Mexico City

Even if you're not yet ready to retire, San Miguel de Allende is perfect for a vacation or long weekend getaway. Getting there United and American airlines offer connecting flights (via Texas) to San Miguel's two closest airports, Leon/Guanajuato (BJX), 90 minutes away, and Queretaro (QRO), one hour away. Round-trip airfares start around $600. Multiple airlines offer flights to Mexico City, which is three hours from San Miguel. When to go January may be the sole inclement month to travel, and even then it's nothing compared to a typical Baltimore winter.

Federico Lopez is proud of the food of his hometown. That town, Mexico City, should be proud of him, too. With his wife, Maria, Lopez owns Fiesta Mexicana, a tiny, friendly Rosedale restaurant dedicated to cooking authentic Mexico City cuisine. As the capital of Mexico and the country's largest city, Mexico City draws culinary inspiration from the entire country. The resulting cuisine feels familiar to the American palate, but fresh. Diners will recognize the tortilla-plus-meat-and-sauce concoctions on their plates; it looks similar to the food at any run-of-the-mill Mexican place in America.

Mexico City lawmakers on Monday made the city the first in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage, a change that will give homosexual couples more rights, including allowing them to adopt children. The bill passed the capital's local assembly 39-20 to the cheers of supporters who yelled: "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!" Mexico City's left-led assembly has made several decisions unpopular elsewhere in this deeply Roman Catholic country, including legalizing abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Even if you're not yet ready to retire, San Miguel de Allende is perfect for a vacation or long weekend getaway. Getting there United and American airlines offer connecting flights (via Texas) to San Miguel's two closest airports, Leon/Guanajuato (BJX), 90 minutes away, and Queretaro (QRO), one hour away. Round-trip airfares start around $600. Multiple airlines offer flights to Mexico City, which is three hours from San Miguel. When to go January may be the sole inclement month to travel, and even then it's nothing compared to a typical Baltimore winter.

DETROIT -- Bowing to pressures from the Mexican government, General Motors Corp. will move its truck assembly plant out of Mexico City within three to five years because of pollution concerns.But GM plans to spend $400 million to build a new truck plant in Mexico, a move that has riled members of the United Auto Workers. Caught in a massive reduction of its North American operations, GM so far has spared its facilities in Mexico while cutting 14 assembly and components plants in the United States and Canada.

MEXICO CITY -- Three Marxist bomb attacks yesterday and another last Sunday are raising fears of a resurgence of the urban guerrilla movements that plagued Mexico in the 1970s.Three dynamite time bombs exploded shortly after 5 a.m. yesterday, slightly damaging the Mexican headquarters of IBM, a McDonald's and a Sanborns department store restaurant, said Hector Pina, a spokesman for the Mexico City attorney general's office.A Citibank building was bombed Sunday night.There were no injuries, and damage was limited to broken windows and damaged furniture, Mr. Pina said.

MEXICO CITY -- The residents of Ixtapalapa did more than accept the government's call to protect the forest next to their homes. They began their own beautification campaign.Digging into their pockets, they bought the materials to pave their streets and in lots that once were arid they planted grass and trees.But it turns out that the forest's worst enemy is the Mexico City government, which says it is protecting the forest.On April 1, a caravan of city trucks -- the open type which normally carry garbage here -- converged at the edge of the designated protected zone, identified by two billboards that say "construction in this area is strictly prohibited."

Mexico City -- Lawmakers began hearings yesterday on a proposal to legalize abortion in Mexico's capital city, amid emotional arguments from women's groups that support the bill and Roman Catholic groups that are opposed. The city's Legislative Assembly is not scheduled to vote until mid-April, but passage seems likely. Mexican feminists say the legalization of abortion in this city of 8 million would be a landmark for the Latin American women's movement. "We've been working for this day for 36 years, and it's almost here," said Marta Lamas, one of the nation's leading feminists and founder of the nonprofit Reproductive Choice Information Group.

After just a year and a half, Mexicana Airlines says that it is suspending service from Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport to Mexico City today. It's the second time that the airline has launched BWI service and then pulled back. Mexicana offered a daily flight to Cancun in 1986, but the airline said the route was unprofitable, and it was canceled five years later. Officials thought that business travelers and a bigger community of Mexican-Americans would make it a go this time.

MEXICO CITY -- In a dramatic move to combat this city's deepening air pollution crisis, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari ordered yesterday the immediate closing of the city's largest government-operated oil refinery.The decision to close the March 18 Refinery, which sprawls over 430 acres in the north of the city, will cost an estimated $500 million and will reduce the country's crude-oil refining capacity by more than 100,000 barrels a day.In addition, oil industry officials said it will force Mexico to import some kinds of gasoline until new refining capacity can be built.

