Syria out of the blindspot

Lebanon is facing an "increasing influx of weaponry and personnel from Syria" to Palestinian militia groups, a United Nations report said yesterday. The report, the second of two United Nations investigations into Syria's interference in Lebanon, said there had been a remarkable turnabout from Syria's long domination there. Damascus removed its troops last spring after 30 years of occupation following mass demonstrations and international pressure over the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The situation remains "volatile," the report warned, citing "a number of worrying developments affecting the stability of Lebanon, particularly in the form of terrorist acts and the illegal transfer of arms and people across the borders into Lebanon."

While couched in diplomatic language, the report's clear implication that the Palestinian groups were acting at the behest of Syria appeared certain to increase pressure building against Damascus in the Security Council. The Council's special investigator issued a report last week saying the slaying of Mr. Hariri had been plotted by top-ranking Syrian and Lebanese intelligence officers, including the powerful brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad. Mr. Assad has denied that he or his aides had anything to do with the assassination. He sent a letter to France, Britain and the United States early this week promising to prosecute any Syrian implicated by "concrete evidence."

As the report was being released, Lebanese Army commandos backed by tanks were surrounding several Palestinian bases in the Bekaa region -including one manned by a main Syrian-backed group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command - and setting up roadblocks near the Syrian border. A Lebanese officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, said the military deployment was a tightening of security because of growing fears that the Palestinian militias were smuggling arms from Syria into the Bekaa.

The report issued yesterday, by the United Nations special envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, noted that the Lebanese Army had detained and deported a number of infiltrators of Palestinian origin who carried Syrian identification documents. It said "Lebanon is witnessing a momentous transformation" since September, 2004 when the Security Council adopted Resolution 1559 calling for the Syrian withdrawal and the disarmament of armed groups. But it also noted a series of assassinations and 14 bombings in the last year, for which Lebanese have widely blamed agents of Syria. "As a result of such acts, numerous Lebanese political leaders have chosen to spend prolonged periods of time abroad, for fear of their lives," it said. The report paid particular attention to the mounting tensions between the Lebanese government and the Damascus-backed Palestinian militias.

Message from John Kerry

Later today, I will deliver a major speech on the war in Iraq.

It asks a hard and essential question: how do we bring our troops home within a reasonable and responsible timeframe, while achieving what needs to be achieved in Iraq?
One thing is certain. It isn't by continuing to pursue the Bush administration's "stay for as long as it takes" rhetoric. And it isn't by blindly following their policy of cutting and running from the truth that underlies that rhetoric.

That's why my speech today will call on the Bush administration to immediately draw up -- and present to Congress and the American people -- a detailed plan with target dates for the transfer of military and police responsibilities to Iraqis so the majority of our combat forces can be withdrawn.

I hope you'll take a moment to read excerpts from this critically important call to action on Iraq.
http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2005_10_26.html
My speech today will assert that there is no reason Iraq cannot be relatively stable, no reason the majority of our combat troops can't soon be on their way home, and no reason we can't take on a new role in Iraq, as an ally not an occupier, training Iraqis to defend themselves by the end of 2006.

Today of all days, it is important to note that instead of attacking Ambassador Wilson's report, instead of attacking his wife to justify attacking Iraq, the Bush administration should have simply paid attention to what his report revealed.

As I write this, we are waiting to learn whether the administration's attacks will prove to be an indictable offense in a court of law. But for its CIA leaks, and for misleading a nation into war, the Bush administration will most certainly be indicted in the high court of history.
Sadly, there have been a legion of Bush administration miscalculations that have left us having far too few options in Iraq.

It is never easy to discuss what has gone wrong while our troops are in constant danger. I know this dilemma first-hand. After serving in war, I returned home to offer my own personal voice of dissent. I did so because I believed strongly that we owed it to those risking their lives to speak truth to power. We still do.

In fact, while some say we can't ask tough questions because we are at war, I say no -- in a time of war we must ask the hardest questions of all. No matter what President Bush says, asking tough questions isn't pessimism, it's patriotism. If you agree, I urge you to join me in demanding a new course in Iraq. You can start by making sure as many people as possible see this speech.

iPods are crap

Even as the iPod Nano flies off shelves, consumer complaints over Apple's wafer-thin music player continue to mount. Weeks after some Nano users griped about cracked or defective screens, a group of disgruntled buyers has filed a lawsuit against Apple Computer Inc. over claims that the device's screen can "scratch excessively during normal usage," rendering it unreadable. The suit alleges that Apple pushed ahead with the Nano's release on September 6 despite evidence that it was defective. Filed in San Jose, California, the lawsuit is seeking class-action status based on claims that one of the Nano's problems is the thin film of plastic resin that covers the screen. The suit contends that previous iPod versions were coated with a stronger, thicker resin that was more scratch resistant.

