Plaintiffs

Elected leaders in Lancaster and Palmdale have waged an "unrelenting war" against low-income blacks and Latinos who receive public assistance in a campaign to drive them out of the historically white Antelope Valley, civil rights lawyers alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday. As many as 200 local minority families have lost their federal housing assistance each year, according to the lawsuit filed in federal court by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and unnamed victims of the alleged harassment.

In a perfunctory order, the Supreme Court on Monday denied a day in court to five alleged victims of one of the grossest abuses of the war on terror: "extraordinary rendition. " That's the euphemism for transferring suspects abroad for interrogation and, it's alleged, torture. Besides denying the five any form of redress for their grievances, the court's action endorses the federal government's overuse of the so-called state secrets privilege to short-circuit the judicial process. That makes the court's action doubly shameful.

Paul E. Sullivan, an analyst with the U.S. Defense Department who won an important civil-rights victory in 1969 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the whites-only membership policy of his Fairfax County, Va., swimming pool club, has died. He was 87. Sullivan died March 14 of complications from a stroke at his Fairfax County home, his daughter Maria Sullivan said last week. In 1965, Sullivan, who was white, moved from his home in Fairfax County's Bucknell Manor development and rented it to Theodore Freeman, an African American economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who lived there with his wife and two children.

The State Bar of California has declined to discipline a Los Angeles attorney who was accused of orchestrating a massive fraud in representing Nicaraguan banana workers in lawsuits against U.S. corporations, according to a document reviewed by The Times. Then-Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Victoria G. Chaney had referred attorney Juan Dominguez, a personal injury lawyer whose ads are ubiquitous on Los Angeles buses, to the state bar after she made findings that he was central in a scheme to recruit fake plaintiffs, coach them to lie about working on Dole-affiliated banana farms, and fabricate medical evidence.

Martin Marootian, a retired pharmacist who stood up for Armenian genocide victims as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that resulted in a $20-million settlement from New York Life Insurance Co. for failing to honor claims on policies sold to thousands of Armenians slain during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, has died. He was 95. Marootian died Feb. 25 of natural causes at his home in San Diego, said his daughter, Andrea. In 1999 Marootian joined a legal battle to force New York Life to honor policies purchased by more than 2,000 Armenians, most of whom perished in what some historians have described as the first genocide of the 20th century.

In a victory for environmental groups, a federal appeals court panel has found Los Angeles County and the county flood control district responsible for discharging polluted storm runoff that flows down the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers to the Pacific Ocean. An opinion Thursday by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Santa Monica Baykeeper, which argued that the county should be liable for allowing billions of gallons of heavily polluted stormwater to flow untreated each year into the region's rivers and eventually to the ocean, where it can sicken swimmers and surfers.

More than three years after Bank of America Corp. agreed to acquire Countrywide Financial Corp., the legal mess the bank inherited from the mortgage giant seems only to grow. It was no secret that the bank took on a heaping plate of litigation with the Calabasas-based lender, which during the housing boom had matched every risky loan its rivals devised. But adversaries who appeared to have settled Countrywide-related claims are returning to besiege BofA again, while new demands are surfacing in courts across the country.

An FBI operation violated the 1st Amendment rights of hundreds of Muslims by using a paid informant to illegally monitor several Southern California mosques based solely on religion, a federal lawsuit filed this week alleges. Filed on behalf of three Muslim plaintiffs, the lawsuit accuses the FBI and seven employees, including Director Robert Mueller, of paying Irvine resident Craig Monteilh to go undercover, infiltrate mosques and record conversations in order to root out potential terrorists.