Nouel Alba, 37, is accused of setting up a Facebook page shortly after the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in which she falsely claimed to be an aunt of 6-year-old Noah Pozner, according to the Bronx district attorney.

Alba has already been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges she lied to federal agents investigating fraudulent fundraising schemes tied to the Sandy Hook school shooting.

Prosecutors said she posted pictures of the deceased child and sought donations, purportedly for his funeral, through an online account. Four people donated a total of $240 to the fund.

Justine Olderman, a public defender representing Alba, said her client was innocent and criticized the prosecution as overzealous considering Alba was already facing charges on a related matter in federal court.

Alba was arrested at her home in the Bronx on Tuesday morning and later indicted by a grand jury at the county’s State Supreme Court, where she pleaded not guilty, prosecutors said.

She is charged with one count of scheming to defraud and one count of identity theft. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison.

Alba faces a federal trial, due to begin in July, on the charge she lied to federal agents in Connecticut who were investigating fraudulent fundraising schemes connected to the Newtown massacre. She has pleaded not guilty.

If convicted in that case, she would face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

“We are shocked that the Bronx D.A.’s Office would use its limited resources to prosecute a case that has already been brought against Ms. Alba in federal court where she has already denied these charges and is fighting to prove her innocence,” Olderman said in an email.

Alba is a single mother raising two children and previously had no criminal record, Olderman said. Alba has been released on bail and due back in State Supreme Court on August 8.

(Editing by Daniel Trotta and Andrew Hay)

The announcement followed the handover to Mongolian officials on Monday of another T. bataar skeleton, which had been sold at auction in New York for more than $1 million before it was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

That sale, which took place in May against the orders of a Texas judge, led authorities to recover more skeletons during a series searches over the ensuing months.

“The recovery of this treasure trove of dinosaur fossils is the latest significant step in returning missing pieces of the Mongolian people’s history that were literally dug out from under them,” Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for New York’s southern district, said in a statement.

Mongolia, whose portion of the Gobi Desert is rich with dinosaur fossils, has long banned the private ownership and export of fossils found within its borders. Nonetheless, many specimens are smuggled out and pass through U.S. customs with vague or misleading labels, and Mongolian dinosaur fossils are openly sold in the United States at auctions and trade fairs, paleontologists say.

Texas-based Heritage Auctions auctioned the T. bataar in New York City last May. In the run-up to that sale, paleontologists and the Mongolian government alerted U.S. authorities that the T. bataar was almost certainly Mongolian.

The T. bataar, which died during the late Cretaceous period, was being sold on behalf of Eric Prokopi, a fossil preparer and dealer in Gainesville, Florida. Many of the other fossils whose repatriation was announced on Friday had also passed through his hands, the U.S. attorney said.

They included a Saurolophus angustirostris that Prokopi had tried to sell through an auction house in California, and at least five Oviraptor skeletons that, coincidentally, arrived in a delivery truck at Prokopi’s home as it was being searched by federal agents in October.

Prokopi pleaded guilty to smuggling charges in December, and was released on bail pending sentencing in August. Georges Lederman, his lawyer, said on Friday that Prokopi had never sought to profit from the fossils.

“The government has painted my client as some nefarious black-market smuggler,” Lederman said in a telephone interview. “He is not. He is a young man with a wife and two young children who has pursued his lifelong love of dinosaurs and fossils. He is hardly a wealthy man.”

Prokopi had spent more than 1,000 hours mounting the original T. bataar skeleton, and agreed to the U.S. government’s request that he help with the skeleton’s disassembling and packing for its return to Mongolia, Lederman said.

“He wanted to make sure it was done right,” he added.

Another T. bataar skeleton, several Gallimimus skeletons, an Ankylosaurus skeleton and skull, a Protoceratops skeleton and several dinosaur egg fossils will also be returned to Mongolia, according to the prosecutor.

The Mongolian Embassy in Washington had no comment Friday.

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Doina Chiacu)

Last month, the college booked the shamed British designer,
once one of the most revered talents in the fashion world, to
teach a workshop called “Show Me Emotion.” His hiring drew
complaints from some students who said the school should not
employ someone convicted of a hate crime.

The school announced on Tuesday that the class had been
canceled.

“An important element of the planned workshop with John
Galliano was a candid conversation about the connection between
his professional work and his actions in the world at large,”
the design school said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, we could not reach consensus with Mr.
Galliano on the conditions of this conversation, and the program
could not move forward,” the school said.

