Former CIA officer is arrested

A former C.I.A. officer suspected by investigators of helping China dismantle United States spying operations and identify informants was arrested in New York at John F. Kennedy International Airport on Monday night. The arrest of the former officer capped an intense F.B.I. inquiry that began around 2012, two years after the C.I.A. began losing its informants in China. More than a dozen C.I.A. informants were killed or imprisoned by the Chinese government. Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a 13-year veteran of the spy agency, was charged with unlawful retention of national defense information and faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted. It was discovered that Lee kept notebooks, described in a court filing as a datebook and an address book. Written in their pages were the names and phone numbers of CIA agents and undercover employees, among other things -- pieces of top secret information "the disclosure of which could cause grave damage to the National Security of the United States." Lee apparently is a naturalized US citizen who has been living in Hong Kong since leaving the CIA in 2007. The F.B.I. apparently learned that Lee was traveling to the United States and scrambled to arrest him. It is unclear why Lee decided to risk arrest by coming back to the United States.

In Other News Late last week, Hayden Porter, a 15-year-old freshman at a high school in Ohio, took his life. He was the sixth current or former teenage student from the school district to kill themselves within the past six months. Police say the suicides don't look like they are linked, and the methods the children used were varied. Almost one in five teenagers between 15 and 19 has considered suicide, and nearly 10% have attempted it, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among Americans between 10 and 24, suicide was the second-leading cause of death in 2015. A former Nazi officer known as "the bookkeeper of Auschwitz" has been told he must serve out his four-year prison sentence, despite lodging an appeal for clemency. Oskar Groening's plea for mercy was denied by German prosecutors in Lueneberg on Wednesday, one day after his appeal was made public. Groening, 96, was sentenced in 2015 after being found guilty of being an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. He was accused of counting the cash found in the belongings of new arrivals at the camp and sending it to Nazi headquarters in Berlin. A request by Groening's lawyers for his sentence to be suspended on the grounds of old age was rejected. Groening remains at home and has not yet served any time in prison as he continues the appeals process. Only in the last few years have former Nazis who were not directly involved in the killings been successfully convicted.