Land Dispute

Three Americans jailed over a land dispute in Mexico's southern Oaxaca state have been released and the charges thrown out, their attorney said. Mary Ellen Sanger, John Barbato and Joseph Simpson were charged with illegally occupying and looting a large house in the town of San Pablo Etla whose ownership by U.S. writer Russell Ames is contested by the local University of the Americas. Sanger, Barbato and Simpson had lived in the house to care for Ames.

Separated from the Yucatan Peninsula by a lagoon, this pristine island has streets of sand, iguanas that roam among humans, and a police presence best described as casual. In the tiny town on its western tip, golf carts are the primary mode of transportation. "It's like out of movie, isn't it?" said a chuckling Ramon Chan, a 41-year-old vendor who on a recent day was hacking away at fresh coconuts from a cart on the beach. In recent years, however, Isla Holbox (pronounced "holl-bosch")

Officials said Wednesday that a dispute over land was behind the shooting deaths of five people--including a 101-year-old man--on a mountain road in western Mexico over the weekend. Nayarit state Atty. Gen. Jorge Armando Banuelos Ahumada said investigators had ruled out political or drug-related motives in the Sunday shootings. "These events were caused by deeply rooted hostility between families," he said.

Mammoth Lakes hardly fits the profile of other cities that have recently plunged into bankruptcy. It was not pensions or plummeting property values or questionable accounting practices that pushed the tiny mountain resort town over the edge: It was a $43-million court judgment in a lawsuit brought by a developer after the town tried to back out of an agreement. The town finally reached a tentative settlement agreement in the case last month, but not before filing for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection.

A Mt. Clef Ridge property owner who wanted to sell his land to Thousand Oaks will have to petition the city's open-space agency instead, the City Council decided Tuesday night. James Kallas bought his land above the Cal Lutheran campus in 1961. He said he has never been able to build there, first because he couldn't afford to, later because the city's restrictive land-use policies prevented him.

A Newbury, N.H., selectman's son involved in a land dispute with the town shot and killed two municipal employees and critically wounded a third before shooting himself, authorities said. John Albro, 37, used a .45-caliber submachine gun and a semiautomatic .22-caliber handgun to kill receptionist Meribeth Swanson and secretary Susan Webster and wound administrative assistant Carole Hockmeyer. Albro was reported in critical condition. Gov.

Former Hopi Chairman Ferrell Secakuku, 69, who helped resolve a longtime land dispute between his tribe and the Navajo Nation, died Wednesday at a friend's home in Flagstaff, Ariz., said his daughter, Kim. He had suffered from cancer. Born in the Village of Sipaulovi, Secakuku was chairman of the Hopi Tribe from 1994 to 1997.

Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said Wednesday that he will send in the army to help end a monthlong standoff between Quebec police and armed Mohawk Indians barricaded at two reservations in the province. Mulroney said he hopes, however, that the conflict will be settled peacefully, and he appointed Quebec Superior Court Justice Alan Gold to mediate the bitter land dispute between the Mohawks and the Quebec government. But he did not rule out the use of force.

Etta Begay walks to the nearest store, a round trip of about eight miles, nearly every day to buy ice for the two plastic picnic coolers that serve as her family's refrigerator. "If we don't have any money on a certain day, we don't have any ice," she said. "Then the food goes bad." Like hundreds of other Navajo Indian families caught up in a land dispute between their tribe and the neighboring Hopis, the Begays live without electricity or telephone.

A Los Angeles County agency has resolved a long-running land dispute among three east San Gabriel Valley cities by giving one of them a slight advantage in attempts to annex unincorporated territory that promises to be a huge tax bonanza. At a public hearing Wednesday, the Local Agency Formation Commission voted to place 52 acres of the 1,140-acre parcel in Covina's so-called "sphere of influence."

