Chile's Mega-Earthquake Triggered 'Icequakes' in Antarctica

Chile's Mega-Earthquake Triggered 'Icequakes' in Antarctica
World | Agence France-Presse | Updated: August 10, 2014 22:51 IST

Paris: A monster earthquake that struck Chile in 2010 also unleashed minor "icequakes" in Antarctica nearly 4,700 kilometres (2,900 miles) to the south, scientists said on Sunday.

Sensors recorded small tremors in West Antarctica within six hours of the Chilean mega-shock, providing the first evidence that the world's greatest ice sheet can be affected by distant but powerful quakes, they said.

Twelve out of 42 monitoring stations dotted across the vast region showed "clear evidence" of a spike in high-frequency seismic signals, the team reported in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The signals tallied with signs of ice fractures near the surface, they added.

The February 27, 2010 quake, which occurred just off the coast of Chile's Maule region, measured 8.8 in magnitude, making it one of the largest ever recorded.

It killed more than 500 people and inflicted an estimated $30 billion (22.5 billion euros) in damages.

More:
http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/chile-s-mega-earthquake-triggered-icequakes-in-antarctica-573813?curl=1407701792

Revealed: USAID ‘Cuban Twitter’ contractor given secret level clearance

Revealed: USAID ‘Cuban Twitter’ contractor given secret level clearance

Documents obtained by Al Jazeera show private firm knew work setting up social network for Cubans could be classified

April 14, 2014 12:30PM ET |Updated 4:48PM ET
by Kaelyn Forde

A firm contracted by the U.S. government to help set up a Twitter-like network in Cuba held secret level security clearance and was warned the operation could involve classified work, according to documents seen by Al Jazeera. And documents show that the program was managed by a section of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) tasked with helping manage regime change in countries where U.S. interests are at stake.

Details contained in the terms of a $1.5 billion contract between USAID and Washington-based contractor Creative Associates International (CAI) and others outline the security clearance arrangements required by the U.S. government. Signed in 2008, the document had been obtained by researcher Jeremy Bigwood through a FOIA request, and shared with Al Jazeera. USAID said the document was for subsequent work put out to CAI and not the one relating to the funding of Twitter-like ZunZuneo. But Al Jazeera understands that the stated security level needed and the reference to the possibility of "classified" work is exactly the same as in the contract relating to controversial Cuba project.

Bigwood first reported on the contract in a report published Monday by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA). The contract details could be seen to undermine official statements that the ZunZuneo program was “discreet” but “absolutely not” covert, according to testimony USAID administrator Rajiv Shah gave before Congress.

Matt Herrick, spokesman for USAID, told Al Jazeera on Monday that references in the contract to "secret" security level being required was standard.

More:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/14/secret-cuba-twitter.html

Another Failed Policy of Subversion: Obama Youth Infiltrate Cuba

August 06, 2014
Another Failed Policy of Subversion

Obama Youth Infiltrate Cuba

by SHELDON RICHMAN


When I saw the headline about the U.S. government and Cuba in my newspaper the other day, I thought I’d awoken in 1961. It was a Twilight Zone moment for sure: “U.S. program aimed to stir dissent in Cuba.” I expected Rod Serling to welcome me to “another dimension.”

But it was 2014. The AP news report said President Barack Obama and presumably then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton had plotted to incite a popular uprising — to “gin up opposition” — against the Cuban government by sending in young Latin Americans masquerading as tourists and health workers.

Did Obama, Clinton, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which oversaw the operation, learn nothing from the 1960s, when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations tried repeatedly to overthrow Cuban ruler Fidel Castro and even to assassinate him?

