Army

Only one lottery ticket - sold in Florida - managed to nail all six numbers in tonight's $600 million Powerball jackpot. But two California players who guessed five of the six numbers will each win $2.3 million, lottery officials said. The winning California tickets were sold at 7-Elevens in Taft and in San Jose, said California Lottery spokesperson Donna Cordova. The winning numbers were 10, 13, 14, 22, 52 and Powerball 11. The lottery involves 43 states, the Virgin Islands and the District of Columbia.

WASHINGTON - The Army suspended the commander of its main basic training camp Tuesday for alleged adultery, the latest in a string of military officers accused of sexual misconduct. Brig. Gen. Bryan T. Roberts, a 29-year Army veteran, was suspended from his post at Ft. Jackson, S.C., while the military investigates allegations of "adultery and a physical altercation," officials said. "We don't have any evidence of any sexual assault. The allegations we have indicate a breach of order and discipline," said Col. Christian Kubik, a spokesman for the Army's Training and Doctrine Command at Ft. Eustis, Va. Roberts, who is married with three children, previously led units in Iraq and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Vietnam veteran John Otte did his best to forget the war. He got married, raised two sons and made a career working at credit unions. But as Otte neared retirement, memories of combat flooded back. Starting in 2005, he filed a series of claims with Veterans Affairs for disability compensation, contending that many of his health problems stemmed from the war. The VA agreed, and now the 65-year-old with two Purple Hearts receives $1,900 a month for post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes - and for having shrapnel scars on his arms.

MEXICO CITY - Responding to mounting concern about disorder in the Mexican state of Michoacan, officials announced Thursday that an army general would take over as its public security chief, overseeing both state and federal security forces. The appointment of the general, Alberto Reyes Vaca, was announced by state officials but had been arranged in coordination with the federal government. For President Enrique Peña Nieto's administration, the move is part of a promised new focus on the southwestern state, long a hotbed of drug cartel violence.

Reading Lewis Sorley's scalding biography of Army Gen. William Westmoreland, "Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam," is like watching a slow-motion replay of an oncoming train wreck. The result of this collision is known: failure of the U.S. military mission, 58,000-plus dead Americans, the U.S. divided and at political war with itself, a once-proud military left tarnished, exhausted and in disrepute. Sorley, a West Point graduate and retired Army lieutenant colonel, is unsparing in his analysis of Westmoreland, the top U.S. general in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and then Army chief of staff in the latter years of the war. In Sorley's view, the general whose rock-like jaw and prominent eyebrows made him look like a Hollywood casting agent's dream of a military leader was arrogant, duplicitous, vain and not altogether smart.

Joe Martinek had 139 yards rushing and scored twice on short runs, linebacker Steve Beauharnais scored off his blocked punt and Rutgers beat Army, 27-10, on Friday night at West Point, N.Y. It was the sixth straight victory for Rutgers (5-2) over Army (3-5) and evened the series at 18-18. The Black Knights have lost 12 straight games against Big East Conference teams since beating Rutgers, 37-35, in 1997. Tom Savage completed 10 of 20 passes for 164 yards to become only the second freshman quarterback in Rutgers history to win a road game.

The head of the Army 's Madigan Healthcare System, one of the largest military hospitals on the West Coast, has been temporarily relieved of command amid an investigation over whether the Army has avoided diagnosing returning combat soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder to save money. Col. Dallas Homas, a West Point graduate has been administratively removed from his position near Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, Army officials announced Monday. Homas had headed the busy medical center since March 2011.  Meanwhile, 14 soldiers who complained about their initial PTSD reviews were scheduled Tuesday to begin receiving the results of a new round of medical evaluations.

When President Obama announced that 40,000 troops now in Iraq would come home by the end of the year, the initial excitement quickly turned to concern that our already struggling economy couldn't easily handle the shock of an additional 40,000 job seekers. Although we should, of course, care deeply about returning Iraq war veterans, we ought not to think for a moment that adding 40,000 workers to the job-seeking pool will break the back of the economy. It's already broken. The nation is laboring under the weight of a reserve army of nearly 27 million women and men who don't have a full-time job, but most surely want one. The term "reserve army of labor" is vintage Karl Marx.

Under a federal program to transform government facilities into models of energy efficiency, Honeywell International Inc. came calling on Army commanders here with a deal to replace the base's decades-old steam power plant. The company proposed installing millions of dollars in new heating equipment and hooking the base to the local power grid -- all free in exchange for the company getting the bulk of future energy savings. It was precisely the kind of deal that politicians and bureaucrats in Washington were pushing at facilities across the country -- modernizing aging machinery without the government spending any money of its own. But today, the Ft. Richardson deal, one of the largest among hundreds of similar contracts, has sunk into a morass of accounting disputes and allegations of misconduct.

