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In the global warming debate we have heard about sea level rises, glaciers melting in Bolivia, penguin habitat damage and all the rest. On the other side we have heard how average temperatures are not rising and about a lot of bad science. Well folks, we finally have something on the "to be damaged" list that is going to cause people to get serious about what is really happening.

From Quartz Polar bears, penguins… and now surfers, the latest victims of climate change

Nicaragua is headed toward energy independence, mostly from renewable sources. It certainly isn't there yet but it has a plan. On the other side lots of people (including people here on NL) have said renewable energy won't work. That is, it's too expensive, unreliable and more.

There has been a lot of discussion about the bad side of happenings in the Catholic church all the way to discussions about how the now ex-pope will be protected from prosecution because what was Vatican City became the nation Holy See. These internal issues along with the fact that most Catholics are in Latin America are likely to have influenced the selection of the first Pope from Latin America as well as first from the Southern Hemisphere.

That is, a source where news from around the world is presented in English. The web site is worldmeets.us. The tag line is Connecting Americans with the World. The following is from the About page

Worldmeets.US is a nonprofit journalism project that gathers and translates the world's news and views about the United States.

From YahooNews:

"At its 2013 La Quinta Conference here, La Quinta announced it is accelerating its international growth, through a series of agreements with an affiliate of Grupo Santos, a Honduran organization whose affiliates include a construction and development company. The agreements will bring La Quinta hotels to cities in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Panama.

You probably know that Wikileaks acquired a huge volume of files from Stratfor, a US government contractor. What's new is a new, fancy search capability available at search.wikileaks.org.

The data covers 2004 through 2011. I decided to search for Nicaragua and see if I could find anything interesting. I have two general conclusions so far:

Farming in Nicaragua is different than farming in the US. Nicaragua still has a significant number of family farms. Not all but some of them have not progressed to the there is a chemical for everything mentality. This article is about US farming. It sounds like a warning for what can go wrong if Nicaragua moves to corporate farming.

I just read an article in Think Progress that seems pretty interesting. It is about building a facility that integrates creating fresh water from sea water along with energy and food production. The energy production includes both electricity and bio-diesel.

As Nicaragua is heavily investing in wind energy to satisfy its future electricty needs, this article is of interest. It is about how in 2012 there was more new energy capacity installed in the US based on wind sources than from natural gas. While wind capacity is big news in Nicaragua, it seems to be all but ignored in the US.

While many (those who don't understand me) will be very surprised I am posting this anti-liberal article, the rest of you wil get it. The article is from Natural News and is really about why gun control makes no sense.

As guns/gun control are a common topic here, this article seems of interest. Maybe it belongs in the humor section except that would really mean most political stupidness would belong there as well.

In any case, the article is about making your own guns. Check it out in Activist Post.

I just read an article in Catholic Online titled New 'Panama Canal' project sparking war between Colombia and Nicaragua. The title neither makes sense nor does it really fit with most of the article and the included Al Jazeera video about the canal project.

I am inclined to write it off as fiction but someone clearly came up with the correlation. Any creditble reason behind it?

The following is a translation of an article written by Cristiana Guevara Mena on today's La Prensa. The great majority of our people is unemployed or underemployed. According to PNUD's statistics our poorest citizen is barely surviving with less than one US dollar per day. Out of this sector of our population living with this kind of budget, offensively inhumane, they have to support a family of at least four more persons.

The war on drugs is certainly getting questioned -- Washington state, Colorado, Guatemalan president Molina and a lot more are questioning/changing things. In the next few years it would seem there are going to be big changes and those changes will have serious affects on the countries on the Colombia to US trail.

Access to health care in Nicaragua is a common concern/discussion topic here. For expats from the US, it is common to want something that resembles the kinds of access (and insurance) people find back home. Is that what Nicaragua needs?