Dominican Republic

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic - The government of the Dominican Republic announced a new crackdown on illegal immigration Wednesday that will lead to the ouster of thousands of Haitians who escaped a devastating earthquake last year. Any migrants lacking appropriate documents will be deported immediately, said Immigration Director Jose Ricardo Taveras. "Starting today, those who come to our country should arrive with a standard visa," he said. The proposal was signed by President Leonel Fernandez and aims to document and classify all migrants according to their work and migration status for the first time in the country's history.

Jamie Moyer went to the Dominican Republic to prove he could still pitch. Ultimately, he may have ended his career there while throwing in a winter ball game. Moyer reportedly reinjured his left elbow in the third inning of a start Saturday for Escogido of the Dominican Winter League. The lefthander, who turns 48 next week, is a free agent and was hoping for a major-league invitation to spring training after pitching parts of five seasons in Philadelphia. Instead, according to the Associated Press, Moyer traveled to California to seek a new diagnosis from Lewis Yocum, the specialist who told Moyer he did not need Tommy John surgery after injuring the elbow in July.

Foods of the Latino world are proliferating like potatoes in the Andes, so it wasn't too surprising to find a Dominican restaurant washing up onto the restaurant beach in Old City. Its name is Sabooor. In Spanish, sabor means flavor. The extra O's, says owner Amara Martinez, emphasize just how pleasing her native cuisine can be. The restaurant, while warm and cheerful with bright splashes of sun-filled Caribbean charm, is quite small. But its soul is large, and perfect for showcasing the dishes of the Dominican Republic.

Down at the Lucky Seven bar, the Peace Corps volunteers had commandeered one of the best tables, no more than a few feet from the color TV tuned to what Dominicans ardently call Las Serias Mundial - The World Series. It was the sixth inning of the second game between the Mets and the Red Sox, and Rafael Santana, a hometown hero from La Romana, was at bat. With the count at 1-1, Santana connected with an inside fastball that burned like a meteor toward the left-center-field gap before suddenly going cold in a shortstop's glove.

On the wall behind John Ober's desk hangs a map of Hispaniola, the two-nation Caribbean island hit last week by Hurricane Georges. Green delineates Haiti, and yellow sets the parameters of Ober's livelihood, the Dominican Republic. Right now, that livelihood is on hiatus as the Dominican Republic tries to recoup from the storm, which ripped the roofs off factories and warehouses that supply goods for Ober's shipping company, Del Lines. Ober dispatches a variety of goods, mainly fabrics and automobiles, to the ports of Boca Chico and Rio Haina in the Dominican Republic.

Sebastian Padilla, a 61-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic, will never live freely in the United States again. Yesterday, Montgomery County Court Judge Richard J. Hodgson sentenced Padilla to 10 to 20 years in state prison for the 1997 murder of a Norristown drug dealer. "If Padilla makes it out alive, he will be deported," said Assistant District Attorney Leonard Feldman. Padilla, who immigrated to the United States in 1980, was convicted by a jury in February of third-degree murder in the stabbing death of Luis Fabian, a 33-year-old auto mechanic known on the street as "Flaco," a cocaine dealer.

It will be a Dutch treat for the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic - the only games that count for anything right now - after Wandy Rodriguez pitched six scoreless innings and three relievers completed a three-hitter in a 2-0 win over Puerto Rico in Miami on Saturday. Carlos Santana homered in the fifth and Francisco Pena knocked in an insurance run with a single in the eighth for the Dominicans. Both teams had already qualified for the semifinals in San Francisco, and were playing for seedings.

A friend of Mariano Duncan's, who served as a live-in security guard at the player's Dominican Republic home, was shot and killed during a robbery there early yesterday morning, the Phillies infielder said. Duncan originally had planned to miss the Phillies' games last night and today, but he decided to return to the ball club because he feared he might react too harshly if he journeyed to his homeland. "I was going to go, but I'm angry and upset," he said, "and when you feel that way, you might do something crazy.

Building block walls for 10 days in the tropical heat of the Dominican Republic is one tough job assignment. But when the call went out, there was no shortage of volunteers among students at the Williamson Free School of Mechanical Trades. The goal of building a small hospital that is desperately needed in the impoverished village of Paraiso has inspired students to put their trade to work in a third-world country. For some students, such as Rich Conley, 22, of Drexel Hill, a senior masonry student, it will be their second trip to Paraiso.

Felipe Lopez made his first trip back to the Dominican Republic in four years last week, but it was doubtful he had to reintroduce himself when he started practice with the national basketball team for the Central America championships. Lopez, who was born in Santiago, is a celebrity in a country that normally saves its reverence for the major-league baseball players it produces. Newspapers have chronicled his career since he was a freshman prodigy at New York's Rice High School in the Bronx.

