Austin’s Chief of Police, Art Acevedo, has made the following statement about undocumented immigrants: “The vast majority of these people are not criminal aliens, they’re economic aliens. They are not a threat to our public safety.”

The most biologically diverse place on earth is a portion of the Amazon rainforest known as Yasuni. Environmentalists have targeted the region for an innovative and internationally recognized conservation project, and the populist President Rafael Correa seems to be on board. However, Correa has many obligations to social movements and businesse alike under Ecuador’s constitutional referendum.

Thirteen and fourteen year olds are too young to rent movies without the consent of their parents. They are not allowed to operate motor vehicles. They certainly can’t register to vote, or enlist in the armed forces.

U.S. technology infrastructure will take a giant leap forward this February when the congressionally mandated conversion to all-digital television broadcasting takes effect. But there is disagreement over consumer and industry preparedness for the upcoming deadline. How many will be left with a blank TV screen come February?

Latin American countries have had a history of recurring bouts of hyperinflation, which have been as severe as they have been frequent. It is widely believed that the overriding reason for this has been populist macroeconomic policies, especially ones by democratically elected regimes.

Pundits, news anchors and John Centipede Citizen, to borrow a phrase, will all tell you that this is an historic election year for a variety of reasons. For the second time, a presidential nominee has selected a woman as his running mate. We, the voting public, came very close to nominating the first female candidate for president of the United States, and we did nominate the first African American to be the presidential candidate from a major political party.

It appears that the media and politicians of both parties can agree on one thing these days: We are surrounded by crisis. One of the most important areas where the system in place is fundamentally broken is the health care system. Oddly enough, it took a different crisis in the economic markets and a financial bailout bill to finally get mental health parity signed into law. While mental health parity may not pose the largest crisis we face, the Mental Health Parity Act will have a positive impact on millions of Americans across the country.

Walking in a desert, concentrating on the mirage, the wanderer looses sight of what he had set out to do. He walks away from his destination lured by the mirage, embracing fiction than fact. Like the wanderer, the focus of United States foreign policies seemed to have drifted from the path to the mirage. Rather than eliminating the world from all evils, it has prolonged the terror of evilness. Instead of concentrating on making the world a safe place, it has declared regions as “war-zones” that were in peace before.

Who noticed when the titans of finance proclaimed absolute mastery over risk? Who stayed up late at night worrying about the outrageous levels of borrowing needed to feed our profit-hungry investment banks? And who noticed when the markets stopped behaving rationally?

Before sunrise on November 7, 2005, I joined members of the Observatorio Ciudadano de Servicios Públicos as we erected a blue tent in front of the Palacio de Justicia in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Volunteers readied vote deposit boxes, paper ballots, and signature pages in anticipation of the crowds of people to come. Over the next two weeks, more than 41,000 of Guayaquil’s citizens participated in a “consulta” regarding the water and sewage services provided by Interagua, a local subsidiary of the U.S. Bechtel Corporation.