A spokeswoman for Parsons would not comment further on the
disagreement, or whether the complaints, including an online
petition against Galliano’s visit with over 2,000 signatories,
affected the decision.

Liz Rosenberg, Galliano’s publicist, did not respond to
requests for comment on Wednesday.

In 2011, a French court convicted Galliano for making
“public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or
ethnicity” after two episodes at a café near his Paris home in
which he used anti-Semitic slurs while arguing with other
customers. The court gave him a suspended fine of 6,000 euros
($8,000), which he will have to pay only if he is convicted of a
similar offence.

Before his trial, a video of a third episode was published
by a British newspaper in which Galliano could be seen drunkenly
taunting people at a nearby table, saying, “I love Hitler, and
people like you would be dead,” and calling them ugly. Dior
fired him from his position as creative director shortly
afterwards, and he was shunned by many prominent people in the
fashion world.

Galliano apologized to the court for his behavior, and said
he had since sought for treatment for alcohol and sedatives to
which he said he was addicted and which he partly blamed for the
outbursts.

Since his downfall, Galliano designed a wedding dress for
the model Kate Moss, and, earlier this year, spent several weeks
working at Oscar de la Renta’s studio in New York, preparing for
de la Renta’s New York Fashion Week show in February.

Before cancelling the class, Parsons said it believed
Galliano, 52, “has demonstrated a serious intent to make amends
for his past actions.”

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg, Bernard Orr)

Not due to open until 2015, the 800,000-square-foot (74,322-square-meter) transit hub will eventually link numerous New York City subway lines with commuter trains and ferry services to neighboring New Jersey.

One official called the rising of the arches a “significant milestone” in the rebuilding of the World Trade Center complex, which was destroyed by hijacked airliners on September 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people.

“We will not, at this site, allow us to be defined as a people by those events,” said Steve Plate, director of construction for the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, which owns the World Trade Center site.

Although the Port Authority has pared back some aspects of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s design, including fixing in place the steel-and-glass arches that were once intended to be retractable, the cost of the project has almost doubled from its original estimate to nearly $4 billion.

Calatrava has said his design was intended to evoke a white dove taking flight.

PATH commuter trains have been running in and out of the site since shortly after the attacks with a makeshift entrance at the surface. Beset by years of delays, the rebuilt World Trade Center site is taking form.

The National September 11 Memorial, constructed around the footprints of the fallen twin towers, opened on the 10th anniversary of the attacks in 2011, although the accompanying museum is still under construction.

Workers last week moved into place the final pieces of the spire atop One World Trade Center, the site’s tallest skyscraper, which when completed, will reach 1,776 feet.

(Editing by Daniel Trotta, G Crosse)

Chen, who made international headlines last year when he escaped house arrest and spent 20 hours on the run before finding refuge at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, said his nephew was suffering from appendicitis and being treated only by a fellow inmate who had received some medical training.

“He’s not being given proper medical treatment or being taken to a medical facility outside the jail,” Chen told Reuters in an interview, speaking through an interpreter.

Chen, who was born blind and taught himself law, said China was using “ruffian, hooligan tactics to try and scare me into silence.”

He said his relatives had been increasingly harassed by Chinese authorities since mid-April, around the anniversary of his escape from 19 months of harsh house arrest in eastern Shandong province.

He said he was “extremely happy and very grateful” to learn of the State Department’s announcement on Thursday that Secretary of State John Kerry would raise the case of his nephew, Chen Kegui, with China. He said he had not been contacted by anyone at the department about the plan.

Kerry tried calling Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to discuss Chen’s imprisoned nephew, but Wang was not available, the State Department said on Friday.

Chen’s nephew was charged after using knives to fend off local officials who burst into his home the day after Chen’s escape was discovered. He was sentenced to more than three years in jail in November after a trial Washington described as “deeply flawed.”

Chen said, “There’s not enough power behind closed-door diplomacy,” and that the United States needed “to strengthen their criticism of the Chinese government,”

“What I mean is at the moment the methods that the U.S. government may be using to bring up these matters with the Chinese government is clearly not enough, it’s too weak. What they need to do is strengthen their criticism of the Chinese government.”

Chen came to prominence by campaigning for farmers and disabled citizens and exposing forced abortions before he was placed under house arrest.