Martha Sarah McClintock, a longtime Lyric Opera volunteer and a former model and author, died Sunday from complications after hip surgery at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. The Mount Washington resident was 67. The daughter of a career Air Force officer and a well-known fabric artist, the former Martha Sarah Bean — she never used her first name — was born in Fresno, Calif. Because of her father's military career, she had a "peripatetic childhood, living in houses from Dayton, Ohio, to Cape Cod and Germany," said her husband of 28 years, John M. McClintock, a former Baltimore Sun foreign correspondent who was a copy editor at the time of his 2008 retirement.

Mary Patricia Castillo, a homemaker who was a financial supporter of Osher Lifetime Learning at the Johns Hopkins University, died in her sleep Wednesday at the Edenwald retirement community in Towson. She was 99. Mary Patricia Willis, who never used her first name, was born and spent her early years in Chesapeake City. She later moved to Baltimore, where she graduated in 1928 from Eastern High School. She then studied fashion design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 1945, she married Cuban-born Eugenio Castillo y Borges, who had been Cuban consul general in Baltimore since 1938.

MEXICO CITY - Money sent home by Mexicans abroad plunged a record 15.7 percent in 2009 as migrants worldwide struggled to find work, the central bank reported Wednesday. Remittances - Mexico's No. 2 source of foreign income after oil exports - totaled $21.2 billion in 2009, compared with $25.1 billion in 2008, the bank said. Since the bank began tracking remittances in 1996, it has recorded just one other annual decline - a 3.6 percent decrease in 2008. - Associated Press div.talkforum #creditfooter { display: none; }

'1,000 Ultimate Experiences,' Lonely Planet, $22.99: The world is full of experiences, ultimate and otherwise; assembling all of these into one book is hard. Fortunately, Lonely Planet is up to the challenge. The editors have scoured places to go and things to do in every corner of the globe in preparing this entertaining volume. They include the world's happiest places, which range from Montreal to the town of Happy, Texas, but also countries wildly different from each other such as Colombia and Denmark (the latter is the world's happiest country, according to happiness studies)

Mexico City lawmakers on Monday made the city the first in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage, a change that will give homosexual couples more rights, including allowing them to adopt children. The bill passed the capital's local assembly 39-20 to the cheers of supporters who yelled: "Yes, we could! Yes, we could!" Mexico City's left-led assembly has made several decisions unpopular elsewhere in this deeply Roman Catholic country, including legalizing abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Robert L. Oatman does executive protection - and no, he isn't a beefy, brainless bodyguard. He is a fit, trim and congenial figure who likes to wear crisp suits and who works with his team to draw up complex plans for shielding people they're paid to protect. It's a point of professional pride that none of his clients have ever been attacked on his watch over the past 20 years. "If you've got to touch your gun, it means you've made a mistake," said Oatman, 62, whose R.L. Oatman & Associates Inc. is based in Towson.

MEXICO CITY -- A famous Mexican cartoonist once proposed a brilliant idea for ridding Mexico City of its choking smog.Abel Quezada's plan would go into effect during Easter vacation after millions flee the city for the beaches and countryside.Upon their return, the vacationers would find all access roads blocked and their cars forever barred from the city.Now with the Easter vacation at hand, the late cartoonist's satirical solution seems like a sensible plan. The Mexican capital is now in the third week of its worst pollution crisis.

As Mexico City closed schools and began taking other measures to contain the spread of a swine flu outbreak that might have infected hundreds of people and killed as many as 60, U.S. officials said Friday they had found one new case in San Diego, bringing the total number of U.S. cases to eight. The most recent victim, a child, has recovered fully - as did all of the other seven victims - said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Six of the eight U.S. cases occurred in California's San Diego and Imperial counties and two in Guadeloupe County, Texas.

Robert L. Oatman does executive protection - and no, he isn't a beefy, brainless bodyguard. He is a fit, trim and congenial figure who likes to wear crisp suits and who works with his team to draw up complex plans for shielding people they're paid to protect. It's a point of professional pride that none of his clients have ever been attacked on his watch over the past 20 years. "If you've got to touch your gun, it means you've made a mistake," said Oatman, 62, whose R.L. Oatman & Associates Inc. is based in Towson.

As Mexico City closed schools and began taking other measures to contain the spread of a swine flu outbreak that might have infected hundreds of people and killed as many as 60, U.S. officials said Friday they had found one new case in San Diego, bringing the total number of U.S. cases to eight. The most recent victim, a child, has recovered fully - as did all of the other seven victims - said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Six of the eight U.S. cases occurred in California's San Diego and Imperial counties and two in Guadeloupe County, Texas.