As we reported earlier this year, some nonprofit organizations are helping out by providing on-the-ground training and survival tips. But if journalists scattered around Mexico can't make it to class in the flesh, they can sign up for an online course the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas is running.

For the second year in a row, the Knight Center course, called "Covering Drug Trafficking," will take place Aug. 3-30.

The course will be free to participants and take place completely online through the use of e-mail, Skype telephone conferencing, video lectures and other technologies.

Álvaro Sierra will be the running the training. He provides classes in how to cover armed conflicts at the United Nations' University for Peace in San Jose, Costa Rica. He was formerly the editor of the editorial page of Bogota's El Tiempo newspaper and a correspondent in Russia (1990-1997) and China (1998-2000). According to the Knight website, he has extensive experience covering armed conflicts as a local reporter and a foreign correspondent. You can hear him talking about the course here on a blog post on the Knight Center website.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Video: Journalists are put through their survival paces during a training course just outside Mexico City earlier this year. Credit: Deborah Bonello

In a news release, Canadian immigration officials said that for the first 48 hours after the new rules go into effect today, Mexican citizens can apply for entry on arrival in Canada. But as of Thursday, a visa will be required:

Refugee claims from Mexico have almost tripled since 2005, making it the number one source country for claims. In 2008, more than 9,400 claims filed in Canada came from Mexican nationals, representing 25 per cent of all claims received. Of the Mexican claims reviewed and finalized in 2008 by the Immigration and Refugee Board, an independent administrative tribunal, only 11 per cent were accepted.

"In addition to creating significant delays and spiraling new costs in our refugee program, the sheer volume of these claims is undermining our ability to help people fleeing real persecution," said Minister Kenney. “All too often, people who really need Canada’s protection find themselves in a long line, waiting for months and sometimes years to have their claims heard. This is unacceptable.

"The visa requirement I am announcing will give us a greater ability to manage the flow of people into Canada and verify bona fides. By taking this important step towards reducing the burden on our refugee system, we will be better equipped to process genuine refugee claims faster."

For the last three years, Canada has seen an increase in immigration violations, according to the country's Citizenship and Immigration website. This includes Mexican nationals without proper travel documents and those not leaving Canada once their period of stay had expired.

Read the whole report here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Activists in the United States are pushing for a California ballot initiative that would end public benefits for illegal immigrants, cut off welfare payments for their children and impose new rules for birth certificates.

Teresa Watanabe reports from the border-watch post the activists call Camp Vigilance.

Photo: Ted Hilton speaks with Evelyn Miller at a Fourth of July barbecue organized by anti-illegal-immigration groups at Camp Vigilance near the U.S.-Mexico border. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas blog writes that "a report by the United Nations Human Rights Council praised Cuba for its successes in promoting the right to education, food, and health care but criticized it for restricting freedom of expression. The IPI commended the council for airing those concerns but worried that the report effectively minimized freedom of expression and the press as fundamental human rights."

“Cuba’s suppression of dissenting voices, thoroughly and systematically carried out for so many years, strongly affects our ability to understand and assess the situation in the country,” the director of the International Press Institute said.

Read more about journalism in the Americas on the Knight Center blog.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Read the rest of the report here, and watch the video below for a tour of Mexico's Museum of Drugs.

For more stories on Mexico's drug war, go to our Mexico Under Siege page.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

--California has roughly 2.7 million illegal residents, about 7% of the state’s population. State officials estimate that they add between $4 billion and $6 billion in costs, primarily for prisons and jails, schools and emergency rooms.

--Beyond those services, the undocumented population adds to the overall cost of other parts of local government, including police and fire protection, highway maintenance and libraries.

--On the other side of the ledger, undocumented residents pay taxes -- sales taxes on what they buy, gasoline taxes when they fuel their cars, property taxes if they own homes. How much those taxes come to is hotly debated, although most researchers agree that the short-term costs to state and local government are bigger than the revenues.

A new analysis of date from a 2008 report from the Pew Hispanic Center (which you can download here) found that about three-quarters (76%) of the unauthorized immigrants in the U.S are Hispanic and that the majority of undocumented immigrants (59%) are from Mexico. However, figures do suggest that that illegal immigration -- at least to California -- is slowing.

Read the rest of the Los Angeles Times report here.

Click here for more posts on immigration.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Here's the Sundance Film Festival write-up of the feature:

Sounds like one to watch.

You can read more about Outfest on LATimes.com here.

La Mission's Facebook page, where you can read press coverage and reviews, is here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Well, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Dole accused Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten of slander and libel in making the documentary, which was shown at last month's Los Angeles Film Festival.

