Free Republic

A natural gas pipeline stretching 435 miles across Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula is just one piece of General Electric’s multibillion-dollar bid to shore up energy infrastructure in North America, where an oil and gas boom has drawn a wave of investments to new pipelines. GE’s energy investing arm has more than $3 billion tied up in 43,500 miles of pipeline, the largest U.S. liquefied natural gas export facility and other energy transportation and storage ventures. But it has started to shift its attention to early-stage ventures as U.S. and Canadian pipeline operators collect billions for new projects that link remote shale...

Bonn archaeologists find huge artificial lake with a ceramic-lined floorSince 2009, researchers from Bonn and Mexico have been systematically uncovering and mapping the old walls of Uxul, a Mayan city. "In the process, we also came across two, about 100 m square water reservoirs," explained Iken Paap, who directs the project with Professor Dr. Nikolai Grube and the Mexican archaeologist Antonio Benavides Castillo. Such monster pools, which are also known from other Mayan cities, are called "aguadas." Similar to present-day water towers, they served to store drinking water. But the people of Uxul seem to have thought of a particularly...

Hezbollah in Yucatán Posted on January 30, 2013 by Baron Bodissey As mentioned here many times in the past, the southern border of the United States is porous not just to Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans, but also to Islamic terrorists. Operatives from Al Qaeda and Hezbollah acquire a Latin American passport and enough Spanish to allow their swarthiness to pass as Latino.This latest report concerns the arrival of a Hezbollah associate in Mexico. Many thanks to Iz-M (via Vlad) for the translation from Diario de Yucatán: More signs of the presence of HezbollahLabboun Rafic Mohammed, the Muslim cleric allegedly linked...

Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar. Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya. Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization -- which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region (Maya map) -- was a loose aggregation of city-states. "This has been a growing...

[via babelfish translation] MERIDA, Yuc. - Yucatan continues to register no case of swine flu, assured Ivonne governor Grouse Pacheco when called to Yucatan people to stay come up, but calm, to avoid panic, and continue hygiene measures sufficient to preserve the health in the State. Accompanied by representatives of the three Powers of the State he instructed authorities conduct coordinated battles in support to the citizenship, in order to avoid some type of contagion, as told in a bulletin of the State government. Representing the Secretariat of Health, the director of Prevention and Protection of Health, Pedro González Martinez,...

Drug war terror spreads in Mexico as bodies are dumped in tourist areas Another day brings another funeral in Mexico. The death toll from violence has already passed 2,700 this year Chris Ayres in Los Angeles Eleven decapitated bodies have been found outside the city of Merida on the Yucatan peninsula, heightening fears that Mexico's recent descent into violence has reached even heavily protected tourist areas.

Archaeologists discovered maze of stone temples in underground caves MEXICO CITY - Mexican archeologists have discovered a maze of stone temples in underground caves, some submerged in water and containing human bones, which ancient Mayans believed was a portal where dead souls entered the underworld.

Each day, I make the dreaded drive down Interstate 35 to go to work in Fort Worth. Each day, I slug through the snarl and sludge of ceaseless traffic, which intensifies my growing desire to commit hari-kari, or at least incites a vehement curse of the highway gods. Certainly, we in Texas need more lanes, more roads, more rails, more something to deal with the ever-expanding urban population and growing international commerce. Yet how do we solve our transportation needs without carving up the countryside like some congratulatory cake? Or should the construction of a superhighway-rail-utility corridor even concern us?...

The findings, archaeologists say, are some of the first strong evidence that the ancient Maya civilization, at least in places and at certain times, had a market economy similar in some respects to societies today. The conventional view has been that food and other goods in Maya cities were distributed through taxation and tributes controlled by the ruling class. Archaeologists suspected that a wide clearing at the center of the ruins of Chunchucmil might have been a market, not a ritual plaza. Rock alignments peeking above the surface seemed to outline the positions of stalls and regular pathways; the rock...

TROPICAL WEATHER OUTLOOK NWS TPC/NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL 1130 AM EDT THU JUN 08 2006 FOR THE NORTH ATLANTIC...CARIBBEAN SEA AND THE GULF OF MEXICO... A BROAD SURFACE LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM LOCATED NEAR BELIZE IS PRODUCING WIDESPREAD CLOUDINESS AND SHOWERS ACROSS THE EASTERN YUCATAN PENINSULA... BELIZE... WESTERN CUBA... AND MUCH OF THE NORTHWESTERN CARIBBEAN SEA. ANY DEVELOPMENT OF THIS SYSTEM SHOULD BE SLOW TO OCCUR DUE TO ONLY MARGINALLY FAVORABLE UPPER-LEVEL WINDS AND INTERACTION WITH LAND. HOWEVER... AS THE SYSTEM MOVES SLOWLY NORTH OR NORTHWESTWARD... LOCALLY HEAVY RAINFALL WILL BE POSSIBLE OVER MUCH OF THE YUCATAN PENINSULA... BELIZE... GUATEMALA......

Probe to 'look inside' asteroids By Paul Rincon BBC News Online science staff in Paris, France Studies of asteroids would aid Earth-protection strategies A new space mission concept unveiled at a Paris conference aims to look inside asteroids to reveal how they are made. Deep Interior would use radar to probe the origin and evolution of two near-Earth objects less than 1km across. The mission, which could launch some time later this decade, would also give clues to how the planets evolved. The perceived threat of asteroids colliding with our planet has renewed interest in space missions to understand these...

MERIDA, Mexico (Reuters) - Hurricane Isidore plowed across Mexico's Yucatan peninsula on Monday, forcing thousands from their homes as it flooded streets, toppled trees and power lines and shut down offshore oil rigs. About 70,000 people in low-lying fishing villages on the peninsula were evacuated to shelters after torrential rains flooded homes and roads, and winds of more than 120 mph (195 kph) ripped off roofs and uprooted trees. Local radio stations reported four road accident deaths during the storm, and Mexico's state oil monopoly, Pemex, evacuated more than 8,000 workers from its drilling platforms in the Gulf of...

Hurricane Races Toward Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula Sat Sep 21, 9:23 AM ET MIAMI (Reuters) - Hurricane Isidore raced toward Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula on Saturday with winds near 105 mph after damaging houses and crops and forcing 300,000 people to flee their homes in western Cuba. The storm was expected to strengthen into a major hurricane with winds topping 111 mph later on Saturday, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. Hurricane warnings were posted along the north and east coasts of the Yucatan Peninsula, including the tourist resort island of Cozumel. Coastal flooding as high as 4 to 8 feet...