There are hardly more striking film festival settings than this former mining town: an 8,750-foot-elevation box canyon flanked on the sides by sheer red-rock cliffs and capped at its end by a misty waterfall. So it seems only fitting that land itself — and in particular its custodianship — played such a prominent part in the just-concluded Telluride Film Festival. Though the works in the 38th annual movie gathering covered an assortment of topics and themes, some of the Labor Day weekend festival's most memorable new films cast the land in a starring role, using terra firma as a narrative linchpin.

A former San Bernardino County supervisor and a Rancho Cucamonga developer were among four people indicted Tuesday on public corruption charges stemming from a land dispute that allegedly involved $100,000 bribes, scandalous political attack mailers and "the services of a karaoke hostess" in China, authorities said Tuesday. Former Supervisor Paul Antoine Biane, who was apprehended Tuesday evening, and Jeffrey Burum, a managing partner at Colonies Partners of Rancho Cucamonga, were named in the 29-count indictment that includes charges of bribery, extortion and misappropriation of public funds, authorities said.

A flamboyant farm-workers organizer who called himself a modern-day Emiliano Zapata has been slain in a brazen ambush that also killed 14 members of his family and staff, officials said Saturday. Prosecutors in the border state of Sonora, where the slayings occurred, said they were investigating a number of possible motives. Sonora, like much of Mexico, has been hit by a wave of killings tied to drug-trafficking gangs. The union leader, Margarito Montes Parra, was killed in the southern part of the state that borders Sinaloa, a major center for the production and transport of marijuana and heroin.

Congressman Ken Calvert said Monday that published reports indicating that he is under investigation by the FBI for his involvement in a disputed land deal were untrue. "I have never been contacted by the FBI, and they have not contacted any of our partners," said Calvert, a Republican from Carona. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said she could neither confirm nor deny whether the agency was investigating Calvert. The Associated Press, which had reported that Calvert was under investigation, said Monday that its published story was erroneous.

Brazil's Supreme Court sided with Amazonian Indians in a land dispute that turned violent last year when authorities tried to evict rice farmers from a government-decreed reservation. The court ruling upholds the 4.2-million-acre Raposa Serra do Sol reservation for 18,000 Indians who lay claim to their ancestral land, despite a few large-scale farmers who also occupy the territory in the northernmost reaches of the Amazon jungle bordering Venezuela.

Mideast land dispute: An Dec. 27 article in Section A about a land dispute in the West Bank between Jewish settlers and a Palestinian family stated that the Kfar Etzion kibbutz established by Jews was overrun by Jordan's Arab Legion on the next-to-last day of Israel's 1948 war of independence. In fact, it was overrun by Jordan's Arab Legion in 1948 the day before Israel's declaration of independence, which set off a wider invasion by Arab armies that unsuccessfully challenged the birth of the Jewish state.

From where she sits in the small grocery her family owns on Casa Nova Street, Juliette Mazzawi can hear the fiery words emanating from the loudspeakers at a makeshift mosque just down the block. The 43-year-old Christian listens to what she considers to be anti-Christian sermons and feels afraid--and she's surprised to feel that way.

Congressman Ken Calvert said Monday that published reports indicating that he is under investigation by the FBI for his involvement in a disputed land deal were untrue. "I have never been contacted by the FBI, and they have not contacted any of our partners," said Calvert, a Republican from Carona. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said she could neither confirm nor deny whether the agency was investigating Calvert. The Associated Press, which had reported that Calvert was under investigation, said Monday that its published story was erroneous.

Former Hopi Chairman Ferrell Secakuku, 69, who helped resolve a longtime land dispute between his tribe and the Navajo Nation, died Wednesday at a friend's home in Flagstaff, Ariz., said his daughter, Kim. He had suffered from cancer. Born in the Village of Sipaulovi, Secakuku was chairman of the Hopi Tribe from 1994 to 1997.

In the latest case of unrest afflicting the Chinese countryside, at least 15 people were wounded, some seriously, when a gun battle broke out in a land dispute between two villages in the southern province of Guangdong. Residents said tension that had been brewing for years intensified in the fall, when Xiaomeichen residents decided to build a road through neighboring Dameichen. Both are in Huangpo county.