The AP investigation disclosed that the USAID agents had “little training in the dangers of clandestine operations — or how to evade one of the world’s most sophisticated counter-intelligence services.” Nevertheless, the AP continued, “their assignment was to recruit young Cubans to anti-government activism, which they did under the guise of civic programs, including an HIV prevention workshop.” The program, which lasted at least two years, began shortly after Obama’s inauguration.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/06/obama-youth-infiltrate-cuba/

Judge Threatens Argentina Following Lawsuit Filed Against US

Published on Friday, August 08, 2014
by Common Dreams

Judge Threatens Argentina Following Lawsuit Filed Against US

After Argentina filed a suit in international court on Thursday, on Friday a US judge threatened the country with a contempt-of-court order

by Max Ocean, editorial intern

?itok=HNzRa_fi
[font size=1]
An image common to see plastered around Buenos Aires recently proclaims "enough vultures: Argentina is united for a national cause." (Credit: flickr/cc/Benjamin Dumas)[/font]

Argentina filed a suit against the United States in the Hague's International Court of Justice (ICJ) on Thursday in an attempt to force an international resolution to the dispute that caused the country's default last month.

In response to the lawsuit, Judge Thomas Griesa—who made the initial ruling that forced Argentina's default —called a hearing at 3 p.m. on Friday, in which he threatened a contempt-of-court order if Argentina doesn't stop issuing what he says are false statements from Argentine officials that the country payed its debt. "There has been no payment," said Griesa.

Argentina maintains that it hasn't actually defaulted, since it made a $539 million interest payment on one of its bonds that is due in 2033. But the default was technically triggered after that payment was frozen in a Bank of New York Mellon account by Griesa on the grounds that the country must also pay the hold-out investors in full if it wishes to make payments to the investors that agreed to a restructuring of Argentina's debt payments in 2005.

The suit filed on Thursday alleges that the country's sovereignty was violated by U.S. court decisions that the country must pay in full its debts to the so-called 'vulture funds' that bought the country's debt for pennies on the dollar back in 2001. The suit is "against the United States of America for the activity of its judicial power," but is "not an action against the country," in the words of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. "It simply means that dependent powers or dependent employees of that country have provoked damage or have acted outside of the law, considering the expressions and resolutions of a municipal judge who wants to trample sovereignty," according to Kirchner.

Eric LeCompte, Executive Director of the religious anti-poverty coalition, Jubilee USA Network, said that the suit's filing "illustrates that we need basic rules of responsible lending and borrowing in place in order to stop predators.
"If we had an international bankruptcy process, countries from Argentina to Grenada never would default and predatory actors are forced to sit at the table," LeCompte continued.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/08/08/judge-threatens-argentina-following-lawsuit-filed-against-us

Argentine Musician Finds Out His Biological Parents Were Killed by Country’s Dictatorship 36 Years A

Argentine Musician Finds Out His Biological Parents Were Killed by Country’s Dictatorship 36 Years Ago

Uki Goni / Buenos Aires
12:39 PM ET


[font size=1]
Estela de Carlotto, president of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, right, and her grandson Ignacio Hurban, left, hug during a news conference in Buenos Aires, Aug. 8, 2014.

Victor R. Caivano—AP[/font]

Ignacio Hurban's parents were killed by a ruling dictatorship, and he was raised by another family


It wasn’t until his thirty-sixth birthday two months ago that Ignacio Hurban was told he was adopted. But his was no regular adoption — it transpired instead under the most violent of circumstances.

His real parents, Oscar Montoya and Laura Carlotto, were arrested in November 1977 by Argentina’s ruling dictatorship because of their political activities, disappearing into the macabre system of death camps the military set up across Argentina. His father was secretly executed shortly after his arrest. But his mother, two months pregnant, was kept alive until Hurban was born in June 1978, after which she was also murdered.

Hurban’s case was by no means an isolated one. It’s estimated that some 500 infants suffered the same fate during the bloody 1976-83 Argentinian regime, during which some 20,000 mostly young left-wing political activists were murdered. The military made only one exception during its killing spree: Pregnant women were kept alive until they gave birth. Afterwards, the infants were handed over to military families or unsuspecting couples to be raised according to the “Western and Christian” values the military claimed to defend. These infants grew up completely unaware of their real identities.

“It’s a crime beyond all imagination,” says Robert Cox, a British journalist who lived in Argentina during those years, bravely reporting and even confronting top generals personally about the crimes they were committing. “I still don’t understand how men who are meant to be men of honor, military men, could fall so low. It’s the one crime above all others that wakes us up to the horror of what happened and how terribly evil it was.”

