Ottawa
Sad civil servants: Depression among Canada’s public servants has reached epidemic proportions, a health research group said this week. The Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Mental Health said that mental-health claims account for nearly half of all disability claims by public workers, including teachers, nurses, police, military, and government bureaucrats. “The public service is a tsunami of distractions—meetings, everything questioned, delegated, people moving—and no one is really in charge,” said the group’s head, Bill Wilkerson. “It’s the most transient, fluid, unsettling work environment on the planet.” He said depression can set in because bureaucrats often end work each day feeling that they have accomplished nothing.
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Murder rate soars: Mexico recorded its deadliest single day in its three-year drug war this week, when 69 people were murdered in drug-related violence. More than one-third of them were killed in Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. During the first 10 days of 2010, a staggering 102 people were killed, compared with 46 during the same period last year. The violence has only increased since President Felipe Calderón ordered 8,000 troops and federal police into Ciudad Juarez last year. And the murders are getting more gruesome: One recent victim had his face peeled off and sewn to a soccer ball, and another was cut up and put into two ice chests.
Caracas, Venezuela
Economic chaos: Venezuela deployed the military this week to shut down stores engaging in “bourgeois speculation.” In an effort to cut imports and boost domestic industry, President Hugo Chávez last week devalued the national currency, the bolivar, from 2.15 to the dollar to 2.60 for food and medicine, and 4.30 to the dollar for everything else. The normal response from retailers would be to raise prices, but Chávez said any store that did so would be closed. Shops have been ordered to sell goods at prices set before the devaluation. “I want the national guard in the streets, with the people, to fight speculation,” Chávez said. Venezuela already has the highest inflation rate in Latin America, at
25 percent.
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