Drug gangs’ violence is stretching along the border

David McLemore, The Dallas Morning… Drug gangs’ violence is stretching along the border

David McLemore, The Dallas Morning News

DEL RIO, Texas – Val Verde County Sheriff D’Wayne Jernigan has dealt with smugglers and drug gangs for decades, both as sheriff and as a customs agent.

But in the last year, the risks of drug-fueled terrorism have raised the stakes to scary levels. Rifles and handguns have been replaced by rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, and high-caliber machine guns.

“Now the bad guys have more sophisticated training and better equipment,” Jernigan said. “They’re better armed and willing to shoot.”

In November, Border Patrol officials reported that assaults against agents all along the border nearly doubled from the previous year.

Law enforcement officials in counties up and down Texas’ 1,200-mile border with Mexico are coping with issues of national security, increased illegal immigration and a growing fear that the drug cartels are moving upriver and just across the border from here.

Val Verde County, a stony outcrop of sheep and goat ranches and sharply etched limestone canyons, rests along the Rio Grande 150 miles west of San Antonio.

National parks need more stable funding to survive, advocates say

Denis Cuff, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. – People love their national parks, but paying to prevent their deterioration is becoming a struggle over the price of preserving America’s heritage.

From California’s majestic Yosemite Valley to Pennsylvania’s historic Gettysburg battlefield, years of tight budgets have left parks struggling to fix trails, roads and campgrounds, and with fewer rangers to keep the peace and lead nature hikes.

The shortage of park rangers helped open the way for Mexican drug cartels to establish guarded marijuana farms in remote areas of Kings Canyon and Sequoia parks, and to a lesser degree, Yosemite Park.

The pot farms appear limited to those vast California parks, officials say.

Conservationists and a growing number of federal lawmakers say it’s time to rescue the national parks with more stable funding.

“There is a problem. The parks are in a tight squeeze,” said Rep. Mark Souder, an Indiana Republican who is sponsoring a bill that would let taxpayers donate to the park system through a check-off box on income tax forms.

Souder was in San Francisco last week to chair the sixth in a series of hearings on national park conditions and funding.

Illegal migrants’ future cloudy as Bush weighs reform proposals

Alfonso Chardy, Knight Ridder Newspapers

MIAMI – Pedro Santizo, a Guatemalan, could benefit – or suffer – under President Bush’s latest proposal to reform immigration law.

Santizo arrived a year ago from his village in Quiche and now works in southwest Miami-Dade, Fla.’s, farm fields. He crossed the Mexico-U.S. border through the Arizona desert and made his way to Homestead where he now earns about $80 a day to pay a $7,000 debt to migrant smugglers and send money to his wife and five children.

Since Santizo is already in the United States, he could qualify for a temporary work permit if Bush’s plan becomes law – but only if Santizo continues to avoid detection and deportation under other measures in Bush’s latest proposal.

To make his temporary work proposal more palatable to Congress and voters worried about illegal immigration, Bush is now calling for an expansion of summary deportations – with no legal option to appeal – as a way to tighten border controls.

Temporary work permits would be issued to those who have lived here illegally for a period of time that has yet to be determined by Congress. An estimated 12 million people might benefit.

New bill aims to curtail mail-order marriage abuse

Edwin Garcia, Knight Ridder Newspapers

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The 24-year-old aerobics instructor from Ukraine looked forward to immigrating to the United States to marry a man from Sunnyvale, Calif., whom she met through an international matchmaking agency.

Months later she was hospitalized, her skull fractured. Police suspected her new husband. When they went to the couple’s apartment one early winter morning in 2001 to question him, he drew a gun and was fatally shot by the officers.

It’s impossible to know how many so-called mail-order brides are victims of domestic violence, but a legislator concerned with what she describes as an alarming problem wants to regulate the international matchmaking industry in California.

“There have been a number of instances where women come expecting one type of a situation, looking forward to marriage and greater future possibilities,” said Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, D-Mountain View, “and end up being subject to domestic violence, rape and other physical abuses.”

Lieber’s bill would force international marriage brokers based in California to be licensed by the Department of Consumer Affairs and their owners to undergo criminal background checks. The proposed law would also order the matchmaking agencies to teach brides (referred to as “foreign recruits” in the bill) how to call police, find domestic violence shelters and file restraining orders.

The legislation is scheduled for a hearing tomorrow before the Joint Committee on Boards, Commissions and Consumer Protection at the State Capitol.

A similar bill on the federal level is working its way through Congress.

Hampton U. students to face hearing over fliers

Philip Walzer, The Virginian-Pilot

Seven Hampton University students face a disciplinary hearing Friday for distributing fliers last month criticizing the war in Iraq and the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. The maximum penalty would be expulsion.

Officials of the private university say the students violated rules requiring prior approval of demonstrations. The students say the University’s stance violates their freedom of speech.

“We don’t want to get kicked out of school,” said one of the students, Brandon King, 21, a senior. “We just want to express our opinions. College should be a place that encourages you to do that.”

About 20 students gathered at the school’s student center around noon Nov. 2 to staff a table and hand out fliers on topics such as the Iraq war, anti-gay prejudice and the U.S. prison system.

It was part of a nationwide campaign led by the group World Can’t Wait, which is sharply critical of President Bush, to encourage college students to walk out of class to engage in political discussion.