Thrills, chills and more than a few spills await folks attending Chapala’s Carnaval bash where an outdoor ice skating rink will stand out as a major attraction during the 12-day celebration.

The IRS Web site brims with alarming headlines — “IRS Pays Out Billions in Fraudulent Refunds.”

On Monday, January 28, Al Jazeera will screen a documentary by a Tapatio filmmaker about a group of activists dedicated to promoting bicycle use and tackling Guadalajara’s environmental problems.

This is not going to come as news to many email users, but there is now an absolute epidemic of email hacking sweeping the internet.  There are several different scams crawling their way around cyberspace, but most of them center on having crooks gain access to your email account in order to steal a copy of all the names in your address book and this often includes all the names harvested from your old emails.  Once the crooks know who your friends are, all of their addresses are blasted with spam emails attempting to compromise them too.

A lot of expatriates in Mexico make use of online banking; some for the convenience, some because it is the only way to transact business with a bank in another country, and some because their bank is pushing them to do so.  There was a story in the news last summer that probably did not attract the attention of many of these users of online banking but should have.

Jalisco Governor Emilio Gonzalez this week defended the 3.5-million-dollar decision to dismantle and then reassemble an historic footbridge crossing the Santiago River at the bottom of the Huentitan Canyon on the northeastern fringe of Guadalajara.