yomexicoNEWS

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico. Sept. 23, 2005

Shelters In Short Supply Hundreds of cars with U.S. plates wait at the Mexican customs office to get a temporary import permit for their vehicles in the border crossing of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005. (AP) "This is like a scene from the 'The Day After Tomorrow.' It seems half of Houston is heading to Mexico." David Gallegos Houston Construction Worker

(AP) Mexico, coming to its powerful northern neighbor's aid for the second time this month, promised to set up shelters for those left homeless by Hurricane Rita and offered medical care, water and vehicle escorts to Mexican-Americans fleeing the storm.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/09/23/world/main881265.shtm

Mexico tests slimming powers of tequila's agave
RedNova Thu, 22 Sep 2005 10:20 PM PDT
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Scientists from Mexico's tequila producing region say juice extracted from the blue agave plant, best known when distilled into the fiery spirit, may help dieters shed pounds and cut cholesterol. Sadly for the world's growing band of tequila lovers, agave's possible health benefits are lost when the plant is distilled into alcohol. Spiky agave plants has been cultivated on.............
http://www.rednova.com/news/science/249315/mexico_tests_slimming_powers_of_tequilas_agave/index.html?source=r_science

Kids on the Internet
"............Recent figures show that young people in America are spending more time browsing the net than watching television. And access to young audiences is invaluable for the book business. Research has shown that young people engendered with a love of reading can easily plough through 500 times as many words in early life as those who are not..........."

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8210-1792376,00.html

Experts say global warming is causing stronger hurricanes

Mexico's rate of inflation at record low

Adriana Arai
Bloomberg News
Sept. 11, 2005 12:00 AM MEXICO CITY- Mexico's annual inflation rate fell to the lowest on record in August, adding to expectations that the central bank will cut the benchmark lending rate for a second straight month.

Inflation in the 12 months through August slowed to 3.95 percent, the lowest rate since the central bank began keeping records in 1969, from 4.47 percent in July. The monthly inflation rate dropped to 0.12 percent from 0.39 percent in July as the cost of cars and foods such as tomatoes and avocados fell.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Spilling the cacao beans on Mexico's hot drink

By Laurence Iliff
The Dallas Morning News

MEXICO CITY — Of Mexico's many gifts to the world, such as avocados and tequila, few have the universal appeal of a piping cup of hot chocolate and its magical links to Mayan rituals and Aztec emperors.

In Mexico, hot chocolate is used not just to celebrate holidays or accompany tamales on Sundays. It can be found almost anywhere one finds coffee or tea.

There are even mobile chocolate (choh-coh-LAH-teh) vendors, who mix chocolate powder with hot water on the streets of the capital, in the subway, in parks. But there also are special places in Mexico where hot chocolate is particularly savored, places that serve as reminders to the hot drink's roots in pre-Colombian southern Mexico, or where it is accompanied with traditional foods that make its appeal all the more special.

Evelio Arias, owner of La Chocolateria Mama Sarita in Mexico City's bohemian Condesa neighborhood, offers more than just a cup of hot chocolate. In fact, he offers 80 different possibilities, plus those you are free to invent on your own.

One not on the menu: hot chocolate with a couple of red, comapa chilies. Arias is afraid to put it on the menu, he says only half-jokingly, because of its powerful, intoxicating effects.

"Cacao, our history tells us," says Arias, "is Mexico's gift to the world."

Originally found in southern Mexico's Mayan region, cacao was brought by the conquering Aztecs to what is now Mexico City, then the seat of their empire. Cacao beans were used as currency by some Indian groups. The conquering Spanish delivered cacao to Europe and the world.

In Tabasco, Arias says, farmers also use cacao to make a corn-based drink called chorote that staves off hunger.

With his concoctions, Arias offers a journey through the taste buds to the birth of hot chocolate and its evolution throughout the centuries.

Arias has his own Tabasco cacao plantation. Most of the production goes to a big chocolate company. But for his business, he oversees the processing of the cacao fruit, which is grown on trees in the shade.

Mama Sarita may be the only business on the globe that sells the original hot chocolate drink favored by indigenous people in Arias' hometown of Macuspana, Tabasco. The Aztec emperor Montezuma reportedly was an addict.

