Imperial County

This lakeside hamlet is about as remote as you can get in Southern California and still have plumbing and pavement. Nestled on the western shore of the Salton Sea, the town doesn't have a supermarket or movie theater or drugstore. But it has as many as 250 homes for sale, most of them newly built -- a huge supply for a place with just 1,440 people. When real estate values began soaring a few years ago, builders flocked here.

Seven Marines were killed in a midair collision of two attack helicopters in a remote part of Imperial County, the Marine Corps said Thursday. The collision between an AH-1W Super Cobra and a UH-1Y Super Huey occurred about 8 p.m. Wednesday during a routine training mission called Scorpion Fire. The training, part of preparations for deployment, was within an hour of suspending for the night. Six of the seven victims were from Camp Pendleton and the other was from the Marine base in Yuma, Ariz.

-- Supervisor District 2 -- -- 100% Precincts Reporting Votes % Larry L. Grogan 1,193 52 Hank Kuiper 1,111 48 -- -- District 4 -- -- 100% Precincts Reporting Votes % Gary Wyatt 1,316 46 Gregory Heath 546 19 Kari Roper 458 16 William V. Kotlensky 282 10 Larry R. Wyatt 250 9 -- -- Calexico City Council (3 Elected) -- -- 100% Precincts Reporting Votes % John R. Rennison 1,099 18 Lewis Pacheco 1,093 17 Carmen M. Durazo 946 15 Leticia Aldana Cota 769 12 Javier Alatorre 652 10 Patricia Mendez-Leon 558 9 Johnny Rodriguez 467 7 Rosie Arreola Fernandez 314 5 Daniel Silva 300 5 Linda V. Rubio 76 1 -- -- Treasurer -- -- Rodolfo L. Moreno 1,488 57 Jordana Selwick 1,115 43 -- -- City Clerk -- -- Lourdes Cordova 2,189 100 -- -- Measure -- -- 100% Precincts Reporting Votes % -- -- H -- Transient occupancy tax increase Requires 55 percent vote Yes 1,295 49 No 1,337 51 -- -- Calexico USD Measure -- -- 100% Precincts Reporting Votes % -- -- J -- School improvement bond Requires 55 percent vote Yes 2,130 77 No 636 23 -- -- Desert Comm Coll Measure -- -- 100% Precincts Reporting Votes % -- -- B -- School improvement bond Requires two-thirds vote Yes 126 53 No 112 47...

Main Street in El Centro is comfortably baking in 90-degree autumn heat. In California's Imperial Valley, where federally subsidized Colorado River water has irrigated the profits of Anglo latifundistas for more than a century, and where farmworkers too often die of sunstroke and dehydration on 120-degree days in August, this is fine weather for protest. Forty or 50 valley residents are marching down Main, past recently boarded-up storefronts, stopping in front of several banks and a McDonald's to chant, "No more, no more, no more oppression!

Economic news has gone from worse to bad lately, and last week was no exception: New national figures showed a surprisingly high number of jobs created in March, the fourth straight month in which jobs were added across the country. Another report, however, brought a sober reckoning closer to home. Each month, the Associated Press creates something of a misery index, a measurement of "economic stress." The calculations take together joblessness, foreclosures and bankruptcies, the last gasps registered as people fall off the edge of the precipice.

Imperial County reported the lowest voter turnout in the state in Tuesday's election, despite a presidential primary, several contested local seats and major state and local bond initiatives. Less than 30% of registered voters cast ballots, according to an unofficial report from the Imperial County Elections Department. That percentage could increase as absentee and provisional ballots are tallied.

Supervisor District 2 Bill Cole 2,907 Mac Gonzalez 1,974 District 4 Abe F. Seabolt, i. 2,773 John R. Kershaw 2,588 Superior Court Office 3 James H. Harmon 14,235 David A. Blume, i.

