United States Laws

The Air Force is quietly seeking a legal way to move its Ballistic Systems Division out of San Bernardino, The Times has learned, even though Congress enacted a law earlier this year specifically saying that it should remain at its present location.

Richard Adee, a South Dakota beekeeper, credits an obscure U.S. trade law with keeping him alive in the cutthroat world of honey, where prices are slashed and supplies are allegedly dumped in search of sweet profit. "The law saved the honey industry," Adee, a second-generation honey producer, said. "We've had a lot of our beekeepers go out of business." For Hans Boedeker, a Tustin, Calif., honey importer, that same law spells doom: "These laws are very arbitrary. There was no dumping of honey."

In writing the Tax Reform Act of 1986, Congress devoted a lot of time to closing loopholes for the rich. One that was given particularly harsh treatment was the "generation-skipping transfer," a once-common device by which wealthy people shifted assets to their grandchildren, thereby cutting out one level of estate tax. But nobody loves a loophole as much as Congress.

A Los Angeles federal judge has ruled that portions of the 1996 federal anti-terrorism law are unconstitutional--a ruling with potential ramifications for new legislation introduced after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In a decision made public Thursday, U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins said that the 1996 law's prohibition against providing "training" and "personnel" to groups designated as "foreign terrorist organizations" by the U.S.

States are moving to outlaw marital rape, the act of sexually assaulting one's spouse. During the 1991 legislative session, four more states--South Carolina, Missouri, New Mexico and Utah--enacted laws making spousal rape a crime. That leaves only two--North Carolina and Oklahoma--with laws that enable a defendant to use the fact that he is married to the victim as an absolute defense against the charge of rape.

Levon Dumont, a free-spirited Santa Cruz teen-ager whose principal passion was the Grateful Dead, was on his way to a concert on Sept. 14, 1989, when he was stopped by an undercover agent at the Milwaukee airport. Dumont's bag was searched, and agents found about three grams of LSD, an illegal hallucinogen. Today, Dumont is serving a 15-year, 8-month sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Ore.

Kong Moua, a Hmong tribesman from the hills of Laos, drove to the Fresno City College campus looking for his intended bride. Locating her at her job in the student finance office, he spirited her away to his cousin's house. Kong Moua called it zij poj niam, or "marriage by capture," in his culture an accepted form of matrimony akin to elopement. However, his "bride," also a Hmong but more assimilated into American culture, called it kidnaping and rape. She also called the police.

A San Clemente teen-ager accused of brutally beating a man on a Laguna Beach strip frequented by gays was charged with a hate crime after police learned he allegedly boasted of his eagerness to attack a homosexual. But in a fatal attack five months earlier, Orange County prosecutors never considered filing a hate-crime charge against a Cypress man accused in the murder and robbery of a Santa Ana attorney--despite a witness' claim that the defendant had planned to target a gay man.

Sergio Infanzon, an illegal immigrant for a decade, decided last month to roll the dice: He turned himself in to the Border Patrol. It was self-interest that motivated this gambit, however, and immigration authorities in Los Angeles and San Diego were not inclined to play along. Infanzon had to travel four hours to El Centro to find agents willing to collar him.

Colombian-born Eucaris Ceballos, believed to be the first woman convicted under the new federal drug kingpin law, was sentenced in Trenton, N.J., to life imprisonment and fined more than $4 million on charges she ran a multimillion dollar cocaine ring in New Jersey and New York.

The Bush administration has decided not to invoke against Israel a U.S. law that bars military aid to countries that use American arms for purposes other than self-defense, despite controversy over dozens of "targeted killings" of Palestinian militants. Under the U.S. Arms Export Control Act, countries that obtain weapons from the United States are allowed to use them only for defense. Parallel language is written into sales contracts. The law requires the State Department to assess compliance.

President Bush said Monday that he is extending for six months a provision suspending the opportunity for U.S. citizens and corporations to sue foreign firms using property in Cuba that was seized from Americans after Fidel Castro took power in 1959. The law allowing such lawsuits was passed in 1996, after an attack in which Cuban MIG fighters shot down two small airplanes flown by anti-Castro exiles operating out of Miami.

Robert D. McConnell, a Manhattan Beach retiree, has spent hours trying to protect his personal financial privacy--and little good it's done him. After plowing through dozens of pages of fine print, he sent a so-called opt-out notice to Bank of America, saying he didn't want the bank sharing or selling his account information. It was returned by the post office, with no forwarding address. "I'm left with no place to send my opt-out notice," he fumes.

Hundreds of hospitals around the country have violated a 15-year-old federal law that requires them to provide emergency care to anyone, regardless of ability to pay, according to a federal survey of emergency room workers and a consumer group's report released Thursday. Government investigative files reviewed by the group, Public Citizen, showed that more than 500 hospitals, including 77 in California, were cited by the federal government from 1997 through 1999.

New U.S. financial privacy rules that took effect Sunday mark a milestone for the financial industry and consumers, but they are by no means the final word in the heated privacy debate. Sunday was the deadline for U.S. banks, brokers, insurers and a host of other companies providing financial services to be in compliance with new privacy protections included in a landmark 1999 banking law.

Sara, a South-Central Los Angeles teenager who recently won acceptance to UC Berkeley, lives with her parents and four younger sisters in a one-bedroom apartment the size of some bathrooms. Many evenings in the past several years, she has had to study through the cries of babies, her parents' arguments over money, and noise from police searching neighbors' homes for illegal drugs. Through it all, she has maintained a 3.9 grade-point average at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights.

On a dusty strip of auto body shops and plumbing suppliers in the San Fernando Valley is a little-known company that occupies one of the most embattled, contradictory and profitable corners of the Internet. For thousands of online porn sites, Cybernet Ventures Inc. is a meal ticket, a source of millions of dollars in revenue. For the government, it is a potential solution to the Internet pornography problem.

Heeding the cries of scholars trying to unlock the secrets of Mayan civilization, the United States announced a ban Thursday on importation of antique artifacts from the famed Peten region of Guatemala, one of the richest and most plundered archeological sites in the world. Eugene P. Kopp, acting director of the U.S. Information Agency, said the ban would "help save the remnants of Mayan civilization from further destruction."

Through their different political, economic and legal lenses, U.S. and European antitrust regulators occasionally see the risks and rewards of mergers very differently. Nowhere is that difference more visible than in the proposed linking of General Electric Co. and Honeywell Inc.

In a move expected to fuel transatlantic tensions, a World Trade Organization panel has decided that a U.S. tax law designed to help the nation's largest exporters violated international rules governing free trade. If the interim WTO decision is allowed to stand in next month's final report, the European Union could impose as much as $4 billion in sanctions on U.S. exports next year. U.S. Trade Representative Robert B.