Mexican President Felipe Calderón's government has submitted a bill to the Senate that would give the state oil company Pemex greater flexibility to hire outside subcontractors and seek private investment. Energy Minister Jordy Herrera denied the bill will propose changes to the constitution, which reserves the ownership of oil resources to the state. However, the move comes just as Chevron has announced proposals to tap Mexico's oil and natural gas reserves. Chevron's Latin American operations chief Ali Moshiri said the company wants to make Mexico "a big part of our portfolio." (Houston Chronicle, April 8)

Some 5,000 protesters shut down the southern Haitian city of Les Cayes on April 3 in a dramatic demonstration against President Rene Preval's government for failing to slow the rising cost of food and other staple products; they also protested the local administration's failure to maintain roads. From early in the morning people barricaded streets with burning tires, forcing stores, banks and schools to close down in the city, the country's third largest. While many people demonstrated peacefully, others looted food and containers of cement from trucks and warehouses. Some protesters raided the offices of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) in the Breset neighborhood, carrying away computers and other office equipment. Two MINUSTAH vehicles were set on fire.

On April 2 some 400 people demonstrated in Ouanaminthe, a city in eastern Haiti that shares the border with the Dominican city of Dajabon, to press demands for justice from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the Haitian judicial system in the death of 20-year-old student Emanne Saintilmont a month earlier. The Committee for Justice for Emanne blamed MINUSTAH soldiers for the young man's death and accused local officials and judges of corruption. Agents of the National Police of Haiti intervened to keep the crowd from approaching the local MINUSTAH office, although the demonstrators succeeded in delivering a letter of protest to officials there. (AlterPresse, April 3 from Solidarite Fwontalye/Service Jesuite aux Refugies et Migrants press release, April 2)

On the evening of April 3 Mexican federal police agents arrested two activists in the northern state of Chihuahua for their roles in militant protests blocking federal highways: Cipriana Jurado Herrera, a leader in the movement demanding justice for the more than 450 young women killed in the Ciudad Juarez area since the 1990s; and Carlos Chavez Quevedo, a leader in the National Agrodynamic Organization (OAN), which has protested high electricity rates for pumping from the wells that area farmers use for irrigation. Both activists were released on bail the night of April 4 after some 50 people staged a sit-in in front of the federal judicial office in Ciudad Juarez.

Tompkins Square anarchists ride again

New York Press, AM New York, The Villager/Downtown Express and the NO! Art blog were among the media that turned out for a press conference on the steps of New York's City Hall April 3, where a grizzled and aging bunch of veterans of the 1988 police riot in the Lower East Side's Tompkins Square Park—including your intrepid blogger—spoke out against the imminent installation of security video cameras in the once-embattled park.

We've said it before, but here we go again. The Conspiracy Industry plays into the very hands of the police state it ostensibly opposes. The latest blog fodder from Raw Story, April 1, emphasis added, links not included:

Mukasey hints US had attack warning before 9/11
When Attorney General Mukasey delivered a speech last week demanding that Congress grant the president warrantless eavesdropping powers and telecom immunity, the question and answer session afterwards included one extraordinary but little-noticed claim.

In an April 1 statement, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the federal government plans to speed up completion of 470 miles of border fence in the southwestern US by the end of 2008 by using two waivers to bypass some three dozen federal and state environmental and land-management laws. The move is permitted under an exemption granted by Congress in the Real ID Act of 2005.

On April 2, several dozen demonstrators gathered in front of Penn Station in Manhattan to protest the collaboration of the Amtrak train company with border and immigration agents who arrest passengers traveling between US cities. With chants of "transportation, not deportation!" and "immigrant rights are human rights," the protesters then marched to Port Authority to condemn the Greyhound bus company's collaboration with similar immigration sweeps.