The Green Season. Border Patrol agents in Laredo, Texas, confiscated 745 pounds of marijuana; the bundles were wrapped in Christmas paper. During a routine immigration inspection, a drug-sniffing dog alerted agents to a passenger van where the pot was found. Border Patrol turned over the driver, van, and marijuana to DEA agents. “It’s kind of a different strategy that was employed,” said Border Patrol public affairs officer Jason Darling in reference to the unusual discovery of “marijuana wrapped like Christmas gifts.”

Fancy Inn. Construction workers have laid the wood floors for San Diego’s first bed-and-breakfast. Currently, the only lodging available to those visiting San Diego is in Alice, ten miles to the east. Although the inn’s proprietor, Mrs. Ann Hoffman Bayless, does not yet have a date for the grand opening, she is eager to welcome visiting lawyers and judges. “We have a lot of high-profile lawsuits in this town,” she says. “I thought maybe some of the attorneys from out of town — the trial lawyers — would be staying here. We’re just two blocks from the courthouse.” The two-story house is a replication of the old French architecture of New Orleans, with wrap-around porches both upstairs and downstairs.

Claro Goes Country. Local radio station KUKA 105.9 changed its music format from conjunto to country. Bobby Peña, general manager with Claro Communications, hopes to appeal to a wider audience with artists such as Tim McGraw and George Strait. Conjunto is a genre of Mexican music that features the accordion and the bajo sexto (12-string bass).

Smile, Baby. Ariel Georgette Lugo of San Diego won “Baby of the Year” in a vote conducted by the Alice Echo News Journal and the CHRISTUS Spohn Hospital in Alice. Voters cast more than 650 ballots based on pictures that had been published in the newspaper. The five-month-old winner received 119 votes. “We had to take a hundred pictures,” said her 21-year-old mother, Maribel, “It was so hard to get her to smile.”