Government Misconduct

In a stinging ruling, a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ripped into the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs on Thursday for its continued resistance to paying benefits to veterans suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukemia because of their exposure to Agent Orange. Thursday's 3-0 decision marked the sixth major ruling against the government by the appeals court or a federal trial judge in a case that started in 1986.

In the first government action of its kind in California, a Los Angeles landlord who is allegedly responsible for exposing possibly thousands of tenants and their children to dangerous levels of lead contamination has agreed to clean up a sprawling Eastside complex and pay a $1.2-million settlement. The agreement struck by Los Angeles City Atty. James K.

Long before the mortgage crisis began rocking Main Street and Wall Street, a top FBI official made a chilling, if little-noticed, prediction: The booming mortgage business, fueled by low interest rates and soaring home values, was starting to attract shady operators and billions in losses were possible. "It has the potential to be an epidemic," Chris Swecker, the FBI official in charge of criminal investigations, told reporters in September 2004.

Only one in six Americans considers President Clinton's televised confession Monday night a sincere apology, but an overwhelming majority believe that the investigation into his relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky has gone on too long and most say he should not be forced from office because of the affair, a Los Angeles Times Poll has found.

This town's new mayor, the impeccably credentialed progressive Tom Bates, remains under siege. Next month, he is expected to plead guilty to an infraction for stealing hundreds of copies of a student newspaper endorsing his opponent and, officials said, he has offered to speak in local classrooms about the importance of controlling his impulses. Even his closest allies say what he did was unethical and just plain stupid.

Two months after her husband, two young sons and nephew died at sea, Libby Cornett got a surprise visit from a U.S. Coast Guard commander who played for her a tape-recording of a three-second radio transmission. "May . . . Mayday, U.S. Coast Guard, come in," cried a tiny, frightened voice that Cornett immediately recognized as that of her 13-year-old son, Daniel.

A former Border Patrol officer said Thursday that constant demands to meet monthly arrest quotas led agents in the Inland Empire to cruise streets, bus stops and even medical clinics looking for illegal immigrants.

On a chilly night last September, bus driver Alexei Kartofelnikov saw a suspicious car parked outside the 13-story apartment building where he lives in this working-class city. He called the police, who discovered three sacks of powder and a timing device in the basement. The sacks tested positive for explosives.

The Bush administration altered critical portions of a scientific analysis of the environmental impact of cattle grazing on public lands before announcing Thursday that it would relax regulations limiting grazing on those lands, according to scientists involved in the study.

An internal investigation by the CIA found that agency officials engaged in a cover-up to hide agency negligence in the downing of a private airplane over Peru in 2001 as part of a mistaken attack on an aircraft suspected of carrying illegal narcotics. Excerpts of an internal CIA report released Thursday accuse agency officials of lying to members of Congress and withholding crucial information from criminal investigators and senior Bush administration officials.