Dublin was busy with construction and slick with rain. I tried to recognize landmarks through the taxi windows—mossy stone gate here, mossy stone church there—while the cab driver told me how the Irish were all getting rich and he had finally been able to move back home from the impossible hell of Scotland. It was the end of 1999, I had just flown from Washington to interview for a magazine called International Living, the new hotel-pub where I was staying was owned by someone from the band U2, in 24 hours I would be back at the airport, and life felt like a Thomas Friedman column.

The registration desk [...]

"Even with the support of the United States, they cannot stop us, because here the Zetas rule. The government must make a pact with us because if not we will have to overthrow it and take power by force." —A sign hung rom a bridge this past February in the city Monterrey, in Northeast Mexico, where, as Reuters reports, the drug war is really not going well.

OMG everything the right has been telling us about how Mexico wants to reclaim our land is totally true! "On Tuesday, the Mexican Army accidentally 'invaded' the United States when thirty-three of its soldiers mistakenly crossed the border into Texas in Humvees; the soldiers were driving in a convoy consisting of four Humvees when they realized they had started driving on a bridge over the Rio Grande where they could not turn their vehicles around until they entered the United States."

"Texas has 8,000 gun dealers, and in the city of Houston there are 1,500. The pattern we’re seeing is that they’ll go to the shows to buy ammo and supplies, combat gear, and so on, and go to the dealers to get their weapons, using straw buyers for $50 per gun, on up. They come, and they just keep coming back. It’s simple because we make it simple. There’s no black market in the U.S. The guns are not being stolen—it’s all legal.” —Dewey Webb, special agent in charge, Houston division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

We've discussed Edgar "Barbie" Valdez Villarreal here before; today the Times has a brief profile of how the high school football star from Laredo, Texas became a Mexican drug cartel killing machine.

Last week in Ciudad Juarez, the Federal Police received an emergency call from a payphone explaining that a police officer had been shot and was lying wounded on the Avenue 16 de Septiembre, a street named for the day of Mexican independence from the Spanish. Several federal police officers and an emergency team of paramedics arrived to tend to the injured officer. A TV crew arrived on the scene around the same time. As the officers and doctors gathered around the body to assess the damage, nearby members of the Juarez cartel used a cell phone to detonate a bomb hidden in a parked car at the intersection. The blast [...]

Last week Mexican president Felipe Calderon spent two days visiting Barack Obama at the White House. In the weeks leading up to the summit, which was punctuated by a state dinner on Wednesday, there was much in the press about issues the two presidents had to discuss, including the Mexican government's negative reaction to the new Arizona immigration bill and the need to improve trade relations and get more Mexican trucks on the roads in the US. But no issue was expected to be more pressing than the question of security. With over 24,000 dead in the past 3 years and growing international concern that Mexico could be on [...]

Unrealistic beauty expectations are nothing new: Julia Pastrana was known in life as the "world's ugliest woman," and her husband made money from this by taking her around to circuses and theaters as a curiosity. He even bought advertising in the New York Times calling his spouse a "link between mankind and the ourang-outang." After Julia Pastrana's death in 1860, he carted her corpse around the world for years, so people could see why he called the "bear woman." Her remains were eventually abandoned in Norway.

The story of her sad life and strange appearance—she was apparently born with the condition called hypertrichosis—is making the news again because what's [...]

"The best was the girl in white with the cleavage at the beginning."

"Mexico's state electricity company on Wednesday started supplying electricity to Texas, where cold weather and power shortages forced rolling blackouts across the state. Mexico's Federal Electricity Commission issued a statement saying it 'was determined to support Texas with electrical energy' as its neighbor to the north scrambled to deal with its power woes."

El Diario de Juarez's front-page op-ed yesterday is a frank plea to the real rulers of Mexico: the drug cartels. "The state as protector of the rights of citizens, and thus, of the media, has been absent," they write-so, in light of the murder of reporters in Mexico, and the inability of the government to do anything about it, the paper wonders: would the leaders of the cartels like the paper to cease reporting? "Even in war there are rules. And in any conflagration there protocols or guarantees to the warring sides, to safeguard the integrity of the journalists covering them. So we reiterate, gentlemen of the [...]

So not long ago now, the cosmetics manufacturer M·A·C and fashion label Rodarte teamed up to… no, really. Sell cosmetics, I was going to say. And then I was going to add their own phrase, "inspired by." But then I just had to stop for a second, because it ain't easy to complete this sentence, because what the sisters Mulleavy of Rodarte were allegedly "inspired by" is the border city of Juárez, Mexico. As Style.com's Nicole Phelps explained back in February about the Rodarte Fall/Winter 2010 collection, "[T]hey became interested in the troubled border town of Ciudad Juárez; the hazy, dreamlike quality of the landscape there; [...]

"Frederick Loos was cussing like a sailor the other night, which was surprising given that he is a Roman Catholic priest and his foul-mouthed discourse was delivered from the pulpit to hundreds of faithful gathered before him. He spoke of God, the need to serve him and how he can transform lives. But interspersed in his sermon was the most colorful of street Spanish, which brought smiles to the faces of many of the gang members, addicts and other young people pressed in tight to listen." -In case you were too distracted or disgusted by yesterday's national sports emergency to catch it, you should now read Marc [...]