Texans whose homes will be bulldozed and whose properties will be decimated to make way for the 18 foot steel and concrete border fence want to know why the fence will skip the properties of the rich and connected.

From the Texas Observer:

Along the border, preliminary plans for fencing seem to target landowners of modest means and cities and public institutions such as the University of Texas at Brownsville, which rely on the federal government to pay their bills.

Local landowners realized that the fence’s location had everything to do with politics and private profit, and nothing to do with stopping illegal immigration.

A 2007 congressional report estimates the cost of maintaining and building the fence could be as much as $49 billion over its expected 25-year life span.

“They are just going to push this problem on the next administration, and nobody is going to talk about immigration reform, and that’s the illness,” Foster says. “The wall is a Band-Aid on the problem. And to blow $49 billion and not walk away with a secure border—that’s a travesty.”

Without even getting into the pros and cons of the fence, and superior solutions to the illegal immigration problem, my question is: How will 370 miles of fence (what they’re planning to build) along a 1900+ mile border increase security?

Read the full story. Photo credit: june+raul.

A Portuguese writer has called for Portugal and Spain to unite and become one country, which he calls Iberia. No, this is not a joke, like what I wrote on April first about merging Spanish Portuguese and Catalan.

José Saramago is a Portuguese writer who has won the Nobel prize and has just enraged his fellow countryfolk with his ideas about merging Portugal with Spain. He’s not just shooting from the hip. He has obviously spent some time thinking this through and claims that Portugal could be just another one of Spain’s autonomous regions, just like Catalonia, Galicia and the Basque country.

I honestly don’t see this happening, but obviously some people are taking him seriously.

There was a hostel fire in Chile which left 10 foreign travelers dead, although another 11 successfully escaped harm. In my travels in Central and South America, I’ve seen countless examples of really dangerous wiring- bare wires, wires that are twisted and taped together, as well as not having fuses in some cases. Of course most outlets are not polarized or grounded, and I’ve never seen a ground fault interrupt in my visits. I’ve often commented that since most buildings are made out of concrete blocks, there’s not much of a fire hazard. Of course I don’t know the cause of this fire in Punta Arenas, Chile.

Here are a couple of pictures from Mexico.

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This is not exactly breaking news anymore, but last November the Real Academia Española (RAE) published a list of new words that they were officially accepting into the Spanish language. All in all, the new version of the RAE’s dictionary contains more than 1,000 new headwords, and more than 4,000 new meanings of words that already exist.

So you want to see some of these newly accepted words?

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If you haven’t heard of him, Peter Kuper is an illustrator and cartoonist. His biography states that his “illustrations and comics appear regularly in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, and MAD, where he illustrates SPY vs. SPY every month”.

Peter Kuper has moved along with his wife and family to Oaxaca, Mexico for a 1 year stay, where a drawn out teacher’s strike has caused mounting conflicts and riots in the colonial city. Here’s a link to some email updates the Kuper has sent out, including what it’s like to live just 10 blocks from where the worst of the riots is. There’s also lots of up-close photos and drawings depicting life in Oaxaca City.

Here’s a current article from “El Universal” in Oaxaca concerning the situation. More can be found on Google news in Spanish.

Update: More information on The Beat.