I am Andrew J. Weaver, organizer of the petition at www.protectSMU.org and an ordained United Methodist clergyman and research psychologist. I am a graduate of Southern Methodist University (SMU) and live in New York City. There are over 11,900 petition signers from every state and ten nations.

Thank you for your support

Contributors to our legal fund have all given permission to use their donations to design and implement a professional educational and advocacy campaign opposing the Bush institute at SMU. The campaign will seek to raise public awareness during the next several weeks about plans to create a partisan institute having no oversight by the university and being planned under the guidance of Bush political operative Karl Rove.

Our goal is to persuade South Central Jurisdiction delegates to reject the SMU/Bush foundation lease proposal when they meet in Dallas at the Hilton Anatole Hotel, July 15-19. We will also seek to convince the “court of public opinion” through the media that the SMU-Bush linkage is injurious to both SMU and the United Methodist Church (UMC) that owns the university.

The campaign will entail an intensive public relations effort incorporating print, internet, fax, radio, TV and advertising. It will include designing and uploading a high-quality website with blog and interactive capability. It will also involve creating and circulating a media kit for print and broadcast distribution as well as a quality delegate information kit.

The campaign is being designed and implemented by P&S Associates of Maine LLC (PSA), publication and communications specialists whose CEO is Stephen Swecker. Mr. Swecker is a United Methodist clergyman and award-winning religious journalist and editor. PSA provides publication services for The Progressive Christian (recently named North America's best general interest religious magazine by the Associated Church Press) and United Methodist NeXus, an online newsletter and recipient of ACP's Award of Merit.

If you wish to make a donation to the educational and advocacy campaign fund, please send it to Rev. Bob Weathers, 2420 Willington Avenue, Fort Worth, Texas 76110. Rev. Weathers is a highly regarded member of the Central Texas Conference and a former District Superintendent. Please make checks to “Protect SMU Fund.” The more money we have available, the more robust the campaign can be.
Growing the Petition

Finally, please continue to encourage your friends and colleagues to sign the petition. Each name is important. We need to tell officials of the UMC at every level that we find that a partisan institute honoring George W. Bush at SMU to be “utterly unacceptable.”

With best regards,

Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D.

After pledging to abandon Bush's pernicious habit of attaching signing statements to bills and once again promising weekly press conferences, McCain came out for a truly big idea that almost no one noticed: "I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the prime minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons."

As C-Span viewers of the weekly British Question Time can attest, this would be revolutionary, even if our version proved far tamer. (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden use this approach, too.) By moving us a bit closer to a parliamentary system, McCain would strike a major blow for real debate and democracy. A pointed question from an opposition leader (e.g., "Why is talking to the leader of a major country like Iran appeasement?") would make a much bigger splash than the same question from a reporter. Imagine this being televised a year from now. Question Time would be great theater that would strengthen ties between the branches.

Great guns on Alderney! It has taken over 400 years but soon the Tower of London is going to get some of its guns back. On May 25, archaeologists will begin work on the recovery of cannon from a sunken Elizabethan ship that went down off the coast of Alderney in the Channel Islands in 1592. The Duke of York is behind the work that aims to conserve, replicate and test-fire the weapons found on this important wreck.

Excavation director Mensun Bound of St Peter's College, Oxford, says, "We are not just bringing up cannon, but also muskets, grenades, swords, rapiers, body armour and helmets. This was a ship that was supplying an English army fighting in France to prevent a second Armada-style invasion by Spain."

Archaeological teams are geared up to answer the on-going mystery of Fort Raleigh's early settlers.

Last week, First Colony Foundation (FCF) teamed up with scholars and the premier production of Time Team America to excavate grounds in hopes of finding artifacts that would answer any of the numerous questions surrounding the mystery.

Fort Raleigh is the first of five sites for Time Team America's series and the team only had three days to complete the excavation. Thus, they worked from sun-up to sun-down, ensuring not a minute was wasted. The team consists of archaeologists, geophysicists, sketch artists, and graphic artists along with the several in the production field. Lead digger Chelsea Rose explained the teams are "looking for artifacts or evidence of features of buildings" including post-holes relative to structures.

Jon Erlandson shakes out what appears to be a miniature evergreen from a clear ziplock bag and holds it out for me to examine. As one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient seafaring, he has devoted much of his career to hunting down hard evidence of ancient human migrations, searching for something most archaeologists long thought a figment: Ice Age mariners. On this drizzly late-fall afternoon in a lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the 53-year-old Erlandson looks as pleased as the father of a newborn—and perhaps just as anxious —as he shows me one of his latest prize finds.