"Rather than admit the design flaw when consumers began to express widespread complaints ... Apple concealed the defect and advised class members that they would need to purchase additional equipment to prevent the screen from scratching excessively," according to the complaint.

Apple blamed the defect on a particular batch from a specific vendor that, according to the company, affected less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the Nanos that had been sold at that point. At the time, a disgruntled user launched the site www.flawedmusicplayer.com as a means of complaining about the screens, which led to Apple's admission to the manufacturing problem and an offer to replace the defective devices. But the company said the Nano's screen was no more susceptible to scratching that previous versions and recommended users buy protective cases.

The plaintiff named in the suit, Jason Tomczak, bought his Nano in September. He said the screen quickly became so scratched that he could not view it. He claims in the suit that the screen was so easily scratched that even rubbing a paper towel across it left significant marks. The suit also claims that putting the Nano in your pocket with items such as car keys, coins, a credit card or the device's headphones can render the screen hard to read. Apple has reportedly sold more than 1 million Nanos since the device's introduction.

Apple replaced Tomczak's Nano because of a battery issue, but the replacement also became so scratched that Tomczak reportedly decided to return it as well. Because Tomczak and other complainants had to a pay a $25 fee to return their Nanos, the proposed class-action suit requests the return of those fees along with the original cost of the device and a share of Apple's "unlawful or illegal" profits from the sales of iPods. The firm handling the case claims that Apple deleted postings on its Web site related to the scratching problem.

Screw Syria

The Bush administration rightly reacted quickly to a report by the United Nations that compellingly links the Syrian government to the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. President Bush called for the U.N. Security Council to convene "as quickly as possible" to respond to the investigation; the United States and France are reportedly discussing two resolutions that would demand accountability from the government of Bashar Assad.

The United States has plenty of reasons of its own to bring pressure on Mr. Assad, including his support for foreign terrorists and Sunni insurgents in Iraq, also not including the hundreds of tons of contraband that was smuggled across the border to Syria before the war. But the detailed report compiled by the U.N. commission clearly justifies -- indeed, makes urgent -- Security Council action. Citing multiple witnesses, documents and recordings of conversations, the investigation details both Syria's dispute with Mr. Hariri and the likely involvement of a number of senior officials in plotting his murder. It also reports the systematic stonewalling of the probe by the Syrian government.

By insisting on full Syrian cooperation with the ongoing investigation, the Security Council has a rare opportunity to enforce consequences for a state-sponsored act of political murder. The Middle East has been poisoned by such acts for decades, yet almost never have the killers and their sponsors been identified and brought to justice. No regime merits such action more than the government of Mr. Assad, who since the fall of Saddam Hussein has stood out as the most conspicuous sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. In addition to brazen meddling in Iraq and in Lebanon, where bombings and assassinations linked to Damascus have continued in the months after Mr. Hariri's Feb. 14 slaying, Mr. Assad is a prime sponsor of terrorism against Israel.

Another U.N. report next week is expected to link his government to the support of Hezbollah and infiltration of weapons and extremists into Palestinian refugee camps in Leba non. Some apologists have argued that Mr. Assad, who succeeded his father as Syria's dictator in 2000, is the victim of hard-liners in his government. The U.N. investigation showed otherwise. Chief investigator Detlev Mehlis of Germany compiled multiple accounts of a meeting on Aug. 26, 2004, between Mr. Assad and Mr. Hariri, in which Mr. Assad threatened to "break Lebanon over your head" if the prime minister did not go along with the illegal extension of the mandate of the Lebanese president, a Syrian puppet. Another Syrian witness told the investigation that the decision to murder Mr. Hariri was made at a later meeting attended by Mr. Assad's brother, Maher Assad, and his brother-in-law, Major Gen. Asef Shawkat.

