Eye Openers

Look for the fight against illegal immigration to intensify in Dallas’ northwest suburbs.

Carrollton’s next mayor, Ron Branson, said Sunday that he’ll begin working immediately to rid the city of illegal immigrants.

His come-from-behind election victory Saturday night coincided with the expected mayoral win in neighboring Farmers Branch by a better-known activist on the same issue: Tim O’Hare.

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Seaweed found at an inland settlement in Chile confirms that the village is one of the oldest inhabited sites in the Americas and demonstrates that residents had extensive contact with the coastline, 50 miles away, researchers said Friday.

Radiocarbon dating of the seaweed shows that the samples are 14,100 years old, give or take 120 years. That means the site, called Monte Verde, is at least a millennium older than the so-called Clovis sites in the American Southwest, long believed to be the most ancient in the New World.”*

Fifty-three illegal immigrants found Sunday had been held against their will in a fortified home by suspected smugglers demanding more money, authorities said.

The group of rescued immigrants included two 13-year-old girls, three women and a mentally disabled man. The rest were men, Department of Public Safety spokesman Harold Sanders said.”*

When migrant workers arrive here, they know to expect long hours in packing houses or excruciating days under the hot sun in fields.

A new program is expected to bring them more skills and help them meet a growing demand for locally grown, organic food.

This fall, the Ellenton-based Florida West Coast Resource Conservation and Development will train its first group of farmworker apprentices. Two to three years from now, they may be able to operate organic farms of their own.”*

In the ad, McCain touts “pro-innovation immigration policies” in English (a move to seemingly appease the right wing base), but the Spanish text that appears simultaneous to that declaration trumpets “Immigration Policy Innovation,” a term that makes it sound like he supports comprehensive immigration reform.”*

A fight between rival groups of black and Latino students at Locke High School quickly escalated into a campus-wide melee Friday, with as many as 600 students brawling until police restored calm with billy clubs.

The troubled campus in South Los Angeles was locked down after the fight broke out at 12:55 p.m., as students returned from lunch to their fifth-period classes. Overwhelmed school officials called Los Angeles police for help, but students and faculty said it took about half an hour before dozens of officers, many in riot gear, restored order.”*

House Democratic leaders worried about the November election want to thwart enforcement-only immigration legislation supported by colleagues in districts where immigration is a hot-button issue, a leading House liberal said Thursday.

“People who are very committed to comprehensive reform but who are charged with the responsibility for the next elections think about Lou Dobbs and the power of this issue in different local election contests,” said Howard Berman, D-Calif.”*

Utah Democrats named Josie Valdez as their choice for lieutenant governor on Saturday, even before casting their ballots for the party’s nominee for governor.

Valdez, the former assistant director of the Small Business Administration Office in Salt Lake City, was nominated by gubernatorial candidate Bob Springmeyer after he told delegates he was the “good jobs, good education, good health, clean air and clean water candidate for governor.”"*

Puerto Ricans are under attack, the numbers are startling, and they are 125% more likely than whites and 80% more likely than blacks to have asthma. When it comes to the prevalence of attacks it is even worse, Puerto Ricans have the highest attack prevalence, 140% higher than non-Hispanic whites. This is according to the Centers for Disease Control 2005 statistics (CDC). In 2005 17% of Puerto Ricans living in the US had asthma compared to 5% of Mexicans, whites had 7.6%, and non-Hispanic blacks had 9.4%.

So of the approximately 396,000 Hispanics living in the tri sate area (US Census 2006) some 25% have asthma. If you break it down further, of the approximately 212.200 Puerto Ricans in the tri State area some 36,000 have asthma.”*

Pollo Campero, a Latin American fried-chicken favorite that had been seen in the U.S. only in takeout boxes aboard arriving flights, has teamed up with Wal-Mart to expand its reach to the nation’s growing Hispanic population.

A restaurant bearing the Guatemalan chain’s mascot chicken in a cowboy hat now sells its famed product inside a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Rowlett, Texas. Officials with the chain’s fledging U.S. arm, Campero USA Corp., hopes to expand its reach into more than 20 Wal-Mart locations across the country by the end of 2009.”*

A jury verdict in favor of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and farm worker Olivia Tamayo has been affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a sexual harassment and reprisal lawsuit against Coalinga, California-based Harris Farms, the EEOC announced April 25, 2008. Harris Farms is one of the largest integrated farming operations in the Central San Joaquin Valley.

At trial, a jury found Harris Farms liable for sexual harassment, retaliation and constructive discharge. Tamayo was awarded over $1,000,000, including attorney’s fees for her private lawyer, on her federal and state law discrimination claims.”*

A high school student says he may file a lawsuit against a physical education teacher who took a Mexican flag he had brought for Cinco de Mayo and put it in the garbage.

