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TOPIC: mexico

In The News

Zelensky Invites Xi, King Charles In Germany, Amsterdam v. British Lads

👋 Hyvää päivää!*

Welcome to Wednesday, where Volodymyr Zelensky formally invites Xi Jinping to Kyiv, top French banks raided in fraud probe, and Amsterdam is trying to keep British bachelor parties at bay. Meanwhile, Chinese-language media The Initium shines a light on the quiet emergence of China's gay senior community.

[*Finnish]

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Mexico Border Fire, Ukraine Gets Western Tanks, Detectorist Jackpot

👋 வணக்கம்*

Welcome to Tuesday, where a shooting in Nashville leaves six dead, Ukraine receives much-awaited tanks from the UK and Germany, and an amateur treasure hunter hits the mother lode. Meanwhile, Italian weekly magazine Internazionale looks at an oft-overlooked form of gender inequality: street names.

[*Vanakkam, Tamil - India]

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Ukraine Denies Pipe Sabotage, Georgia Protests, Holi Kickoff

👋 Hoi!*

Welcome to Wednesday, where Ukraine responds to a report about its involvement in the Nord Stream gas pipe sabotage in November, protests over press freedom rock Georgia's capital Tbilisi and the beginning of Holi celebrations coincide with International Women’s Day. Meanwhile, Karl De Meyer in French daily Les Echos takes us on a trip to Umeå, Sweden, a city where urbanism and feminism are words that go together well.

[*Dutch]

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Live Execution Of Ukrainian Soldier, 343 Migrants In Mexico Truck, Smiling Sphinx

👋 Akkam!*

Welcome to Tuesday, where Kyiv demands answers about a video that appears to show a captured Ukrainian soldier shot in cold blood, hundreds of migrants are found in an abandoned truck in Mexico and archaeologists unearth an ancient sphinx with an enigmatic smile. Meanwhile, Argentine daily Clarín takes us on a modern van-life Odyssey that’s reached the 20-year mark.

[*Oromo, Ethiopia]

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LGBTQ Plus
Marissa Revilla

How Mexico Is Leaving Its Trans Citizens In ID Limbo

Without the option to change their ID documents to reflect their gender, trans residents in Chiapas and 12 other Mexican states are denied certain rights.

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS — When Santiago Santiago Rodríguez began his hormonal transition a year ago, he discovered that he wouldn’t be able to change his name and gender on his documents in his home state of Chiapas, which doesn’t have a law regulating the administrative process.

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He decided to have his name changed in Mexico City, one of the country’s 19 states with a gender identity law, a type of legislation that guarantees a person’s right to modify their birth certificate through a simple administrative request. Fewer than half of the country’s 32 states have such laws.

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Society
Aline Suárez del Real Islas and Mar García

In Mexico, Influencers Make Castoff Clothing Cool

Young consumers around the world increasingly seek out secondhand and alternative clothing markets — making Mexico City’s flea markets, or tianguis, suddenly and surprisingly popular.

MEXICO CITY — The shouts of vendors mingle at the hodgepodge of stalls selling food, fruit and household items at the tianguis Las Torres, a flea market in eastern Mexico City. Beneath the tents, heaps of clothing are mounded on containers, planks and tubes. People examine garment after garment, holding them up to judge their size and draping their choices over their forearms and shoulders. The vendors watch from above, yelling prices and watching for occasional theft.

Bale clothing, or secondhand clothes, often called “ropa americana” (American clothing) here, is widely available at stalls in the open-air markets, or tianguis, of Mexico City and the State of Mexico. These garments, often illegally smuggled from the United States, used to be an affordable apparel option for Mexican families.

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Green Or Gone
Maya Piedra

Deep Inside The Ecological Devastation Of Mexico’s Avocado Production

As avocado production stifles biodiversity, depletes water reserves and takes over once-forested land, farmers and environmentalists in Jalisco warn that Mexico’s “green gold” may not be so green after all.

