MEXICO CITY — A new kind of Mexican immigrant is making it big in the USA: huge Mexican corporations that are snapping up U.S. brand names, opening U.S. factories and investing millions of pesos north of the border.  read more »

Miss Universe 2010 - Jimena NavarreteLAS VEGAS -- A 22-year-old Mexico woman has won the Miss Universe pageant after donning a flowing red gown and telling an audience it's important to teach kids family values.  read more »

Apple's (NasdaqGS: AAPL - News) retail stores aren't the only place where lines form these days. It's 7:30 on a July morning, and already a crowd has gathered for the opening of Trader Joe's newest outpost, in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. The waiting shoppers chat about their favorite Trader Joe's foods, and a woman in line launches into a monologue comparing the retailer's West Coast and East Coast locations.  read more »

Mexican drug cartel boss known as 'the King of Ice'

Ignacio Coronel Villareal, usually known as Nacho Coronel, nurtured a reputation as an old-school Mexican drug trafficker who respected traditional codes of criminal conduct, although he accrued most of his power and riches during the country's barbarous turf wars.  read more »

After 50 years, the U.S. travel ban on Cuba has not made the island any more free. But those Americans pressing to lift it are now closer to success than ever before.

Nobody would accuse Guillermo Fariñas of being soft on the Cuban government. The psychologist and dissident journalist has staged nearly two dozen hunger strikes to protest state repression. His belly is peppered with needle pricks from all the forced feedings.  read more »

The Afghan War is the longest war in U.S. history. It began in 1980 and continues to rage. It began under Democrats but has been fought under both Republican and Democratic administrations, making it truly a bipartisan war. The conflict is an odd obsession of U.S.  read more »

Reports have been coming out of the Gulf for days about British Petroleum blocking access to beaches and animal-cleaning stations, in some instances using private Blackwater-style mercenaries to do so. Journalists as well as citizens have been thwarted in their attempts to see for themselves the extent of the damage being done by the runaway Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Know what I'd like to see happen? I would like to see a thousand people, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, just show the hell up down there and demand access.  read more »

Constant interaction with Earth makes it important to track solar activity

The sun's temper ebbs and flows on what scientists had thought was a pretty predictable cycle, but lately our closest star has been acting up.

Typically, a few stormy years would knock out a satellite or two and maybe trip a power grid on Earth. Then a few years of quiet, and then back to the bad behavior.  read more »

When I read The Fifth Agreement on the plane en route to New Mexico recently for a coaching conference where I knew I’d be meeting its authors, I must admit one person that didn’t pop into my mind was Ozzy Osbourne.  read more »

ESA/HOPS ConsortiumHERSCHEL TELESCOPE PROVIDES NEW GLIMPSE AT THE END OF STAR-FORMING PROCESS

NGC 1999 is the green tinged cloud towards the top of the image. The dark spot to the right was thought to be a cloud of dense dust and gas until Herschel looked at it. It is in fact a hole that has been blown in the side of NGC 1999 by the jets and winds of gas from the young stellar objects in this region of space.  read more »

Today I was on WUNC North Carolina's excellent talk radio program The State of Things for a short segment on the politics of the Gulf oil disaster. If you missed it, go check out the podcast for today's show here.

The disaster has clearly changed the offshore oil debate. After two years of "drill, baby, drill," the Obama administration announced just last March that it was opening vast new expenses of water along the Atlantic coast, Gulf of Mexico and north coast of Alaska to oil and gas projects.  read more »

AP – FILE - In this July 11, 2006 file photo, a vessel sails towards a wind farm off the coast of Whitstable …WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday approved the nation's first offshore wind farm, the 130-turbine Cape Wind project off Cape Cod, Mass. , and said that the power of strong winds over the Atlantic Ocean would be an important part of the U.S. drive to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

European countries have been building offshore wind farms for 20 years, and China is building its first, off Shanghai . Other U.S. states along the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes also are looking into building wind farms  read more »

Discussions to establish the UN Permanent Forum of Indigenous Peoples began in the late 1980s. The Permanent Forum is an idea of indigenous peoples.The Permanent Forum is an advisory body to the Economic and Social Council with a mandate to discuss indigenous issues related to economic and social development, culture, the environment, education, health and human rights.

According to its mandate, the Permanent Forum will:

* provide expert advice and recommendations on indigenous issues to the Council, as well as to programmes, funds and agencies of the United Nations, through the Council
* raise awareness and promote the integration and coordination of activities related to indigenous issues within the UN system
* prepare and disseminate information on indigenous issues  read more »

First: A reality check on Mexico

Mexico is in a unique position to reap many of the benefits of the decline of the US economy. In order to not violate NAFTA and other agreements the U.S.A. cannot use direct protectionism, so it is content to allow the media to play this protectionist role. The U.S. media – over the last year – has portrayed Mexico as being on the brink of economic collapse and civil war.  read more »

John ShoreSpeaking as someone who, well, had the conversion experience 14 years ago that I recounted in "I, a Rabid Anti-Christian, Very Suddenly Convert," we Christians too often fail in these ten ways:  read more »

Why is the Fed so opposed to being audited, and what does it have to hide?

Commercial banks, by law, have to hold a certain percentage of their deposits as cash at the Federal Reserve. From January 1959 until August 2008, the total of these reserves held by the commercial banks  read more »

John RobbinsI am someone who longs for world peace. Perhaps you are, too. But every single day our world spends more than $4 billion on war. The last hundred years have been by far the bloodiest in human history.

I support human rights and human dignity. I want every child to grow up healthy and strong.  read more »

A sudden and unexplained mass enlightenment of the US population leads to jubilant celebrations: © whenthemusicstops.comWashington - President Obama, U.S. congressmen and their aides held an emergency four hour-long meeting Wednesday to decide what action to take to stem a sudden and unprecedented mass enlightenment of the US population that threatens to destabilize the Government and create a fiscal crisis.

Millions of citizens jubilantly celebrated their new awareness as they suddenly realized they have been lied to all their lives on just about everything by their psychopathic, conscienceless leaders of major corporations, government and security agencies.

Residents in all major cities across the United States awoke Wednesday morning complaining that they were experiencing an inexplicable mental clarity that was causing them to realize the way  read more »

U.S. Economy: Profit Surge May Help Broaden ExpansionMarch 26 (Bloomberg) -- The fastest pace of economic growth in six years during the final three months of 2009 fueled a surge in corporate profits that may set the stage for job gains and a broadening of the U.S. recovery.

Company earnings increased 8 percent in the fourth quarter, capping the biggest year-over-year gain in 25 years, figures from the Commerce Department showed today in Washington. The economy expanded at a 5.6 percent annual rate.  read more »

Paul Krugman:Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesHealth reform is the law of the land. Next up: financial reform. But will it happen? The White House is optimistic, because it believes that Republicans won’t want to be cast as allies of Wall Street. I’m not so sure. The key question is how many senators believe that they can get away with claiming that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and regulating big banks is doing those big banks a favor.

Some background: we used to have a workable system for avoiding financial crises, resting on a combination of government guarantees and regulation. On one side, bank deposits were insured, preventing a recurrence of the immense bank runs that were a central cause of the Great Depression. On the other side, banks were tightly regulated, so that they didn’t take advantage of government guarantees by running excessive risks.  read more »