The Miami Herald

MIAMI -- Two Eastern European women who helped squeeze South Beach tourists by running up thousands of dollars in exorbitant bar tabs pleaded guilty Wednesday in Miami federal court.

Anastassia Mikrukova, 24, of Estonia, and Agnese Rudaka, 23, of Latvia, pleaded guilty to one count each of lying to federal authorities when applying to enter the country as tourists.

MIAMI -- He was not a member of the South Florida "sleeper" cell that plotted the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but former Broward County Community College student Adnan El Shukrijumah has risen to the top ranks of al-Qaida's global operations, according to the Justice Department.

The Saudi-born El Shukrijumah, who studied computer science and chemistry at the community college, left his family's home in Miramar, Fla., for Trinidad the week before the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults. His whereabouts were a mystery for years.

But last July, the 35-year-old was charged along with four others in an alleged al-Qaida plot to attack New York's subway system and targets in England.

MIAMI - In the biggest such study to date, research institutions including the University of Miami have identified four genes implicated in causing Alzheimer's disease.

While only five or six of as many as 100 genes linked to Alzheimer's are now known, the development signals a "monumental breakthrough" that could lead to identification of nearly all the suspect genes in three to five years, said Dr. Margaret Pericak-Vance, who led analysis of the genes for UM's medical school.

MIAMI -- In secretly recorded conversations, a former FBI agent said he routinely arrested Bahamian criminal defendants in South Florida and unlawfully sent them back to their homeland on commercial airline flights without any formal review of their cases in U.S. courts.

The shocking admissions by retired FBI Agent Gerard "Jerry" Forrester, the FBI's Miami liaison officer in the Caribbean in the 1990s, surfaced this week as part of an unrelated civil court battle in the Bahamas between New York hedge fund billionaire Louis Bacon and Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard, who own estates in the Bahamas' exclusive Lyford Cay.

MIAMI -- A few years ago, Ernesto Angel Montaner was overheard bragging at a wedding reception that the FBI would never be able to touch him since he'd been the only defendant acquitted in a vast health care fraud case in the 1990s.

He doesn't have much to boast about anymore. He's stuck behind bars at a federal detention center in downtown Miami awaiting trial on Medicare fraud charges.

Montaner, a member of a prominent Cuban exile family, was extradited in late February from Costa Rica, where he had fled in early 2009. That was one year before prosecutors charged him, his son and a business partner with conspiring to bilk the taxpayer-funded Medicare program by submitting millions of dollars in false claims at their rehabilitation clinics.

MIAMI -- Trapped in a bathtub, his hands and feet bound, 10-year-old Victor Barahona could only listen through a wall as his adoptive parents beat his sister to death.

Nubia, his twin, was struck repeatedly by their adoptive parents, Jorge and Carmen Barahona, "while she screamed and cried until she was dead," Miami-Dade police detectives reported in an arrest warrant unsealed Monday.

The chilling document was released as Miami-Dade's top cop and prosecutor announced at a press conference that Jorge and Carmen Barahona will face charges of first-degree murder, aggravated child abuse and child neglect. The warrant also raises further questions about when Nubia died and whether a state child welfare agency investigation could have prevented the girl's death.