Tucson Merchants are complaining that crime, drug users and vagrants are hurting business in the downtown area, yet the city of Tucson council members turned down the over $100,000 grant for security cameras thinking that they would be stripping away at our civil liberties. There still is a possibility of having the photo-radar and red-light cameras at intersections. More will be determined about the cameras during new council sessions after December.

MTV is airing a show this evening about Living on the Border and one of three people who will be featured in this documentary is a member of the Minuteman living in Tucson. It is the conflict between illegal entrants into the United States from Mexico and those patrolling the border dealing with the different cultures, health care issues, drugs and more. This episode includes a sheriff’s deputy and an illegal immigrant in Texas as well.

An open house drew quite a crowd that was held at the Manning House on a new Tucson Convention Hotel. Information included designs for the hotel and the four finalists hoping to be selected to build a convention center hotel in downtown Tucson. The attendees were business owners, city officials, developers and more interested parties in the development of this downtown project. This is to be a publicly financed hotel with a proposed cost of from $150 to $200 million. The money is to come from the city’s access to low-interest, tax exempt financing. It would actually be owned by a public entity and operated by a hotel chain hoping to draw more conventions to the downtown Tucson area.

While officers were attempting to serve a drug-related arrest warrant near North Country Club and East Glenn last night they discovered what they thought were explosives. The bomb squad was called to the scene and residents in nearby homes/apartments were evacuated a Tucson Police Department Official said. The man to be served the warrant was not at home at the time.

UMC has great hopes to cure diabetes that is so prevalent in Southern Arizona. Even though many of the physicians have left the hospital and are not working on this program, UMC in Tucson is hoping to recruit more researchers and surgeons for the project. The trauma center has also lost many of it’s specialty physicians that the hospital is trying to replace. Unfortunately, the salaries are not competitive enough to draw quality surgeons at this time.

The Drug Tunnel roof under the Nogales Port of Entry to this country collapsed. This tunnel was discovered when it’s poor quality construction forced the collapse of it’s roof which created a sink hole in the lane’s pavement directly in front of where U.S. Customs inspects vehicles. The tunnel appeared to have been dug by hand. There must be a maze of tunnels near this border entry including some tunnels that were previously found beneath the employee parking lot. It was not determined if this tunnel south of Tucson was to be used for drug or illegal immigrant smuggling.

The Internet offers a wealth of knowledge for making explosives, recruiting and training group members as well plans for attack. The UA has received a federal grant for it’s Dark Web work of $1.5 million to obtain information on threats from extremist groups by listening to terrorist chat rooms and any other links/databases that may contain threats to the country. The UA in Tucson is working with Fort Huachuca as well as other federal intelligence agencies to gather this much needed information. It appears that there are over 50,000 terrorist related Web sites available in many different languages.

Tucson is in great need of trauma surgeons. Tucson’s doctors are leaving – and it needs over twice as many as it now has. University Medical Center, which is Southern Arizona’s only Level 1 trauma center, is in critical shape suffering great shortages of funds and specialty surgeons like eye specialists, neurosurgeons, orthopedic and plastic surgeons. Lacking are also intensive care beds for the serious injury patients. Tucson is losing the quality in trauma service it once had, which it now finds too expensive to sustain.

The Border Patrol listened to the problems and concerns of the residents near the proposed checkpoint on I-19 and may not place a permanent one there. The Border Patrol has agreed to continue operating their existing site and will add improvements to it such as investments in new technology. Though the Border Patrol has plans for a permanent checkpoint on Interstate 19 somewhere in the Tucson area, the suitable location is still to be determined and the hopes are that it will be located much closer to the border and away from populated areas.

Bank Fraud and Identity Theft to obtain fake credit cards were the charges against three motorcycle salesmen Michael De La Rosa, Joshua Damian Luna and Anthony Blas Rivera in Tucson. They were employed at Arizona Honda and could possibly spend 30 years in prison. They are accused of using customers’ credit applications to obtain personal information which allowed them to apply for credit cards in the customers’ names. They then used these credit cards to pay off their own debts, transfer funds into their personal bank accounts and more.