SDSU Receives $1.8M to Teach Marines Middle Eastern Languages

1. San Diego State University is getting a $1.8 million grant from the Defense Department to teach U.S. Marines languages spoken in the Middle East and Central Asia. University officials say about 200 Marines will be taught Arabic, Farsi and Pashto over the next year at SDSU's Language Acquisition Resource Center.

2. Federal authorities sought Wednesday to determine who built and operated a "sophisticated," 400-yard drug-smuggling tunnel between storage buildings in Tijuana and Otay Mesa. Members of the multi-agency San Diego Tunnel Task Force found the passageway on Tuesday while searching the warehouse on the U.S. side of the border, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials.

3. Sheriff Bill Gore responded Wednesday to charges, aired on a nationally syndicated television show, that his department badly mishandled its investigation of a lurid, heavily publicized death at a historic Coronado estate last summer. Gore accused the "Dr. Phil" program of indulging in "sensationalism at its lowest point" in a two-part examination of the death of Rebecca Zahau, a 32-year-old Arizona woman whose nude body was found hanged at the ocean-front manor owned by her pharmaceutical-tycoon boyfriend.