QUES: The letterhead on correspondence still bears the Bexar County Legal Aid name, even though the organization is no longer. Texas Rural Legal Aid - known for its fearless and sometimes controversial advocacy of the poorest of the poor - last week took over four other corporations serving the legal needs of the indigent in Southwest Texas, including the one in Bexar County. The new 68-county legal aid organization has yet to be named and stretches from El Paso to Corpus Christi, Harlingen to Austin. The leader for the super-sized law firm has big plans. "I'm more interested in looking at what we as advocates can do to address the serious problems of poverty than the number of cases we close," said David Hall, the TRLA executive director. In the Rio Grande Valley, Hall's attorneys set up separate groups to assist small-business owners and residents with low-interest loans and legal representation. They also operate a legal arm that assists migrant workers from Texas to Kentucky. Now, Hall said, he wants to make services to the poor more efficient by working with law students who will handle less complicated legal matters, allowing licensed attorneys to take more "high impact" cases to court. "What we need to do is handle cases as efficiently as we can, leveraging the amount of time of the lawyer that goes in there and maximizing the number of people that they can help at one time," Hall said. His plan is to place the 110 attorneys on staff in teams working on specialized legal issues. He wants to expand the law clinic it already has with St. Mary's University Law School to involve students at the University of Texas Law School. The law students at St. Mary's interview potential clients, assist them with filling out legal documents and answer the telephones for the legal hotline, freeing up TRLA lawyers to handle the complicated cases, Hall said. By the end of September, Hall said all the attorneys working with the poor in the 68county area will be placed on the same computer network so they can pass cases to the best available attorneys. Last year, board members on the former Legal Aid of Central Texas and Bexar County Legal Aid resisted the merger, saying that the mergers were done illegally and without the input of board members. They also argued that Hall's litigious style hampered their ability to garner funds from Congress. TRLA generated controversy in 1996, when its attorneys challenged the rights of 800 military personnel to vote in Val Verde County elections by absentee ballot after a former Ku Klux Klan member won a county commissioner post. Brendan Gill, the former executive director of the Bexar County group, said he has since come to see the merger as a positive move for South Texas. "I always knew there were good points to merging, just as I knew that there were bad points," Gill said.
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION: How many attorneys are planned to be brought onboard and to encompass which law schools?

QUES: A stranger in town meets pretty young Susan Martinez De La Cruz and accompanies her to a barbecue , where wealthy Jason Carberry is saying a few words for the recently departed Robin Randall , a citizen who got shot . Jason objects to the stranger's presence , being Susan's guardian and protective of her . He challenges him to a shootout , but the stranger pulls his pistol before Jason's can even clear the holster . Calaveras Kate , a saloon singer who's in love with Jason , is relieved when the stranger declines to pull the trigger . Rafael Moreno suddenly rides into town and picks a fight with the stranger . Their brawl continues until the arrival of Judge Wallace Wintrop and his niece , Sheila , who have come to town from back East and deplore all this random violence out West . The stranger is recognized as Reb Randall , the dead man's brother . He is looking for the killer , who could be Rafael , or could be Jason , or could even be Billy Buckett , the coward of the county . The women hold their breath to see if the men they love will survive .
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION: What did Jason do for Susan?

QUES: Critics say that is not nearly enough compared with other prescribers, such as M.D. psychiatrists or nurse practitioners who have at least six years' medical education and clinical experience. Neither Davison nor most other RxP opponents doubt the efficacy of medications. Their greatest objection is to the notion of turning psychology into a prescribing profession. In a field that has struggled long and hard to prove that mind, mood and behavior can be studied empirically, the past decade, Davison says, has seen "exciting developments" that demonstrate the validity of various psychotherapeutic interventions and the psychosocial-behavioral models on which they are based. "The timing is peculiar to abandon psychological science or to convert it to a medical science," explains Elaine M. Heiby of the University of Hawaii, who chairs a committee of the 1,000-member American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology that is concerned about the medicalization of psychology. "Making sure that practicing psychologists are giving patients interventions based on the best available psychological science should be the APA's priority," argues Emory University's Scott Lilienfeld, president of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology (SSCP). More than any philosophical betrayal of psychology, RxP opponents fear that the movement will undermine the science they love. They believe that if prescriptive authority becomes the norm, biomedical requirements will inevitably seep into the psychology curriculum, at the expense of traditional psychological science and methodology. Lilienfeld feels that many clinical psychologists already receive inadequate training in fundamentals such as research design and evaluation. RxP opponents charge the APA with pushing its prescription-privileges agenda without adequately assessing support for it in the field. The 300-member SSCP is the only group within the APA to have taken a formal stance against prescription privileges. The APA has scheduled 30 minutes at its meeting in August for an RxP debate, but its leadership believes it already has an accurate sense of support for its RxP policy. "Except for this small vocal minority, we have just not gotten a lot of groundswell against this from members," says APA president Philip G. Zimbardo of Stanford University. With prescription privileges now a reality in one state, some RxP opponents concede that it may be too late. This year four states besides New Mexico -- Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois and Tennessee -- have pending legislation for psychologist prescription privileges. Over the past decade, 14 state legislatures have considered such laws. Between 1991 and 1997, a U.S. Department of Defense psychopharmacology demonstration project involving two to four years' training produced 10 military psychologists who can write prescriptions.
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION: Which APA president has scheduled 30 minutes at its meeting in August for an RxP debate?

QUES: Moscow (CNN) -- Divers have completed their search of a Russian cruise ship that sank last weekend with the loss of many lives, the Emergency Situations Ministry told CNN Friday. The official death toll has reached 114 -- including 66 women, 28 children and 20 men, the ministry said. The bodies of 15 people are still missing. There were 208 people on the "Bulgaria" at the time of the accident Sunday, of whom 79 were rescued. Divers have checked all the boat's compartments, the ministry said, and are now looking for more bodies around the boat as well downstream on the Volga River, where they could have been carried by the current. The area where search efforts continue has been enlarged to 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the scene, Russian Transport Minister Igor Levitin said at a briefing Friday. Preparations are under way for the cruise ship to be raised from the river bottom in the coming days. Two large boat cranes, one from Moscow and another one from Volgograd, which will be used for the lifting, are on the way to the accident site. "We have asked the Emergency Situations Ministry to keep 23 divers at the scene to continue the search for bodies even during the lifting operation," Levitin said. Specialist military divers were brought in mid-week to aid in the search efforts. Four people face criminal charges over the sinking of the ship, which Russian media have called the most devastating river accident in the country's history.
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION:
How many people were charged?