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Sunday, September 19, 2010

The Civic Parade of Pichilemu took place on Saturday morning, in Daniel Ortúzar Avenue. The event was attended by around 9,000 people. It started with an exhibition of cueca, the Chilean national dance, by winners of communal and regional Cueca championships.

All the schools from urban Pichilemu and its rural villages participated in the parade, including La Aguada School, Espinillo Basic School, Cáhuil School, Charly’s School, Colegio Preciosa Sangre, Agustín Ross High School, Digna Camilo Aguilar School, and others. Neighborhood councils (such as Infiernillo, presided by Mauricio Vargas), elderly clubs, sport clubs (such as Arturo Prat and Independiente), the Public Safety Agency and the Fire Bureau also participated. The Parade music was performed by Banda Instrumental Pichilemina (Pichileminian Instrumental Band).

The parade is part of celebrations marking two hundred years since Chile began the Independence process, that ended in 1818 after Bernardo O’Higgins proclaimed it.

“This parade shows the power that the Pichileminian people has to stand again [after the February 27 earthquake],” Mayor of Pichilemu Roberto Córdova said. “It is the greatest parade in the History of Pichilemu,” he added.

The event was broadcast by the local radio stations Entre Olas, Atardecer and Somos Pichilemu. Jorge Vargas González, owner of Radio Somos Pichilemu and former Mayor of the city also attended the event, along with his wife Andrea Aranda, current Councillor.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

One person has been killed and dozens of boats have been severely damaged or sunk by storms on the Spanish island of Majorca.

The storms hit the island frequently last week, and the weather finally calmed on Sunday.

In San Telmo, a 62-year-old man died when he tried to save his sinking yacht. Winds of up to 60 mph were reported with gusts reaching 75 mph.

Boats could be seen sinking into the water for several days after the storm, with people unable to rescue them due to the conditions.

Local residents stated that they were the worst to hit the island, which has a large number of ports, in ten years, with the clean up effort continuing into this week.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

In the midst of the intensifying global financial crisis, finance ministers and central bankers of the G7 nations – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, and the United Kingdom – met in Washington, D.C. and released a joint statement.

With failures of large financial institutions in the United States, the crisis rapidly evolved into a global crisis resulting in bank failures in Europe and the Americas, and sharp reductions in the value of stocks and commodities worldwide. The crisis further lead to a liquidity problem and the de-leveraging of world assets, which further accelerated the problem. The crisis has roots in the subprime mortgage crisis and is an acute phase of the financial crisis of 2007–2008.

After the meeting, a joint statement was released with a commitment to “stabilize financial markets and restore the flow of credit.” The statement outlined five steps to achieve these goals:

1. Take decisive action and use all available tools to support systemically important financial institutions and prevent their failure.
2. Take all necessary steps to unfreeze credit and money markets and ensure that banks and other financial institutions have broad access to liquidity and funding.
3. Ensure that our banks and other major financial intermediaries, as needed, can raise capital from public as well as private sources, in sufficient amounts to re-establish confidence and permit them to continue lending to households and businesses.
4. Ensure that our respective national deposit insurance and guarantee programs are robust and consistent so that our retail depositors will continue to have confidence in the safety of their deposits.
5. Take action, where appropriate, to restart the secondary markets for mortgages and other securitized assets. Accurate valuation and transparent disclosure of assets and consistent implementation of high quality accounting standards are necessary.

“Central banks from around the world have acted together to provide additional liquidity for financial institutions, taking the necessary steps to support the global economy,” said US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson in a statement after the meeting.

“We have taken a lot of actions,” said European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet. “My experience of markets is that it always takes a little time to capture the elements [of the decisions taken].”

The Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King said: “Central banks will work together as we demonstrated this week, to ensure sufficient short term liquidity is provided to stabilise banking systems. But it is also vital that governments work together to ensure their banking systems are recapitalised to enable them to lend to finance spending in the real economy.”

Saturday, January 5, 2008

A previously unknown militant group has claimed responsibility for killing a United States diplomat in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum on New Year’s Day.

The group, calling itself Ansar al-Tawhid (Companions of Monotheism), said its members shot 33-year-old John Granville and his Sudanese driver Abdel Rahman Abbas. The name of the militant group has been used by many other groups of extremists in other areas of the world.

It was not immediately possible to authenticate the claim, which was posted on a Web site used by Islamists.

Granville was being driven home on New Year’s Day when another vehicle cut his car off, and assailants opened fire.

FBI agents and other U.S. investigators have traveled to Sudan to investigate the shooting.

Sudan’s foreign ministry has said the shooting was an isolated incident with no political connotations. Sudanese media reports quoted a government official earlier this week as saying there is no evidence the attack was an act of terrorism.

U.S.-Sudanese relations have been tense because of the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region. The shooting happened one day after a joint United Nations–African Union force took over peacekeeping duties in Darfur.