OAKLAND, Calif. – After weathering the fear of federal prosecution and competition from drug cartels, California’s medical marijuana growers see a new threat to their tenuous existence: the “Wal-Marting” of weed.

The Oakland City Council on Tuesday will look at licensing four production plants where pot would be grown, packaged and processed into items ranging from baked goods to body oil. Winning applicants would have to pay $211,000 in annual permit fees, carry $2 million worth of liability insurance and be prepared to devote up to 8 percent of gross sales to taxes.

The move, and fledgling efforts in other California cities to sanction cannabis cultivation for the first time, has some marijuana advocates worried that regulations intended to bring order to the outlaw industry and new revenues to cash-strapped local governments could drive small “mom and pop” growers out of business. They complain that industrial-scale gardens would harm the environment, reduce quality and leave consumers with fewer strains from which to choose.

“Nobody wants to see the McDonald’s-ization of cannabis,” Dan Scully, one of the 400 “patient-growers” who supply Oakland’s largest retail medical marijuana dispensary, Harborside Health Center, grumbled after a City Council committee gave the blueprint preliminary approval last week. “I would compare it to how a small business feels about shutting down its business and going to work at Wal-Mart. Who would be attracted to that?”

The proposal’s supporters, including entrepreneurs more disposed to neckties than tie-dye, counter that unregulated growers working in covert warehouses or houses are tax scofflaws more likely to wreak environmental havoc, be motivated purely by profit and produce inferior products.

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NEWCASTLE, United Kingdom (AFP) – Newcastle manager Chris Hughton admits he is concerned Steven Taylor could be sidelined for several weeks after the defender suffered a shoulder injury.

Taylor, who has been troubled by shoulder problems several times in the past, sustained his latest injury during Newcastle’s 3-0 pre-season friendly victory at Carlisle on Saturday.

The former England Under-21 centre-back now faces a race against time to be fit in time for the start of the new Premier League season, which kicks off for Hughton’s team at Manchester United on August 16.

Hughton is unsure when Taylor will return and the situation won’t become clearer until he has undergone medical tests.

“Obviously we are aware of Steven Taylor’s shoulder problems in the past, but we will not know the extent of this one until we can assess it properly in two or three days,” Hughton said.

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Federal authorities arrested a fugitive alleged drug kingpin Saturday after a decade-long chase through the Caribbean marked by his narrow escapes and public taunting that he paid off police to remain free.

Known as the Pablo Escobar of the Caribbean, Jose Figueroa Agosto was caught wearing a wig while driving through a working-class Dominican neighborhood of San Juan. When he realized he was being followed, he tried to run on foot as he had last September in the Dominican Republic after a pursuing vice squad shot out a tire on his Jeep.

But this time U.S. Marshals, FBI, drug enforcement agents and Puerto Rican police caught up.

“We asked him his name, and he simply answered that we knew who he was,” said Antonio Torres, who heads the U.S. Marshal Service’s fugitive task force in Puerto Rico.

“It is a tremendous arrest, definitely,” U.S. Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez told a news conference Saturday, where she was surrounded by other cheerful federal authorities.

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FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – An American Indian lacrosse team’s refusal to travel on passports not issued by the Iroquois confederacy goes to the heart of one of the most sensitive issues in Indian Country — sovereignty.

The rights of Native nations to govern themselves independently has long been recognized by federal treaties, but the extent of that recognition beyond U.S borders is under challenge in a post-Sept. 11 world.

After initially refusing to accept Iroquois-issued passports because the documents lack security features, the State Department gave the team a one-time waiver.

The team maintained that traveling on anything other than an Iroquois-issued passport would be a strike against the players’ identity. But the British government wouldn’t budge in denying team members entry into England without U.S. or Canadian passports, leading the Iroquois Nationals to withdraw Friday from competing at the World Lacrosse Championships in Manchester in the sport their ancestors helped create.

“Any documents or IDs we put forth recognizing our members should also be recognized by the federal government and other governments,” argued Sanford Nabahe, a member of the Lone Pine Paiute-Shoshone, who — like many in the American Indian community — closely followed the Iroquois’ passport dispute. “The (federal) government has given us that autonomy.”

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HOUMA, La. – Inside a sprawling command post in southern Louisiana, The Blob is everywhere.

It stains the many maps tacked to white walls. Computer monitors beam satellite images of it floating in the Gulf of Mexico, a magenta mass that looks more like an island than the colossal oil slick that it is. It sometimes changes shape on these screens, or breaks off into bits and pieces, but The Blob itself never vanishes.

Coast Guard Capt. Roger Laferriere oversees this command center, coordinating the unprecedented cleanup of oil off of the Louisiana coast. There are other posts like it in Mobile, Ala., and Miami, but none has more manpower, equipment — or more of The Blob, as Laferriere and his staff have christened their enemy — than this base inside what once was a BP training facility for offshore oil production.

On any given day, some 40,000 people are working all along the Gulf Coast to track where the oil is headed, lay protective boom, skim what they can and clean shorelines; nearly half of them are under what is known as the Houma Incident Command Post.

Some are analysts who sit in darkened rooms at the BP warehouse, feeding satellite data into computerized maps that show where the oil is moving, what marshes have already been boomed and what areas skimmers are toiling.

Others — many of them shrimpers and fishermen turned cleanup contractors — work out of quaint docks converted into “forward operating bases,” hitting the water after sunup to do the hands-on tasks necessary to contain and clear the oil. There’s displaced boom to be repositioned. Torn boom to be picked up, brought to shore and repaired. Absorbent boom soaked through on one side that must be turned or swapped out.

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