Month: Mar 2016

Photo: @Mexican Commission for the Defense and Protection of Human Rights (Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos – CMPDH)

After a decade of struggle for conservation of the natural wealth of their territory, the community of San Francisco, Xochicuautla, Mexico State, obtained the definitive suspension of the construction of the Toluca-Naucalpan highway that threatened their forest. Following ten years of various strategies, political and legal, the suspension opposed the presidential decree of 2015 for the expropriation of 37 hectares of the ejido for the construction of the highway.

The infrastructure project was promoted by the then-governor of the State of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto. The company in charge of the construction of the highway, Autopistas de Vanguardia S.A., is part of the Grupo Higa, which sold the so-called “White House” to the wife of the current President of the Republic for seven million pesos, causing a…

By Bill Bigelow

March 18, 2016 “Information Clearing House” – “Zinn Education Project“-  “Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition…

This video from Scotland says about itself:

4 December 2014

Orkney is home to a rich variety of flora and fauna all year round. We are perhaps best known for our seabirds and seals, but there are many more species here, including many other birds, the tiny but very elusive Orkney vole and the even tinier Primula scotica.

By Peter Frost in Britain:

The Orkney call to eco whale-watchers

Friday 18th March 2016

PETER FROST is off to an archipelago full of spectacular vantage points for a highly rewarding observation of its rich wildlife from puffins to whales and its ancient history

New Zealand, Australia, New England and California are just a few places advertising themselves as holiday destinations at the moment. Most of them make great play of the fact that you can watch whales as part of your holiday.

In fact you don’t need to go that…