Bribery | featured news

Two former and two current airport security screeners were arrested this week on federal charges of drug trafficking and bribery for smuggling large bundles of cocaine and other illegal drugs through security checkpoints at Los Angeles International Airport in exchange for cash, authorities said.

Four current and former Transportation Security Administration screeners have been arrested and face charges of taking bribes and looking the other way while suitcases filled with cocaine, methamphetamine or marijuana passed through X-ray machines at Los Angeles International Airport, federal authorities announced Wednesday.

Claims that U.S. retail giant Wal-Mart used payoffs to speed zoning and other permits in its break-neck Mexican expansion are sparking soul-searching in Mexico, where crowded government offices are the working grounds of shadowy facilitators known as "gestores."

Two Democratic lawmakers on Monday said they are launching an investigation into allegations of bribery at Wal-Mart Stores Inc's Mexican affiliate.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world's largest retailer, squelched an internal investigation into allegations of bribery at its Mexican subsidiary instead of broadening the probe, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

James Murdoch has severed all ties with News Corp's British newspaper business, which is at the centre of multiple investigations over phone and computer hacking and bribery, according to regulatory filings.

James Murdoch has written to the influential UK parliamentary committee investigating a phone hacking scandal to apologize and restate his own innocence ahead of a potentially damaging report that could determine his future in Britain.

A former reporter on the News of the World newspaper, the defunct News Corp British paper at the heart of phone-hacking and corruption allegations, said he lost his job as crime correspondent because he refused to bribe police officers.

The phone hacking scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch's News Corp threatened to spread to other titles on Friday, as sources said a journalist at the Sun newspaper had been arrested over allegations of police bribery.

Companies from Russia and China are most likely to pay bribes when doing business abroad, a new survey suggests.