The drug-related violence in Mexico is harrowing and depressing. It poses a growing danger to Mexican civil society, the Mexican economy and the U.S. We are Mexico's largest trading partner, and only part of that business is drugs. The simple equation has always been one of supply and demand: America's insatiable demand drives the drug business in Mexico. But the huge increase in violence and lawlessness in Mexico over the past five years vastly outstrips the rise in drug use ...

There is a slight knocking noise on the phone line, not nearly the worst interference I've heard on a phone call to Mexico, but Kevin Huckabee apologizes anyway. "Sorry about the noise in here," he says in the same low Texan half-mumble I remember from our first meeting in Jurez two months ago. "Some guy is banging on his cell wall, I don't know why." Huckabee, 47, is talking to me from a phone inside Cereso prison on ...

The buzz at Pivot25, a conference for mobile-phone software developers and investors held this June, is all about the future of money. Ben Lyon, the 24-year-old business-development VP of Kopo Kopo, wants $250,000 to produce his app for shops to process payments made by text message. Paul Okwalinga, 28, describes his money app — called M-Shop, it allows you to buy travel tickets and takeout via mobile phone — as "not reinventing the wheel but pimping it." Kamal Budhabhatti, 35, ...

This is how Mexican investigators believe gangsters murdered business student Juan Francisco Sicilia: Two of his friends had been assaulted in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, by a pair of policemen moonlighting as muggers for the Pacfico Sur drug cartel. The friends reported the criminal cops, who panicked and asked their mafia bosses for help. On March 27, eight Pacfico Sur thugs, including a crazed psychopath called El Peln , abducted the two accusers, as well as ...

If the past few days are any indication of things to come, Peru's President-elect Ollanta Humala is in for a rough ride when he takes office on July 28. On Saturday, indigenous protesters in the country's southeast radically upped the stakes in their nearly seven-week campaign against the government's mining and oil/gas policies by taking over an airport in Juliaca, the business hub of the Puno department. Five protesters were killed by the police the previous day ...

It's good news for solar advocates and bad news for competitors: General Electric is breaking into the solar business in a major way. In April, GE announced it had built a solar module with the highest publicly reported efficiency rate for cadmium telluride thin film — the most popular low-cost solar technology. The commercial module topped out at 12.8%, according to independent testers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — nearly 3 percentage points higher than the industry average.

As it turns out, Keith Olbermann still had a thing or two more to say. In his return to TV on Current, the fiery, progressive host was again naming Worst Persons in the World, delivering Special Comments and promising to speak out against powerful business interests. Chief among those businesses: his former employer MSNBC, which he left in January after years of friction. One of his first guests, blogger Markos Moulitsas, dished about a past feud with MSNBC ...

So who would you like to hack today? A bank, a website, a corporation or perhaps a government agency that's rubbing you the wrong way? The hacktivist group LulzSec is taking requests. Or maybe you'd like to get your hands on some stolen credit-card accounts to boost your personal spending level or purchase some malware that will divert a business's payments from its vendors to you. A malware seller called Zeus not only can do that but ...

T.J. Rodgers may be many things--tough taskmaster, Green Bay Packers fan--but reticent he is not. And if anything gets the pugnacious founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor talking, it's the notion that corporations ought to exist for more than the pursuit of profit. In the simplest terms, that idea--called corporate social responsibility, or CSR--invites companies to consider their impact on people and the planet on a par with their traditional quest for profit. Rodgers considers that bunk. Not that he ...

T.J. Rodgers may be many things--tough taskmaster, Green Bay Packers fan--but reticent he is not. And if anything gets the pugnacious founder and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor talking, it's the notion that corporations ought to exist for more than the pursuit of profit. In the simplest terms, that idea--called corporate social responsibility, or CSR--invites companies to consider their impact on people and the planet on a par with their traditional quest for profit. Rodgers considers that bunk. Not that he ...