The judge presiding over about 100 federal police corruption lawsuits in Los Angeles has ruled the city’s police department can be sued as a racketeering enterprise. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Gary Feess could lead to a sharp increase in the city’s financial liability from the police corruption scandal in which some members of the Rampart station’s anti-gang unit allegedly robbed, beat, framed and shot suspects. Legal experts say the ruling is groundbreaking because no police department or major police official has ever been held liable under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

This news from Cincinnati: Five people have filed a lawsuit against Cincinnati police officers who, they say, attacked them without warning or provocation during last week’s protests. The fatal police shooting of a 19-year-old Black man, Timothy Thomas, on April 7 prompted three days of protests and rioting. Dozens of people were injured. More than 800 arrests were made. The mayor imposed Cincinnati’s first citywide curfew since the race riots of 1968.

In New York, a police department administrative hearing begins today into the actions of the four officers acquitted last year in the shooting death of Amadou Diallo. The shooting will be reviewed by the NYPD’s Firearms Discharge Review Board. It will decide if the officers — Kenneth Boss, Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy — will face administrative charges. The four officers were acquitted last year of murder and other charges in the 1999 fatal shooting.

From Washington, gun control advocates marking the second anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting are calling on Congress to toughen laws requiring background checks. They released a report yesterday saying some states have actually made it easier to buy guns since the April 20, 1999, shooting. The rampage in Littleton, Colorado, left 15 people dead, including the two gunmen. A friend of the gunmen said she bought three of the four weapons used in the shooting at a gun show without a background check. She says a check may have given her cold feet. Erin Flynn, a junior at Columbine, who was there the day of the shooting, says she still hears the gunshots and misses two friends who died.

This news from Baltimore: A lawyer known for suing the tobacco and asbestos industries is now going after cellular phone companies, alleging in new lawsuits that the companies have known about health risks for users of the phones but failed to warn them. Peter Angelos filed class-action lawsuits yesterday in Maryland and three other states. The suits seek to force the wireless industry to cover the costs of headsets that Angelos says would protect users from possible radiation hazards. The suits claim there are links between cellular phone use and a host of health problems, including damage to basic brain function.

This news from Istanbul, Turkey: After months of surviving on sugared or salted water, Zehra Kulaksiz lies on a cot in a makeshift house in the poor outskirts of Istanbul with barely the strength to talk. On the wall above her head is a picture of her 19-year-old sister Canan, who died of starvation on Sunday to protest the treatment of leftist prisoners in Turkey’s prisons. The prisoners have been transferred to new cells, where they are isolated and, according to their families, beaten daily. Despite the deaths of 14 hunger strikers, Turks and most in the West are largely ignoring the plight of Kulaksiz and 230 other fasters, including 222 prisoners that are loyal to progressive groups.

This news from Israel: Israeli riot police entered a disputed Jerusalem shrine today after Muslim worshipers threw stones and a Palestinian television reporter was wounded by Israeli army fire in a Gaza Strip refugee camp. Also today, Israel eased travel restrictions in the Gaza Strip.

From Johannesburg, South Africa’s success in winning a landmark case against the drug industry was tempered today by signs that cheap AIDS medicines are unlikely to flood quickly into a country ravaged by the disease.

The senior Navy commander in the Pacific has decided not to court-martial Commander Scott Waddle, the captain of the submarine Greeneville, for his actions in the collision that sank a Japanese fishing boat off Hawaii in February, claiming the lives of nine Japanese crew members, including four high school students. According to an unnamed official, the sub commander will be ordered to an admiral’s mast hearing, in which he will be asked to submit a letter resigning from his nearly 20-year Navy career, although he’ll depart with an honorable discharge and his rank and pension intact.

The children of Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War may well be at greater risk of contracting leukemia, according to a new study. While Agent Orange has long been associated with increased incidence of various conditions and birth defects, the research is the first to make a link between the defoliant and AML, one kind of leukemia. Children who contract AML have an average life expectancy of just two years.