Chen’s older brother, Chen Guangfu, said this week that local authorities had harassed him repeatedly since mid-April by throwing rocks, bottles and dead poultry at his home in a village in Shandong province in retaliation for what they believed were Chen’s plans to visit Taiwan and Tibet.

Chen said on Friday he planned to visit supporters in Taiwan next month but had no plans to visit Tibet. He spoke with Reuters after giving a speech at the launch of a report into Chinese censorship by PEN International, an association of writers that advocates for freedom of expression.

Chen, who lives in New York with his wife and is studying law at New York University, said he hoped to return to China.

“Part of the issue is, if I go back, will I be able to leave at any time?” he said.

(Editing by Paul Thomasch and Peter Cooney)

Francis Sourou Ahissou, a 48-year-old citizen of Togo in West Africa, entered a guilty plea in Manhattan federal court as part of a plea deal with the government.

He admitted he agreed to sell cocaine to people he thought were Taliban militants that could then be resold for a profit, and that some of the cocaine would be smuggled into the United States, during meetings in Benin and Ghana in 2010 with undercover informants working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The Taliban ruled Afghanistan until the U.S. invasion of 2001 and is deemed a terrorist organization by the United States.

Ahissou and four other men arrested in the sting had been charged with one count of conspiracy to engage in narco-terrorism and one count of conspiracy to distribute more than 5 kg (11 lb) of cocaine knowing it would be imported into the United States.

Under the deal with prosecutors, Ahissou agreed to plead guilty to only the second charge in exchange for a recommendation from the government that he be sentenced to 14 to 17 and a half years in prison.

The maximum penalty is life in prison and a fine of $10 million.

Speaking in French through an interpreter, Ahissou told the court he had a degree in accounting and confirmed he understood his rights and the charges against him.

Before being led away in handcuffs, Ahissou nodded at the judge and the prosecutor, thanking each in turn.

He is due to be sentenced on August 7.

Ahissou and four other men charged in the sting were arrested in Monrovia, Liberia, with the help of Liberian authorities in February 2011. He has been in custody since then.

Other men arrested in the sting were also charged with agreeing to sell surface-to-air missiles to people they thought were Taliban militants for use in Afghanistan.

(Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst. Editing by Andre Grenon)

Jia Hou, the Liu campaign’s former treasurer, was found guilty of three of four counts against her; she was cleared of the fourth count. Xing Wu Pan, a fundraiser for the candidate also known as Oliver, was found guilty of both counts against him.

U.S. prosecutors said the two were part of a conspiracy to fraudulently obtain money from the city’s donation-matching program and that the conspiracy was thwarted only by a federal investigation.

“As the jury found, Jia Hou and Oliver Pan stuck a knife into the heart of New York City’s campaign finance law,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, the chief federal prosecutor for Manhattan, said in a statement.

“Cases like this give the people of New York yet another reason to be troubled by the electoral process,” said Bharara, who has made corruption cases against political figures a hallmark of his tenure.

Liu, who is the city’s comptroller, was not charged with any wrongdoing in the case against his two fundraisers.

Bharara brought two separate corruption cases against New York politicians last month, accusing some of selling their votes and another of trying to bribe his way onto the ballot for mayor. Those cases have yet to come to trial.

The jury convicted Pan of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and attempted wire fraud, each charge carrying a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Hou was acquitted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, but was convicted of attempted wire fraud plus obstruction of justice and making false statements.

Sentencing was set for September 20.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Leslie Adler)

The U.S. Attorney’s Office said Jia Hou, the Liu campaign’s former treasurer, and Xing Wu Pan, a fundraiser for Liu, were part of a coordinated conspiracy by the campaign to fraudulently get money from the city’s donation-matching program, thwarted only by a federal investigation.

Defense lawyers for Hou and Pan in closing arguments on Wednesday said the two were “collateral damage” in the government’s “obsessive” probe of Liu’s campaign.

The jury, in U.S. district court in Manhattan, is due to begin deliberating the case on Thursday.

Liu, now the city’s comptroller, has not been charged with any crimes and denies knowing of any wrongdoing in his campaign to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor this year.

Liu ranked third in the large Democratic mayoral field, according to an NBC New York-Marist poll conducted earlier this month.

Hou and Pan were barely acquainted, their defense lawyers told the jury.