Two former dictators of that regime were eventually convicted for the systematic kidnapping of children. Jorge Rafael Videla died in prison last year while serving a 50-year sentence, Reynaldo Bignone remains behind bars. Various military couples who knowingly took in such children have also been convicted, including cases in which the “adoptive father” played a hand in the killing of the infants’ real parents.

More:
http://time.com/3096122/ignacio-hurban-argentina/

GOP Obstructionism Is Holding Up Funds to Catch Rapists

GOP Obstructionism Is Holding Up Funds to Catch Rapists

A spending bill blocked in the Senate would allot $41 million to help cities and states catch sexual predators.

—By Erika Eichelberger
| Fri Aug. 8, 2014 9:44 AM EDT



For weeks, Republicans in the Senate have held up an $180 billion spending bill that would direct money to several federal agencies, from the Justice Department to the Department of Transportation. Funding for all kinds of measures—from rent subsidies for the poor, to a new NASA rocket, to transportation projects—has been left in limbo. But one specific provision that's being held up has victims' advocates particularly worried: a $41 million grant to help states and localities go after rapists by funding jurisdictions to process backlogs of rape kits, the samplings of biological evidence that are taken after a sexual assault and used to identify attackers.

The kits, which contain semen, blood, saliva, hair, and other DNA evidence from rape victims, can be held in storage for decades, allowing rapists to roam free. Experts estimate that there are over 100,000 untested kits sitting on shelves at scores of police departments and crime lab storage facilities around the country, partly because states and localities lack the money needed to process them.

Kym Worthy, the county prosecutor in Wayne County, Michigan, has pushed hard to get through Detroit's backlog, but has run up against funding shortages. She plans to apply for a chunk of the $41 million grant as soon as it's approved. "I'd like it to happen tomorrow," she says. "Every day that goes by is other day that the victims have to wait for justice. This is first grant of it's kind where they really got what it takes."

But since June, the money has been stalled because Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), want Democrats to allow them to add several unrelated amendments to the huge appropriations bill. One of those amendments, sponsored by McConnell, would make it harder for the EPA to enact new rules on coal-fired power plants. (His home state of Kentucky has a big coal industry). Another amendment—a longtime favorite of Sen. David Vitter (R-La.)—would strip Obamacare subsidies from congressional staffers. Republicans don't have any intention of passing the main spending bill, argues a Senate Democratic leadership staffer; they're just using the amendments process to stall it. "Demanding amendment votes is meant to distract from [Republicans'] disagreement over popular bills," the staffer says. "Regardless of the outcome of the amendment votes…Republicans have indicated that they are not willing to support the underlying bill." McConnell's office did not respond to requests for comment, but the minority leader has previously accused Democrats of "shutting out" Republican amendments, and other Senate Republicans have accused red state Dems of not wanting to vote on controversial amendments in an election year.

More:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/rape-kit-backlog-senate-republican-spending-bill

Sweet victory for Mexico beekeepers as Monsanto loses GM permit

Sweet victory for Mexico beekeepers as Monsanto loses GM permit

Evidence convinced judge of threat posed to honey production in Yucatán – but firm will almost certainly appeal against ruling

Posted by
Nina Lakhani

Friday 8 August 2014 07.22 EDT
theguardian.com


[font size=1]
Greenpeace activists and Mayans form a human chain to spell out the words ‘ma ogm’,
which translates as ‘no gmo’ (genetically modified organisms).
Photograph: Arturo Rocha/Greenpeace[/font]

A small group of beekeepers in Mexico has inflicted a blow on biotech giant Monsanto, which has halted the company’s ambitions to plant thousands of hectares of soybeans genetically modified to resist the company’s pesticide Roundup.

A district judge in the state of Yucatán last month overturned a permit issued to Monsanto by Mexico’s agriculture ministry, Sagarpa, and environmental protection agency, Semarnat, in June 2012 that allowed commercial planting of Roundup-ready soybeans.

The permit authorised Monsanto to plant its seeds in seven states, over more than 253,000 hectares (625,000 acres), despite protests from thousands of Mayan farmers and beekeepers, Greenpeace, the Mexican National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity, the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas and the National Institute of Ecology.