The film "Bananas!" chronicles a 2007 case against Dole and prominently features L.A. attorney Juan J. Dominguez, who now faces contempt charges.

The Times' Victoria Kim reports:

In light of the judge's finding of fraud by the plaintiffs' attorneys, Dole attorneys contend in the complaint that "Bananas!" unfairly demonizes Dole and is riddled with factual inaccuracies.

Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney, in a 60-page ruling dismissing two pending lawsuits, said attorneys for the Nicaraguans engaged in a brazen scheme to recruit men who had never worked on banana plantations, train them to lie on the stand and fabricate medical evidence to back up the claims."

Read the rest of Kim's story about the Dole lawsuit here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Over the course of the season’s 11 episodes, the pair will travel cross-country and collect video of Latinos sharing their views on various topics, from immigration to the economy. The odyssey will culminate in Washington, where the duo will present their findings on Capitol Hill when they meet with the president of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

But these mujeres aren't just looking for outlooks on politics.

To promote the show’s fourth season, the gals will head to Hollywood and Highland on Thursday (starting at 2 p.m.) to find out once and for all -- using the unscientific method of seeing which food they can give away the fastest -- whether Angelenos prefer hot dogs or tacos. 

In Los Angeles, where taco establishments (both mobile and stationary) reign supreme, the winner would seem obvious, right? Maybe. Except that each night Pink’s Hot Dogs on La Brea Avenue is bustling with frankfurter connoisseurs.

So, naturally, settling the matter would require the two chicas to face off in a food smackdown. Crash, the outspoken rock chick from L.A., will be handing out 1,000 Joselito’s tacos and Yasmin, the fiery songstress from Queens, N.Y., will be giving away 1,000 Pink's hot dogs. The outcome will determine which kind of takeout rules Angelenos' hearts.

But if you want your Crash-and-Yasmin fix without excess fat, catch the premiere Thursday at 7 p.m. 

-- Yvonne Villarreal

Photo: Yasmin, left, and Crash tempt Angelenos with Pink's hot dogs and Joselito's tacos. Credit: mun2

The cover was, of course, crafted as a homage to Jackson, whose memorial service took place in Los Angeles yesterday.

"Since I couldn’t be in Los Angeles to pay my respects, this is how I will thank the man who inspired my first awkward gabacha dance moves," writes the former Los Angeles resident in a blog post entitled "Guillermo Jean."

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

A Latino graduate went deeply into debt on student loans in hopes of improving local education. Then the recession changed the odds, writes columnist Hector Tobar.

Plascencia got into this predicament because he's a wonky 25-year-old from the barrios of East Los Angeles and El Monte. He gets angry when he thinks about those high school friends who couldn't write a coherent paragraph and the teachers who accepted this sad truth without complaint.

When he graduated from El Monte High, he was a good student with an unspectacular 3.4 grade-point average. But he worked hard at Loyola Marymount University and latched onto a dream.

He would infiltrate Southern California's ailing public school system and change it from the inside, announcing to everyone that underachievement in barrio communities would no longer be tolerated.

To do this, he needed training. So he interned, networked and fought his way into one of the best boot camps for aspiring public servants in the United States -- the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies.

His plan was to come back home to California this summer and, with his newly minted master's degree, get a job and start to "make a little trouble" in the education bureaucracy.

Everything was going smoothly -- until the budget crisis hit.

Read more of Tobar's column here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

"From time to time, I find myself thinking about an Irving toddler who apparently disappeared while playing with his older brother in Irving's Lively Park on June 21, 2006 -- Elian Majano, then two years old. Today, close to the third anniversary of his disappearance, he should be five years old.

"His father handed the photo (pictured at the right) of brothers Alexis, then 4, and Elian to me when I visited the family's cramped apartment in South Irving -- an aging complex occupied by many immigrant families. (Elian's parents are from El Salvador). Now this little boy has joined a long list of other missing children from throughout the country, his case featured on America's Most Wanted online."

Read more about Elian Majano here.

Click here for more posts on immigration and migrant issues.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Residents of Latin American and Caribbean nations constitute some of the happiest on the planet, according to a recent study.

A British research group, the New Economics Foundation, found that Costa Rica in Central America is the "happiest and greenest" in the world.

The group's Happy Planet Index, which is based on data from 143 countries around the world, reports that:

The report from the organization says that Costa Rica has taken steps to reduce its environmental impact.

Download the report here

"They hail the Salvadoran immigrant as a reformed gangster turned peacemaker and believe he is incapable of betraying the community's trust," she writes.

One of Sanchez's supporters, former state Sen. Tom Hayden, said outside court at Tuesday's bail hearing, during which Sanchez, head of the anti-gang group Homies Unidos, was denied bail: "If they wanted my house, they could have it."

