Word: villas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Forest Service rangers stealthily approach, an unsuspecting Mexican laborer named Pedro Villa Garcia, 51, stands in a clearing. All around him the hillside is freshly terraced, irrigated by black plastic hoses and dotted with iridescent green cannabis. Villa Garcia peers down the path. Is that a black bear--a common local species--emerging from the morning mist? Suddenly he sees the rangers and dashes off through the brambles. But the police dog, a Belgian Malinois, catches up quickly, sinking its teeth into Villa Garcia's arm. Two rangers wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him. "We're good...
...Villa Garcia is unarmed when he is caught in the Tahoe forest--probably, rangers say, because it is early in the season. If they had already matured, the 3,500 plants he was tending would have yielded some $8 million worth of pot--an investment worth protecting. In the fall, when scores of Mexican workers arrive to harvest and process the pot, shoot-outs occur between law-enforcement agents and camouflage-clad growers toting AK-47s. Sometimes the pot pirates mistake innocent tourists for thieves or cops. Last year kayakers on the Salmon River in the Klamath National Forest were...
Squirming in his handcuffs, the white-bearded Villa Garcia looks more like a kindly grandfather than a drug trafficker. He says he has been in the U.S. poquito--only a short time. A stranger came to his village in the Mexican state of Michoacan and brought him across the border, along with four others. One of them was with him on the Tahoe farm but managed to escape. "I did not know what kind of work it would be," he says in Spanish, adding that he was paid $200 a month. Villa Garcia was arraigned on narcotics-cultivation charges, pleaded...
...destination weddings get - couples are more likely to remain closer to home. "It's less a case of getting married on a beach in the Caribbean these days," says Vikki Berg, travel editor at Brides magazine in the U.K. "People prefer to go off to a villa in Italy instead." Tuscany and Umbria are the most popular venues - though Italians themselves, like the French and Spanish, still tend to wed at home. Ireland, Austria, Malta and Cyprus are also popular choices. Bulgaria has become a favored spot for Israelis, who have to travel abroad for civil ceremonies as these aren...
Larry Gelbart is a Hollywood rarity. In a youth-obsessed town, Gelbart, an accomplished screenwriter and playwright, is busier than ever at 75. There's the film about Pancho Villa for HBO. A jazz song cycle at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. The sequel to The Candidate for Robert Redford. A new musical about Napoleon. A Las Vegas spectacular about Busby Berkeley...