Crime | featured news

Gu Kailai, the wife of the disgraced political leader Bo Xilai, has been indicted for intentional homicide, in a crime that has triggered China’s most serious political crisis in decades. The official Xinhua news agency on Thursday evening published a brief dispatch announcing that Ms. Gu and an aide employed by the family had been formally charged in the poisoning death of the Briton, Neil Heywood, 41, whose body was found last November in a hotel in Chongqing, the sprawling municipality Mr. Bo led until his downfall.

In a bust that gives new meaning to the term “white-collar crime,” authorities in suburban Washington, D.C., broke up a ring of thieves who bought stolen Tide laundry detergent and exported it for resale in Vietnam...Specifically, shoplifting Tide is big business.

Nearly half of recently retired officers in a survey said they had “personal knowledge” of crime-report manipulation, but the Police Department questioned the study’s methodology.

The bureau says that murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault all went down in 2011.

Medical marijuana dispensaries would seem to be natural targets for criminals... The models the researchers came up with confirmed that factors such as unemployment, commercial zoning and a high proportion of young adults were indeed associated with higher crime rates. But the number of marijuana clinics in a neighborhood had nothing to do with any of it, they found.

A woman who punched, scratched and rubbed her buttocks against a $30 million painting has been sentenced to two years of probation, prosecutors said on Thursday.

With robberies, kidnappings and other crimes rising, and the police appearing unwilling to go after criminals, some areas are seeing a rise in vigilante justice, with mobs sometimes killing suspects.

All federal government organizations are potentially at risk for workplace violence, not just those in high-crime areas or dealing with violent members of the public, according to an agency studying the issue.

A federal judge on Friday sentenced "Barefoot Bandit" Colton Harris-Moore to 6 1/2 years in prison for his infamous two-year, international crime spree of break-ins, and boat and plane thefts that ended in 2010....

The 20-year-old "Barefoot Bandit" was sentenced Friday to more than seven years in prison after pleading guilty to dozens of charges. Colton Harris-Moore gained international notoriety while evading police across America in stolen planes, boats and cars during a two-year crime spree.