Sen. Russell Pearce has proposed prohibiting cities and counties from having policies that limit the full enforcement of federal immigration law.

The Mesa Republican called a hearing Thursday morning at the Legislature to examine so-called sanctuary policies.

Many local police bosses in Arizona have resisted the push in recent years to dive deep into immigration enforcement. They have said it would detract from their traditional roles in investigating thefts, assaults and other crimes and would jeopardize the trust they have built in immigrant communities.

It’s the last paragraph that grabs me.

Am I interpreting it wrong or are local authorities essentially saying: “We’re too busy with other stuff to worry about this federal law junk. Besides, we don’t want to offend anyone.”

What do you think? Is Pearce just being a pain or is this a legitimate concern?

Officials said Tuesday that they were bracing for forecasted thunderstorms.

Thirty homes were evacuated as a precaution, but Arizona State Forestry Division spokeswoman Judy Wood says everyone was allowed to return home Monday evening.

Wood said no homes or other structures are threatened.

Crews expect the blaze to continue burning away from the town.

Wood said crews initially attacked the blaze with 10 air tankers and 10 to 15 fire engines, an unusually strong offensive because of the fire’s proximity to Bisbee.

But she said Tuesday that three hotshot crews had been released and aircraft had been pulled off, with about 160 firefighters still on the scene.

The cause of the fire began is under investigation.

Pickaway County prosecutor Judy Wolford says Randall Turner entered the plea Friday. The 53-year-old Turner faces two to eight years in prison.

A tractor operator told sheriff’s deputies Aug. 4 he’d been confronted by an angry man with a handgun while he mowed the edge of Turner’s property in Ashville, 20 miles south of Columbus.

Turner says he fired the shots to disable the tractor. The operator wasn’t hurt, but a bullet ricocheted and grazed Turner’s forehead.

Turner sued the county in 2007, saying his property had been damaged by the mowing. The lawsuit was dismissed last week.

The deal is subject to the approval of a Texas court overseeing the bankruptcy reorganization of Asarco LLC, the Tucson-based company that owns the mining sites.

State officials say $20 million would fund the cleanup and revegetation of the Sacaton Mine, a 3,000-acre open-pit copper mine near Casa Grande that was abandoned in the 1980s.

About $3 million would pay for cleaning and restoring the 600-acre Salero and 335-acre Trench mines outside Patagonia in southern Arizona. Both mines were abandoned about a century ago.

The deal is part of a $260 million, 11-state settlement with Asarco to resolve ongoing environmental disputes at 17 mines.

“Resolution of these environmental claims is part of our effort to meet our obligations to our creditors, reorient ourselves and emerge from bankruptcy,” said Doug McAlister, Asarco’s general counsel.

Environmental regulators worry that hazardous chemicals left in mine sites will leach into the soil and groundwater.

Crews will use fresh rock or soil to cover piles of waste from mine operations and allow vegetation to grow. Officials expect the move to direct the flow of rainwater around the waste.

Officials don’t think the groundwater has been contaminated at any of Arizona’s three sites, but the settlement includes money for groundwater cleanup if it is needed, said Patrick Cunningham, acting director of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.

Cleanup could take up to 30 years if groundwater is found to be contaminated, Cunningham said.

Also as part of the settlement, Arizona would get about four miles of riparian habitat along the Lower San Pedro River south of Hayden and Winkelman in Gila County. The land, which has not been mined, is valued between $3 million and $4 million.

Officials say the property exchange would compensate for damage to Mineral Creek and the Gila River caused by releases from Ray Mine and the Hayden Facility, two active Asarco operations nearby.

The riparian habitat is home to many migratory birds, nesting raptors, waterfowl species and the endangered southwestern willow flycatcher. The settlement includes about $4 million for land management.

“The San Pedro River is one of the most important riparian areas in the state, and perhaps the most threatened,” said Mark Winkleman, commissioner of the State Land Department, which owns much of the land surrounding the river. “This settlement will help preserve it, and that is of the utmost importance to this state.”

County public health director Dr. Bob England says Lowell Elementary School has been “experiencing a much higher than normal rate of absenteeism due to illness that looks like flu.”

England ordered the school closed as a precaution until May 26.