Also directly implicated is Gen. Rustum Ghazali, Syria's most recent intelligence chief in Lebanon, and its former ambassador in Washington, Walid Mouallem. Mr. Mehlis has compromising tape recordings of both of them, including a meeting in which Mr. Mouallem warned Mr. Hariri, two weeks before his death, that "we and the [security] services here have put you into a corner." Intriguingly, one senior official not implicated in the murder plot is Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan, who was found in his office last week, dead of a gunshot wound, in what officials said was a suicide.

The Security Council has a good precedent to follow here. When Western investigators linked the Libyan government to the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner over Scotland, the United Nations applied sanctions to the regime of Moammar Gaddafi and kept them in place until his government accepted responsibility for the crime and surrendered two of its authors for trial. The United Nations should demand no less in this case. The Syrian sponsors of Mr. Hariri's murder must be identified and brought to justice; if that includes Mr. Assad and his relatives, so be it.

Relief in pot enforcement

Telluride Colorado is a nestled town in the San Juan Mountains, home to moneyed hippies, artists and nature buffs, Telluride is a live-and-let-live kind of town. In August, the Town Council voted 6-0 to put the issue on the Nov. 1 ballot. Residents will be asked whether to instruct town marshals, the local law enforcement, to make the investigation, arrest and prosecution of marijuana possession their lowest priority. The proposal applies only to the possession of an ounce or less of marijuana by people 18 or older.

Several cities already have what proponents term "sensible" pot ordinances, most notably Seattle, where voters in 2003 approved an initiative to make the possession of small amounts of marijuana law enforcement's lowest priority. Still, Telluride's vote will be closely watched, experts said, because it is the first marijuana ballot proposal since the Supreme Court ruled in June that the federal government could enforce its zero-tolerance policy on pot, even in the 10 states that permit its use for medical purposes. Colorado is among those states; the others are Alaska, California, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington.

Executive Director Allen St. Pierre of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws said the fact that the Supreme Court did not strike down the state laws seemed to suggest "concern by justices about thwarting local control, local values."
"The great disconnect at the policy level is here in Washington, D.C.," he said. "Congress is frozen in a sort of reefer madness that states and localities are not."

Bush's missing poll points found

Republican voters don't want illegal immigrants expelled, just legalized properly, a new poll says. Facing a choice between a registration and an earned-legalization plan and a plan that included deportation and enforcement only, GOP voters favored the earned-legalization approach by 58 percent to 33 percent, said the poll, which was conducted by the Tarrance Group for the Manhattan Institute from Oct. 2 to Oct. 5. The one distinction that raised the favorable for Republicans was the including of enforcement. Other polls have shown that republicans will not support an immigration policy that does not have a clear intent for enforcement.

The poll also found that 78 percent of likely Republican voters favored an immigration policy that included increased border security, tougher penalties for employers who hired illegal workers and a policy that allowed illegal immigrants to come forward and register for a temporary worker program that eventually placed them on a path to citizenship.

Some 67 percent of respondents indicated to the pollsters that they would have a more favorable view of President George W. Bush if he supported an earned-legalization reform plan. The poll was conducted among 800 likely Republican voters. The margin of error was plus/minus 3.5 percent.

Border Police

In light of recent border politics and the post September 11, 2001 focus on real and imagined foreign threats, I have found myself thinking of Bacon’s Rebellion.

After the showdown in April between California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger praising private border patrols and President Bush condemning them as vigilantes many of us on the left were asking ourselves if this was some good-cop, bad-cop stunt. It occurred to me that the questions raised by these modern self titled “minutemen” patrolling the Mexican border bear far less resemblance to those first responders to British invasion and much more to the conflict between Bacon’s gang of men and Berkeley’s gentlemen who all felt entitled to a piece of their Virginia. While these modern vigilantes would probably prefer being aligned with frontiersmen of the mid 19th century West, the issues go back further and frankly it just seems irresistible to cast Bush and Schwarzenegger as Sir Wm. Berkeley and Nathaniel Bacon.

Berkeley and Bacon essentially started out on the same team. They were both immigrants, and they had a familial relationship strengthened by political patronage when Berkeley gave Bacon a seat on his council in 1675. Problems in the Jamestown settlement arose when Berkeley began, to put it lightly and in modern terms, tinkering with elections by stacking the deck in favor of him and his rich crony planters by disenfranchising propertyless men. This combined with corrupt taxation policies that the lower rungs of colonial men resented got their blood stirred up. The solution seemed obvious to the lower planters, get more profitable land from the local Indians.

