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“I would like you [of the press] to understand the magnitude of what this means. It is transcendent, it’s something that goes well beyond the relationship we have had up to now.” —President Vicente Fox, regarding NAFTA Plus, onboard the presidential plane returning to Mexico from George W. Bush’s Crawford ranch, March 2005. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) has been in effect almost 12 years and a new stage, NAFTA Plus, is in the works, referred to as “deep integration,” particularly in Canada. The elites of the three NAFTA countries (Canada, the United States, and Mexico) have been aggressively...

HONG KONG, Aug 18 (Reuters) - The Chinese government has sent thousands of police to petrol stations in the southern city of Guangzhou to prevent social unrest as drivers scramble to fill their tanks, the Hong Kong Economic Times reported on Thursday. The paper said authorities had sent a large number of public security officers as well as paramilitary police to fuel stations amid fears that the latest fuel shortage could spark social instability. "Several thousand public security officers and paramilitary police have been stationed at the 547 filling stations across Guangzhou in recent days," the paper said. The country's...

A handful of Democratic House candidates in tight races near the Mexican border are aligning themselves with Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican known for his straight-talking, tough-guy persona. Fearful of looking soft on illegal aliens — or simply eager to tap into McCain’s star power, or both — Democrats in California and Arizona are endorsing the Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act, introduced last spring by McCain and Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.). The growing support on the campaign trail for the McCain-Kennedy bill comes as Congress prepares to plunge into a debate about border security, terrorism and an array...

The Senate voted yesterday against fulfilling its pledge from last year to hire 2,000 more Border Patrol agents and fund 8,000 new detention beds for illegal aliens in fiscal 2006, as some potential presidential candidates weighed in on border security and illegal immigration. [snip] Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, who had made a splash recently with comments about cracking down on illegal immigration, voted against both amendments, as did Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic nominee, and Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, who has said he plans to run. Mrs. Clinton's office didn't...

WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Thursday that immigration reform is probably off the table for this year, a prediction that threw cold water on the methodical efforts of Sen. John Cornyn to pass a bill this fall. "The overall guest worker-immigration legislation will come in this Congress (which ends in late 2006). It won't be this summer, I can't promise it will be in the fall," said Frist, R-Tenn. "More likely, it will be in the early part of next year, but within the next 12 months." Cornyn, R-Texas., said he was unaware of Frist's comments and...

President Vicente Fox:More a Caricature of an Effective Presidency than the Real Thing • The PAN's loss of a key election last Sunday is likely a forecast of the party's defeat in the 2006 run for the presidency. • Immigration initiatives offered in the past by the U.S. once held promise, but now have either died or faltered.• Economic stagnation and political ineptitude defines President Fox's indifferent presidency.• Bush's staccato interjections and photo ops are no substitute for a bona fide policy, but were good enough for Fox.• A weak labor union movement allows for continued exploitation of Mexican workers.•...

The word "barbarian" comes from the ancient Greek, and originally meant a person or peoples who spoke a foreign tongue. The Greeks considered a barbarian to be an alien or outsider, one who was not of their language or culture.  This term was later applied to the Germanic invaders of Rome, who would eventually overrun the Empire and usher in the Dark Ages.  These invaders did not come as warriors so much as peaceful immigrants - some legally, most not.  They did not see themselves as Romans, and they made no effort to adapt themselves to Roman customs and laws....

GITMO DETAINEES DESECRATE QURAN By Michelle Malkin   ·   June 03, 2005 09:57 PM That's the headline you won't be reading over this AP story filed tonight on investigative findings released by Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, the commander of the detention center in Cuba. Buried down in the AP story about Quran abuses at Gitmo, we learn: [Hood] said his investigation found 15 cases of detainees mishandling their own Qurans. "These included using a Quran as a pillow, ripping pages out of the Quran, attempting to flush a Quran down the toilet and urinating on the Quran," Hood's report said. It...

This bipartisan deal cut by Sen. John McCain is noxious. No, the issue isn’t judges. (Or campaign finance, or health care, or any number of other things.) It’s illegal immigration and a proposal that has just been cooked up by the Arizona maverick and the Massachusetts non-maverick Sen. Ted Kennedy to grant an amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants. Under the bill, illegals would have to work in the U.S. — which they are already doing — for six years as legal temporary workers, then they would be eligible to apply for green cards. Also, a new category of guest...

Lee Driscoll is cracking down on illegal immigrants in his restaurants. And it's breaking his heart. He's not just going the extra mile. He's taking the full trip. And it's tearing him up inside. He's going to fire as many as 51 of his employees - for crimes that include trying to make a living for their families. And, Driscoll says, it's not unlike firing members of his own family. "I think it will make me very emotional," he is saying on the day the story breaks. "I think it will make me cry." Lee Driscoll is CEO of...

