Weekend BlogNews

[Letter from Mexico] Ugly Canadians
A personal chronicle of a diplomatic crisis worsening each day
The super-scoop that Ottawa was to slap visas on all Mexican visitors to Canada as of Wednesday July 15, took us all by surprise.
Canada's NAFTA partners, were now being shunned, rejected, spurned by incompetent bureaucrats and politicians fanning the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment. The Mexicans who welcomed me here many times, were now being ignominiously treated by Ottawa's finest diplomats with utter and scandalous contempt and disrespect.
I looked around for some Canadian colleagues. But there were none to be seen. This important news story would surely get big news coverage, if it were a diplomatic dispute between the French, or the Chinese or even the Czechs who also have been slapped in the face with a visa by Ottawa.
But then, there was always the convenient official excuse that Ottawa could come up with whenever it wanted a total news blackout or a cover-up: those dreaded budget cuts. Indeed, there was hardly any coverage from Mexico or Latin America for that matter, since Ottawa cut funding to the national broadcaster, CBC/Radio Canada, forcing it to shut down its last remaining regional bureau. And perhaps with good reason, since Canadians wouldn't be able to see, just how reviled they are in Mexico and in the rest of Latin America.
Canada is getting much bad press here lately. Splattered on the front page of the influential daily La Jornada this week, was a well documented and scathing article about Canadian mining activities in this country. The headline denounced the fact that more than 70 percent of all mining operations are owned and operated by Canada-based firms, that sytematically destroy the local land, poison the water supply with harmful chemicals (using cyanide and mercury to extract ore, gold and silver) and destroying local communities. This is old news. I have been covering this for years, but finally it became front page material.

Canada has been plundering and fleecing Mexico of its mineral wealth since NAFTA was signed in 1994. Of course not all can be blamed on Canada. It was done with the active knowledge and complicity of Mexican government officials. But having spent years investigating and campaigning against Canadian mining operations abroad, I found it odd it and rather coincidental that the media had suddenly obtained official government documents and other such information just as the Canada Mexico diplomatic tiff worsened. Local government officials, it seems, have declared war on Canada in the Mexican media.
This week Mexico imposed visa restrictions on Canadian functionaries travelling to this country. The tit-for-tat visa war goes on.
Fotofrontera : Wallpaper de lugares para vivir en paz
( Places to Live in Peace )
Reinout-Meier-Mattern
That's how it works... Dr. Michael Hudson - Economy
Dr. John's Hiding Place : Ubuntu
Linking Jaunty to your World
Your Laptop Can Stay Home
Gh.o.st, offers what its British-Israeli founding innovator Zvi Schreiber describes as a "virtual computing environment, wholly available on an Internet web page.
I can go to any computer in a school or university library, office space or press room with an Internet connection, log in to my personal desktop on Gh.o.st and access all my files. What's more, I can open my word processing program and resume work on an article, a piece of translation or the page of the chapter of the book I am writing at exactly the same line where I left off an hour ago, a day ago or a longer.

The desktop has a system that takes its applications and browser from the web. It operates in 20 languages and transition between languages is at the click of a key.
Growing renewables by deregulating utilities
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Hospital defends secretly deporting undocumented patient
Fears That Amazon Tribes Won’t Be Heard
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Check Out the Vanity Plate on This Cambridge Policeman’s SUV
Russia builds key naval HQ in Syria: Missile presence worries Israel
Israel is deeply concerned, according to our military sources, by the sophisticated air-defense S-300PMU-2 and Iskander-E missile systems the Russians propose to hand Syria on the pretext of installing a shield to defend the facility against air or missile attack. Moscow claims they will remain under the control of Russian crews but, according to information reaching Israel, they will be quietly and gradually handedover to the Syrian army; the Russian teams are in fact instructors.

Russia justifies this, according to DEBKAfile's Moscow sources, by the deployment of the highly sophisticated American FBX-T missile-interception radar systems at the Israeli Negev base of Nevatim.
( That's funny! Russia can't get the U.S. to quit basing missiles in Eastern Europe or leave Iran alone ; but AIPAC might help move the 'quid pro quo' )
Also, You Are More Likely To Be Killed By A Sasquatch There
Public option: What's the plan?
At the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and Citizen Action Illinois sponsored rally in Chicago last weekend, single-payer advocates confronted HCAN leadership and Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) who instead of working to pass HR 676, John Conyers single-payer bill titled the United States National Health Insurance Act, are supporting the so called “public option.”

What the public option plan is, no one can exactly say. There are no concrete proposals spelling out what the plan would include, who could join it, how much it would cost, or how it would be funded. But the details don’t matter, they advocated for it anyway.
"Your public option plan here: Will build to suit*"

*the highest bidder, that is.
More Troops Relying on Food Stamps
Via Rail engineers on strike
The locomotive engineers and yardmasters have been without a collective agreement since Dec. 31, 2006.
Put it in the closet …
WHO moves forward in secrecy to accomplish forced vaccination and population agenda