2100 GMT: The death toll has risen to 708 — 541 in Maule Region, 64 in Bio Bio Region, 103 elsewhere. President Michelle Bachelet said, “We face a catastrophe of such unthinkable magnitude that it will require a giant effort” to recover.
Amidst the tragedy, a story of a miracle escape: a man and his 7-year-old daughter fell 13 floors in their apartment building but suffered only cuts and bruises.
Given the damage and deaths from today’s earthquake off the coast of Chile and the declaration of a Tsunami Warning, EA is “mirroring” the LiveBlog of Josh Shahryar:
There is a live stream from Chile (in Spanish) on latest developments. The country is three hours behind Greenwich Mean Time:
Continued activity but no drama — CNN is loudly filling time. We’re handing over to the Hawaii live stream. Readers are invited to send in any information.
EA readers notify us of news from Haiti, almost a month after the earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people.
On Saturday, the G7 nations (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and US) agreed on debt forgiveness for Haiti. Meanwhile, Britain’s Channel 4 has a special feature on a three-month baby who will die unless she can get an operation overseas for a skull injury. US military authorities, however, are refusing to let her travel because she has no papers.
Some pundits have recently tried to compare the recent upper middle-class mobilizations against the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the ones occurring in Iran since last summer’s Presidential election. As proof of the similarities, the author notes the technological aspects of the mobilization, such as activity on Twitter. He furthermore notes that Venezuela is “a population subjugated to ill-planned economics, a strongman unwilling to leave power, and a government ever more keen to restrict its citizens’ rights to freedom of speech”.
This is a very superficial analysis of events that can be overturned with a range of empirical evidence. However, I will confine myself to some obvious facts. For instance, the Chavez Government hasn’t resorted to executions of opposition members like the Islamic Republican regime in Iran. The “curbed free press” of Venezuela isn’t actually that curbed. In no other country in the recent years has the ruling class shown its teeth so openly against a popular reformist government, through “Chilean” methods like assassinations, employer lock-outs, and pot-beating upper middle-class housewives. What Western media reports also fail to show are the (even if somewhat modest) attempts of the Chavez Government to support the growth of communal radio programmes that are intended to challenge the corporate media monopoly. Read the rest of this entry »
First, it was watching retweets of news from Iran in Spanish. Then I slowly started seeing “hashtags” for both Iran and Venezuela in the same tweet. Finally, I saw the Twitter account of a collective. Reading the profile helped me grasp the enormity of what I was witnessing: a student movement like Iran’s is relying on the Internet to inform people of what is happening inside Venezuela.
A few months ago, as I was tweeting about a protest in Iran and live-blogging, I noticed former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations Diego Arria, a Venezuelan, tweeting information about the protest in Iran. While it surprised me to see such a revered diplomat taking key interest in Iran’s Green Movement, I soon also began to witness mass support from Venezuelan students for the Iranian cause. But most interesting and heartening to me was that they have been on Twitter and other social media outlets for more than a year fighting for their own rights as well.
For those who oppose the rule of President Hugo Chavez, theirs is a story much similar to Iran’s: a population subjugated to ill-planned economics, a strongman unwilling to leave power, and a government ever more keen to restrict its citizen’s right to freedom of speech. As protests rocked Venezuela two weeks ago, news of the protests made its way out not only on the backs of the traditional mainstream media outlets but also on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Photobucket, and other websites once used for entertainment, killing time, or just plain ol’ finding a date.
In an interview with the Argentine daily Clarin, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas has prodded President Obama through criticism: “For now he is doing nothing, but he has invited us to revive the peace process. I hope that in the future he can play a more important role.”
And, within weeks of Israeli President Shimon Peres’ tour of Latin America (and the same day that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in Brasilia), Abbas called upon Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to take a more active role as mediator in the Middle East, “He can do it, because he has good relations with the two parties in the conflict and I think he can help.”
Abbas also explained that there will be no more concessions from the Palestinian side:
We accepted to have only 22 per cent of Palestine, and that is the biggest concession. And we also accepted that Israel had 78 per cent. So, what kind of concessions are they expecting from us?
Now we are ready to announce our independence if the Israelis will allow us to.
On September 24, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was the guest on Larry King’s CNN talkshow. In this interview, Chavez offered thoughts from the United States to Iran; from oil politics to the Gaza War; from his thoughts about assassination to his wishes when he was a child.
LARRY KING, HOST: Tonight, Venezuela’s outspoken, headline making president Hugo Chavez. He called George W. Bush “The Devil” and now says it seems there are two Barack Obamas. Read the rest of this entry »
2100 GMT: The death toll has risen to 708 — 541 in Maule Region, 64 in Bio Bio Region, 103 elsewhere. President Michelle Bachelet said, “We face a catastrophe of such unthinkable magnitude that it will require a giant effort” to recover.
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