Sanderson veered into her from behind.In the second week of trial, it’s clear that both sides have spared little expense to ensure they have a roster of expert witnesses on call i...

Myanmar junta dissolves Suu Kyi’s party, much of opposition

Published Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:43:58 GMT

BANGKOK (AP) — Myanmar’s military government took another major step in its ongoing campaign to cripple its political opponents on Wednesday, dissolving dozens of opposition parties including that of ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to meet a registration deadline ahead of elections.Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, or NLD, was one of 40 parties ordered dissolved in an official announcement by the election commission published Wednesday in the state-controlled press. The NLD governed Myanmar with overwhelming majorities in Parliament from 2015 to 2021 before being overthrown by the military.The NLD had already announced that it would not register, denouncing the promised polls as a sham.The party, and other critics, say the still-unscheduled polls will be neither free nor fair in a military-ruled country that has shut free media and arrested most of the leaders of Suu Kyi’s party. The NLD won a landslide victory in the November 2020 election, but in February 2021, t...