A magnitude 4.2 earthquake struck southern Imperial County near the Mexican border on Sunday afternoon, but there were no reports of injuries or damage, authorities said. Robert Dollar, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, said the quake struck at 3:57 p.m. and was followed over the next hour by about half a dozen aftershocks, all under magnitude 2.0. He said the sparsely populated area has had more than 400 earthquakes over the last 12 months.

State Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris vowed to crack down on crime along the U.S.-Mexico border in a meeting with law enforcement officers in a desert region where officials have struggled for years to plug one of the biggest drug pipelines into the country. Harris, in her first visit to the border since becoming California's top law enforcement official, said Thursday that she would increase the number of state agents working with the Imperial County Narcotics Task Force. The multiagency force has helped put together some of the biggest cases ever against Mexican organized crime groups, but the county remains a major trafficking corridor, officials said.

For years this tiny desert town in western Imperial County has been a haven for retirees and others who desire a slow and quiet existence. Howard Kelly, 62, a Vietnam War veteran, moved here to escape the urban noise that triggers his incapacitating post-traumatic stress disorder. Joseph Asciutto, 64, a retired firefighter from San Diego, built a home in this stark landscape he visited as a boy and grew to love, and which he now calmly observes from a lawn chair on his front porch.

Rep. Bob Filner (D-Chula Vista) has joined readers in criticizing a newspaper cartoon showing his GOP opponent, a wounded Iraq veteran, calling it inappropriate. "The cartoon was in poor taste and does not reflect the Imperial Valley's strong support for our troops and veterans," Filner said of political cartoon published Saturday in the Imperial Valley Press. The cartoon showed a poster of Filner's opponent, Nick Popaditch, wearing a patch on his right eye; two young skateboarders are puzzled about whether he is a spy, a pirate or a sitcom character.

The 7.2 Mexicali earthquake was so powerful that it shifted the Earth's crust up to 10 feet in Mexico, according to radar images and data released Wednesday by NASA. The Easter Sunday quake also shifted the crust 31 inches near Calexico. The data for the California shift came from NASA satellites and those for the Mexican shift from European and Japanese satellites. Both sets of data were analyzed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Eric Fielding, a JPL geophysicist, said shifts would be obvious in some places because the earth cracked.

Economic news has gone from worse to bad lately, and last week was no exception: New national figures showed a surprisingly high number of jobs created in March, the fourth straight month in which jobs were added across the country. Another report, however, brought a sober reckoning closer to home. Each month, the Associated Press creates something of a misery index, a measurement of "economic stress." The calculations take together joblessness, foreclosures and bankruptcies, the last gasps registered as people fall off the edge of the precipice.

Residents and public officials on both sides of the border were assessing damage and looking to repair shattered nerves Sunday amid aftershocks from the magnitude 7.2 earthquake that struck on Easter, the strongest to hit the region in more than a century. In the California city of Calexico, most of the city's downtown business district remains closed as structural engineers decide whether the aging buildings can be saved. A squad from the Federal Emergency Management Agency is expected this week.

A state judge appears poised to throw out a landmark pact involving California's use of Colorado River water. If upheld, Thursday's tentative ruling by a Sacramento County Superior Court judge would unravel a complex 2003 agreement that put the state on a timetable to reduce its reliance on the Colorado River. Brokered by federal, state and regional officials, the deal also established a program of farm-to-city water sales that are playing a growing role in Southern California's water supply.

Chalk one up for the flat-tailed horned lizard. In the latest round in a 16-year legal battle to keep the squat lizard with dragon-like head spines safe from urban encroachment in its Southern California and Arizona haunts, a federal judge has reinstated a 1993 proposal to list the creature as a threatened species. U.S. District Judge Neil V. Wake's ruling earlier this week in Arizona follows a recent U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals order that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reconsider its earlier decision to deny the lizard protection under the Endangered Species Act. That decision rejected a Bush administration policy that environmentalists said favored development at the expense of the lizard and many plants and animals across the nation.