Story ties Abramoff to Norquist -- scandal expanding toward White House? In a very positive step in the right direction, the New York Times ran a front page story yesterday ("Link to Lobbyist Brings Scrutiny to G.O.P. Figure," May 23, 2005) tying indicted lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, to non-indicted lobbyist, Grover Norquist. They are quite the pair of influence peddlers. Norquist is the man people are thinking about when they say they feel like they need to shower after a visit to Washington. Abramoff was so clever at facilitating the selling off of our democracy, and steering the bigger cut to...

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — As Korean automaker Hyundai invited visitors to tour its first U.S. plant, deliveries for the first U.S.-built Sonatas were arriving at dealerships in the U.S. and Canada. Hyundai held a lavish grand opening of its new plant here Friday, at which it meshed Korean and U.S. culture. Korean dancers and drummers performed, along with local high school marching bands. The event drew 4,000 guests, including the nearly 2,000 plant employees, former President George Bush, and other Alabama and U.S. government officials, as well as Hyundai executives, Korean government officials and Korean media. The Hyundai move takes a...

This one is a working title which is aiming for release on the next generation console from Microsoft, Xbox, PC, PS2 and Gamecube.The face of war has changed. Enemy lines blur, and there is no longer a clear opponent. New enemies and new threats require a new type of warfare - a new type of soldier. Enter the Ghosts.In 2013, the U.S. Army will implement the Integrated Warfighter System (IWS), evolving what we know as the modern soldier. IWS combines advanced weapon systems, satellite communication devices and enhanced survivability into one fully integrated combat system. The IWS program has...

As Islamist groups rage and riot and declare holy war over Newsweek’s now-retracted “Quran desecration” story, it may be helpful, for the sake of clarity, to remember what happened in April 2002 when Palestinian terrorists took over Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity and held priests and nuns hostage for weeks. On April 24, the Jerusalem Post reported on the damage that the PA forces were causing: Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the...

Immigration is the next big thing in political hot buttons, but who wins and who loses? Both parties are divided within their own ranks on how to position themselves for maximum advantage on an issue that is rising quickly toward the social and political surface. Both sides agree it could be a deciding factor in many races in next year’s midterm election. “It is the strongest issue out there for the blue-collar white males,” says Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, a Virginia-based Democratic consultant who is co-author of an upcoming book, “Foxes in the Henhouse,” which will suggest ways his party can...

Billboard for TV newscast has 'CA' crossed out, nation's named added An immigration activist group is drawing attention to a photograph showing a billboard ad for a Spanish-language TV newscast in L.A. on which the "CA" abbreviation after "Los Angeles" has been crossed out and the word "Mexico" added in its place. An e-mail to supporters of Americans for Legal Immigration states: "We just received this photo of a billboard in CA that reads 'Los Angeles CA' but the CA is crossed out and replaced by the word 'Mexico.' It looks like this billboard is compliments of Clear Channel." The...

A U.S. official says the United States has released illegal aliens who are violent criminals under a legal loophole resulting from recent Supreme Court rulings. Testifying before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee, deputy assistant attorney general Jonathan Cohn says a number of violent criminals have been released under the legal loophole, and others are to be released soon. "Among the aliens who will benefit are criminals who have murdered their wives, molested young children, and brutally raped several women," he said. Mr. Cohn says the loophole was created after the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 and again last year that criminal...

WASHINGTON, April 12 - Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, said on Tuesday that he was discouraging efforts to incorporate immigration and border security measures into the Senate version of a supplemental military spending bill, which would set the stage for showdowns among Congressional Republicans over immigration later this year. Meeting with reporters, Dr. Frist, of Tennessee, said, "I am encouraging my colleagues to defer, to postpone discussions of immigration and to postpone that debate." He said, however, that he was still negotiating with senators who seek to add immigration provisions to the military spending bill. The House version of...

<p>MEXICO CITY - (KRT) - Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, Mexico's leading presidential contender, was stripped of his criminal immunity by Congress Thursday so he can stand trial for disobeying a judge's order to stop building a road to a hospital.</p>

The Senate Appropriations Committee yesterday unanimously passed the emergency spending bill for the war on terror, but left out restrictions on using driver's licenses as federal identification and asylum claims that passed in the House version. The $80.4 billion bill is $1 billion less than the version that passed in the House three weeks ago, and $1.5 billion less than what President Bush had initially requested. It trims the foreign-affairs appropriations by $1.4 billion from what Mr. Bush requested, cutting aid he sought as a reward for nations that have contributed armed forces to the war on terror. But the...