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WEST POINT, N.Y. (AP) -- The U.S. Military Academy at West Point says it has reinstated a cadet involved in an airport scuffle with bodyguards for R&B diva Patti LaBelle. Richard King, a member of the Class of 2011, was on already suspended separation for previous conduct when the March 11 scrape happened at an airport in his hometown of Houston. In a lawsuit against the Grammy Award-winning LaBelle, he says three of her bodyguards attacked him for no reason. The singer has countersued, saying King was drunk and hurling racial slurs. Video shows King on the phone and a...

WEST POINT, N.Y. — U.S. Military Academy officials were investigating Friday how an apparently healthy, athletic 18-year-old West Point cadet died during a land navigation exercise. Cadet Jacob D. Bower of Fairmont, W.Va., was found unresponsive Thursday by fellow cadets in a largely wooded area used for training. Attempts to revive Bower were unsuccessful and he was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. The incident and cause of death are under investigation. Temperatures in the Hudson Valley were in the 90s Thursday, but West Point's Lt. Col. Sherri Reed said it was not clear if high temperatures were a factor.

Assault charges have been filed in connection with a violent confrontation in Houston caught on tape between a former West Point cadet and two people in singer Patti LaBelle's entourage. It was Patti LaBelle's son, Zuri Edwards, who originally said he was the victim in this incident at Bush Intercontinental Airport, but Houston police are not buying that now. In court documents, Edwards is described as an instigator, while LaBelle's hairdresser and bodyguard are charged with assault.

President Barack Obama named Brenda S. “Sue” Fulton, an Army veteran who campaigned to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, to the Board of Visitors of the United States Military Academy on Tuesday, putting the first openly gay or lesbian person onto the board that advises him on West Point. Ms. Fulton, 52 years old, is the executive director and co-founder of Knights Out, an organization of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered West Point graduates and allies. Her appointment to the West Point board, announced Tuesday, does not require Senate confirmation. She graduated from West Point in 1980, part...

NANGARHAR PROVENCE, Afghanistan — On June 24, Army 1st Lt. Dimitri Del Castillo was 24 years old, a newlywed, and just starting his career as an infantry officer. On June 25th, the 2009 West Point graduate was killed when his unit came under small arms fire in the Watahpur District of Kunar Province, Afghanistan

Soul diva Patti LaBelle has delivered a legal counter-punch against a former West Point cadet who claimed her bodyguards beat him, saying the man sparked the altercation by addressing the singer in a racially and sexually offensive way.

The former West Point cadet who's suing singer Patti LaBelle's entourage for allegedly assaulting him at Bush Intercontinental Airport last March has added an airport operations worker to the list of defendants. In an amended complaint filed earlier this week, Richard King accuses Houston Airport System employee Cahl Rasmussen of relaying false and defamatory information to King's West Point supervisors -- namely, that King instigated the confrontation that left him bloody and landed him in the hospital. "[Rasmussen] was not a witness, but without compunction, passed on the aforesaid false report as if it was true," the complaint states. "In...

News9.com: HOUSTON – A West Point cadet is speaking out about an incident at Houston’s Bush International Airport involving R&B singer Patti LaBelle. Houston native Richard King claims he was attacked while waiting for his family to pick him up outside the airport terminal. “I had no idea who Patti LaBelle was until this incident,” King said. Surveillance cameras captured parts of what happened. “I was on the phone and that’s all I remember. I remember waking up the next day with staples in my head,” King said. King was pushed into a concrete pole by LaBelle’s bodyguards and when...

West Point officials will stand by their decision to kick Houston senior cadet Richard King out of the Army military academy in the wake of a March altercation involving soul singer Patti LaBelle at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The academy’s Monday statement was the first regarding the attack, which left the 23-year-old man with a concussion and lingering symptoms. King’s attorney, John Raley, had asked the academy to reconsider the dismissal. Although academy officials did not discuss details of the King case, the former student said he had been placed in an 18-month, active-duty mentorship program for violating the academy’s...

HOUSTON—There are new developments in the case of a West Point cadet who is suing R&B singer Patti LaBelle in connection with an alleged beating at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport.

