Fbi Agent

An FBI agent who investigated a weapons smuggling case denied Wednesday allegations from defense attorneys that he used public funds to knowingly pay for the suspects to have sex. The agent, Charles Ro, said that while undercover in the Philippines he frequently took three Filipino nationals accused of weapons smuggling to karaoke bars where scantily clad and sometimes topless young women worked as hostesses. Ro said the defendants never told him they had engaged in sex with prostitutes at the clubs, nor did the bills he paid indicate that sexual services were being provided.

In Fox's bloody new drama "The Following," Kevin Bacon plays one of the more oft-used characters in thriller fiction. Alcoholic and emotionally detached, his character is former FBI agent Ryan Hardy, who has never quite recovered from his dance with the devil. Once upon a time, Hardy was the lead agent on a string of grisly murders at the fictional Winslow College. When he first encountered Joe Carroll (James Purefoy), he too fell under the charismatic English professor's spell, using him as a source to help unravel the literary clues left at the crime scenes.

A day after meeting a pretty young woman working at a karaoke club in the Philippines, Marc Napolitano started getting text messages from her, he said. The woman, named Maui, wrote that she missed him, loved him and wanted to see him. Within days of their first meeting, Maui went to Napolitano's hotel room, where they had sex, he said. The room was paid for by American taxpayers, he said. So was the cellphone on which he got her messages, and so were the trips that took him to the Philippines.

Sergio Santiago Syjuco said he looked up to Richard Han, who was older, wealthy and clearly important. When Han went into karaoke clubs in the Philippines - which were widely known to double as brothels - he always got the biggest private rooms and the best service, Syjuco said. Managers would offer dozens of young women as paid companions for Han and members of his party, Syjuco said. Han boasted that he was an international arms dealer and he picked up the tab for all the booze and sex, Syjuco said.

SEATTLE -- The target was busy Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, Ore., when thousands of people gathered for the annual lighting of the Christmas tree. The plan, prosecutors say, was to park a van loaded with explosives and detonate it from a distance. “You know, the streets are packed,” Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a young Beaverton, Ore., man, told his contact, who went by the name of Youssef, according to a prosecutorial memo. The plan was “for them to be attacked in their own element with their families, celebrating the holidays.

This story has been updated. See information below. More than 150 years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe can boast a superfluous achievement: He is one degree away from Kevin Bacon. Sort of. In Fox's new psychological thriller "The Following," the 54-year-old Center of the Hollywood Universe plays a former FBI agent dispatched to track down a professor-of-literature-turned-Poe-inspired-serial-killer (James Purefoy) who has escaped from prison and recruited an army of murderous disciples via the Internet.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, long the most famous overachiever in the U.S. Army, is already on his way to a new career distinction: breaking the land speed record for rehabilitation from a scandal. It was only two weeks ago that Petraeus resigned from his job as director of the CIA after it became clear that his affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, couldn't be kept under wraps. The dust hasn't settled yet on the chaos kicked up by the FBI's discovery of the affair, touched off by Broadwell's jealousy of another woman who liked men in uniform.

It seemed at first like a welcome break from political overload. There's nothing like a juicy sex scandal to relieve election fatigue. But this one, it turns out, brims with suggestions of military misconduct and questions of national security that have talking heads droning about matters of policy while most of us just want the dope on disgraced generals, the West Point vixen and Kardashian-esque identical twins. By now, we are all caught up on the basics of the scandal that brought down C.I.A.

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was lucky there was no such thing as email during the Second World War. His romantic relationship with his lovely Irish driver, Kay Summersby, did not come to light for decades and did not keep him from leading the D-Day Invasion, becoming the first supreme commander of NATO or rising to the presidency. Gen. David Petraeus was not so fortunate. He tried to hide an affair with his attractive biographer and jogging partner, Paula Broadwell, by using a dropbox that would evade any email trail.

DOVER, Fla. - He's been dubbed the "shirtless FBI agent" - a rogue investigator so smitten with a pretty socialite that he sent her a bare-chested photo of himself and pursued her complaint about harassing emails all the way to Congress. The facts emerging about Frederick Humphries - until now perhaps the least-known figure in the David H. Petraeus adultery scandal - offer a different portrait. The chain reaction initiated by Humphries continued Thursday, as Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta ordered a review of ethics training for Pentagon brass and the CIA began an "exploratory" investigation into the conduct of Petraeus, the agency's former director.