In withdrawing the permit, the judge was convinced by the scientific evidence presented about the threats posed by GM soy crops to honey production in the Yucatán peninsula, which includes Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán states. Co-existence between honey production and GM soybeans is not possible, the judge ruled.

Mexico is the world’s six biggest producer and third largest exporter of honey. About 25,000 families on the Yucatán peninsula depend on honey production. This tropical region produces about 40% of the country’s honey, almost all of which is exported to the EU. This is not small change: in 2011, the EU imported $54m (£32m) worth of Mexican honey.

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/aug/08/sweet-victory-beekeepers-monsanto-gm-soybeans

What will it take for Chilean Australians to have peace from Pinochet's heavies?

What will it take for Chilean Australians to have peace from Pinochet's heavies?

Adriana Rivas, a woman close to the top in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, is working as a cleaner in Sydney. Chile’s exiles demand she be brought to justice

Antonio Castillo
theguardian.com, Friday 8 August 2014 22.00 EDT

Decades have passed since the end of the Chilean military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, but for exiled Chileans still living in Australia there is no forgiving or forgetting – especially when former Pinochet heavies can still call Australia home.

Adriana Rivas González, aka “La Chani”, was the personal secretary of General Manuel Contreras: the former head of the secret police, and the second most powerful man after Pinochet, now serving life in prison.

She has been been living peacefully in Australia since 1978, when she married and settled in Sydney. After recent reports from the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent programme, it is understood that she now works as a nanny and cleaner.

It is also alleged that La Chani was also a member of the Lautaro Brigade, an elite unit charged with exterminating members of the Communist party. She was detained in Chile in 2006 for four years, while an investigation was conducted into her involvement in the disappearance of three Communist leaders .

More:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/09/what-will-it-take-for-chilean-australians-to-have-peace-from-pinochets-heavies

[center]

Adriana Rivas González with Manuel Contreras





~ ~ ~ [/center]
Her husband, Manuel Contreras, Wikipedia:

Juan Manuel Guillermo Contreras Sepúlveda (born May 4, 1929) is a Chilean military officer and the former head of DINA, Chile's secret police during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. As head of DINA he was the most powerful and feared man in the country, after Pinochet. He is currently serving 25 sentences totaling 289 years in prison for kidnapping, forced disappearance and assassination.[



More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Contreras

[center] ~ ~ ~ [/center]
Manuel Contreras headed D.I.N.A.,
described in this Wikipedia:

~snip~

DINA internal suppression and human rights violations[edit]

Under decree #521, the DINA had the power to detain any individual so long as there was a declared state of emergency. Such an administrative state characterized nearly the entire length of the Pinochet dictatorship. Torture and rape of detainees was common:


In some camps, routine sadism was taken to extremes. At Villa Grimaldi, recalcitrant prisoners were dragged to a parking lot; DINA agents then used a car or truck to run over and crush their legs. Prisoners there recalled one young man who was beaten with chains and left to die slowly from internal injuries. Rape was also a reoccurring form of abuse. DINA officers subjected female prisoners to grotesque forms of sexual torture that included insertion of rodents and, as tactfully described in the Commission report, "unnatural acts involving dogs."[2]

Foreign involvement[edit]

The United States backed and supported the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, and continued to aid the Pinochet dictatorship until it ended. Documents declassified from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in September 2000 revealed that the head of the DINA in 1975 was a "paid CIA asset".[3] The CIA actively supported the junta after the overthrow of Salvador Allende. The head of the DINA, General Manuel Contreras, was made a paid asset despite continuing CIA reservations concerning the human rights abuses of the organization. Eventually the CIA became aware of DINA's "possible" involvement in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C., but it continued to maintain him as an asset. The CIA reports remain heavily excised.

