The prenuptial agreement is a legal device designed to remove some of the concerns and liabilities foisted upon a married couple. A properly crafted prenup can solve disagreements before they happen, whether involving personal business involvement, individually held real estate and property, credit hangups and debt, the disposition of finances, or any monetary arrangements left over from life before marriage. It’s also a useful tool for post-marriage arrangements. Support payments, income arrangements and property rights can all be sorted out in advance, to the satisfaction of both parties.

The functional objectives of a prenuptial agreement can include the following:

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Aside from passionate political discussions, populist promises and negative campaigns that flirt with libel, presidential elections also have the peculiarity of rediscovering forgotten groups of voters every four years.

Since the number of Hispanics began to increase rapidly in the 1980s, candidates to any elected government position, as well as the news media, started to speculate about the importance of the Latino vote and paid more attention to that electorate.

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Service: Online Only: The New Yorker

Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca, Scholar in Residents at Western New Mexico University, writes about the Linguistic Phenomenon known as Spanglish. His insights and discussion have actually shown me a new way of seeing Spanglish and it’s uses/meanings. Perhaps the negative stereotypes associated with Spanglish has been unfairly earned. Read on, and maybe he’ll change your views too:

From: http://lae.greenwood.com

Both American and Mexican elitists decry the presence and use of Spanglish along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, calling it bad English and bad Spanish – substandard and ungrammatical.

But Spanglish does not emerge just from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It emerges where there are communities of Spanish-speaking Hispanics in the United States from any Spanish-speaking country. Cubans in Miami speak Spanglish. Puerto Ricans in New York and Chicago speak Spanglish. Dominicans in D.C. speak Spanglish. Latinos everywhere in the
United States speak Spanglish to varying degrees.

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From: Zanesvilletimesrecorder.com:

Some of those who rail against illegal immigration can dish it out but they can’t take it. Since most illegal immigrants come from Mexico or other parts of Latin America, critics sometimes say the sort of crude things that give the debate its anti-Latino flavor. But let someone call them on it and do they ever get defensive.

Speaking to supporters in Palm Beach last week, Barack Obama blasted a couple of media personalities by name.

“A certain segment has basically been feeding a kind of xenophobia. There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year,” Obama said. “If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen.”

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From: edwatch.blogspot.com:

Calls are heating up to kill the Tucson Unified School District’s ethnic studies program - at the same time it becomes more likely that the district’s most controversial department could expand to reach more, and younger, students. Critics, from the state’s schools chief to lawmakers to conservative talk-show hosts and columnists, have singled out Mexican-American/Raza Studies in particular, saying it’s divisive and turns students into angry revolutionaries. But supporters say the program’s reach is too limited, given that it boosts student achievement by providing relevant and rigorous work to students all too often overlooked.

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In 1992, construction workers retrofitting UCLA’s undergraduate library discovered many dusty boxes hidden behind a bookshelf in the basement. The boxes contained research materials and questionnaires from a pioneering 1965 study on Mexican Americans.

Sociology professors Vilma Ortiz and Edward Telles skimmed the surveys, which included names and addresses. That’s when they decided to embark on an ambitious project: re-interviewing the families and assessing the integration of Mexican Americans over time.

“We stumbled onto something,” Ortiz said. “That was the beginning.”

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…read full articles of "CU Prof Seeks to Debunk Immigration Myths"

Undocumented Mexicans and other undocumented Latinos report less use of health care and poorer experiences with the health care system compared with their counterparts who were born in the United States, according to a report in the November 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

An estimated 8.4 million of the 10.3 million undocumented individuals in the United States are Latino, including 5.9 million from Mexico, according to background information in the article. “One recurrent theme in the debate over immigration has been the use of public services, including health care,” the authors write. “Proponents of restrictive policies have argued that immigrants overuse services, placing an unreasonable burden on the public. Despite a scarcity of well-designed research into these questions regarding immigrants, use of resources continues to be a part of the public debate.”

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BOSTON — An MBTA worker who was suspended for wearing a noose around his neck as part of his costume on Halloween will get to keep his job after apologizing.

Jaime Garmendia, 27, a Mexican-American who said he was celebrating the "Day of the Dead," with his costume, was suspended for five days without pay last week and must undergo racial sensitivity training, the Boston Herald reported. Garmendia, a customer service employee, wore a black three-piece suit to work with a red noose around his neck.

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