Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

El Pasoan Maria Ruiz, one of 10 finalists for CNN's Hero of the Year, did not win the top prize, according to a report on CNN.com Sunday morning.
Liz McCartney, dedicated to helping survivors of Hurricane Katrina rebuild their homes, has been named the 2008 CNN Hero of the Year, according to a story on CNN.com.

About 200 students and staff from Jesus Chapel School, where Ruiz volunteers and her 12-year-old son attends school, along with several of Ruiz's friends and relatives, cheered for Ruiz during the rally. The rally will be featured during "CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute," which will be broadcast at 7 p.m. MST Thanksgiving Day. The host for the show will be Anderson Cooper, and it will be taped Saturday at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.

Political and business leaders in the state of Chihuahua responded with a gush of enthusiasm to news that New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson was under serious consideration for the post of commerce secretary in the incoming Obama administration.

Looking to bolster the fight against childhood lead poisoning, the Environmental Protection Agency last month approved a tough new rule aimed at clearing the nation's air of the toxic metal. But at the last minute, federal documents show, the Bush administration quietly weakened a key provision, exempting dozens of polluters from scrutiny.

Twenty or thirty years ago, traditional financial institutions fled neighborhoods like Watts, and guys like Tom Nix, co-founder of the biggest chain of check cashers and payday lenders in Southern California, rushed into the vacuum. They built a whole new financial subculture, which now includes regional giants like Nix, national brands like Ace Cash Express, Advance America and Check ’n Go and thousands of local chains and anonymous corner stores — more outlets, in total, than all the McDonald’s restaurants in the United States plus all the Starbucks coffee shops.

She...criticized Congress and the federal government for failing to act on immigration overhaul. "The states will take the lead, and Arizona will take the lead among the states," she said. Now, Napolitano may have a chance to lead the federal effort to enforce immigration laws if, as expected, she is nominated by President-elect Barack Obama to head the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal regulators announced late Sunday night that the government had approved a radical plan to stabilize Citigroup in an arrangement in which the government could soak up billions of dollars in losses at the struggling bank. President Bush said on Monday that more such rescues could be arranged if they became necessary.

When it stood alone, FEMA was a praiseworthy rampart in the face of catastrophe, notably manned by professionals, not political appointees. Under the Bush administration, and inside the Department of Homeland Security, it degraded into a patronage-ridden weakling. FEMA should be allowed to stand alone, with its administrator reporting directly to the president when disaster strikes, and before.

Wall Street analysts, congressional overseers and the media have parsed every detail of the Treasury Department's financial rescue program -- $250 billion and counting. Largely outside public view, however, the Federal Reserve is lending far more than that amount -- $893 billion, roughly the equivalent of the annual economic output of Mexico -- to help a wide range of institutions weather the economic storm.

"They all have to be kept in codes. So officers, the law, the man, won't be able to figure out what you are saying," testified Johnny "Conejo" Michelletti, a former soldier in the Barrio Azteca turned government witness.

More than 43,000 children from Mexico and other countries being repatriated at the U.S. border are not being cared for properly, according to a recently released report by the Center for Public Policy in Austin.
The report, titled "A Child Alone and Without Papers," states that the center found scant guidance on how those children should be repatriated to their home countries.

Socorro Independent School District administrators are implementing a new plan to reach at-risk students after the Texas Education Agency learned of a discrepancy in the district's program.
State money, specifically designated for students at risk of dropping out of school, is provided to districts throughout El Paso County.

President-elect Barack Obama sought to seize the reins of the economic crisis Monday as he and his new economic team worked closely with President Bush to inject confidence into the trembling financial markets, which rallied and erased most of last week’s losses.

Rodríguez, 40, was killed Nov. 13 in front of his home by a single gunman. He was shot 10 times while warming up his car, directly in front of his 8-year-old daughter, as he was about to drive her to school in the morning. The slaying highlighted the growing danger to Mexican journalists reporting on the drug war, which has claimed more than 4,500 lives since President Felipe Calderón unleashed the army and police against the cartels and corrupt officials in early 2007. Most journalists continue to do their jobs but concede they are limiting their coverage of the carnage.

El Paso native (and CNN Hero award finalist ) Maria Ruiz knows firsthand how different life can be a mere 30-minute drive south of her Texas home...For 12 years, she's traveled several times a week to the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico, bringing aid to hundreds of impoverished children and their families.

Kim, the owner of a small company writes to say she’s struggling over whether or not to keep her business in Texas because of the business climate and state of public education. Here is her comment: "(Texas) is so manipulated by bad politics. The franchise tax, the new TWC commissioner talking about ways to cut off UI benefits at ten weeks, ongoing debates about alternatives to evolution being taught in public schools; justifying keeping my business in Texas is getting harder and harder." Below is Senator Shapleigh's reply

Forty years after Operación Intercepción—which was followed by Operación Cooperación, Operación Cóndor, and other drug-war initiatives—as much as thirty per cent of Mexico’s arable land is suspected of being under cultivation for clandestine crops, drug violence in Sinaloa has taken a quantitatively different turn, and the Sinaloa traffickers have generated entire dynasties of criminals who are at war in nearly every one of Mexico’s thirty-one states, as well as Mexico City.

Mr. Craddick has been criticized for being heavy-handed and not letting members vote with their constituents' wishes. He denies the accusations but support within his own party has been eroding since before the speaker's race of January 2007, when several Republicans broke ranks to support a challenger.

The worse news for the country is that at a time of genuine national peril we actually do need an opposition party that is not brain-dead.

At a invitation-only forum last night at KLRU’s studios called “Critical Condition — Central Texas,” a panel of 13 health care leaders came together to talk about the state of health care in the Austin area. They talked about a fragmented system for delivering care; they touched on the region’s fragmented leadership in health care. Not a good combination for solving the crisis.