The little “tree” in my hand is a dart head fashioned from creamy-brown chert and bristling with tiny barbs designed to lodge in the flesh of marine prey. Erlandson recently collected dozens of these little stemmed points from San Miguel Island, a scrap of land 27 miles off the coast of California. Radiocarbon dating of marine shells and burned twigs at the site shows that humans first landed on San Miguel at least 12,000 years ago, and the dart head in my hand holds clues to the ancestry of those seafarers. Archaeologists have recovered similar items scattered along the rim of the North Pacific, and some have even been found in coastal Peru and Chile. The oldest appeared 15,600 years ago in coastal Japan. To Erlandson, these miniature trees look like a trail left by mariners who voyaged along the stormy northern coasts of the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the Americas during the last Ice Age. “We haven’t published the evidence for this hypothesis yet, and I’m kind of nervous about it,” he says. “But we are getting very close.”

The nonprofit Gettysburg Foundation recently purchased the 80-acre Spangler Farm within the Gettysburg battlefield boundary and donated it to the National Park Service.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that more than 1,000 acres of the 6,000-acre Gettysburg National Military Park remain in private hands and unprotected from development. Congress has not appropriated any money for land acquisition or easement purchases since 2001.

If not for organizations like the Foundation and others, and for private citizens who donate easements, preservation at the historic park would be at a standstill.

The Illinois House voted 93-3 on Monday to authorize the creation of new license plates to observe the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth next year.

Rep. Raymond Poe, R-Springfield, sponsored House Bill 4665, which advances to the Senate. No one spoke against the legislation, which still needs to pass in the Senate and be signed by the governor before becoming law.

The secretary of state’s office would decide on the design and color of the license plates, which would cost more than the typical Illinois license plate.

For hundreds of years a band of scholars have fought to get the Cornish language recognised and revived in Britain, but they hit upon a major stumbling block when no-one could agree on how it should be written.

Now, after more than two years of passionate negotiations, the different factions have finally streamlined the many versions of their language to create a new Standard Written Form.

The resolution means the path has been cleared for Cornish to get official acceptance and funding, with support from the EU. It will be used in education, on brochures, pamphlets and on street signs....

A thousand years ago Cornish, which is closely linked to Welsh and Breton, was spoken by most of the population in Cornwall. Its decline began in 1549 when the Latin prayer book was replaced by an English version, provoking a revolt.

Pinpointing the moment that defines Edward M. Kennedy's 45-year Senate career is, to say the least, a bit of a challenge. The Massachusetts senator has played critical roles in legislation ranging from his first bill, an overhaul of the American immigration quota system, up through No Child Left Behind and the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007; his political allies easily span the political spectrum. But his biographer, Adam Clymer, believes there is one moment that stands out as particularly telling. In 1982 Kennedy had lost a presidential bid in the prior cycle and was toying with the possibly of another run in 1984. After dabbling in some campaign planning, Kennedy made up his mind: he would remain a senator. "At that point he committed himself to the Senate … That's the moment that he put himself on the path to becoming what I think of as the most effective lawmaker of the 20th century," says Clymer, who in 1999 wrote "Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography."

Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, [John McCain] is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there. (In a new book, Hagel, who voiced deep concerns about Iraq even as he voted for the war resolution in 2002, predicts that the war will turn out to be “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s history.”) This divide among old allies may be the inevitable result of a protracted war that has cleaved plenty of American households and friendships. But it may also be that the war is revealing underlying fractures among the Senate’s Vietnam coalition.

There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

Not all of McCain’s fellow veterans subscribe to the theory that the singularity of his war experience has anything to do with his intransigence on Iraq. (Bob Kerrey, for one, told me that while he was aware of this argument, he has never believed it.)

President Lyndon Baines Johnson ("LBJ") has been described in many ways -- as a bold dreamer, a progressive, a "can do" President, who had the drive and the knowledge to help transform many of his dreams into reality. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, as part of the year-long centennial celebration commemorating President Johnson's 100th birthday (August 27, 1908), is hosting a series of events in Washington, D.C., to celebrate the remarkable life and legacy of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

On May 19-21, 2008 friends, family, former LBJ staffers and colleagues, along with the U.S. Congress, will pay tribute to the native Texan who served as our nation's President and Vice President, Majority Leader of the United States Senate and U.S. Congressman. Many of Johnson's closest advisors will be in attendance to share first-hand accounts from their interactions with President Johnson.