Clint Straatman denies Froylan Camelo’s version of events but said he took the flag Monday because “white kids” might have hurt the 16-year-old. He said he put it in a garbage can because he had no place else to keep it.

Camelo said he was changing into gym clothes at Minico High School in Rupert when Straatman told him, “Give me the flag.”"*

Berkeley High senior Chase Stern said he was taking an Advanced Placement test May 6, when he noticed that his classmates were fidgeting in their seats and seemed distracted.

He soon found out that the Latino students were receiving text messages and phone calls from family members, warning them that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers were nearby, and that they should be cautious and find their way home because family members could not pick them up.

Scores of undocumented parents began to panic as early as 7: 30 a.m. May 6, as word got around that ICE vehicles were parked near schools in East Oakland and South Berkeley.”*

When he considers the myriad challenges facing Austin Latinos, Paul Saldaña needs only to gaze out the window of his small consulting business, not far from the old East Austin neighborhood where he was born and raised.

Around East Sixth and Robert T. Martinez Jr. streets, the average income for a family of four is $17,000 to $21,000 a year, Saldaña says. Yet, within two blocks of his office, he notes, condos are on the market starting at about $300,000 for 800 square feet of living space.

His point: Development and gentrification are driving up property taxes and driving out longtime Latino residents and businesses.”*

A group of Latino Denver police officers wants the FBI to investigate possible civil rights violations in the case of a white officer accused of using excessive force against a 16-year-old.

The Denver chapter of the National Latino Peace Officers Association is forwarding a letter to Police Chief Gerry Whitman today, asking him to halt an internal affairs investigation into the Latino teenager’s injuries.”*

The presence of immigration officials at National Cattle Congress has stoked fears of an impending raid and caused some in the Hispanic community to avoid workplaces and public areas.

Four days after The Courier first reported the installation of trailers, generators and ventilation equipment on the grounds, the presence of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement remains a mystery. Tim Counts, an ICE spokesman in the Twin Cities, refused comment on Tuesday. He said he didn’t know when, or if, the agency would explain its activities.”*

A state Department of Education investigation into allegations that a black vice principal forced Hispanic fifth-graders to eat on the floor has determined that the incidents occurred, but they were not racist acts.

The investigation found that Sumner Elementary Vice Principal Theresa Brown regularly punished students by making them eat on the gym floor. And although only Hispanic bilingual students eating on the floor were denied lunch trays, that was due to administrative failure, not bias, the report said.”*

Health care is a human right, not a “commodity or a privilege,” Dr. Julio Frenk, a former health secretary of Mexico, said Wednesday at the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health.

“It is unethical to limit health care on the basis of migratory activity,” he said.

People without health insurance - among them Mexican immigrants in Arizona - should not be denied medical care, he said.

Border regions such as Arizona’s with Mexico “are areas of cultural conflict,” just as they are along geographic borders everywhere, as globalization pushes people into closer contact.”*

Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo, one of the architects of the border wall project between Mexico and Texas, drew boos from residents in Brownsville, Texas, at a public meeting on the subject this week.

“If you don’t like the fence … between the city and Mexico, I suggest that you build the fence around the northern part of the city,” fired off Tancredo when opponents to the fence made their displeasure heard at the meeting.

Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada called the Congressman a bigot, and said that the border wall project was a “racist thing.”"*

The head of a Congressional subcommittee looking into complaints of inadequate medical care in immigration detention announced on Tuesday that she had introduced legislation to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress.

“This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration,” the chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, said of the bill, which she introduced late last week. “This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization.””*

A new study by an international team led by a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, sheds light on the factors influencing the stalled growth of this parrot’s population and, in turn, provides an analytical tool that could help pinpoint the biggest factors hindering the recovery of other endangered species.

“This is the first time a framework has been developed to integrate simultaneously the multiple factors impacting the decline of a species,” said Steven Beissinger, professor of conservation biology at UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management and lead author of the paper. “The Puerto Rican parrot’s wild population has only increased, on average, by about one bird a year, and it can’t seem to get out of that funk.”

The research, published in the May issue of the journal Ecological Monographs, not only highlights the various challenges to the parrot’s recovery, but identifies the factors hindering population growth.

Despite intense conservation efforts over the past three decades, the Puerto Rican parrot’s population, which once flourished throughout the island, has languished at 30 to 40 individuals in the wild, with one year seeing a low of only 13 birds.

The parrot today can only be found in Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest on the northeast part of the island. The wild Puerto Rican parrot population is often supplemented by birds released from captive breeding programs, which house another 150 or so parrots.

The parrot’s population began its dramatic descent towards the end of the 19th century as extensive deforestation destroyed much of its habitat. Additional stresses have come from poachers smuggling the birds out of Puerto Rico for the pet trade, competition for nesting sites with other birds and, significantly, hurricanes. The researchers also considered whether the low population numbers have been affected by inbreeding, which reduces the genetic health of the population.