He says with swine flu and seasonal flu behaving much the same way, it’s not recommended that students already home with mild illness be tested for swine flu. So, England says it’s likely that the strain of flu will remain unknown.

Lowell Elementary School spokeswoman Sara Bresnahan said officials saw a spike of absences on Monday among the school’s 700-student population. About 20 percent of the student body called in sick.

England ordered three schools closed April 29 after students contracted swine flu. A few days later, he announced he wouldn’t order new closures unless a particular school had a widespread outbreak.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said he got calls about the object all afternoon on Monday.

He said the object did not show up on FAA radar and was likely a balloon.

Later, Bill Stepp of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas identified the object as a 4,000-pound research balloon released from a NASA organization used to measure gamma ray emissions in high altitudes.

The balloon was launched at about 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning from Fort Sumner, N.M., and was grounded at about 9 p.m. Monday just south of Kingman in western Arizona.

Stepp said the balloon, which usually floats at an altitude of 130,000 feet, can be seen for about 170 miles on a clear day and has raised concern from Albuquerque to Phoenix.

“It’s something unusual,” he said. “People just don’t know what it is.”

Marshall Valentine, who works in a Scottsdale office, said he and about five other co-workers who spotted the object high in the sky around 2 p.m. Monday had no idea what it was.

“It looks like someone blew a bubble in the sky and it stayed there,” Valentine said. “A plane flew under it and it looked like it was a mountain higher than a plane flies.”

Similar descriptions of an unidentified flying, clear orb were also reported out of Sedona.

Jennifer McCoy, who runs the UFO Store in Sedona with her husband, said a local resident told her about the object around 2 p.m.

She said she went into the parking lot and saw the object in the cloud line.

It “looked like the gigantic bubble from the Wizard of Oz,” she said.

The Arizona Republic reported on its Web site that the lockdown took effect at 3 p.m. Monday at Maricopa County’s Towers Jail, the Fourth Avenue Jail and Lower Buckeye Jail.

“Lockdown will continue until they start eating again,” Sheriff Joe Arpaio said.

The lockdown will prohibit visits, phone calls and television in the jails, and is expected to affect about 4,200 medium- and maximum-security inmates, according to a sheriff’s news release.

Inmates participating in hunger strikes since early May have repeatedly threatened inmates who continue to take their meals.

The news release says six inmates have asked to be placed in protective custody “so they can eat without fear of reprisal.”

Authorities said the hunger strikes were triggered by an anti-illegal immigration enforcement march on May 2. The event drew thousands of demonstrators and about 200 inmates went on strike.

Since then, more than a thousand inmates have repeatedly refused their meals.

Inmates and their representatives have said they’re protesting the quality of the jails’ food. Complaints about the quality of food comes as a dietitian has worked to make sure the jail menus meet USDA guidelines, as U.S. District Judge Neil Wake ordered in a ruling against Maricopa County last fall.

Sheriff’s authorities argue that new healthier menu items fall within 2005 USDA guidelines, but taste worse.

Jail intelligence officers say inmates were displeased with the evening meals, and that most inmates were still eating the morning meal.

This Feb 18, 1969 file photo shows Dutch photographer Hugh Van Es in a Macao cafe. Van Es, a photojournalist who covered the Vietnam War and recorded the most famous image of the fall of Saigon in 1975 – a group of people scaling a ladder to a CIA helicopter on a rooftop, died Friday morning. He was 67.

HONG KONG – Hugh Van Es, a Dutch photojournalist who covered the Vietnam War and recorded the most famous image of the fall of Saigon in 1975 — a group of people scaling a ladder to a CIA helicopter on a rooftop — died Friday morning in Hong Kong, his wife said. He was 67 years old.

Van Es died in Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong, where he had lived for more than 35 years. He suffered a brain hemorrhage last week and never regained consciousness, his wife Annie said. Hospital officials declined to comment.

Slender, tough-talking and always ready with a quip, Van Es was considered by colleagues to be fearless and resourceful. He remained a towering figure after the war in journalism circles in Asia, including his adopted home in Hong Kong.

“Obviously he will be always remembered as one of the great witnesses of one of the great dramas in the second half of the 20th century,” said Ernst Herb, president of Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondent Club.

“He really captured the spirit of foreign reporting. He was quite an inspiration,” Herb said.

