Mexico celebrates 200 years with huge fiesta,Viva Mexico!

MEXICO CITY  Mexico looked beyond its drug war to throw a 200th birthday bash celebrating a proud history, whimsical culture and resilience embodied in the traditional independence cry: “Viva Mexico!”Across the capital, hundreds of thousands of people flooded the streets despite their fears, blowing horns and dancing alongside a parade of serpent floats, marching cacti and 13-foot-tall warrior marionettes and staying late into the night at open-air concerts.President Felipe Calderon capped the evening by ringing the original independence bell from a balcony in the Zocalo square and delivering “El Grito,” patterned on founding father Miguel Hidalgo’s 1810 call to arms against Spain: “Long live independence. Love live the bicentennial … Long live Mexico!”Roaring thousands echoed his cry as fireworks exploded in the square and at the iconic Angel of Independence about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) down the city’s crowded main promenade.

“I love being Mexican!” said Michel Dosal, wearing a green, white and red Mohawk wig. “The 15th of September is better than Christmas. It’s better than my birthday!”In cities where drug violence is heaviest, festivities were more subdued. The grito was canceled in Ciudad Juarez for the first time in its history. People still showed their patriotism in the border city – Mexico’s most violent – by hanging Mexican flags from their roofs and hosting family dinners.

In the western city of Morelia, the scene of a cartel-related grenade attack that killed eight during the 2008 independence celebration, barely 2,000 showed up at the main plaza for a “grito” that once drew tens of thousands.”My son asked me to take him to see the grito, so I brought him despite my fears,” said Silvia Godinez Perez, a secretary. “We can’t easily forget what happened two years ago.”

But in Mexico City, a $40 million fiesta, two years in the making, drew people from across the country to the main Reforma Avenue and Zocalo. Moments before Calderon emerged on the balcony of the National Palace, a voice boomed from loudspeakers: “Let’s show the world that Mexico is strong and standing.””This one is special,” said Iris Mari Rodriguez Montiel, a small business owner who had traveled from the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz and waited since morning for the festivities to start. “It gives me chills just to think about it.”

Little girls wearing ribbons of the Mexican flag watched the 1.7-mile (2.7-kilometer) parade down Reforma from the shoulders of their fathers. Other children blew trumpets as the air filled with confetti.”It’s like a Carnival of Rio, plus an Olympic ceremony, plus Woodstock all put together in the same day,” said artistic director Marco Balich, who produced the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics. “For the cost of a warplane, you can celebrate the birthday of a country.”

Several neighboring heads of state and U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis attended.Still, anxiety hovered over the festivities in a country that most recently has seen car bombs, the assassination of a gubernatorial candidate, and the massacre of 72 migrants who refused to smuggle drugs for a brutal gang.Military helicopters buzzed overhead in the capital, heavily armed federal agents and metal detectors greeted revelers.

The Interior Department said there were no attacks against the celebrations. Prosecutors in the Caribbean coast resort of Cancun said they were investigating whether six men detained with assault rifles and hand grenades had planned an assault on bicentennial festivities. In northern Nuevo Leon state, eight gunmen were killed in a shootout with soldiers, authorities said.”In Mexico, we all live in fear. And the worst part is that we are starting to get used to it,” said Eric Limon, 33, a professional dancer who volunteered to wear a jaguar mask and swing a colorful Aztec club and spear for the parade.

“I want to be part of something important,” he said. “I know this won’t solve our problems, but this is my grain of sand to create a sense of unity. This is what Mexico needs.”Those who stayed away from the city center celebrated from their rooftops and staged their own neighborhood fireworks displays. All night long, rockets whistled and boomed skyward, blanketing the yards and streets with smoke.(AP)

Scanners force trade-off between privacy, security

the security gate at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO  As Ronak Ray hunted for his flight gate, he prepared for the prospect of a security guard peering through his clothes with a full body scanner. But Ray doesn’t mind: what he gives up in privacy he gets back in security.”I think it’s necessary,” said Ray, a 23-year-old graduate student who was at San Francisco International Airport to fly to India. “Our lives are far more important than how we’re being searched.”Despite controversy surrounding the scans, Ray’s position was typical of several travelers interviewed at various airports Wednesday by The Associated Press.Airports in five other U.S. cities are also using full body scanners at specific checkpoints instead of metal detectors. In addition, the scanners are used at 13 other airports for random checks and so-called secondary screenings of passengers who set off detectors.