“Our tool helps diagnose why the population has grown so slowly by combining different kinds of analyses and population models in an integrated framework, and sorting out which factors have the greatest impact,” said Beissinger.

“Such information could help prioritize conservation and research efforts in the El Yunque National Forest,” said study co-author Joseph Wunderle Jr., research scientist at the U.S. Forest Service’s International Institute of Tropical Forestry.

The model integrated 30 years of data on the Puerto Rican parrot, which was listed as an endangered species in 1967.

After testing the range of hypothesized factors impacting the Puerto Rican bird’s struggle to increase its population growth rate, the researchers found that hurricanes play the largest role in hindering the parrot’s recovery. In 1989, for example, Hurricane Hugo cut the population of Puerto Rican parrots down from 47 to 22 birds.

“Since hurricanes are relatively infrequent occurrences, it was surprising how important they were. These events are having a long-term impact, the frequency of hurricanes is expected to increase with global warming,” said Beissinger.

The Puerto Rican Department of Natural and Environmental Resources is trying to establish a second population of wild Puerto Rican parrots elsewhere on the island. “This will help act as an insurance measure against further environmental disasters,” said Beissinger. “But without understanding why the existing wild population has grown so slowly, the new population may get stuck in the same bottleneck.”

The study found that after hurricanes, the next largest factor in the parrot population’s bottleneck is the failure of mature adult birds to mate and breed. “More research is needed to understand this ’social dysfunction’ that is causing individuals of breeding age to hold back from finding a mate and nesting,” said Wunderle.

Lower priority factors, according to the study, include the availability of nesting sites and the failure of eggs to hatch once laid.

“People have assumed that predation on adults was a key factor in the parrot’s decline, but we didn’t find as much support for that in our study,” said Wunderle.

“The factors that are most important in keeping the parrot numbers in a bottleneck can change from one year, or even one decade, to the next,” added Beissinger.

Beissinger noted that in the 1980s, low rates of hatching success were a major factor in the population bottleneck and, prior to that, nest predation was important. Concerted efforts by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to guard parrot nests have since alleviated some of that pressure.

“The approach we developed has real generality,” Beissinger pointed out. “For example, it could be used to analyze the current salmon crash in California, which is blamed on water diversion, global warming, habitat destruction and myriad other factors. If we want to be efficient in our efforts at species recovery, it is important to know what factors to target in order to have the biggest impact.”

Other authors of the paper are J. Michael Meyers, research wildlife biologist for the U.S. Geological Survey at the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forest and Natural Resources; and Bernt-Erik Saether and Steinar Engen, both professors at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Support for this research was provided by the U.S.D.A. Forest Service, the National Science Foundation and the Research Council of Norway.
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No, the man being honored by 500 fellow Cuban Americans at a sold-out gala was Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative wanted in Venezuela on terrorism charges and under a deportation order for illegally entering the United States three years ago.

Posada, 80, has mostly kept a low profile since his release from a Texas prison a year ago and a federal judge’s dismissal of the only U.S. charges against him — making false statements to immigration officials.

But recent events like the Friday dinner and an exhibition and sale of his paintings last fall show that the man who spent his life trying to topple the communist government of Fidel Castro has returned to the social forefront of this city’s exile community.”*

David was brought to tears while speaking at CASA de Maryland’s press conference to unveil a report about a Frederick County program to detain and deport unauthorized immigrants. She said she has been unable to retrieve information about her partner’s case.

The negative effects from this program are not only physical, but psychological, David said.

“The fear is immense,” she said.

The Frederick County Sheriff’s Office program will cost millions and increase racial profiling without reducing crime, according to the report presented Tuesday by the immigration activists group.”*

Gunmen opened fire on cattle ranchers, killing at least 11 in two weekend attacks in Mexico’s southern Guerrero state, police said Sunday.

Attackers traveling in 10 sport utility vehicles sprayed bullets at a ranch in the town of Petatlan before dawn on Sunday, killing five and wounding five others, local police chief Miguel Donatelo said.

The property is owned by Rogaciano Alba, president of Guerrero’s cattle ranchers’ union and a former mayor of Petatlan, which sits 40 miles (60 kilometers) east of the Pacific resort town of Zihuatanejo.”*

There is no shortage of good things to eat in the open-air Wholesale Market here in Nicaragua’s capital. Canvas sacks groan with rice and lentils. White eggs are stacked neatly, 30 to a box, fresh from the hens that laid them.

But talk to merchants and shoppers and they’ll tell you stories of want, not bounty. The fallout from exploding global prices for grains and fuel has landed hard on this impoverished Central American nation of 5.7 million people.”*