United States Government Employees

Federal agents have arrested a senior U.S. Customs agent, a criminal defense lawyer and three others in an alleged scheme to smuggle 15,000 counterfeit Microsoft computer programs from Hong Kong to the United States. The arrests, disclosed Monday, grew out of a probe into complaints that Richard Casas, a veteran Customs Service agent, was receiving kickbacks for referring criminal suspects to attorney Lawrence S. Boyle of Westminster.

The Census Bureau's Los Angeles region placed second nationally for timeliness and completeness during the 2000 head count, but its performance may have come at the expense of accuracy, according to a growing chorus of area census employees. Census officials vehemently deny any compromise in the integrity of the count nationwide or in the region that includes Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties.

There is "substantial evidence" that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton lied under oath in denying that she played a role in the 1993 White House travel office firings, independent counsel Robert W. Ray reported Thursday. But Ray, summing up his findings in the so-called Travelgate scandal for a panel of appeals court judges, said that he will not seek to indict Mrs. Clinton because he cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that any of her testimony was false.

Three government food inspectors were shot to death Wednesday as they visited a sausage factory that had recently reopened after being closed for health violations. Police took the factory's owner--who had railed against the government--into custody. A fourth inspector escaped unharmed from the Santos Linguisa factory in San Leandro, about 20 miles southeast of San Francisco, San Leandro Police Lt. Dan Marchetti said. The bodies of two inspectors for the U.S.

Independent counsel Robert W. Ray won't prosecute anyone in the White House travel office controversy, and is putting the finishing touches on a report likely to be made public before Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate campaign ends, officials say.

Three former federal government employees have been sentenced to five years' probation and ordered to pay a $31,256 fine for conspiring to defraud a Woodland Hills credit card processing firm, officials said. Wanda McClain, 31, a former U.S. Department of Defense employee, Carolyn Deruso, 60, who is on administrative leave from the Department of Defense, and her daughter Lelani Deruso, 31, a former U.S. Department of Treasury employee, pleaded guilty to fraud charges in Feb.

Not many years ago, the Central Intelligence Agency automatically denied a security clearance to anyone it suspected was homosexual, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were ripe for blackmail. This week, the CIA held a gay pride celebration at its Langley, Va., headquarters, hosting gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) at a ceremony intended to underscore how far the agency has come from its homophobic past.

A Los Angeles INS agent pleaded not guilty Tuesday to federal charges that he removed illegal immigrants from a lockup and collaborated with a convicted drug trafficker to ransom them to their relatives in the United States. Jesse J. Gardona, a 15-year veteran of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, remains free on $100,000 bail. Gardona allegedly turned over 11 immigrants he had arrested in July, 1998, to Jose Jesus Quintanilla-Guzman, who operated out of an East Los Angeles body shop.

A former career U.S. immigration officer was convicted of four counts of espionage Tuesday in a case that was less about spying for Fidel Castro's Cuba than it was about cashing in once the Communist ruler is gone. Mariano Faget, 54, a supervisor in the Miami office of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, was found guilty of violating the Espionage Act by disclosing official secrets and lying about his contacts with Cuban diplomats.

Workers at a government uranium-processing plant in southern Ohio routinely inhaled uranium dust, arsenic and other poisons for decades because supervisors did not require them to wear respirators, the Energy Department said Thursday.