You can read Hayden elaborating more about what he describes as a "weak case" from the prosecution  in The Nation, and watch him speaking outside the courthouse on the video below.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutor Elizabeth Carpenter says that Sanchez's supporters have "been duped by his public face."

— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Renata Avila, one of the authors of Global Voices, the international blog network, writes about how the web is being used by Guatemalan painters and artists, wherever they are in the world.

"Sebastián Sarti is Guatemalan, but was born in Costa Rica, where his Guatemalan father was exiled and married his Puerto Rican mother. He grew up in Nicaragua, lived for a while in Guatemala, and now he is dedicated to his paintings in Aix et à Marseille. He is sharing his works on his personal blog El Desorden de la Cabeza (The Mess Inside My Head)," writes Avila.

She goes on to feature Guatemalan artists in Antigua, New York and France - you can read about them and find links to their blogs here.

Global Voices was founded in 2005 by Rebecca MacKinnon, a former CNN bureau chief in Beijing and Tokyo, and Ethan Zuckerman, a technologist and Africa expert, while both were fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The idea for the project grew out of an international bloggers’ meeting held at Harvard in December 2004 and it began as a simple blog. (Here's a written report and podcast of that meeting).

— Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Read more on the Knight Center blog.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Mexican women left behind by husbands who migrate to the United States in search of work were one of the focuses of the documentary "Los Que Se Quedan," or "Those Who Remain," by Carlos Hagerman and Juan Carlos Rulfo, which we've mentioned a number of times here on La Plaza.

In response to those posts, Jared Wilkerson, one of the authors of a recent study on that subject, got in touch with us about the findings he recently made with his colleagues at Brigham Young University.

The study, called "Effects of Husbands’ Migration on Mental Health and Gender Role Ideology of Rural Mexican Women," found that those women generally have a poorer state of mental health than a comparison group. The study attributes this condition largely to the nontraditional gender roles that are forced upon the women because of their husbands' absence.

As Wilkerson explained to us via e-mail:

"For most of the women, a shift in ideology comes as a necessity, not a choice. This necessity is brought on when their husbands leave and their duties of livelihood and community representation increase. As the women see themselves doing things traditionally associated with male success — which happens to be the most visible form and baseline of success, they begin to think such success is right and proper for both men and women. This newfound ideology does not die when husbands return.

"When a woman holding this nontraditional ideology is surrounded by society, culture, location or other circumstances that are contrary to that ideology, it may be more difficult for her to act upon or even feel comfortable with the ideology."

And how does he think this can contribute to the immigration debate now raging in the United States?

"Americans should not see this study as a call to 'seal our borders' from the 'evil aliens' in order to keep alien families together. That would likely be less of a solution to the problem of women’s mental suffering, especially in places where farming is not a perennial option like the ranchos, because men would likely become frustrated and agitated with their inability to provide for their families. This agitation would surely lead to familial suffering.

"In the long run, if labor is allowed to flow freely and safely across the border to satisfy demand in the United States, then women who care about their husbands’ well-being will be less anxious for their safety. Further, the free and safe flow of labor would allow families to plan when and for how long forays into the United States would last, providing surety and stability for wives and children who remain at home."

You can decide for yourself what the immigration debate can learn from these findings; download it here.

Wilkerson co-wrote the study with his former BYU psychology professor Niwako Yamawaki and Samuel D. Downs, and it was published in the Healthcare for Women International journal this week. The study was carried out in rural Guanajuato in a cluster of five villages.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Photo: A screen shot from the documentary  "Los Que Se Quedan," or "Those Who Remain."

You can watch El Micha letting loose with another reggaeton artist, Pipey, in a video here on YouTube.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Boucher wrote about Mexican fiction mastermind Del Toro in today's Calendar section, and an extended version of the article runs on the blog.

On the far side of the globe, in New Zealand, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is now in his seventh month of labor on “The Hobbit,” a $300-million epic that will be told over two films in 2011 and 2012. But you can also find the Guadalajara native on the shelf of your local bookstore with his just-released debut novel, “The Strain,” the opening installment of a vampire trilogy he already has mapped out.

That’s only the beginning. The 44-year-old Del Toro, who was nominated for an Oscar for the dark fairy tale “Pan’s Labyrinth” and showed his crowd-pleasing sensibilities with the “Hellboy” films, also has plans to reanimate some musty and monstrous literary classics. He plans to make a “Frankenstein” film as well as an adaptation of  H.P. Lovecraft’s epic “At the Mountains of Madness,” a project he breathlessly refers to as "my obsession."

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City