But this was not a palatable solution to all classes of Chesapeake society. Berkeley, serving the royal crown and his wealthy peers had to worry about pesky matters like foreign relations with the Indians and the international fur trading market while Bacon, styling himself as defender of the common man simply wanted to go out to the frontier and deal with the Indian problem on his own – the Indians who were keeping him from the financial gain that he felt entitled to. In response, Berkeley like President Bush wanted to strengthen the border (with more tax dollars) rather than resort to vigilantism, a resolution that Bacon and his men found unacceptable. Their attitude can be summed up by Schwarzenegger's April comments that “Our federal government is not doing their job. It’s a shame that the private citizen has to go in there and start patrolling our borders.”

Both stories, Bacon’s rebellion and the political and popular response to minutemen patrolling the Mexican border raise a number of fundamental American questions. Bacon’s rebellion is said by some to have almost destroyed Jamestown. Illegal immigration or legal immigration for that matter since the 19 th c has been accused of destroying or at least disparaging the nation. In the case of Bacon’s rebellion, the threat clearly came from within – it was not the people of color on the fringes of the society that caused the clash between Bacon and Berkeley and their respective supporters. The eruption occurred when two leaders began acting like outlaws, one by subverting democracy and the other by offering up a violent solution.

While it is clear that a number of serious problems arise when a large number of people cross national borders illegally, it seems equally clear that most of those problems are of our own making and arise out of our own immigration policies. Obviously, lawlessness on the border would decline if legal channels were available which would, in my opinion, make it much easier to detect who the real criminals and potential terrorists actually are. Although President Bush is clearly not about to make any radical immigration policy changes, his denunciation of the civilian vigilantes makes me suspicious that, just perhaps, he may have at least a faint sense that the economies of our western states are dependent on our modern subordinated labor force, undocumented workers, while the governor of California remains remarkably oblivious to that fact.

A poll released September 8 indicates that while a majority of Californians are concerned about illegal border crossings, a majority do not support private citizen patrols. The poll does not extrapolate what “concerned” actually means to those polled but the results should tell Governor Schwarzenegger that he is not in fact supporting the will of the majority by applauding these “minutemen.” He did offer a rather weak recant in late September to a group of reporters in Mexicali claiming that he would not support armed patrols and that “no one ought to harass anyone” but would not rescind his overall approval of the project.

While ultimately Bacon and his men succeeded in getting what they wanted – the people on the borders were eventually subdued -- my fondest hope is that this current conflict over how our borders should be patrolled will keep our focus on our own policies rather than continuing to scapegoat those on the edges of American society.

Just more selective enforcement

The United Nations unfortunately will get back thousands of pages of documents that an investigator retained when he quit the U.N. oil-for-food probe - but only after Congress completes its own examination of the humanitarian program, officials said. Robert Parton resigned from the U.N.-backed Independent Inquiry Committee in April, because the U.N. ignored evidence critical of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. The chief of the probe, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, denies there was a cover-up.

Three U.S. Congressional committees investigating the Iraq oil-for-food program later filed subpoenas for Parton and the documents, though he turned them over to just one - the House International Relations Committee, led by Henry Hyde, R-Ill. Volcker's probe filed restraining orders blocking the other subpoenas.

Parton has reached a three-way deal under which he will give interviews to all three congressional committees, Hyde spokesman Sam Stratman said Thursday. The United Nations will drop charges that he violated a confidentiality agreement, and Hyde's committee will return the material once it completes its own inquiries into oil-for-food and Volcker's committee itself, Stratman said. Volcker's probe was independent of the United Nations but received its funding and mandate from it. Only after its reports are released will Hyde's committee return the 16,000 pages of documents, Stratman said. "The reports from this committee will address both the substantive allegations surrounding the oil-for-food program as well as the U.N.'s ability to investigate itself," Stratman said.

In an interim report March 29, Volcker's panel concluded there wasn't enough evidence to prove Annan influenced the awarding of an oil-for-food contract to a Swiss company that employed his son, Kojo Annan. It faulted him for not properly investigating allegations of conflict of interest in the awarding of the contract. Another report earlier this month faulted Annan and his deputy, Canada's Louise Frechette, for tolerating corruption and doing little to stop Saddam's manipulations.

The other congressional probes are led by Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn.,and Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn. Staff for Shays and Coleman refused to comment on the deal with Parton, only saying that all crimes will be investigated.

