World/Nation Briefs May 16, 2010
Forum held on immigration law
MIAMI - Detractors and defenders of Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration aired their views in a lively town-hall style meeting broadcast nationally Friday night by the Spanish-language network Univision.
The commercial-free forum held in Phoenix and Miami comes in the wake of Arizona's new law some critics fear could lead to racial profiling.
The measure requires police to ask a person about his or her immigration status if there's "reasonable suspicion" that the person is in the country illegally. Being in the country illegally would be a state crime under the law.
Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio urged people to give the law a chance before passing judgment. The measure is set to go into effect July 29.
"This is just another law. I am not concerned about the hype, the threats, the racial profiling" accusations, Arpaio said. "We are talking about illegal immigration - that when you cross that border, you have broken the law."
Mills: Forces hurting opium trade
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - U.S. forces are dealing a blow to the Taliban's multimillion-dollar opium business by securing deals with farmers to plant legal crops, the commanding general in charge of U.S. Marines in Afghanistan said Friday.
Maj. Gen. Richard Mills said during a video conference call at Camp Pendleton that farmers who own half of the poppy fields in Afghanistan's key poppy-growing area have pledged to not reseed next year.
Afghanistan supplies 90 percent of the world's opium, the main ingredient in heroin.
Curbing the Taliban's drug trade was a major goal when Marines seized the former insurgent stronghold of Marjah earlier this year.
During the spring harvest that just ended, more than 17,300 acres of poppies were swapped for legal crops around the farming community of Marjah, according to the Marine Corps.
US missiles kill 5 in NW Pakistan
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - A suspected U.S. missile strike killed at least five people in the Khyber tribal region of northwest Pakistan on Saturday, in what would be one of the first such attacks in the area, intelligence and government officials said.
U.S. missiles have regularly pounded al-Qaida and Taliban targets along the Afghan border for two years now. The attacks have killed scores of people, most of them identified as militants by Pakistani officials. But they have caused anger in Pakistan, where many people see them as an unacceptable violation of the country's sovereignty.
The suspected strike in the remote Teerah Valley of Khyber could fan fresh anger because it represented a widening of the covert program.