Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Mexicans take flu outbreak with dose of skepticism
Mexicans are taking the swine flu outbreak a bit like they do their tequila – seriously, but with a big pinch of salt.
There’s a real fear of catching the killer virus, which has already claimed up to 159 lives, largely because many Mexicans are skeptical about getting the right treatment from state hospitals.
Nothing sums that up better than the millions of surgical face masks being worn by everyone from businessmen to street kids washing car windshields in the capital’s never-ending sprawl.
It’s a bizarre sight, and the rebellious or foolhardy who shun the masks draw suspicious glances.
Trade and Mutually Assured Destruction
Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo has an original view on protectionism.
Instead of promising not to raise barriers to trade (and quietly ignoring their pledges), leaders should hit back hard with all the legal means available at any country trying to use protectionism to shield itself from the crisis at the expense of others.
Zedillo, who steered Mexico through the 1994/95 “Tequila crisis” and the 1997/98 Asian crisis, compares this to the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction that kept the nuclear peace during the Cold War.
from MacroScope:
Winners in a trade war
Trade protectionism -- or at least the threat of it -- has raised it head as the global economy has declined, bringing with it all the historical fears about the Great Depression. Consider the flurry of concern about a "Buy American" clause in one of the U.S. stimulus bills.
It is traditionally assumed that widespread protectionism would most hurt the biggest economies, the United States and Japan. But Barclays Capital analyst David Woo says this is not so and that Russia, Canada, Australia and Sweden are the most vulnerable.
Best reads of January
Gaza gets 180 minute respite to shop, bury the dead – “For 180 precious minutes, Israeli warplanes and tanks held their fire, giving 1.5 million shell-shocked residents of the coastal enclave a chance to check on family members, shop for essentials and bury their dead.”
Spain’s jobless lose homes, tensions mount - “‘One day this place is going to explode,’ said unemployed waiter Miguel Roa, a Spaniard. Since December, he has lost his job and his home as well as seeing his family split as economic crisis ended 14 years of growth in Spain.
Video Stories from Both Sides of the USA-Mexico Border
By Juliana Rincón Parra
Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content of this post — the views are the author’s alone.
Frontera Filmmakers is social networking website based in San Diego, California that unites video producers from both sides of the USA-Mexico border. Its members share links to more than two dozen films and trailers related to border politics and culture.
from Photographers Blog:
Nobody to trust in Mexico’s north
The first version of the killings came from Mexico City media. “Massacre in Tamaulipas State,” said the news anchorman. Seventy-two corpses had been discovered on a ranch in San Fernando municipality, all showing signs of a mass execution.
News of executions, macabre assassinations and kidnappings are commonplace in northern Mexico, but this headline was not. With journalists’ reflexes we began to plan a trip to what suddenly became the bloodiest theater in the drug war. In the past two months a candidate for governor was gunned down, two mayors assassinated, grenades exploded on city streets and the cousin of a media mogul kidnapped. In one weekend 51 people had been murdered in infamous Ciudad Juarez.