The GOP's Border Police

Around 1900, at age 11 or so, Tom Tancredo's grandfather, an orphan, sailed, unaccompanied, from Italy to New York with a note pinned to his shirt, asking that he be directed to Iowa. In Manhattan he was told that, the ocean being in one direction, Iowa must be in the other direction, so he began to work his way west. More than two years later, having rather overshot Iowa, he arrived in Denver. Eight decades later he recalled seeing the Rocky Mountains and thinking, "If Iowa is past that , the hell with it."

Today, grandson Tom is a congressman representing Denver suburbs and voicing the sentiments of many Americans who are incandescent with anger about illegal immigration. Hence he is giving Republican Party officials nightmares about a boisterous Tancredo presentation of those sentiments in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries.

Tancredo says, "I'm too fat, too short and too bald" to be president. Actually, at 5 feet 8 inches "in my cowboy boots" and 177 pounds, he would have towered over President Madison, is 150 pounds lighter than President Taft was and has much more hair than did President Eisenhower. Still, Tancredo knows he is not going to be president and hopes "some tall guy with good hair" will make illegal immigration a big issue in 2008.

But he believes he will have to, and he recently has been to, among other places, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. He is consulting with Bay Buchanan, who, as Pat Buchanan's sister, knows something about mounting intraparty insurgencies. She expects he will run and hopes she will be Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote.

Tancredo knows his candidacy would be quixotic, and he worries that if he wins few votes his issue will be discounted. But he also knows that presidential primaries are, among other things, market research mechanisms whereby unserved constituencies are discovered and dormant issues brought to life.

Which is what worries Republican officials. They desperately want to avoid giving offense to the Hispanic vote, the rapidly growing -- and already the largest -- cohort in play in American politics. Hence the Bush administration's eagerness to get past hurricanes and Supreme Court nominations and to enactment of the president's immigration reforms.

The basic problem is that the nation's economy is ravenous for more immigrant labor than the system of legal immigration can currently provide. Furthermore, about 11 million illegal immigrants are in America. It would take a lot of buses -- 200,000 of them, bumper-to-bumper in a convoy 1,700 miles long -- to carry them back to America's border. America will not do that -- will not round up and deport the equivalent of the population of Ohio.

Tancredo agrees, and insists that no such draconian measure is necessary. His silver bullet is to "just enforce the law" -- the law against hiring illegal immigrants. Give employers computerized means of checking the status of job applicants, and, he says, the ones here illegally will go home. If only it were that simple. But the details of his plan are less important than his emphatic raising of an issue that many Americans believe is being ignored or treated gingerly for reasons of political calculation or political correctness.

He says that "The Disuniting of America," a 1992 book by one of liberalism's eminent intellectuals, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., alerted him to the dangers of the "cult of multiculturalism." Today's immigrants, he says, do not feel what his grandfather did -- "pressure to assimilate." Because most come from nearby countries in this hemisphere, they do not experience what is called the "psychological guillotine" of being severed from their old country by distance and the difficulty of transoceanic travel.

Elected in 1998, Tancredo is consistently obstreperous, meaning conservative as Republicans used to understand that. He voted against President Bush's prescription drug entitlement because he says we can't afford it, against Bush's education reform, the No Child Left Behind Act, because it is expands federal infringement of state responsibilities, and against the recent $50 billion appropriation for recovery from Hurricane Katrina because of insufficient accountability -- "Not one person on the [House] floor could tell you what it was being spent for." His proposal for paying for Katrina? "Sell 15 percent of all federal land." But not, he says temperately, Yellowstone Park.

Such high-voltage views will enable him to live off the land in 2008, depending on the free media attention that comes to a live wire. So Republicans may have found their Al Sharpton, a candidate who simply has no interest in being decorous.

Reform in California

The newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a stalwart Liberal Democrat, blasted Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger for allegedly abusing California's ballot initiative process to force his political agenda on an uncooperative legislature.

Four ballot measures that deal with teacher tenure, union dues, a spending cap and redistricting are supported by the man known as the Governator. Also, Liberals in California have witnessed what happens when ballot initiatives were passed throughout the country such as laws banning gay and lesbian marriage.

"I'm opposed to all of his initiatives," said Villaraigosa, a former California Assembly speaker, who had indicated during his mayoral campaign that he was eager to work with Schwarzenegger. So much for campaign promises.

"In this instance it's very clear that the initiative process is being misused," Villaraigosa complained to the Associated Press. "These are matters that could and should be addressed by the Legislature."

