After he ordered the military to use force to crack down on street protests in October 2003, causing many deaths, then-president of Bolivia Gonzalez Sanchez de Lozada fled the country with his cronies and has been comfortably ensconced in Miami ever since. Human rights organizations and the Bolivian government have been trying to get him extradited to give testimony and possibly be tried, but the U.S. is not cooperating so far.
Now there's an online petition you can sign, asking the U.S. to serve the subpoena.

Tuesday I went to Nogales, just across the border and just an hour's drive south of Tucson. I went with a friend, Jonathan, who works for a cool organization called Borderlinks. He was going there for work, and I tagged along, since I'd never been there before. It was a great trip, I learned a lot and met some of the people Borderlinks works with there. I took a bunch of pretty interesting photos. The second Mexican/U.S. border town I've been to, It was interesting comparing Nogales to Juarez/El Paso. Nogales is definitely smaller (around 280,000 compared to Juarez's 1.5 million), and Nogales seems a little more "Mexican" - less "gringoized," though it still has that unique borderland feel that is a mix of both cultures. Nogales, though less contaminated than Juarez with gringo brandnames and businesses, seems to have grown in an even more disorganized way, being really just a long thin strip of buildings lining the highway south toward Hermasillo, following the maquiladoras. And it has no z

My friend José, one of the smartest and most careful-thinking people I know, has written something in his blog with a very good point about the war in Iraq, and the ethical responsibility of our nation. I realize it will not be extremely popular amongst a lot of activists I know, but I confess I have said and thought similiar things in the past. I remember the night of the September 25 anti-war vigil in Portland, on the Morrison bridge with my candle, a reporter from KBOO with a microphone and a minidisc recorder was interviewing people and she asked me what I thought should happen in Iraq with the troops. I expect that most of the folks she asked on that bridge that night said "bring em all home now," but I said, basically, that things aren't ever black or white, they're always grey, and it's complicated. it would probably be really disasterous to pull all of our forces out immediately, and yet obviously we're screwing stuff up there, so there has to be a middle path, where we start extricating ourselves, but in a responsbile way.

It's a really hard problem; all the important problems usually are.

The LA Weekly brings us an interesting, though unsurprising, story on how the border thing is becoming a big deal to Republicans.

on Minutemen co-founder and California Congressional Candidate Jim Glichrist: "While campaigning last week with Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.)

An editiorial in the Kansas City paper about Bush's visit to Argentina is one of the most asinine, insulting, condescending pieces of dreck that I've ever read about Latin America. excerpt:

he [Bush] recently learned that he is unpopular among some Latin Americans.

Violent protests greeted him this month at a meeting of Western Hemisphere presidents in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

But neither he, nor we, should lose any sleep over this. It was the product of the unholy triumvirate of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Argentine President Nestor Kirchner and over-the-hill soccer star Diego Maradona.

The three of them are the personification of the most common failing of Latin American nations: perpetual adolescence.

I'll be condescending back, Shirley, and say, I should have expected this kind of think from Kansas.

An really great article in the LA Weekly about all that goes into bringing a Ceasar salad to your plate encompasses a plethora of social problems of today: genetic engineering, labor, immigration, health, pesticide pollution of the environment, gentrification, urban sprawl... It's all there.

I feel responsible for wasting the fistful of romaine left on my plate. All the work that went into getting those leaves here

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A study reports that chronic exposure to noise increases the chance of heart attacks. Oddly enough the average noise level of a typical busy large office, 60db, is about the threshold that researchers have found for an increased risk of heart attack. Even more oddly, they've found that noise in the workplace doesn't effect women. This doesn't seem right. Why would the type of noise matter? whether it's a jet plane or xerox machine, noise is noise. and why would it matter between the sexes?

I hate these kind of articles where they just present these weird findings without even a theory for the reasons. In Harper's magazine on the back page it's funny, but in general I want more sense made from the datasmog being pumped at me.

A right-wing song called "Bush Was Right", by a band called "The Right Brothers," is out and wow, it is BAD. MSNBC has made a silly video (making fun of it) to go with it.

I've just been informed that there is something to do with combatting the forces of creationism called Project Steve (sic) that is being done by the National Center for Science Education. If I was a scientist I would definitely join that. Even though I'm not a Steve but a Steev, they'd probably take me...

The Blogosphere, or the little corner of it that I regularly monitor (read: that I subscribe to in my feedreader), seems to be slowing down, probably for Thanxgiving.

I bunch of Tucson folks I know went to the Seri Coast for the week. (I just spelled that phonetically espanol-style, because I don't know how it's really spelled.) It's on the land of a Mexican Indian tribe, the Seri, on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, about 8 hours from Tucson. Apparently it's really beautiful and completely primitive - you have to bring absolutely everything with you, water and all. I maybe could have gone, and wanted to, but I couldn't justify leaving for a whole week when I really should be concentrating on finding housing and work. I'm sure they're having a wonderful, "Y Tu Mam