The original drink had neither sugar nor milk, but rather was bitter cacao in boiling water with a touch of honey from the maguey cactus. To the untrained palate, Arias' hot chocolate is a heartier, headier drink with a noticeable stimulant effect — caffeinelike.

"In Tabasco, making hot chocolate is like making tortillas," says Arias, 38. "One of the traditions is that you drink it every afternoon and every evening. My great-grandmother said that to make good hot chocolate you have to be in a good mood."

When Arias moved from Tabasco to Mexico City seven years ago, his hot chocolate addiction went unsatisfied. "I did not like the quality of the chocolate here. It was too sweet, too commercial," he says.

And so, Arias imported the raw materials from Tabasco and made chocolate for himself and his friends and soon expanded into his small business.

"The traditions that die are the ones that are not open to change," says Arias. "The ones that will survive are the ones that can change without losing their essence."

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

Mexico Sends Aid Convoy to U.S.
By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press WriterWed Sep 7, 9:40 PM ET
Mexican army convoys and a navy ship laden with food, supplies and specialists traveled to the U.S. Wednesday to help in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort — a highly symbolic journey marking the first time Mexico's military has aided its powerful northern neighbor.
A convoy of 45 vehicles and 196 soldiers arrived at the border city of Nuevo Laredo Wednesday evening. It was to cross into U.S. territory early Thursday, Gen. Francisco Ortiz Valadez told reporters as his men refueled at a local gas station.
He said the troops would help refugee operations in San Antonio, Texas.
"Our mission is to give aid to the civilian population affected by the disaster," Ortiz said.
Federal police briefly blocked the highway in both directions as the convoy arrived at the gasoline station.
Radio talk shows and newspapers in Mexico buzzed with excitement over news that this country, long on the receiving end of U.S. disaster relief, was sending a hurricane aid convoy north.
The convoy represents the first Mexican military unit to operate on U.S. soil since 1846, when Mexican troops briefly marched into Texas, which had separated from Mexico and joined the United States.
It included military specialists, doctors, nurses and engineers carrying water treatment plants, mobile kitchens, food and blankets.
"This is just an act of solidarity between two peoples who are brothers," said Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar.
Army press office employee Francisco Aguilar said he did not have details of the convoy's precise location. It originally was scheduled to arrive in Houston to provide food for evacuees, but apparently had been rerouted to Dallas.
All of the convoy's participants will be unarmed. In July 2004, Mexican troops interrupted the funeral of a Mexican-born Marine killed in Iraq. They objected to the nonworking, ceremonial rifles carried by two Marines who came from the United States for the ceremony.
Mexico later apologized but said it has an obligation to enforce a ban on foreign troops carrying weapons in its territory.
The convoy has "a very high symbolic content," said Javier Oliva, a political scientist at Mexico's National Autonomous University. "This is a very sensitive subject, for historic and political reasons."
Large Mexican flags were taped to many of the 35 olive-green Mexican Army trucks and tractor trailers as they rumbled northward toward the border Wednesday.
The convoy includes two mobile kitchens that can feed 7,000 people a day, three flatbed trucks carrying mobile water-treatment plants and 15 trailers of bottled water, blankets and applesauce. The 195 Mexicans taking part include military engineers, doctors and nurses.
"This is the first time that the United States has accepted a military mission from Mexico" for such work, said Javier Ibarrola, a newspaper columnist who covers military affairs in Mexico.
The relief mission was controversial for some Mexican lawmakers, who said the president should have sought Senate approval before sending troops abroad. But the Fox administration said no such approval was needed for aid missions. But it nevertheless later asked permission and the Senate approved it.
The government was planning to send a second, 12-vehicle aid convoy to the U.S. sometime this week and has sent a Mexican navy ship equipped with rescue vehicles and helicopters to the Mississippi coast.
The ship Papaloapan left the Gulf coast port of Tampico on Monday. Fox's office was unsure when it would arrive, but said it would dock about 30 miles south of Biloxi, Miss.