One of the major ballot initiatives that has government workers and union leaders up in arms is Proposition 75, a law that would require unions to poll their memberships before endorsing candidates or contributing money and time to their campaigns.

A spokesperson for Gov. Schwarzenegger countered, "The governor decided to take the issues before voters in a Nov. 8 special election because the Legislature was unwilling to work with him." Tired of the backroom deals and lack of resolve to correct numerous state problems, a majority of Californians and Americans favor the ballot initiative approach to passing legislation

The AP quotes a Schwarzenegger spokesperson as saying, "The governor could not agree with the mayor more that the Legislature should have worked with the governor to pass these reforms. Instead, the Legislature focused on its own priorities, things like gay marriage and drivers licenses for illegal immigrants." Schwarzenegger opposes both gay marriage and California drivers licenses for illegal aliens, two issues that are crucial to Liberal-Left activist groups and politicians

Villaraigosa's comments, while not out of keeping with his political loyalties, are indicative of the Liberal mindset that giving Americans direct decision-making on political issues is a dangerous thing. In fact, Liberals prefer to bypass even legislatures in order to have black- robed lawyers on judicial benches ram policy decisions down the throats of citizens.

As he pushes his ballot agenda, Schwarzenegger has been trying to rebuild his standing with Hispanic voters who helped put him win office in 2003, but whose support has eroded in recent months. Much of that erosion is the result of people such as Los Angeles' mayor, who oppose Scharzeneggers strong stand on illegal immigration, denigrating him for daring to support tough border security and Governor's support of the controversial Minuteman Project. Political insiders claim Gov. Schwarzenegger is being maligned by a strong Liberal-Labor coalition coupled with a hostile and partisan news media.

Canadian Marijuana Surpasses Wheat as Biggest Crop

Canada's marijuana dealers are converting suburban homes and abandoned warehouses into pot farms, creating an $8.5 billion market that's three times the size of the nation's biggest legal crop, wheat. Cities such as Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto may each have as many as 20,000 pot factories according to some estimates, said Rich Baylin, former national coordinator for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Cultivation is rising because penalties are often one-eighth those in the U.S., and Canadians' acceptance of pot has risen.

The grow-op business has created a rift with the U.S., where police say much of the weed is sold. Efforts by Prime Minister Paul Martin to decriminalize marijuana are a bigger threat to U.S. relations than the softwood-lumber dispute, according to a Compas Research poll of 146 Canadian chief executives in March. Almost half of all adult Canadians smoked pot at least once in their life, according to a survey last year by Health Canada. The same proportion support decriminalization of possession, compared with a third of their U.S. counterparts, a November Ipsos-Reid poll found.

This announcement came as thousands gathered on the Boston Common on Saturday to sway to gritty rock music, shop for T-shirts with slogans like ''Thank You for Pot Smoking," and rally against marijuana prohibition.

Turnout was smaller than in years past, when the event sometimes drew crowds of 30,000 or 40,000, according to police. The theme of this year's rally was "Secure the Blessings of Liberty," which Saunders described as a call to political action. His group is backing a bill that is before the state Senate and would impose a civil fine of $100 for possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, rather than a criminal penalty.

Google Challenged By Chinese Government

October 4, 2005

Taiwan's government asks Web search company Google Inc. to stop calling the self-governing island a "province of China" on its Google Maps service.

China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province. It has also warned to attack the island if it insists on formal statehood. The two countries separated in a civil war, which ended in 1949. Taiwan insists it is a sovereign, independent state.

Foreign ministry spokesman Michel Lu says, "It is incorrect to call Taiwan a province of China because we are not. We have contacted Google to express our position and asked them to correct the description."

Local authorities may finally enforce the law

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison wants to expand the responsibilities of local and other law enforcement to rounding up illegal immigrants.

Hutchison plans to propose legislation today that would allow local officials to arrest and detain illegal immigrants for immigration violations.

She also planned to propose a program that allows states to license officers, marshals and F-B-I agents who want to volunteer.

Using local law enforcement to enforce immigration laws has been a divisive issue among law enforcement officers.

Some want the authority to enforce immigration laws. Others say they don't have the resources to do so. They also say doing so hurts their ability to investigate crimes involving the immigrant community or that may have been witnessed by immigrants.

Alabama, Florida and Los Angeles County have federal approval to train civilian law enforcement so they can arrest suspected illegal immigrants.