Hou, who goes by the name Jenny, was described by her lawyer on Wednesday as an overworked, under-experienced 24-year-old “ingénue” when she was hired, who tried her best to follow complicated fundraising rules and to deal with donations from businessmen who admitted in earlier testimony they sometimes misled her to mask irregularities.

Pan’s lawyer said his client agreed to recruit more than a dozen so-called straw donors only at the persistent urging of a wealthy Texan businessman he considered to be a friend and a possible future business associate.

Pan learned later that the man was an undercover FBI agent investigating Liu’s campaign. Straw donors are illegally reimbursed as a way of circumventing limits on individual donations.

“Mr. Pan is collateral damage in the government’s obsessive pursuit in making a criminal case against John Liu,” Pan’s lawyer Irwin Rochman told the jury in his closing argument.

“I don’t represent John Liu. I don’t give a damn about John Liu, but that’s how we got here, and they are now struggling to make this a federal case. This case doesn’t belong in this courtroom.”

Rochman told the jury that Pan admitted recruiting straw donors for the undercover agent, and in doing so almost certainly broke New York state laws, although he argued Pan did this only as a result of government entrapment he described as a months-long “courtship” by the undercover agent involving lunches, fancy dinners and many telephone conversations.

Judge Richard Sullivan instructed jurors on Wednesday that they can convict Pan or Hou of the federal crime of attempted wire fraud only if they find that the defendants’ actions were part of a deliberate attempt to defraud the city’s donation-matching program.

Pan never thought that far ahead, Rochman argued. He barely understood the program, Rochman said, pointing to FBI transcripts in which Pan repeatedly garbles the way the program works. His only goal was to please someone he “naively” thought had become his friend by getting the undercover agent, wired with a hidden camera, a private meeting with Liu at a fundraising event, Rochman said.

Half the straw donors Pan found to secure the meeting were from outside New York City, Rochman said, and therefore ineligible for matching funds. And once the agent got his meeting with Liu, Pan paid scant attention to the fate of the donations he had arranged.

Federal prosecutors have cited only one instance of Hou apparently soliciting a straw donor herself: an online chat with an ex-boyfriend the night before a fundraising deadline in which Hou told him she would reimburse him if she processed his donation. Hou’s lawyers said her offer was a polite gesture and that both knew he would never accept reimbursement from her.

Both sides agreed that the ex-boyfriend was a New Jersey resident and not eligible for the matching-funds program, and that his donation was never processed because the campaign’s $1 million goal was reached the next day.

But in their closing argument on Tuesday, prosecutors said Hou’s apparent willingness to find a straw donor and Pan’s recruitment of several of them could not be a coincidence, and were evidence of a “playbook” used by the Liu campaign in a “corrupt scheme to undermine an election.” They told the jury that Liu must have known that straw donors were being used in his campaign, a charge he denies.

Pan, of Hudson County in New Jersey, and Hou, of Queens County in New York, each face one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of attempting to commit wire fraud. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Hou also has been charged with obstruction of justice and making false statements.

(Editing by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

Prosecutors told the jury that Jia Hou, the campaign’s former treasurer, and Xing Wu Pan, a fundraiser for Liu, were following a “playbook” used frequently in Liu’s campaign when they recruited straw donors, who are then illegally reimbursed for their donations.

Hou and Pan have pleaded not guilty to charges that they broke campaign financing rules by using straw donors in an attempt to fraudulently get money from the city’s donation-matching program.

Liu, the city’s comptroller, has not been charged with any crimes following the federal investigation of his campaign. His lawyer said on Tuesday he was never aware of any wrongdoing in his campaign.

Liu ranks third in the large Democratic field seeking to succeed Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an independent serving his third and final term, according to an NBC New York-Marist poll conducted earlier this month.

In 2011, Pan was secretly recorded several times by an undercover FBI agent who posed as a Texan restaurateur called Richard Kong, who said he was trying to secure a meeting with Liu to ask for help with opening a restaurant chain in the city.

Pan arranged for the agent to donate $16,000 to Liu’s campaign through 20 straw donors and organized a fundraising event at a restaurant to complete the transaction and meet with Liu, prosecutors say.

The New York City Campaign Finance Board limits the amount an individual can donate to a campaign to $4,950, in part to try to prevent wealthy people from having an outsize influence in elections.

Pan explained to the agent that Liu and his campaign staff would know he was the real source of the funds through “code words.”