DINA foreign assassinations and operations[edit]

Further information: Operation Condor and Operation Colombo

The DINA was involved in Operation Condor, as well as Operation Colombo. In July 1976, two magazines in Argentina and Brazil appeared and published the names of 119 Chilean leftist opponents, claiming they had been killed in internal disputes unrelated to the Pinochet regime. Both magazines disappeared after this one and only issue. Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia eventually asked Chilean justices to lift Pinochet's immunity in this case, called "Operation Colombo", having accumulated evidence that Pinochet had ordered the DINA to plant this disinformation, in order to cover up the "disappearance" and murder by the Chilean secret police of those 119 persons. In September 2005, Chile's Supreme Court ordered the lifting of Pinochet's general immunity from prosecutions, with respect to this case.

Assassinations of Carlos Prats and Orlando Letelier[edit]

Main article: Letelier assassination

The DINA worked with international agents, such as Michael Townley, who assassinated former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier in Washington DC in 1976, as well as General Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1974. According to a CIA document released in 2000, French Organisation de l'armée secrète (OAS) member Albert Spaggiari also acted as intermediary for the DINA in Europe, as well as Italian neo-fascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie (alias ALFA).[4] In a 1979 letter declassified in 2000, Michael Townley stated: "There were meetings between him (Contreras), his Excellency (President Pinochet), and the Italians in Spain after Franco died. Also the Italians carried out numerous acts of military espionage against the Peruvians and Argentines not only in Europe, but also in Peru and Argentina".[5]

Michael Townley described numerous meetings between Pinochet and Italian terrorists and spies as well as Pinochet's meetings with anti-Castro Cubans.[6]

Michael Townley worked with Eugenio Berríos on producing sarin gas in the 1970s, at a laboratory in a DINA-owned house in the district of Lo Curro, Santiago de Chile.[7] Eugenio Berríos, who was murdered in 1995, was also linked with drug traffickers and agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).[8]

Colonia Dignidad[edit]

Main article: Villa Baviera

Investigations by Amnesty International and the Chilean National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report have verified that Colonia Dignidad, long alleged as a center used for rituals of ex-Nazi Paul Schäfer, was used by the DINA as a concentration camp for the detention and torture of political prisoners. Most accounts have this happening between 1973 and 1977 but precise dates are not known. Boris Weisfeiler, an American Jewish professor of Russian origin, is thought to have disappeared near Colonia Dignidad.

The son of DINA head Manuel Contreras claims that his father and Pinochet visited Colonia Dignidad in 1974, and that his father and Schäfer were good friends. The current leader of the since-renamed Villa Baviera admits that torture took place within the old colony, but claims that Villa Baviera is a new entity.

In March 2005, former DINA agent Michael Townley acknowledged links between Colonia Dignidad and the DINA, as well as relations with the Bacteriological War Army Laboratory. He spoke about biological experiments conducted on detainees, with the help of the laboratory and the DINA house in Lo Curro.[citation needed] According to Townley, former Christian Democrat President Eduardo Frei Montalva was assassinated by a poison made at Colonia Dignidad.[9]

New Brazil law supports domestic workers' rights

7 August 2014 Last updated at 20:06 ET
New Brazil law supports domestic workers' rights

A new law in Brazil has come into force under which employers can be fined if they fail to register their domestic workers.

It is part of new measures to provide basic protection for some seven million domestic workers long excluded from Brazil's stringent labour laws.

Employers can now be reported and fined several hundred dollars each time they break part of the code.

A constitutional amendment limits domestic workers to a 44-hour week.

It defined other rights as well - basic entitlements such as an eight-hour working day, the right to the minimum wage, a lunch break, social security and severance pay.

More:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-28700220

Mexico opens debate over low minimum wage

Mexico opens debate over low minimum wage
5:50 AM Saturday Aug 9, 2014

MEXICO CITY (AP) The issue of Mexico's low national minimum wage is gaining national attention after the government of Mexico City suggested it could act to raise the salary on a local level.

The debate at a city-sponsored forum this week highlights the near-universal dissatisfaction with the country's minimum wage of just over 67 pesos per day, or about $5.

While Mexico's Constitution says the minimum should be sufficient to provide for the basic needs of a worker and his or her family, a single person could easily spend a day's minimum salary on one meal at a low-cost restaurant.

Mexico's wage is among the lowest in the hemisphere.

Mexicans who earn close to the minimum said Friday their lives are a constant struggle to make ends meet.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11306363

(Short article, no more at link.)