A House panel voted Thursday to let Arizonans make their own guns and bullets - and offer them for sale - without having to comply with federal regulations.

The House Judiciary Committee voted Thursday to make it a crime for volunteer workers to pick up early ballots from voters.

WASHINGTON - Putting aside party differences, Senate Republicans and Democrats coalesced Thursday around compromise legislation that holds out the hope of citizenship to an estimated 11 million immigrants living in the United States unlawfully.

PHOENIX -- Calling it an unnecessary intrusion on individual rights, the state House voted narrowly Monday to kill legislation that would have imposed Arizona's first-ever statewide ban on texting while driving.

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of federal agents, along with high-tech surveillance gear and drug-sniffing dogs, are headed to the Southwest to help Mexico fight drug cartels and keep violence from spilling across the U.S.-Mexico border, Obama administration officials said Tuesday.

Rejecting the pleas of the state's former top federal prosecutor, a House panel voted Thursday to let police destroy marijuana they have seized even if it turns out the person had a right to possess it.

The head of the House Judiciary Committee wants to update Arizona's dated and sometimes anachronistic bankruptcy laws.

WASHINGTON - Legislation to revamp the nation's intelligence agencies moved closer to a vote and likely approval, perhaps as early as Tuesday in the House, as a leading Republican opponent announced he would support a compromise version.

December 6, 2004

Bill Richardson: The FBI defines organized crime “as any group having some manner of a formalized structure and whose primary objective is to obtain money through illegal activities. Such groups maintain their position through the use of actual or threatened violence, corrupt public officials, graft, or extortion, and generally have a significant impact on the people in their locales, region, or the country as a whole.”

Cecil Ash was born right here in District 18. He attended grammar school in Mesa, then moved to the family's ranch about a hundred miles southeast of Mesa where he attended high school in Hayden, Arizona.

WASHINGTON - Supporters of a guest worker program that would let illegal immigrants stay in the United States said Tuesday they don't have enough Senate votes to overcome objections from conservatives who oppose the measure on grounds it amounts to amnesty.

WASHINGTON - The House has voted to prohibit gamblers from using credit cards to bet at illegal offshore Internet casinos.

Washington  --  A US Airways executive repeated assurances in Washington on Tuesday that the company plans to maintain a significant corporate presence in Phoenix after its proposed merger with Texas-based American Airlines.

Immigration is not just an issue of current concern and divisivness, it is and has been as America’s political interests play to populations that gave political advantage to political parties.

State lawmakers launched what could be considered an end-run of last year's voter rejection of a change in how judges are selected.

WASHINGTON - Senate leaders reached a deal Thursday on reviving a broad immigration bill that could provide millions of illegal immigrants a chance to become American citizens and said they'll try to pass it before Memorial Day.

It doesn't look like Barack Obama will need to get his original birth certificate to state officials to be on the presidential ballot in Arizona next year.

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Monday that overhauling the nation's immigration laws "is not going to be easy" and warned critics against stoking anti-immigrant feelings by calling them a threat to the nation's identity or a burden to the economy.

WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft asked Congress Thursday for expanded powers to hold suspected terrorists indefinitely before trials and to let him seek the death penalty or life imprisonment for any terrorist act.

What else is the Bush administration not telling us? It turns out that since shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, the National Security Agency has been secretly amassing the calling information of tens of millions of subscribers to three major phone companies, according to USA Today.

State lawmakers are moving to give themselves and other candidates the right to collect more money -- a lot of it -- from individuals and political action committees, even as they ask voters to effectively kill the option of public financing.

Amid shouts from those on both sides of the issue, Sen. Steve Gallardo, D-Phoenix introduced legislation on Monday to repeal the controversial two-year-old immigration law.

It appears that Barack Obama will make closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay an early order of business for his administration. The prison has been so tainted in U.S. and world opinion and so damaging to the United States' reputation that it is simply not worth keeping.