IFP NATIONAL Organiser Albert Mncwango said the party was prepared to go to court if Education Minister Naledi Pandor and her KwaZulu-Natal counterpart did not withdraw a grade 12 book, titled In Search of History.
He was speaking at a march at Port Shepstone .
About 2000 party supporters took to the streets to call for the immediate withdrawal of the book.
Mncwango said it was untrue that the IFP and its leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi were perpetrating violence in the province as depicted in the book.
The book has a cartoon showing Buthelezi signing a document with a pen dripping with blood.
Mncwango said the cartoon implied the IFP was involved in violence.

Steve Capus
President, NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10112

Mr. Capus:

This e-mail is to formally request that NBC Nightly News and The Today Show air for their viewers President Bush's actual answer to correspondent Richard Engel's question about Iran policy and "appeasement," rather than the deceptively edited version of the President's answer that was aired last night on the Nightly News and this morning on The Today Show.

In the interview, Engel asked the President: "You said that negotiating with Iran is pointless, and then you went further. You said that it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barack Obama?"

The President responded: "You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has. People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the words of people seriously. And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you've got to take those words seriously. And if you don't take them seriously, then it harkens back to a day when we didn't take other words seriously. It was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolph Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the likes of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon."

This answer makes clear: (1). The President's remarks before the Knesset were not different from past policy statements, but are now being looked at through a political prism, (2). Corrects the inaccurate premise of Engel's question by putting the "appeasement" line in the proper context of taking the words of leaders seriously, not "negotiating with Iran," (3). Restates the U.S.'s long-standing policy positions against negotiating with al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas, and not allowing Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Engel's immediate follow-up question was, "Repeatedly you've talked about Iran and that you don't want to see Iran develop a nuclear weapon. How far away do you think Iran is from developing a nuclear capability?"

The President replied, "You know, Richard, I don't want to speculate – and there's a lot of speculation. But one thing is for certain – we need to prevent them from learning how to enrich uranium. And I have made it clear to the Iranians that there is a seat at the table for them if they would verifiably suspend their enrichment. And if not, we'll continue to rally the world to isolate them."

This response reiterates another long-standing policy, which is that if Iran verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment program the U.S. government would engage in talks with the Iranian government.

NBC's selective editing of the President's response is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that he agreed with Engel's characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it. Furthermore, omitted the references to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas and ignored the clarifying point in the President's follow-up response that U.S. policy is to require Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program before coming to the table, not that "negotiating with Iran is pointless" and amounts to "appeasement."

This deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline is utterly misleading and irresponsible and I hereby request in the interest of fairness and accuracy that the network air the President's responses to both initial questions in full on the two programs that used the excerpts.

As long as I am making this formal request, please allow me to take this opportunity to ask if your network has reconsidered its position that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, especially in light of the fact that the unity government in Baghdad recently rooted out illegal, extremist groups in Basra and reclaimed the port there for the people of Iraq, among other significant signs of progress.

On November 27, 2006, NBC News made a decision to no longer just cover the news in Iraq, but to make an analytical and editorial judgment that Iraq was in a civil war. As you know, both the United States government and the Government of Iraq disputed your account at that time. As Matt Lauer said that morning on The Today Show: "We should mention, we didn't just wake up on a Monday morning and say, 'Let's call this a civil war.' This took careful deliberation.'"

I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a "civil war." Is it still NBC News's carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?

Lastly, when the Commerce Department on April 30 released the GDP numbers for the first quarter of 2007, Brian Williams reported it this way: "If you go by the government number, the figure that came out today stops just short of the official declaration of a recession."

The GDP estimate was a positive 0.6% for the first quarter. Slow growth, but growth nonetheless. This followed a slow but growing fourth quarter in 2007. Consequently, even if the first quarter GDP estimate had been negative, it still would not have signaled a recession – neither by the unofficial rule-of-thumb of two consecutive quarters of negative growth, nor the more robust definition by the National Bureau of Economic Research (the group that officially marks the beginnings and ends of business cycles).

Furthermore, never in our nation's history have we characterized economic conditions as a "recession" with unemployment so low – in fact, when this rate of unemployment was eventually reached in the 1990s, it was hailed as the sign of a strong economy. This rate of unemployment is lower than the average of the past three decades.

Are there numbers besides the "government number" to go by? Is there reason to believe "the government number" is suspect? How does the release of positive economic growth for two consecutive quarters, albeit limited, stop "just short of the official declaration of a recession"?

Mr. Capus, I'm sure you don't want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the "news" as reported on NBC and the "opinion" as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines. I welcome your response to this letter, and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network's viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don't hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division.