He arrived in Hong Kong as a freelancer in 1967, joined the South China Morning Post as chief photographer, and got a chance the following year to go to Vietnam as a soundman for NBC News, which he took. After a brief stint, he joined The Associated Press photo staff in Saigon from 1969-72 and then covered the last three years of the war from 1972-75 for United Press International.

His photo of a wounded soldier with a tiny cross gleaming against his dark silhouette, taken 40 years ago this month, became the best-known picture from the May 1969 battle of Hamburger Hill.

And his shot of the helicopter escape from a Saigon rooftop on April 29, 1975 became a stunning metaphor for the desperate U.S. withdrawal and its overall policy failure in Vietnam.

As North Vietnamese forces neared the city, upwards of 1,000 Vietnamese joined American military and civilians fleeing the country, mostly by helicopters from the U.S. Embassy roof.

A few blocks distant, others climbed a ladder on the roof of an apartment building that housed CIA officials and families, hoping to escape aboard a helicopter owned by Air America, the CIA-run airline.

From his vantage point on a balcony at the UPI bureau several blocks away, Van Es recorded the scene with a 300-mm lens — the longest one he had.

It was clear, Van Es said later, that not all the approximately 30 people on the roof would be able to escape, and the UH-1 Huey took off overloaded with about a dozen.

The photo earned Van Es considerable fame, but in later years he told friends he spent a great deal of time explaining that it was not a photo of the embassy roof, as was widely assumed.

The image gained even greater iconic status after the musical Miss Saigon featured the final Americans evacuating from the city from the Embassy roof by helicopter. Van Es was upset about the play’s use of the image that he so famously captured, and believed he was ripped off. He had long considered legal action but decided against it.

Born in Hilversum, the Netherlands, Hubert Van Es learned English from hanging out as a kid with soldiers during World War II.

He said he decided to become a photographer after going to a photo exhibit at a local museum when he was 13 years old and seeing the work of legendary war photographer Robert Capa.

After graduating from college, he started working as a photographer in 1959 with the Nederlands Foto Persbureau in Amsterdam, but Asia became his home.

When the Vietnam war ended in 1975, van Es returned to Hong Kong where he freelanced for major American and European newspapers and magazines and shot still photos for many Hollywood movies on locations across Asia.

Van Es, who served as president of the Hong Kong FCC in the early 1980s, was often found holding court at the club, his firsthand accounts and opinions sought out by reporters new and old.

“His presence there is really memorable,” Herb said.

He covered the Moro rebellion in the Philippines and was among the horde of journalists who flew into Kabul to cover the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. CBS cameraman Derek Williams got through immigration but everyone else was stopped and held in the transit lounge.

“As they were then being shepherded back to the plane,” Williams recalled, “Hugh saw an open door to his left, and just made a break for it with only his camera bag. He ran through the terminal and jumped into a taxi to try to get to the Intercontinental Hotel.”

Afghan police arrested van Es, but the plane had taken off so they took him to the hotel. Williams said he and van Es spent three days in Kabul before being expelled. Van Es’ still photos, for Time magazine, were the first to capture Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan.

He and his wife, Annie, whom he met in Hong Kong, were married for 39 years. He is survived by Annie and a sister in Holland.

This is a May 19, 1969 file photo taken by then AP photographer Hugh Van Es showing a wounded U.S. paratrooper grimacing in pain while waiting for medical evacuation at base camp in the A Shau Valley near the Laos border in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Houston's Aaron Brooks (left) shoots as the Los Angeles Lakers' Lamar Odom defends during Thursday's game in Houston. The series is tied 3-3 with the deciding Game 7 set on Sunday.

HOUSTON – The Houston Rockets keep surprising everyone but themselves, and now they’ve got a chance to pull off the ultimate stunner: knocking out the Los Angeles Lakers.

Aaron Brooks scored 26 points, Luis Scola added 24 points and 12 rebounds, and the scrappy, undermanned Rockets pushed the Lakers to the limit in their Western Conference semifinal series with a 95-80 victory in Game 6 on Thursday night to tie the series 3-3.

Reserve Carl Landry scored 15 as the Rockets built another huge lead in the first half, then fought off a Lakers rally to force Game 7 on Sunday at the Staples Center.

