Indictments

Two former executives at Kmart Corp. were charged Wednesday with a $42.3-million securities fraud allegedly executed to meet their division's financial targets. The indictments are the first from a federal probe of accounting practices at the retailer in the period leading up to its January 2002 bankruptcy filing. Legal experts said the indictments could be a tactic to get lower-level former Kmart managers to give evidence against senior executives.

Maryland's U.S. attorney has been ordered to submit proposed public corruption indictments to superiors for approval after he exhorted his staff to produce three "front page" indictments of elected officials by the first week of November. Democratic officials said two e-mails this month and an earlier memo showed that U.S. Atty. Thomas DiBiagio, a Republican appointee of President Bush, was conducting partisan prosecutions, and called for his resignation.

Philippine prosecutors indicted 321 soldiers and junior officers suspected of involvement in last weekend's bloodless mutiny, and Interior Secretary Jose Lina accused an opposition senator of backing the uprising, which the government says was part of a larger coup plot. Opposition senators demanded that Lina present evidence to back up his allegations against Sen. Gregorio Honasan. He has denied involvement in Sunday's mutiny and was not present at the hearing.

The Justice Department's extraordinary and politically sensitive decision to seek criminal drug-trafficking indictments against Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega was not well thought out and was never submitted to President Reagan or White House Chief of Staff Howard H. Baker Jr. for their approval, Administration officials said Wednesday. The indictments have become a stumbling block to U.S. efforts to oust Noriega, who remains out of the reach of U.S. law as long as he stays in Panama.

Using e-mail, YouTube videos, phony travel documents and a burning desire to kill "or die trying," a middle-aged American woman from Pennsylvania helped recruit a network for suicide attacks and other terrorist strikes in Europe and Asia, according to a federal grand jury indictment unsealed Tuesday. Colleen R. LaRose, who dubbed herself "JihadJane," was so intent on waging jihad, authorities said, that she traveled to Sweden to kill an artist in a way that would frighten "the whole Kufar [nonbeliever]

In one of the most closely watched legislative races in the state, Assemblyman Scott Baugh (R-Huntington Beach) on Tuesday captured most of the absentee vote--ballots cast, for the most part, before his indictment last week on felony charges. Despite the torrent of publicity since then, Baugh remained optimistic that he would prevail in the Republican primary.

SCOTT BAUGH Assemblyman Scott Baugh (R-Huntington Beach) was indicted Friday by the Orange County Grand Jury on four felony counts of perjury, and for 18 misdemeanor violations of the Political Reform Act during his election campaign. One of the perjury charges involves Baugh's getting his former campaign treasurer, Dan Traxler, to lie about the source of a $1,000 cash donation.

It's been nearly 24 years since Robbin Brandley, 23, was stabbed to death in a parking lot after leaving a piano concert at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. Her killing sparked successful efforts to make college campuses safer by requiring better lighting in parking lots and the disclosure by schools of information about crimes on campus. Still, no one has ever been prosecuted for her death. On Monday, a former Marine who confessed more than a decade ago to stabbing Brandley to death and killing four other women in Southern California was indicted by an Orange County grand jury, setting the stage for an eventual trial.

Eric H. Holder Jr. is an attorney general of great integrity and deep experience, but he did neither President Obama nor the country a service Monday when he appointed a longtime federal prosecutor to investigate whether CIA interrogators should be criminally prosecuted for abusive interrogation of Al Qaeda prisoners. The president himself -- with the unqualified support of Leon Panetta, the new director of Central Intelligence -- has already ordered an end to the use of torture against suspected terrorists.

Half a dozen Thai and Laotian nationals were indicted Friday on charges that they harbored and employed illegal immigrants at three underground Los Angeles "sweatshops." A total of 51 illegal immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Thailand and Laos worked at the three garment factories raided Aug. 23 by U.S. immigration agents and Department of Labor officials, authorities said. Indicted were Tawach and Kiriya Hirunpolkul, who officials say ran a factory on the Eastside at 1643 N.