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Milagros, Retablos and Arte Popular 0 TRADING COMPANY FOLK ART & OTHER TREASURES FROM AROUND THE WORLD 209 CONGRESS AVEAUSTIN 512/479-8377 OPEN DAILY 10-6, FREE PARKING BEHIND THE STORE www.tesoros.com International Headquarters Come Visit us for LUNCH! In addition to our organic coffee, pizzas, empanadas, pastries and pies, we now prepare made to order sandwiches, salads, and even black bean gazpacho. 3601 S. Congress off E. Alpine Penn Field under the water tower check our site for monthly calendar Sian Hama, fl i I Retirement System of Texas held $407.5 million in the beverage company, according to stock disclosures. Rogers said his group will continue to press Texas school districts to boycott Coke. EL PASO REBELDE January could be the month that changes El Paso forever. The city is witnessing an unprecedented organizing effort to raise awareness about ASARCO, the industrial facility that literally looms over the town. \(See, “Clean Up or Cover Up?” October 8, an awareness concert hosted by the students at the University of Texas-El Paso, and press conferences galore all are leading up to a “contested case” air permit hearing in the city on January 27. ASARCO wants approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental again. Hundreds of El Pasoans, who are still fighting to remedy a century of ASARCO’s toxic industrial legacy, are planning to attend the TCEQ hearing in force to urge the state against reopening the facility. ASARCO lawyers have tried to stop the hearing, rightly afraid it will do irreparable harm to the little that’s left of their standing in the community. They argue that since it’s only a permit renewal and they have not changed their operating specifications, the TCEQ has no authority to hold the contested case hearing. On December 20, State District Court Judge W. Jeanne Meurer rejected the company’s request for a temporary injunction to put a halt to the hearing. The next step will be for the company to appeal to the Texas Supreme Court. Lairy Johnson, ASARCO’s environmental manager told the El Paso Times that he expected the company to win the day at the hearing. “ASARCO will show that our modern, state-of-the-art facility has a good compliance record, is protective of public health and does not create a condition of air pollution,” he said. The company’s defeat in the courts was followed by a January 5 legal opinion from Attorney General Greg Abbott that says the TCEQ cannot arbitrarily raise the level for soil lead contamination from 500 parts per million to 640 ppm. Under the higher standard, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the company and federal regulators would only be required to clean up 335 contaminated properties instead of 578. Money for the cleanup has already run out, but efforts to lull El Paso into quiescence on the topic, successful so many times in the past, are failing this time around. In addition to the rock concert on January 19, that same day, UTEP students plan to convince their student government to pass a resolution against ASARCO. The text of the resolution is the same as one passed by the student government in the 1970s. Student leaders hope to pass out a petition with at least 400 signatures to make their case. “I’ve never seen this kind of organizing and energy on an environmental issue in El Paso before,” says Sen. Eliot Shapleigh \(D-El And unlike in the past, it shows no signs of fading away. Cielito Lindo, continued from page 25 speech, noting that “scientific progress would be the future of all humanity, free of wars.” Not all that different from some of the talk that’s coming off the Puebla mountaintops today. For more than 15 years, the University of Massachusetts and Mexico’s National Institute of Astrophysics and Optics in have been building a giant telescope on an extinct volcano known as Cerro la Negra. “With a base like a launching pad and an antenna the size of a big Ferris wheel, the telescope will be able to pick up electromagnetic radiation known as millimeter waves,” Reuters reported last fall. The project will cost about $100 millionroughly the cost of the telescope that traveled from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Tonantzintla in the 1940s, when adjusted for current prices. With the new telescope, “We are going back to 400 million years after the Big Bang,” Itziar Aretxaga, a Basque astrophysicist, told Reuters. “We could discover hundreds of thousands of new galaxies.” Mama, does the world end over there? 30 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 1/21/05