Bodyguard

A Glendale man was booked on suspicion of attempted murder Wednesday after he allegedly fired shots at a stripper and her bodyguard on a freeway after she refused to have sex with him, authorities said. Although at least four bullets hit the car, no one was injured. Steve Iskenderian, 21, is being held in lieu of $500,000 bail and will be arraigned Friday, said Det. Dan O'Hanian of the Los Angeles Police Department's Van Nuys Division.

Early in the Bollywood film "Bodyguard," leading man Salman Khan performs what is arguably the world's first muscle dance. That is, wearing a sleeveless denim jacket, he glares into the camera and flexes his biceps to the beat of the song. In case you miss the point of the pulsating brawn, the lyrics of the song noisily declare that the Bodyguard is the hottest and toughest man in town. After which, the story of his extremely convoluted love affair with the lady he is guarding proceeds.

A bodyguard for the Billionaire Boys Club pleaded guilty today to being an accessory to the murder of a Beverly Hills con man whose body has never been found. Under terms of the plea bargain with the district attorney's office, James Pittman, 34, who has been in custody since October, 1984, will not have to serve any additional jail time when sentenced Dec. 1 for the June, 1984, killing of Ron Levin. Pittman also pleaded guilty in a separate case to possessing a handgun.

For a beleaguered and increasingly isolated Afghan President Hamid Karzai, revelations of an alleged assassination plot hatched in Pakistan and involving one of his own bodyguards are another blow to the prospects for a deal to end the Afghan war. The Afghan government's accusation of a Pakistani link in the alleged assassination plot against the Afghan leader adds new tensions to a cross-border relationship already on edge. Lutfullah Mashal, a spokesman for Afghanistan's main intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, said the ringleaders of the assassination plot, an Egyptian and a Bangladeshi, were based in Pakistan's tribal areas.

Gunmen shouting allegiance to the Communist insurgency ambushed and killed a businessman and his bodyguard as they drove to work Monday, police said.

At first, the pills were a way to calm the nerves, washed down with expensive champagne before she emerged from behind the curtains and did what she did best: be Anna Nicole Smith, basking in camera flashes and adoration. But in her last months, the late model came to beg and demand the drugs, drinking a powerful sedative straight from the bottle, asking for her meds an hour after her last heaping dosage as she sought a semblance of relaxation while grieving the loss of her son. That was the downward spiral described by Smith's bodyguard in the first week of the criminal trial of the three people accused of illegally providing the model with dangerous quantities of prescription medication.

Sidney Spiegel, 81, World War II bodyguard to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, died Wednesday in Somerset, N.J., of pneumonia. As an Army sergeant with the military police, Spiegel was assigned to Eisenhower. The general later wrote in his book, "Crusade in Europe," published in 1948: "A sergeant who accompanied me everywhere in France was a motorcycle policeman named Sidney Spiegel. His personal loyalty and his anxiety to protect me knew no bounds."

Jesus Yanez Pelletier, 83, a human rights activist who was Fidel Castro's bodyguard but became his detractor. Yanez Pelletier was often introduced as "the man who saved Fidel," a reference to his early position as a prison guard who refused orders from President Fulgencio Batista's army officers to poison Castro during the mid-1950s.

Clyde Vidrine, a former aide to Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, was shot to death Tuesday as he left a courthouse with a woman, and deputy marshals arrested her estranged husband. Vidrine, 48, died in a Shreveport hospital from shotgun wounds several hours after the attack in front of the federal courthouse, authorities said. James R. Cummings, 35, of Blanchard, was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder, police said.

A bodyguard to Manuel Antonio Noriega overheard two U.S. servicemen discussing the invasion of Panama hours before it occurred, a Pentagon spokesman said today. It was unclear, however, whether the guard relayed that information to Noriega or whether the incident played any role in the U.S. failure to capture Noriega in the days after the invasion. "There is some evidence that some officials may have had some advance thought that this operation was about to happen.

He carries a dictionary under his arm and wears a very large Star of David around his neck. His name is Fidel Babani, but you can call him Senor Scrabble. Babani, in addition to being an active member of Cuba's tiny Jewish community, is president of the also small, but growing, Cuban Scrabble Assn. Two very different passions, perhaps, but in his island nation, adherents have followed parallel paths: From both vantage points, Babani has seen slow, sometimes contradictory change.