Sincerely,

Ed Gillespie
Counselor to the President

BLUE and white flags with the star of David brighten Jaffa's streets for Israel's sixtieth anniversary and the roar of practice aerobatics in the sky adds to the sense of anticipation.

But Sami Abu Shehadi, a member of Israel's Arab minority, is in no mood for tomorrow's festivities across Israel. As he likes to remind visitors, until 1948 this was a thriving Arab city, a cultural capital known for its writers and newspapers and a commercial centre with an ancient port. As part of what Palestinians view as the nakba, or catastrophe, of Israel's creation, Jaffa was conquered in April 1948 by the Irgun Jewish underground group and nearly vanished, with all but 3,000 of its 80,000 residents fleeing under Israeli pressure and becoming refugees in Lebanon, Gaza and elsewhere.

Scratch an Israeli name, or glimpse under a flag and you will find Palestinian history, Mr Shehadi, whose grandfather was one of the few Jaffans to stay, says on his alternative city tours.

A plan to build an expanded visitor center at the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument in Montana has sparked heated opposition from historians, two former park superintendents and conservation groups. This week, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) and the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees (CNPSR) have asked NPS Director Mary Bomar to halt the plan and review its appropriateness, legality and impact on the historic battlefield.

Under the plan, an enclosed theater seating 200 people would be built at the base of Last Stand Hill, site of the climax of the 1876 battle in which General George Armstrong Custer and five companies of the 7th Cavalry were wiped out. On April 23, 2008, the National Park Service cleared the project for construction, slated to begin as early as this summer.

Although the site is now occupied in part by a patio attached to the current visitor center, the expansion has drawn heavyweight opposition, led by former NPS Chief Historian Robert Utley, because it would –

At low tide, the Hillsborough River recedes enough to reveal wood beams poking through the water.
To the untrained eye, the barnacle-encrusted wood appears to be nothing more than a neglected boat mooring.

"It looks like an old dock," said Tom Wagner, spokesman for the Florida Aquarium in downtown Tampa.
The beams could be part of something far more interesting.

The planks are the remains of a ship between 80 and 100 feet long, Wagner said. A team of divers and underwater archaeologists from the aquarium that discovered the wreck near Lowry Park Zoo think it could be a sunken Confederate vessel.

Archaeologists are taking measurements and checking nautical records. Wagner said the find could be the first Confederate blockade runner, a ship designed to outrun the Union blockade of Tampa Bay, found in Florida.

Map in hand, park ranger Karlton Smith lays an index finger on one rectangular shape he trusts to orient visitors with their historic surroundings.

"This building's actually McDonald's," he says. "That's a good marker."

Seconds later, an outstretched arm points toward the modern-day structure as it stands in real life on Emmitsburg Road - across the street from where Smith stands on Cemetery Ridge, a chunk of land on which hundreds were killed and wounded during the Battle of Gettysburg.

The use of 20th-century developments as reference points is one way Smith said he has been able to help visitors better understand what happened here in 1863.

But it's a teaching method that could someday be considered passé.

For Gettysburg National Military Park Ranger Karlton Smith stands on the ground of Cemetery Ridge on the Gettysburg battlefield, the chunk of land the National Park Service wants to rehabilitate with federal dollars sometime next year. (Evening Sun Photo by Brett Berwager)
Purchase reprints of Evening Sun Photos at EveningSunPhotos.Com.
several years now, the Gettysburg National Military Park has been carrying out plans to "rehabilitate" some of the land within its 6,000-acre boundary.

SPENCER --It's a clash between two Southern staples -- the Civil War and racing.
The dispute centers on a former textile mill and 130 acres of forest just north of this Rowan County railroad town near the Yadkin River.

Here, former Boston investment banker Dave Risdon, now of Huntersville, is clearing land to build a 2.15-mile "country club" raceway for amateur drivers of souped-up sports cars and motorcycles. The raceway would include a clubhouse and 120 townhomes lining the track.

But for preservationists, the land is sacred. They claim it as part of a Civil War battlefield where Confederates won their last victory in the Carolinas on April 12, 1865 -- three days after Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox, but two weeks before N.C. troops surrendered.

Rightly famous for more than a century of archeological excavations in the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Latin America, the University of Chicago lately has been working just around the corner and down the street on a dig in Jackson Park.

Among the treasures unearthed by archeologist Rebecca Graff and some of her students are rusty nails, broken crockery, pieces of glass bottles, clumps of gravel and metallic slag, now all neatly labeled in kitchen storage bags.

