A statue of Jesus Malverde at a shrine in Mexico City (David Agren).

MEXICO CITY — Alejandro Ruiz Rodriguez, a Mexico City law student, lost a stack of important legal documents last year. Despite searching everywhere imaginable, they never turned up. As a last resort, he asked Jesus Malverde, an unofficial saint beloved by narcotics traffickers, for intervention. Inexplicably, the documents surfaced shortly thereafter. “I don’t know if it was just by chance or if Jesus Malverde was responsible,” the 26-year-old said at a monthly gathering of Malverde adherents in Mexico City. “Either way, I’m here every month to give thanks . . . it was absolutely miraculous.” Like an increasing number of […]

The revelation that the Office of Vice President Richard Cheney has refused to comply with an executive order requiring it to file an annual report on how it handles classified national security information has drawn attention to several complex issues in the area of government secrecy.Executive Order 12958 — first signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 and reissued by President George W. Bush in 2003 — seeks to establish a uniform, government-wide system for safeguarding classified information. Under the order, classification can only be mandated by officials and individuals who can clearly justify their action. The Information Security Oversight […]

Germany has a new superstar. With the publication of his new book “Five Years of My Life: a Report from Guantanamo” [“Fünf Jahre Meines Lebens: ein Bericht aus Guantanamo”], the former Guantanamo inmate Murat Kurnaz has been all over the German media. Even before the book’s official release on April 23, there had already been a feature spread on the Web site of the popular weekly Stern, an empathetic review on the rival Spiegel-Online, and reports featuring the star author himself on both of Germany’s public television networks ARD and ZDF. Typically glowing reviews in all of Germany’s major papers […]

Editor’s Note: Click here to watch a video report related to this article. ISLAMORADA, Florida — Bound at the wrists and ankles, a Cuban man accused of smuggling a boatload of his countrymen from the communist island to U.S. shores is loaded off the deck of a Coast Guard Cutter and onto a small, swift vessel that whisks him to the Florida Keys. There, customs and immigration officials await his arrival at Coast Guard Station Islamorada beneath a picnic shelter used as an impromptu interrogation center. The suspect — a resident Cuban alien — is questioned about the knife, bullets […]

Editor’s Note: Corridors of Power, penned by WPR Editor-at-Large Roland Flamini, appears in WPR every Monday. SORRY ABOUT THAT NO. 1 — It’s generally considered poor form in the international community for a foreign leader visiting a friendly country to have a private meeting with the leader of the opposition, but President George Bush wasn’t going to be in Rome and pass up a chance to spend quality time with prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Prior to Saturday’s presidential visit, the Italian government had made it clear to the White House that a meeting with Berlusconi would not be appreciated, and […]

The Russians, Tom Clancy’s old reliable villains, are back. The American techno-thriller author has lent his name to several computer games, including the intricate new title from Ubisoft known as EndWar. The video game’s scenario? In the next twenty years, America deploys a space weapons system to protect the United States and Europe from nuclear attack, while a sullen Russia stays out of the missile shield club. A few years later, the world’s peak oil doomsayers are suddenly proven right and all of the world’s major oil producers — except for Russia — are found to have massively inflated their […]

PANAMA CITY, Panama — Renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuels was supposed to be the focus of this week’s Organization of American States General Assembly. Instead, the ongoing war of words between the United States and Venezuela dominated headlines here. Though the assembly’s final declaration was entitled: “Energy for Sustainable Development,” newly unveiled projects like the one to promote ethanol production in El Salvador played second fiddle to diplomatic row between Washington and Caracas. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came to the Panamanian capital armed with new criticism of populist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, this time over […]

Editor’s Note: Corridors of Power, written by World Politics Review Editor-at-Large Roland Flamini, appears every Monday. A PARTING GIFT FOR BLAIR? — At a Friday Council on Foreign Relations briefing in Washington on this week’s G-8 summit, Gene Sperling, former National Economic Council director, and now a CFR senior fellow, said President Bush’s proposal for a series of meetings on climate change are “an attempted parting gift to Prime Minister [Tony] Blair . . . and I think if Blair is trying to look and say he got something out of this partnership, perhaps this is his last chance to […]

State-sponsored censorship of the Internet has increased significantly in recent years, according to a study of 41 countries conducted during 2006 and 2007 by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a consortium of researchers from four major universities, including Harvard and Oxford. “The conclusions from this first year of global testing highlight that Internet filtering is growing in scope, scale and sophistication worldwide,” an ONI summary of its work states. “At least twenty-five of the forty-one countries ONI tested are engaged in some form of technical Internet filtering.”That’s up from just five states conducting systematic filtering five years ago, John Palfrey, executive […]