In his best-laid plans, Richard King was set to leave West Point next year as both a starting cornerback on the Cadet football team and a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Instead, in a span of a little less than three months, he's been inflicted with likely career-ending injuries, busted to private and thrust into the queue for active duty — all, according to a lawsuit filed this week, the consequences of an unexpected encounter with R&B diva Patti LaBelle after King landed in his native Houston for spring break on March 11: (link to surveillance video at link...

Never come between the "Godmother of Soul" and her luggage. That's the lesson a West Point cadet says he learned at Houston airport when he charges Patti LaBelle's security guards roughed him up. Richard King, 23, is suing LaBelle over the incident, captured on surveillance video last March 11 at Bush Intercontinental Airport. King, a Houston resident who is a senior at the military academy, had come home for spring break when he wandered close to LaBelle's limousine. He was talking to his brother on his cellphone when her bodyguards "sprang into action," according to the civil suit he filed...

Lawyers for a West Point cadet who says bodyguards for soul singer Patti LaBelle beat him while he was waiting for a ride at a Houston airport released security video Thursday showing the student being pushed and punched by two men and a woman. Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7592273.html#ixzz1OEBHK1oZ

ALBANY, N.Y. – A lesbian former cadet who left West Point saying she couldn't live a lie was rejected for re-admission Wednesday because of the lingering military ban on gays and said she is giving up on her dream of graduating from the academy. Katherine Miller said in a statement that she plans to graduate from Yale University, which she's now attending, and join the military through officer candidate school. "Although I am deeply saddened that I will not be readmitted to West Point, I understand and respect the decision," said the 21-year-old from Findlay, Ohio. She said that although...

A lesbian cadet who resigned from West Point last year has been rejected for readmission to the academy even as the military moves toward ending its "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

Classroom Anthony has received several distinctions for her work in the classroom, including being selected as a first-team CoSIDA/ESPN The Magazine Academic All-American and also being honored as the Patriot League Scholar-Athlete of the Year the past two seasons. Other honors include the Superintendent’s Award for Excellence, the Superintendent’s Award for Achievement, International Scholar Laureate Program participant and 2010 chapter president of Tau Beta Pi. Anthony maintains a 3.75 GPA in civil engineering and ranks 28th in a class of 1,105 cadets. In 2010 she completed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering Research and Development Center internship, which included performing...

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates bluntly told an audience of West Point cadets on Friday that it would be unwise for the United States to ever fight another war like Iraq or Afghanistan, and that the chances of carrying out a change of regime in that fashion again are slim. "In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it,"Mr. Gates told an assembly of Army cadets. Huffington Post HIGHLIGHTS...

Classroom Anthony has received several distinctions for her work in the classroom, including being selected as a first-team CoSIDA/ESPN The Magazine Academic All-American and also being honored as the Patriot League Scholar-Athlete of the Year the past two seasons. Other honors include the Superintendent’s Award for Excellence, the Superintendent’s Award for Achievement, International Scholar Laureate Program participant and 2010 chapter president of Tau Beta Pi. Anthony maintains a 3.75 GPA in civil engineering and ranks 28th in a class of 1,105 cadets. In 2010 she completed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineering Research and Development Center internship, which included performing...

York, PA - First Lt. Daren Hidalgo, a former Dallastown resident, was killed Sunday near Mama Kiriz, Afghanistan, while conducting combat operations, according to the website of the 2nd Cavalry Association and Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations. He was assigned to G Company, 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment, Rose Barracks, Germany. Hidalgo was a 2005 graduate of Dallastown Area High School, according to newspaper archives, and received a U.S. Military Academy appointment to West Point. Phil Bayliss said he and Hidalgo were best friends from the time Hidalgo moved to the York area when they were in fifth grade. Bayliss, now...

Heroic NYPD cops battled ferocious winds and sub-freezing temperatures as one was lowered from a hovering helicopter onto a mountaintop cliff early today to rescue two near-dead West Point cadets who’d gotten stranded in the dead of night after wandering away from their unit during a training exercise. The amazing death-defying rescue took place about 2:30 a.m. atop Storm King Mountain several miles north of the United States Military Academy at a time temperatures had plunged to 18 degrees and winds were gusting as high as 50 mph. Aviation Unit Officer Steve Browning and Detective Mike Sileo, pilot and co-pilot...