“The code words are, ‘It’s your event’,” Justin Anderson, a prosecutor from the office of the U.S. attorney for New York’s southern district, told the jury at Manhattan federal court. “Now what that’s code for is, it’s Richard’s money.”

SECRET RECORDINGS

In secret recordings replayed to the jury on Friday, Pan can be heard introducing the agent to Hou and Liu in that way shortly before the agent has a private meeting with Liu.

“It would defeat the whole purpose of the straw donor scheme if the candidate didn’t know where the money is coming from,” Anderson told the jury. “That’s the whole point of these people funneling large donations into a campaign – it’s to get credit for it.”

Hou, as treasurer, also deliberately ignored signs that contributions were coming from straw donors and failed to fully report so-called intermediaries who helped collect donations to the campaign finance board, he said.

“They simply followed the campaign playbook, they selected straw donors themselves who they thought could carry them over the goal line,” Anderson said, saying their actions were part of “a corrupt scheme to undermine an election, conceal a source of campaign contributions, hide intermediaries and cheat the city out of the public’s money.”

Pan’s lawyers say their client was a victim of entrapment who only agreed to the straw donor scheme because of pressure from the undercover agent.

Hou’s lawyers have pointed to her youth and inexperience – she was 24 when she became treasurer – and said she always followed the advice of campaign lawyers in interpreting campaign financing rules.

Paul Shechtman, a lawyer for Liu who testified earlier in the trial, criticized the prosecutors’ approach of suggesting Liu knew of illegal methods in his campaign.

“It’s a sad day when a great office substitutes rhetoric for evidence,” he said by telephone after the hearing. “There is not a shred of evidence at the trial or in the last three years that John Liu knew anything about any wrongdoing that might be connected to his campaign.”

Pan, of Hudson County in New Jersey, and Hou, of Queens County in New York, each face one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of attempting to commit wire fraud. Each charge carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Hou has also been charged with obstruction of justice and making false statements.

Defense lawyers for both defendants are due to make their closing arguments on Wednesday before the jury begins deliberating.

(Editing by Scott Malone and Philip Barbara)

The district attorney’s office began an investigation of abuse allegations and set up a hotline last June following a New York Times Magazine article that accused some former teachers at the prep school in the Bronx of molesting and raping male students.

As a result, police and investigators interviewed 25 former students who said they had been sexually abused by school employees. At least 12 unnamed former school employees were accused of being involved in the abuse, Robert Johnson, the Bronx District Attorney, said in a statement.

“The interviews conducted by The Bronx District Attorney’s Office and the NYPD reveal a systemic pattern of alleged abuse beyond what was outlined in the original New York Times Magazine article,” Johnson said in his statement.

“The reported abuse ranges from what may be characterized as inappropriate behavior to child endangerment, actual instances of sexual contact, sexual intercourse and criminal sexual acts,” he added.

The instances of alleged sexual abuse occurred between 1962 and 1996, with the majority of abuse reported to have happened in the 1970s, he said. There is evidence that some school officials during this period were aware of the abuse but did not report it to the police, he said.

Current New York state law in most cases gives victims of child sex abuse only until they are 23 years old to make a complaint.

The school did not respond to requests for comment on Friday. In a letter to past and present members of the school last August, the school’s board of trustees said they were “appalled and saddened” by the allegations.

The school has said that none of the accused employees still work at the school – at least one has died – and that it is working to improve safeguards against similar incidents happening in the future.

Tek Young Lin, an English teacher at the school until 1986, told the New York Times last year he had sex with around three of his male students, suggesting, to the dismay of many alumni, it was simply a different era back then. The school subsequently removed his name from the chairmanship of the department, which had been named in his honor.

Earlier this year, the school paid settlements worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to most members of a group of 32 students who said they had been abused, local media reported.

The Horace Mann Action Coalition, a group of concerned alumni formed in the wake of last year’s article, said on Friday it was grateful for the investigation. It also called for a change in what it called the state’s “archaic” statute of limitations, and asked for the school’s board to apologize for past events and cooperate with the coalition’s investigation into the accusations.

Johnson, the district attorney, also said he would be working to widen the state’s mandatory reporting law, saying that there is a gap in the current law which means that employees at private schools, unlike those at public schools, are not mandated to contact law enforcement agencies if they suspect a colleague is abusing children.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen; Editing by Paul Thomasch)