Shoppers around Guadalajara will soon have more options as some of the plazas in the metropolitan area are seeing big new construction projects.

Every year, in the last week of June, 175,000 music lovers are drawn to a remote farm in southwest England, just down the road from the mysterious ancient monument of Stonehenge. Loaded to breaking point with camping gear and copious amounts of alcohol, they navigate the narrow and traffic-saturated country lanes and pitch up before a pyramid-shaped stage to witness performances by some of the greatest artists in the world.

British biological medicine graduate Joshua Cooper has come to Guadalajara to work as a volunteer in the Cruz Verde (Green Cross) Zapopan through a placement with Global Volunteers. Cooper describes the Doctors at the Green Cross as “hard working and compassionate.” Despite the lack of funding and resources available to the Green Cross, the patient care is noted by Cooper as an “improvement on the hospitals throughout the United Kingdom.”

Old-fashioned horse drawn carriages loaded up with sight-seers have been a standard part of the daily landscape in the heart of downtown Guadalajara since the dawn of the 20th century.  But the sound of clip-clopping hooves mixed in with roaring car and bus motors was curiously absent from the city streets on August 20.

The sparkle in Cardell Calhoun’s brown eyes almost matches the polished stone he holds out. 

My phone has been ringing on a regular basis with dozens of calls from internet users who are freaked out over the news of all the government-sponsored spying, and desperate for some simple answer that will let them put a stop to it. I have tried my best to be patient with all these callers, but few of them are willing to accept that putting a stop to Big Brother snooping through your personal business will not be a simple task.