Graff is thrilled with what she and her crew of 20 undergraduates have been pulling out of the park during their Friday and Saturday all-day digs. If she is right, much if not most of it is from the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition, the fabled World's Fair that for six months in 1893 made Chicago the center of the world.

A man accused of being a guard at a Nazi death camp during World War II has finally lost his legal fight to stay in the United States.

John Demjanjuk, 88, migrated to the US in the 1950s. He was extradited to Israel and sentenced to death for war crimes, but the ruling was overturned.

He returned to the US but was accused of lying on his immigration application about working for the Nazis.
The US Supreme Court has now rejected his appeal against deportation.

DOUG MCFADDEN, an archaeologist, walks through the site of a future suburb picking up shards of pottery more than a thousand years old. The 280-acre field in south-west Utah is littered with Indian artefacts. Last year a trench was dug through part of the site that was not expected to contain many remains. It revealed a grave, pit houses and part of a building.

Southern Utah is one of the archaeologically richest parts of America. The Anasazi Indians who lived there until the 14th century left pottery, the remains of houses and thousands of mysterious images painted on or chipped into rock, much of it fortunately preserved by the region's parched climate. Less fortunately, the Anasazi tended to settle in areas that have plenty of water—just the sort of spots where developers like to build pseudo-Tuscan villas.

And they do, here more than almost anywhere else. The population of St George, the biggest town in south-west Utah, swelled from 90,000 to 126,000 between 2000 and 2006—a growth rate of 16 people a day. Kanab, 90 minutes' drive to the east, seems poised for a similar explosion. It lies near spectacular Zion Canyon, luring retired folk who know the area from their holidays. And the high birth rate in a heavily Mormon area means houses are always in demand, even now.

Under Utah law developers are under no obligation to preserve, or even reveal the existence of, archaeological remains.

Though most Muslims reject Islamism and its propaganda, anti-Semitic messages from satellite channels like the Hamas-run Al-Aqsa are helping to bring a message of hate and intolerance to Europe. The effects of such hate preaching can already be felt in Germany.

Five years later, robber gangs still loot Iraq's cultural heritage at the estimated 11,000 archaeological sites across the country, with dealers buying the protection of the clans who control large tracts of the country. A 1,400-strong Mobile Archaeological Site Protection Force was mustered in 2006 but it proved to totally ineffective - usually outgunned by the gangs, its men poorly paid and motivated. Security officials estimate that it would take a force of 50,000-75,000 to protect the sites properly - and there's little prospect of that amid the chaos of Iraq.

The robber groups are highly organized, sometimes heavily armed, often numbering 200-300 men, and, archaeological experts say, often financed by unscrupulous foreign dealers. They are ripping apart these sites, some of which had not even been officially excavated. Some of these illicit digs are family affairs, with impoverished Iraqis seeking to make a few dollars from pottery shards and other relics.

Most are massive quarrying operations with bulldozers, mechanical diggers and dump trucks. They are operating in broad daylight with virtual impunity since protecting these sites is low on US security priorities. Many of the plundered sites are now barren, cratered moonscapes because of the holes dug by the looters.

One journalist's bid to report mass murder in South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced those who knew.

Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly identified as sympathizers. Today a government Truth and Reconciliation Commission is working to dig up the facts, and the remains of victims.

How could such a bloodbath have been hidden from history?

Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a "public secret," barely whispered about through four decades of right-wing dictatorship here.

After four decades carrying
millions of New Yorkers, 44 of the city's subway cars
are now home to millions of fish.

The worn-out cars were dumped on Friday into the
Atlantic Ocean, 21 miles off the Maryland coast, to
create an artificial reef, designed to attract fish
for the state's lucrative sport-fishing industry.

"These reefs provide quality habitat for marine life
off our coast which benefits not only the environment
but also local businesses," said Ocean City Mayor Rick
Meehan.

The 18-ton stainless steel cars -- minus wheels,
windows and doors -- were stacked two-high on a barge
where a bucket crane with a specially designed
hydraulic lift picked them up one by one and dropped
them into 90 feet of water.

[In early April] when Texas authorities entered the compound of the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints near Eldorado, the men, women, and children of the ranch surely thought of a similar raid conducted on their predecessors more than half a century earlier. In 1953, Arizona law-enforcement officials descended on the Short Creek community on the Arizona-Utah border and took nearly 400 Mormon fundamentalists, including 236 children, into custody. The raid on Short Creek backfired, however, by arousing public sympathy for the polygamists, and it shaped the ensuing relationship between state powers and polygamous communities for the next 50 years. But this legacy also ultimately helped lead to the recent events in Eldorado.