Re "Tillman's brother lashes out," April 25 If the Army can present a bald-faced lie to the family of one of its own, to the point of ordering witnesses to keep silent about the truth, what bigger lies could the Army be babbling at the rest of us? I can guess at some: That conditions in Iraq are getting better. That the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are beatable. That the surge is something other than a further tragic waste of American lives. That our prisoners and "detainees" are being treated humanely and fairly.

An upside-down American flag is considered a signal of distress. And that's the feeling Robert Rosebrock had when he looked up and noticed the red, white and blue street-lamp banners outside the Department of Veterans Affairs' West Los Angeles Medical Center were in disarray - tattered, tangled around the poles or flapping upside-down in the breeze. "It was disgraceful," said Rosebrock, a 71-year-old U.S. Army veteran who arranged for the flags' installation 11 months ago using $12,000 donated by Metabolic Studio, a charitable arm of the Annenberg Foundation.

Dependable and steady, Maribel Ramos was a hard-charging Army veteran just a couple of weeks away from graduating from college with a degree in criminal justice. Beyond all else, friends agree, she was not the kind of person who'd simply walk away. But Ramos, 36, has been missing for 11 days, seen last on surveillance footage turning in her rent check at her apartment complex in Orange on May 2. She was reported missing the next day, a Friday, after she failed to show up for a speaking commitment at a veterans group event and then never showed at the softball game she'd played weekly for almost six years.

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. - Army Sgt. John Russell opened fire on U.S. mental health workers at a combat stress center in Iraq out of revenge after doctors said he was not eligible to leave the Army, prosecutors said Monday at the opening of Russell's court-martial on charges of premeditated murder. Five U.S. servicemen were shot to death at the Camp Liberty clinic in 2009. The defense claims that Russell suffered from chronic stress and mental illness that flamed into a psychotic fury.

A fake tweet that claimed President Obama had been injured after explosions went off at the White House was quickly debunked by the Associated Press, which said its Twitter account had been hacked. But a band of hackers who support Syrian President Bashar Assad crowed that they had sent Americans into a tizzy. “This small tweet created some chaos in the United States in addition to a decline in some U.S. stocks,” the Syrian Electronic Army wrote on its website, referring to a brief, steep drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. - U.S. Army Sgt. John Russell pleaded guilty Monday to second-degree murder in the fatal shooting of five fellow service members and the attempted murder of another in Iraq in 2009 after the government agreed not to seek the death penalty. Russell, 48, was dispassionate and matter-of-fact as he gave his first public account of his methodical march with an M-16 rifle through the Camp Liberty combat stress center - the only mass killing of Americans by a U.S. serviceman during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Only hours after a new trailer for "Lone Ranger" debuted online last week, the blogosphere flew into a tizzy questioning whether Johnny Depp's portrayal of Tonto is racist. In the upcoming western, Depp's Tonto -- the sidekick to a masked Texas ranger played by Armie Hammer -- sports face paint and a headdress with a dead raven atop it. Some critics have taken issue with both Depp's costume and the fact that the role was not portrayed by a Native American actor. (For the record, Depp told Entertainment Weekly that in 2011, "I guess I have some Native American somewhere down the line....

The Army made up for recruiting shortfalls by welcoming 630 recruits last year with histories of what the Army termed "serious criminal misconduct" -- including manslaughter and making terrorist threats (Feb. 14). Meanwhile, more than 10,000 personnel have been discharged since 1994 under the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy barring openly gay and lesbian service members. Interestingly, a University of California commission's report on the same day as your article estimates that the Pentagon policy of booting sexual minorities has cost taxpayers $363.

JERUSALEM - Israelis take pride in calling their military the "people's army," a unifying institution that helps smooth over religious differences and instills nationalist values. But despite a long tradition of mandatory conscription, today only about half of all Israelis serve, largely because Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox Jews are exempt. On Wednesday, government talks aimed at broadening the draft broke down amid staunch opposition from ultra-Orthodox groups. The negotiations follow an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that the exemption for ultra-Orthodox was unfair.

SHERMAN, Texas - Sgt. John Russell designed his new house here so there would be room for everyone: for him and his wife, Mandy, his wife's parents and his own. There was a doggie door for Louie and Queenie - "the little ones," he called them in his emails. It was where he wanted to spend the rest of his life when he got home from Iraq, he'd say as he shared photos of the latest construction. After a dispute with a co-worker, Russell fretted that he'd get demoted and would not be able to make the payments.