“For the last two days, all I’ve heard is that we weren’t going back to L.A.,” said Houston coach Rick Adelman. “Our guys in the locker room didn’t believe that.”

Kobe Bryant scored 32 and Pau Gasol added 14 for Los Angeles, which lost for only the third time in the last 18 games when it has a chance to close out a series.

The Lakers have one more opportunity to finish off Houston, but they probably didn’t expect to need it, three games after Yao Ming exited the series with a broken left foot.

“They all have the same mentality, they all fight for everything they get,” Bryant said of the Rockets. “That’s why we’re in the position that we’re in right now. They don’t quit. So Game 7 is going to be exciting.”

The winner will play the Denver Nuggets, who finished off Dallas on Wednesday night and now have a few extra days to rest.

Like Bryant, Los Angeles coach Phil Jackson tried to put a positive spin on his team’s predicament.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he said. “We are just going to go out and play. It’s our home court and it’s what we play for. We play a different game on our court, and that’s pretty obvious to see.”

Los Angeles won Game 5 by 40 points, matching Houston’s worst playoff loss, but the Rockets came out dominant instead of demoralized on Thursday.

They put together a near carbon copy of the first half of Game 4, when they seemed to hit every open shot, smothered the Lakers on defense and built an 18-point halftime lead.

“We really came out with a great deal of aggression,” said Shane Battier, who played 42 minutes despite an illness. “We were just focused. We took care of the ball, we swung the ball around and we played the way we know we can play.”

Bryant missed a halfcourt shot at the halftime buzzer and angrily shook his head as he stormed off the court. The Rockets led 52-36 at the break – one basket shy of the halftime score in Game 4.

“We just didn’t start the game off the way we should have,” Bryant said. “We didn’t execute right. They jumped on top of us.”

On Sunday, Houston stretched its lead to 29 and cruised to a 99-87 win. This time, the Lakers made a game of it, opening the second half with a 16-2 spurt.

But Landry converted a three-point play to break the Lakers’ momentum and Brooks hit a 3-pointer to help Houston rebuild its lead.

The Rockets hit their last eight shots in the third quarter and took a 75-65 lead to the fourth. Landry drove down the lane for a one-handed dunk with 6:56 left to put Houston up 81-71 and Bryant checked in after a long rest.

But Bryant missed four of his next six shots and Brooks scored eight points over the next five minutes.

It was unclear if the North would agree to the offer. Pyongyang did not accept an earlier proposal to discuss the industrial zone due to differences over whether the detained worker should be on the agenda.

The Unification Ministry said it sent a new proposal for a meeting next week. “We hope the North will accept our proposal,” ministry spokesman Kim Ho-nyeon said.

South Korea says the detained worker is its top priority in such talks, but the North says any meeting should focus only on its industrial zone in Kaesong where more than 100 South Korean companies run factories, according to Seoul officials.

North Korea detained the Seoul worker at the zone on March 30 for allegedly denouncing Pyongyang’s political system.

Relations between the two Koreas have significantly deteriorated since Seoul’s conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office in February last year. Since then, reconciliation talks have been cut off and all key joint projects — except the factory park — have been suspended.

Pyongyang also has ratcheted up tension in its standoff with foreign governments over its nuclear programs. The regime has quit nuclear disarmament talks, expelled all inspectors and threatened to conduct nuclear and missile tests.

The two Koreas had their first government-level talks under Lee last month, but the meeting produced little progress, with the North refusing to free the detained worker while demanding that Seoul pay more for using North Korean workers and the land in Kaesong.

North Korea later proposed that a follow-up meeting be held earlier this week, but the South requested in a counterproposal that they meet on Friday. The North did not accept the proposal due to its opposition to Seoul’s demand that the issue of the detained worker should be on the agenda, officials said.

Last weekend, the North’s committee handling ties with the South said that the country would not even consider talking with South Korea, lashing out at Seoul for criticizing the isolated country’s human rights record.

North Korea has also been holding two American journalists since March 17. Laura Ling and Euna Lee, reporters for former Vice President Al Gore’s San Francisco-based Current TV media venture, were detained while reporting on North Korean refugees living in China.

Pyongyang said Thursday that it will put the reporters on trial on June 4.