Lee Young-guk is a struggling duck breeder in muddy work clothes, shepherding 10,000 feathered wards at his rural family-owned spread near the North Korean border. For the taciturn 50-year-old, his omnipresent baseball cap worn low over watchful eyes, common farm life is a distant second act to the years when he enjoyed an intimate view of a bizarre lifestyle that, as he puts it, "few mortals ever witness. " For 10 years, until 1988, Lee was a personal bodyguard for Kim Jong Il, working among the phalanx of trained killers who protected the future North Korean dictator, infamous for, among other things, his fetishes for handguns, imported caviar and foreign-made limousines.

A motorcycle-borne suicide bomber killed the deputy governor of strategic Kandahar province Saturday, raising fears that insurgents were reigniting a campaign of assassinations of public servants that terrorized the south's main urban hub for much of last year. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed Abdul Latif Ashna and injured three of his bodyguards as he was driving to work in Kandahar city. It was the highest-profile strike of its kind in months. A wave of political assassinations in and around Kandahar -- including that of the city's deputy mayor last April as he prayed in a mosque, and his successor, six months later -- spiked in the spring and summer of 2010.

Michael Jackson's doctor ordered a security guard to remove an IV bag apparently containing the anesthetic propofol from the stricken pop star's bedside and then told arriving paramedics he had administered only a mild anti-anxiety drug, witnesses testified Wednesday. Developing: Updates from the hearing The guard, Alberto Alvarez, told a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge deciding whether Dr. Conrad Murray should be tried for involuntary manslaughter that before instructing him to call 911, the physician told Alvarez to gather up medical paraphernalia, including vials and an IV bag containing "a milk-like substance.

When bodyguards around the nation flocked to San Diego recently, the talk was all about paparazzi, terrorists and the latest tech gizmos, with seminars like "Surviving the Kill Zone ? Human Factors Are the Key. " Guards trained in martial arts showed the latest techniques for subduing nightclub troublemakers, joked about the challenges of guarding celebrities like Paris Hilton and compared notes on the latest technology borrowed from the military. The 29th annual Executive Protection Institute Conference this month came at a time when demand for bodyguards has soared in lockstep with increasing global unrest spurred by wars and economic turmoil and rising public curiosity about the private lives of celebrities.

Ecologists have discovered the secret weapon used by certain acacia trees to defend themselves against ravenous elephants: ants. The finding could one day help conservationists protect vulnerable plants from elephants and other large herbivores, said University of Florida biologist Todd Palmer, who reported the discovery online Thursday in the journal Current Biology. Elephants can have a devastating impact on the trees of the African savannas, Palmer said. A hungry pachyderm can easily demolish a tree, wrapping its prehensile trunk around thick branches and ripping them off. A herd of them can lay waste to an area — a problem for people trying to protect wild lands or cropland.

When Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker decided to leave the exile of their Palm Springs home and return to PTL's Heritage USA complex in Ft. Mill, S.C., last week, their bodyguard of 11 years said he thought it was to "pack up their things and say goodby." "We had an agreement that we would look around for one last time, say goodby to our friends and head back to California," Don Hardister, 36, said in a telephone interview Thursday. "I told them that if anything went wrong, I was going to resign."

They possess major league jewelry. It practically glows in the dark. Some play host to famous faces and some have famous faces. And the possibility of being a robbery victim looms overhead like a haze above Malibu. To reduce the odds, many of the famous, the wealthy and the bejeweled on the social circuit turn to private security when they entertain or go out. At a benefit or even at a party in a private home, that fellow in the tuxedo who is discreetly attentive to the lady in diamonds may be a hired bodyguard.

Mexican authorities on Friday announced the arrest of six police officers as suspects in the slaying this week of the mayor of a wealthy northern city. The suspects include a police agent who served as the mayor's bodyguard. But as Jose Alberto Rodriguez and the other five suspects were paraded before journalists Friday, Rodriguez proclaimed his innocence. "I did not participate!" he protested. Separately, the army announced the capture of four suspected gunmen who may be implicated in the slaying, caught in a raid Friday on a house where a small arsenal of grenade launchers and other weapons was seized.

At first, the pills were a way to calm the nerves, washed down with expensive champagne before she emerged from behind the curtains and did what she did best: be Anna Nicole Smith, basking in camera flashes and adoration. But in her last months, the late model came to beg and demand the drugs, drinking a powerful sedative straight from the bottle, asking for her meds an hour after her last heaping dosage as she sought a semblance of relaxation while grieving the loss of her son. That was the downward spiral described by Smith's bodyguard in the first week of the criminal trial of the three people accused of illegally providing the model with dangerous quantities of prescription medication.