Items Of Interest

I have three items of interest to mention today. The first is the physical item shown here that we found laying in the middle of the doormat that sits directly in front of our front door. Whoever left it neatly centered on the mat had to have trespassed on our property in order to do so.

My second item worthy of note is a very brief (a few seconds or less) news item broadcast by one of the local stations over the lunch hour today. The newscaster said that a man had been arrested on terrorism charges in San Antonio, which caused me to look up at the television from what I was doing, since that's not exactly an everyday occurrence around here. What looked like a page from an indictment was flashed up on the screen just long enough for me to notice a couple of highlighted portions. One of these appeared to be the man's name, a Muslim-sounding one. The other highlighted portion I managed to see before the camera left it said something like "part of a very large-scale smuggling operation", and I think the newscaster also said something about this. The whole item was gone before I could make out or hear anything else, which seemed strange for what had sounded like a major news story. We watched the newscasts at dinnertime and again at 10 PM, but we never saw or heard anything more about this story, which seems even stranger than the story itself. (We do get a surprising number of stories handled in similar ways to this that seem to be more attempts to tip certain people off than actual news reports.)

The third item I'd like to mention is that Jeff Vanvonderen of the A&E show "Intervention" is in San Antonio to host a town meeting at Trinity University tomorrow night. He's scheduled to screen an episode of the show and then hold a discussion about the prevalence of heroin here. At least one young victim is scheduled to speak about her experiences, and questions will be answered at the end. According to promos for this meeting, Mr. Vanvonderen intends to address the problem of drug dealers here deliberately targeting young people in our area, which has long been a concern of mine as well.

Update: In the next morning's San Antonio Express-News, there was a "mini-article" about the accused smuggler discussed above. The man in question is a Somali with alleged ties to Islamic terrorist groups. Apparently he was taken into U.S. custody in March 2008 in Brownsville and later sought asylum. What we saw on t.v. yesterday was probably new charges that have been brought against him for failing to disclose that he ran a large-scale immigrant smuggling ring. There's no explanation for where he was or what he was doing between 2008 and now, and we didn't see or hear anything more about this tonight.