Months after the FBI began probing allegations against Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.), investigators are now looking at whether someone set out to smear him while he was running for reelection last year and then ascending to his new post as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to four people briefed on the inquiry. As part of a wider public-corruption investigation into the senator, the FBI has been examining whether Menendez patronized prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, according to people familiar with the inquiry.

1. Reliever Justin Friend was promoted from double-A Reading to triple-A Lehigh Valley on Thursday, but you have to wonder if he is awake yet to realize it. Friend and his Fightin Phils teammates took a seven-hour bus ride from Portland, Maine, and arrived in Reading around 6 a.m. Thursday. Upon arrival, Friend was told about the promotion and that he had to report to Coca-Cola Park in Allentown for a 10:35 a.m. game. When the IronPigs finished their game with Louisville, Friend and his new teammates got on a bus for a seven-hour ride to Durham, N.C. 2. Double-A Reading had lost nine of its last 10 entering the weekend, and that might not have been the most depressing aspect of the Fightin Phils' plight.

Bolivia expels U.S. aid agency LA PAZ, Bolivia - President Evo Morales acted on a longtime threat Wednesday and expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development for allegedly seeking to undermine Bolivia's leftist government, and he harangued Washington's top diplomat for calling the Western Hemisphere his country's "backyard. " Bolivia's ABI state news agency said USAID was "accused of alleged political interference in peasant unions and other social organizations. " In the past, Morales has accused the agency of funding groups that opposed his policies, including a lowlands indigenous federation that organized protests against a Morales-backed highway through a rain-forest preserve.

The Penn Relays again will receive worldwide attention with the 14th annual "USA vs. the World" competition, renewing the passionate rivalry between the United States and Jamaica and, this year, involving athletes who won gold medals in the 2012 London Olympics. However, the Drake Relays, always held on the same weekend in Des Moines, Iowa, are striving to get noticed in the same circles thanks to an assist from Hy-Vee, a local supermarket chain that is helping Drake put up almost $500,000 in prize money for events featuring Olympic medalists from last year.

SUIT UP, friends. The growing anti-#PhillyShrug™ army is heading out. The campaign kicked off last month with a custom T-shirt made by my pals at Airtime Airbrush in the Gallery at Market East. (Have you gotten your T-shirt yet? Twenty five bucks and you're official.) Pockets of non-shruggers all over the city have stepped up to join: Community groups who fought off projects they didn't think were right for their neighborhoods. College students who've identified the same pervasive apathy and are determined to change it. Prisoners who have written me about their plans to dump the Philly Shrug that they partly blame for their troubles.

LAKELAND, Fla. - The Phillies went into spring training hoping they would have a potent combination at the top of the rotation. After Wednesday, they know they at least are leaving Florida with their No. 1 starter still packing a nasty left uppercut that can take apart any team in baseball, with the possible exception of the Dominican Republic all-star team that won the World Baseball Classic. "That lineup was ridiculous," Cole Hamels said after making his final Grapefruit League start Wednesday against another loaded batting order.

A top Dominican law-enforcement official said Friday that a local lawyer has reported being paid by someone claiming to work for the conservative website the Daily Caller to find prostitutes who would lie and say they had sex for money with New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez. The local lawyer told Dominican investigators that a foreign man, who identified himself as "Carlos," had offered him $5,000 to find and pay women in the Caribbean nation willing to make the claims about Menendez, according to Jose Antonio Polanco, district attorney for the La Romana region, where the investigation is being conducted.

In a nod to the great Jackie Robinson's start with the Negro Leagues, Kansas City was announced Wednesday as the host site for the only advance public screenings of 42, which chronicles his epic story. Harrison Ford, who stars as former Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, and fellow cast member Andre Holland planned to attend the April 11 event, which will benefit Kansas City's Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, museum president Bob Kendrick said. Although the story of Robinson in Brooklyn is well known, Robinson played for the Kansas City Monarchs in 1945, batting .387 while hitting five home runs and stealing 13 bases in 47 games.

Edwin Encarnacion hit a two-run double in the first inning that held up, and the Dominican Republic capped a dominant, unbeaten run through the World Baseball Classic with a 3-0 win over Puerto Rico for the championship Tuesday night in San Francisco. Erick Aybar added an RBI double to back winner Samuel Deduno, and the Dominican righthander threw his arms in the air as he watched a run-saving defensive gem by centerfielder Alejandro De Aza in a tough fifth. Cheers of "Dominicana!

Three Dominican women were paid to lie about having sex for money with Sen. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) and a close friend, Dominican police said Monday, citing statements from the women and other evidence. At a news conference in the Dominican Republic, police said they had determined the women were paid hundreds of dollars by a local lawyer to make the false claims in videotaped interviews. The women said their recorded statements, taped in a Dominican shopping mall in La Romana province, were read from a script provided by a lawyer.