ZAPOTLÁN EL GRANDE — Ten minutes away from downtown Ciudad Guzmán, the municipal capital of Zapotlán el Grande, is a small century-old ranch, where fruits and vegetables sprout from the ground and fall from the trees. It’s a picture of biodiversity fast fading from Mexico's western state of Jalisco.

Ranch owners Rogelio Trejo and Yaskara Silva, who inherited the land from Trejo’s parents, have seen the change take place. Once upon a time, sage would turn surrounding mountains into a sea of blue-green. Now, there are avocado farms as far as the eye can see.

“They’ve destroyed our natural forests,” Trejo says.

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Migrant Lives
Astrid Morales

Walls Of Shame: Trump Is Not Alone In Building Barriers To Shut Out Latin Americans

Keeping out the poor from one country to another, or even within a country, is not a new idea, though former U.S. President Donald Trump seems to have set off a new wave across the region, and the world.

If you are from Latin America and you hear the word “wall,” you most likely think of the one that Donald Trump began to build between the United States and Mexico. However, there are currently more than 60 border walls around the world, and, contrary to popular belief, Trump's is not the only one keeping Latin Americans out of a territory.

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eyes on the U.S.
Alex Hurst

Eyes On U.S. — Something Broken In The Kingdom Of American Tech

PARIS — There’s a dual story about the U.S. tech scene circulating in the world’s media. The first is structural, about trendlines and economics as Silicon Valley’s all-powerful platforms and companies have seen their stocks tanking and announced large layoffs for the first time ever. The second storyline is about the big tech titans themselves.

No surprises, Twitter is still taking up extraordinary amounts of headline real estate. And it’s impossible to disentangle Twitter the company from its Very-Online new owner, as Elon Musk’s barrage of changes continue to cross new red-lines that could wind up threatening the viability of the company itself.

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Society
Abril Castro Prieto

Colonialism Of Childbirth: How Racism Slammed Into My Surrogacy Experience

In Mexico, it's common to hear the term "improving the race" when a darker skinned person dates someone who is white. The author came directly in contact with these prejudices — and Spain's discrimination of people from its former colonies — when she went through surrogacy.

On my 26th birthday, my black, lesbian artist friend Kara Lynch gave me Angela Davis' autobiography. Together with Lynch and several artists and writers from the borderlands of Tijuana and the United States, we formed the first openly feminist collective in Baja California, Mexico, in 2002 — the Interdisiplinario la Línea. We wanted to make visible the work of great undiscovered Mexican writers and artists.

When she handed me the book, I remember Lynch telling me that it was an indispensable text “for us, as women of color”. At first, I didn't understand if her "we" was really for me.

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food / travel
Mercedes Pérez Bergliaffa

Frida Kahlo, Capturing Her Pain In Painting And Photographs

The Costantini collection of Latin American art, on display in Buenos Aires, includes family photos of Mexico's Frida Kahlo, whose singular paintings and resilience in suffering made her, in death, a symbol of female strength and creativity.

BUENOS AIRES — The Tercer Ojo (Third Eye) exhibition in the MALBA museum in Buenos Aires, displaying one of Latin America's outstanding art collections, will give visitors a glimpse of the lives of two celebrated Mexican painters of the 20th century, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

Kahlo turned to painting to escape years of acute back pain, and is often associated with the Surrealists of her time. The display includes pictures taken by her father among others, showing private moments in the life of a passionate woman who has become an icon of modern popular culture.

In 1929, Kahlo married Rivera, a towering figure of Mexican modern art and in particular, Muralism. Throughout her life as an artist, she remained in his shadow.

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In The News
Sophia Constantino, Laure Gautherin, Anne-Sophie Goninet and Bertrand Hauger

Thai Preschool Attack, OPEC To Cut Oil Production, French Literature Nobel

👋 ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ*

Welcome to Thursday, where at least 31 people, including 23 children, have been killed in an attack at a daycare center in Thailand, OPEC stuns the energy market and the Nobel Prize in literature goes to a French author. Meanwhile, for Paris-based daily Les Echos, Guillaume Ptak draws a parallel between the growing militarization of Ukrainian citizens and life in Israel.

[*Namaskar - Kannada, India]

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