The real costs of a culture of greed Robert Scheer September 6, 2005 WHAT THE WORLD has witnessed this past week is an image of poverty and social disarray that tears away the affluent mask of the United States. Instead of the much-celebrated American can-do machine that promises to bring freedom and prosperity to less fortunate people abroad, we have seen a callous official incompetence that puts even Third World rulers to shame. The well-reported litany of mistakes by the Bush administration in failing to prevent and respond to Katrina's destruction grew longer with each hour's grim revelation from the streets of an apocalyptic New Orleans. Yet the problem is much deeper. For half a century, free-market purists have to great effect denigrated the essential role that modern government performs as some terrible liberal plot. Thus, the symbolism of New Orleans' flooding is tragically apt: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Louisiana Gov. Huey Long's ambitious populist reforms in the 1930s eased Louisiana out of feudalism and toward modernity; the Reagan Revolution and the callousness of both Bush administrations have sent them back toward the abyss. Now we have a president who wastes tax revenues in Iraq instead of protecting us at home. Levee improvements were deferred in recent years even after congressional approval, reportedly prompting EPA staffers to dub flooded New Orleans "Lake George." None of this is an oversight, or simple incompetence. It is the result of a campaign by most Republicans and too many Democrats to systematically vilify the role of government in American life. Manipulative politicians have convinced lower- and middle-class whites that their own economic pains were caused by "quasi-socialist" government policies that aid only poor brown and black people — even as corporate profits and CEO salaries soared. For decades we have seen social services that benefit everyone — education, community policing, public health, environmental protections and infrastructure repair, emergency services — in steady, steep decline in the face of tax cuts and rising military spending. But it is a false savings; it will certainly cost exponentially more to save New Orleans than it would have to protect it in the first place. And, although the wealthy can soften the blow of this national decline by sending their kids to private school, building walls around their communities and checking into distant hotels in the face of approaching calamities, others, like the 150,000 people living below the poverty line in the Katrina damage area — one-third of whom are elderly — are left exposed. Watching on television the stark vulnerability of a permanent underclass of African Americans living in New Orleans ghettos is terrifying. It should be remembered, however, that even when hurricanes are not threatening their lives and sanity, they live in rotting housing complexes, attend embarrassingly ill-equipped public schools and, lacking adequate police protection, are frequently terrorized by unemployed, uneducated young men. In fact, rather than an anomaly, the public suffering of these desperate Americans is a symbol for a nation that is becoming progressively poorer under the leadership of the party of Big Business. As Katrina was making its devastating landfall, the U.S. Census Bureau released new figures that show that since 1999, the income of the poorest fifth of Americans has dropped 8.7% in inflation-adjusted dollars. Last year alone, 1.1 million were added to the 36 million already on the poverty rolls. For those who have trouble with statistics, here's the shorthand: The rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting, in the ripe populist language of Louisiana's legendary Long, the shaft. These are people who have long since been abandoned to their fate. Despite the deep religiosity of the Gulf States and the United States in general, it is the gods of greed that seem to rule. Case in point: The crucial New Orleans marshland that absorbs excess water during storms has been greatly denuded by rampant commercial development allowed by a deregulation-crazy culture that favors a quick buck over long-term community benefits. Given all this, it is no surprise that leaders, from the White House on down, haven't done right by the people of New Orleans and the rest of the region, before and after what insurance companies insultingly call an "act of God." Fact is, most of them, and especially our president, just don't care about the people who can't afford to attend political fundraisers or pay for high-priced lobbyists. No, these folks are supposed to be cruising on the rising tide of a booming, unregulated economy that "floats all boats." They were left floating all right. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by yoarmy
Switching to organic foods provides children ``dramatic and immediate'' protection from widely used pesticides that are applied to a variety of crops, according to a new study by a team of federally funded scientists. Concentrations of two organophosphate pesticides -- malathion and chlorpyrifos -- declined substantially in the bodies of elementary school-age children during a five-day period when organic foods were substituted for conventional foods, the researchers reported Thursday in the online version of the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives

September 2005 13:08 EDT

Monday, September 5, 2005 Mexico's president urges closer U.S. cooperation on border issues By Ginger Thompson / New York Times News Service MEXICO CITY -- President Vicente Fox responded over the weekend to criticism from U.S. authorities about a recent surge in violence and illegal immigration along the border, saying that the United States shares responsibility for the problems and should work harder with Mexico to correct them. Fox said he rejected "forcefully" the statements by the Bush administration and governors of border states, contending they had unfairly depicted Mexico as a haven for organized crime, though his government has arrested more drug traffickers and dismantled more cartels than any of its predecessors. He also said Mexican immigrants had been portrayed unfairly as potential terrorists when they had in fact become a pillar of the U.S. economy. In an interview aboard the presidential airplane on Saturday, Fox acknowledged that his government had a long way to go to make the border secure. But he said the United States should stop casting blame for problems created by both countries. He also said the United States should not allow concerns about border security to derail efforts to adopt new measures, two of them currently before Congress, that would allow millions of additional Mexicans to become guest workers in the United States. "Security is a shared responsibility," Fox said. Then, referring to the United States, he said, "I don't understand that now they only cast blame and accusations, and they do not collaborate or cooperate so that together we can resolve this problem." On the changes in immigration policy, he said: "There is will on the part of President Bush, according to what he has expressed publicly, and what he has expressed in conversations with us. So, I trust that in the coming weeks and months, we will succeed finally in arriving at a positive resolution for the benefit of both countries." More pressing realities, however, may stand in the way. Work on immigration policy was first postponed four years ago, after the Sept. 11 attacks. Then it was put off for Bush's re-election campaign. Now, it may be set aside again as the United States struggles to recover from Hurricane Katrina. But Fox does not have a lot of time left; he is entering his last year in office. His comments were aimed at what many here perceive as a troubling shift in U.S. attitudes and diplomatic policy toward Mexico. In recent weeks, U.S. officials have openly berated Mexico for failing to stop a wave of drug-related violence that has cost close to 1,000 lives along the 2,000-mile border. The Bush administration has issued numerous travel advisories, describing rampant violence by heavily armed drug traffickers and warning tourists that they cannot rely on corrupt Mexican authorities to protect them. Neither Fox nor his aides denied that the problems exist. But they said that the responses from the United States did not reflect the complexities of the problems, nor did they acknowledge that Mexico had undertaken unprecedented efforts to address them. Related news from the Web Latest headlines by topic: • George Bush • 2004 Presidential Election • US News Powered by Topix.net


6 September 2005 12:36 EDT
U.S. Confirms Passport Policy Under the new requirements, travelers to and from Canada, Mexico and other allied nations will have to show secure documents. From Associated Press September 2, 2005 WASHINGTON — The U.S. government said Thursday that it would proceed with plans to require travelers from Canada, Mexico and other allied nations to show a passport or other secure document to enter the country. The departments of State and Homeland Security said they expected to officially adopt the policy — which has drawn complaints from travelers, the affected nations and even President Bush — by the end of the year. But they pushed back by a year the date when the requirements would begin to affect travelers. Under the new timeline, by Dec. 31, 2006, all who travel by air or sea from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Bermuda and Central and South America will have to show a passport or one of four other secure documents. For travelers crossing land borders, namely from Mexico and Canada, the rules will take effect by Dec. 31, 2007. Department officials also said they would keep working to come up with a cheaper alternative document to allow U.S. citizens and other travelers to cross into the country by land. U.S. passports cost $97. After the rules were announced in April, Bush said he was surprised by the passport requirement, which drew sharp criticism from the Canadian government, and said he had ordered a review of the plans. In December, Bush signed into law an intelligence overhaul that requires tighter border security and was the basis for the passport proposal. Homeland Security spokesman Jarrod Agen said the administration was looking to use biometric technology to create an alternative identification card before the 2007 deadline. Moving forward with the passport plans Thursday, he said, "gives us time to develop the most sensible and secure document which won't stop the flow of traffic at the border." The Canadian government will continue working with the administration to develop a new document for widespread use on both sides of the northern border, said Jasmine Panthaky, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Embassy in Washington. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives. Article licensing and reprint options Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times Privacy Policy Terms of Service Home Delivery Advertise Archives Contact Site Map Help partners: