Borders

Thai and Cambodian soldiers revived a long-simmering dispute over an 11th century temple near their border, trading fire with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades in clashes that left as many as four people dead. The latest flare-up could overshadow a summit of Asian leaders opening next week in the Thai coastal town of Pattaya. The summit was delayed in December after anti-government protesters took over the two main airports in Bangkok, the Thai capital.

The nation's busiest border crossing was closed and declared a crime scene Tuesday after at least two U.S. agents attempted to stop smugglers from speeding through the San Ysidro Port of Entry by firing their weapons at three vans loaded with suspected illegal immigrants. Port Director Oscar Preciado said it was the first time officials had shuttered the 24-lane border crossing to vehicular traffic since President Kennedy's assassination in 1963. Three people in the vans suffered injuries and a person in a nearby car also was wounded in the unusually brazen smuggling attempt, U.S. authorities said.

Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has introduced legislation that, if passed, would instruct the U.S. Census Bureau not to take into account illegal immigrants and other noncitizens in the 2010 census. I'm all for it. Furthermore, I propose that the government no longer recognize deficits in budgets, record violent crimes in police reports, acknowledge casualties of war or count -- let alone give proper names! -- to hurricanes in weather reports. Vitter's last-minute proposal -- census questionnaires, which are scheduled to be sent out in the spring, have already been printed -- is the latest in the political right's increasingly absurdist "fight" against illegal immigration.

Alan Bersin is back at the border and on the move. On the third day of a sprint through Texas and Arizona, a law enforcement convoy zooms into Nogales. Riding in a sport utility vehicle, Bersin scans a dusty landscape that he knows well: this desert town of 20,000 with its fast-food joints and discount shops facing the pastel facades and helter-skelter skyline of Nogales, Mexico, a city of 300,000 just south of the fence. Bersin, a compact 63-year-old with the stride of a former star football player at Harvard, arrives at the Nogales station, the U.S. Border Patrol's biggest.

A 23-year-old fugitive wanted for his alleged role in the killing of a San Bernardino rapper has been arrested at the Mexican border. Officials said Monday that Jeffrey Berrouet was taken into custody Saturday night at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. San Bernardino County sheriff's detectives issued an arrest warrant for Berrouet in the June 2008 robbery, kidnapping, torture and slaying of Robert Mastrangelo. The Press Enterprise newspaper says Mastrangelo, who performed under the name Self Sufficient, was found in a drainage ditch off Interstate 15 in Barstow.

North Korea fully reopened its border to South Koreans commuting to jobs at factories in a northern economic zone after four days of restrictions, South Korean officials said. The crossing was closed twice in a week, stranding hundreds of South Koreans who work in Kaesong and keeping new deliveries of raw materials from factories in the jointly run industrial complex. About 280 South Koreans crossed into Kaesong, 200 others returned home, and about 100 others chose to spend the night in the enclave, officials said.

Egypt has opened its border crossing with the Gaza Strip for the second time in two months to allow medical aid and Palestinians to enter the coastal territory. Border official Ghazi Hamad said more than 40 trucks carrying medicine and mineral water had crossed into Gaza so far. He said 120 Palestinians who were stranded in Egypt were also able to cross. The border was to remain open until today. Egypt has largely kept the crossing closed since the Islamic militant group Hamas took over the strip in June 2007.

Rules requiring passports or new high-tech documents to cross the United States' northern and southern borders are taking effect Monday, nearly eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks and long after the 9/11 Commission recommended the changes. They were delayed by complaints from state officials who worried that the restrictions would hinder the flow of people and commerce and affect border towns dependent on international crossings. In 2001, a drivers license and an oral declaration of citizenship were enough to cross the borders with Canada and Mexico; Monday's changes are the last step in a gradual ratcheting up of the requirements.

School district officials are unable to agree--so far--to a boundary transfer with the Newport-Mesa Unified School District on property along the Newport Coast, reviving plans to enroll as many as 342 students from planned development there. "The boundary transfer is far from negotiated at this point," said Steven Rabago, a trustee of the Laguna Beach Unified School District. "We are waiting to hear more substantial proposals from the city, from [the developer], the Irvine Co.

An Orange County group that co-sponsored Proposition 187 on the 1994 ballot fanned the flames of controversy again this week when it erected a billboard near the Arizona border that welcomes visitors to "California, the Illegal Immigrant State." Several Latino leaders expressed outrage over the Coalition for Immigration Reform's latest tactic in the emotional debate over immigration.