LOS ANGELES TIMES: Mexicans vote Sunday, but the biggest story may be how many don't bother. At stake are all 500 seats in the lower house of Congress, six governorships and scores of local posts. But apathy and disgust with politics are rampant. Many voters plan to deface their ballots in protest. Every campaign, however, offers moments that are memorable, incongruous, weird. Here are a few tidbits from Mexico, the 2009 edition.

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NEW YORK TIMES: Immigration authorities had bad news this week for American Apparel, the T-shirt maker based in downtown Los Angeles: About 1,800 of its employees appeared to be illegal immigrants not authorized to work in the United States.

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EL PASO TIMES: Could pollution be the cause of health problems in Sunland Park? Many residents suspect that it is. They consider the Asarco smelter in El Paso and the Camino Real landfill in Sunland Park to be the major sources of contamination in their community.

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THE HILL: Senate Democrats on Thursday unveiled their plans to create a government-run public health insurance option and require most employers to provide healthcare benefits to their workers, partially filling in the blanks on two of the biggest unsettled questions in the effort to reform the healthcare system. According to Democrats on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, their legislation would extend health insurance coverage to 21 million uninsured people over 10 years at a net cost of $611.4 billion. Combined with separate legislation being developed by the Senate Finance Committee, senators said their healthcare reform plan would bring the total number of newly insured people to 41 million by 2019, or 97 percent of the projected U.S. population, excluding illegal immigrants.

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WASHINGTON POST: Mounting job losses rattled hopes yesterday that the economy is on track to grow later this year, showing that prospects for American workers are terrible -- and still getting worse. Employers reduced their payrolls by 467,000 jobs in June, the Labor Department said, far more than forecasters had expected. The unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent, from 9.4 percent. And last week, another 614,000 people applied for unemployment insurance benefits.

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