But many more air travelers may have to get used to the idea soon. The Transportation Security Administration has ordered 150 more full body scanners to be installed in airports throughout the country in early 2010, agency spokeswoman Suzanne Trevino said.Dutch security officials have said they believe such scanners could have detected the explosive materials Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab of Nigeria is accused of trying to ignite aboard a Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines flight Christmas Day.Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport has 15 full body scanners, but none were used to scan Abdulmutallab when he boarded. In Europe and the U.S., privacy concerns over the scanners’ ability to see through clothing have kept them from widespread use.

The technology was first used about two years ago to make it easier for airport security to do body searches without making physical contact with passengers.The idea of an electronic strip search did not bother Judy Yeager, 62, of Sarasota, Fla., as she prepared to depart Las Vegas. She stood in the full-body scanner Wednesday afternoon and held her arms up as a security official guided her through the gray closet-sized booth.”If it’s going to protect a whole airplane of people, who gives a flying you-know-what if they see my boob whatever,” Yeager said. “That’s the way I feel, honest to God.”George Hyde, of Birmingham, Ala., who was flying out of Salt Lake City with his wife, Patsy, on Wednesday after visiting their children and grandchildren in Park City, Utah.”I’d rather be safe than be embarrassed,” Hyde said. Neither he nor his wife had been through a body scanner before.”We’re very modest people but we’d be willing to go through that for security.”

Trevino said the TSA has worked with privacy advocates and the scanners’ manufacturers to develop software that blurs the faces and genital areas of passengers being scanned. In all cases, passengers are not required to be scanned by the machine but can opt for a full body pat-down instead.At Salt Lake City International Airport, fewer than 1 percent of passengers subjected to the scanner chose the pat-down since the machine was installed in March, said Dwane Baird, a TSA spokesman in Salt Lake City.On Tuesday, some 1,900 people went through the scanner and just three chose not to, he said.Critics of the scanners said the option to opt out was not enough.”The question is should they be used indiscriminately on little children and grandmothers,” said Republican U.S. Rep. Tom McClintock of California. McClintock co-sponsored a bill approved by the House 310-118 in June prohibiting the use of full body scanners for primary screenings. The bill is pending in the Senate.

He said the devices raised serious concerns regarding constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.”There’s no practical distinction between a full body scan and being pulled into a side room and being ordered to strip your clothing.”To further protect passenger privacy, security officers looking at the images are in a different part of the airport and are not allowed to take any recording devices into the room with them, Trevino said. The images captured by the scanners cannot be stored, transmitted or printed in any way.But the TSA still has some public relations work ahead of it, judging by the reactions of passengers in Albuquerque, N.M., who were worried about what would happen to their images once they were scanned.”Are they going to be recorded or do they just scan them and that’s the end of them? How are these TSA people going to be using them? That’s a real concern for me,” said Courtney Best-Trujillo of Santa Fe, N.M., who was flying to Los Angeles on Wednesday.

The six airports where full body scanners are being used for what TSA calls “primary screenings” are: Albuquerque, N.M.; Las Vegas, Nev.; Miami, Fla.; San Francisco; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Tulsa, Okla.The remainder of the machines are being used for secondary screenings in Atlanta, Ga.; Baltimore/Washington; Denver, Colo.; Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas; Indianapolis, Ind.; Jacksonville and Tampa, Fla.; Los Angeles; Phoenix, Ariz.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; Richmond, Va.; Ronald Reagan Washington National; and Detroit, Mich.

Though most passengers interviewed by The Associated Press felt security trumped other concerns, Bruna Martina, 48, a physician from the coast of Venezuela, said the scanners still made her feel uncomfortable.”I think there has to be another way to control people, or to scan them, but not like this,” she said as she headed back home after a vacation in Miami with her husband and two sons. She also does not think the scanners will thwart another attack.”They’ll find another way,” Martina said. “There is always somebody cleverer than the rest.”(Ap)