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You can’t say the feds didn’t give advance warning. Last month, the Justice Department threatened to sue Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio if he kept up with his refusals to cooperate with an ongoing civil rights investigation into whether he discriminates against Hispanics. Now, a suit has been filed against both the sheriff and his office.

Arpaio, famous for his controversial tactics, including sweeps through immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, told The Arizona Republic that he and his office have been cooperating with the feds and had not been targeting Hispanics.

"These actions make it abundantly clear that Arizona, including this Sheriff, is Washington's new whipping boy. Now it's time to take the gloves off," Arpaio said in a statement released Thursday afternoon (PDF). "The Obama administration intended to sue us all along, no matter what we did to try to avert it."

The latest lawsuit (PDF) is the third the Department of Justice has filed against entities within Arizona for what it claims are discriminatory practices relating to immigration.

Earlier this week, the agency sued a network of community colleges in the Phoenix-area. It claimed that Maricopa Community Colleges required newly hired non-citizens "to present additional work authorization documents beyond those required by law," without imposing the same requirements on U.S. citizens. Here’s the DOJ:

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires employers to treat authorized workers in the same manner during the hiring process, regardless of their citizenship status. Yet, Maricopa Community Colleges imposed different and greater documentary requirements on at least 247 non-U.S. citizens, and did not end this practice until January 2010, well after the Justice Department initiated its investigation.

A Maricopa Community Colleges spokesman declined to comment on this matter to The Washington Post and other news outlets.

In early July, the Justice Department filed suit against Arizona and Gov. Jan Brewer, challenging the constitutionality of the state's immigration law. A recent State Department report (PDF) to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights — intended as a "partial snapshot of the current human rights situation in the United States, including some of the areas where problems persist in our society" — also made mention of the law:

A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.

In a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Brewer protested the mention of Arizona in the report and called for its removal (PDF). In it, she defended her administration and said it was “unconstitutional” for the federal government to submit state laws to the United Nations for “review,” which she called “internationalism run amok.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission is keeping a close eye on a stock market practice that may violate rules against market manipulation, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The practice, called “quote stuffing,” happens when stock exchanges are flooded and, at times, clogged by huge numbers of buy and sell orders—orders that are ultimately cancelled.

Regulators are trying to determine if traders are using rapid-fire computerized trading systems to cause the inundation by design, purposefully gumming up the exchanges and giving traders an information advantage on small price movements in stocks.

The Journal reported that the SEC is investigating whether quote stuffing may have been one of the causes of the May 6 “flash crash,” when the Dow briefly plunged 1,000 points in a matter of minutes.

To get an idea of the volume of quotes produced by high-speed, computerized trading, consider this: During the day of the flash crash, “there were hundreds of times that a single stock had over 1,000 quotes from one exchange in a single second,” according to Nanex, a ticker of quotes and trades.

Or, for the visual learners out there, take a look at Nanex’s mesmerizing, time-delayed video clip that flashes all of the quotes for one stock, in this case Public Storage, in just one second.

If quotes from various exchanges clog the system, as the New York Stock Exchange admitted happened during the flash crash, some traders could profit. Nanex’s report explains why quote-stuffing could represent market manipulation:

“Competition between [high frequency trading] systems today has reached the point where microseconds matter. Any edge one has to process information faster than a competitor makes all the difference in this game. If you could generate a large number of quotes that your competitors have to process, but you can ignore since you generated them, you gain valuable processing time.”

But saying there could have been manipulation isn’t the same as proving there was. The factors that caused the crash are up for debate. The Journal reported that not everyone agrees with Nanex’s conclusions:

“Others say the canceled orders are above board, reflecting either legitimate behavior by traders in search of profitable trades, basic market-making, where broker-dealers constantly provide quotes for potential trades and then cancel, or computer programs gone awry.”

The SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are expected to issue a report later this month.