Agencies

Attorney Kwang Man "John" Lee, authorities say, was a man who could make things happen - for a price. For a pound of marijuana and $44,000, the Koreatown attorney allegedly said, he could get an immigrant client a U.S. citizenship. "Price is OK for the risk," Lee told an associate, according to federal authorities. The silver-Corvette-driving attorney, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service agent, allegedly had associates at various stages of the immigration process willing to take bribes and provide favors for his clients.

When the Supreme Court - in our view wrongly - ruled that corporations had a constitutional right to spend their money to influence elections, it also said that disclosure of such expenditures "permits citizens and shareholders to react to the speech of corporate entities in a proper way. " In that spirit, the Securities and Exchange Commission should heed a petition drive to require publicly traded companies to disclose their political spending to...

Privacy rights groups on Monday filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles County's two major law enforcement agencies after they refused to turn over information collected by electronic license plate scanners, the suit claimed. The Los Angeles Police Department and L.A. County Sheriff's Department have made use of the plate-reading technology for several years. Typically mounted on patrol vehicles, the small cameras continuously scan license plates and check them against criminal databases in search of stolen cars and cars registered to known fugitives.

WASHINGTON - When Bolivian President Evo Morales expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development from his impoverished country last week, he complained that Washington "still has a mentality of domination and submission" in the region. It was a familiar charge for the State Department's principal foreign aid agency. In the last two years, it has been booted out of Russia, snubbed in Egypt and declared unwelcome by a bloc of left-leaning Latin American countries. USAID "threatens our sovereignty and stability," the eight-nation Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas fumed in June in a resolution that accused the United States of political interference, conspiracy and "looting our natural resources.

The jobs of the nation's citizen soldiers are supposed to be safe while they are serving their country: Federal law does not allow employers to penalize service members because of their military duties. Yet every year, thousands of National Guard and Reserve troops coming home from Afghanistan and elsewhere find they have been replaced, demoted, denied benefits or seniority. Government agencies are among the most frequent offenders, accounting for about a third of the more than 15,000 complaints filed with federal authorities since the end of September 2001, records show.

WASHINGTON - The presence of caffeine in gum, jelly beans, waffles and other foods has prompted the Food and Drug Administration to investigate the stimulant's potential effects on children and adolescents. The FDA's announcement comes a few weeks after gum maker Wrigley introduced its Alert Energy Caffeine Gum. Each piece of the gum contains about as much caffeine as a half-cup of coffee, according to a consumer update that the FDA posted on its website Friday. The update provided more information on an investigation the FDA announced earlier this week.

WASHINGTON - President Obama nominated Democratic Rep. Mel Watt to be the top regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, moving to replace a career bureaucrat who has been sharply criticized by liberals for not doing more to help troubled homeowners. But confirmation of Watt, a 20-year congressman from North Carolina, to be director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency is expected to be blocked by Senate Republicans. And the fight over the nomination could make it even more difficult for Republicans and Democrats to come together on legislation to overhaul the housing finance system and replace taxpayer-owned Fannie and Freddie.

Paul Tanaka, the Los Angeles County undersheriff accused of fostering a culture of jailhouse abuse, offered a searing critique of his boss Sheriff Lee Baca, calling him a confused and erratic leader who cares more about politics than public safety. In his first extensive comments since being pressured to step down, Tanaka told The Times that Baca pushed subordinates to hire his friends and relatives and undermined public safety to settle political spats. For example, Tanaka said Baca demanded that all sheriff's deputies be removed from joint crime-fighting operations with the FBI as payback for a federal investigation of the jails - an order Tanaka said he refused to carry out. Tanaka, who is considering a run against Baca in 2014, said he was speaking out because he feels he has been made a scapegoat for many of the agency's problems.

WASHINGTON - The CIA and departments of Justice and Homeland Security have begun a high-level internal review of whether intelligence was mishandled prior to the Boston Marathon bombings, though President Obama and his top advisors said they had seen nothing to suggest counter-terrorism agencies did anything wrong. Obama said at a White House news conference that the review would seek to answer whether "additional things … could have been done" that "might have prevented" the two bombings that killed three people and injured more than 260 others on April 15. "We want to go back and we want to review every step that was taken," Obama said.

A growing number of Indian tribes are getting into the payday loan business, saying they just want to raise revenue for their reservations while helping cash-strapped consumers nationwide. But federal officials suspect that, at least in some cases, tribes are being paid to offer their sovereign immunity to non-Indian payday lenders that are trying to dodge state regulations. So far, the tribes have prevailed over California and other states that have tried to assert authority over tribal lending operations.