Daily Headlines: April 28, 2014

* Vatican: Pope John II was officially declared a saint yesterday partly due to the reported healing of a brain aneurysm that affected Gloribeth Mora Diaz of Costa Rica.
 
* Panama: According to the latest polls the election for Panama’s next president on May 4th could be a neck-and-neck race between Jose Arias representing the ruling conservative party and “moderate leftist” candidate Juan Navarro.

* Brazil: Brazil’s civil aviation minister admitted that Rio de Janeiro’s main international airport could be hit by blackouts during the World Cup of soccer that begins in roughly six weeks.

* Peru: Some five hundred members of the Achuar indigenous group occupied Peru’s biggest oil field in the Amazon rainforest in order to call for the cleanup of oil that has spilled over the last few decades.
  
Video Source – AFP via YouTube

Online Sources – BBC News; ABC News; Reuters; Bloomberg; The Guardian

Daily Headlines: February 5, 2014

* Mexico: President Enrique Peña Nieto pledged to spend $3.4 billion in funds for social and infrastructure programs in Michoacán, a Mexican state where recently legalized “self-defense” groups have battled against the Knights Templar drug gang.

* Puerto Rico: Puerto Rican Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla’s plans to present a balanced budget a year ahead of time were not enough to present Standard and Poor’s from lowering the credit rating of the commonwealth to “junk” status.

* Brazil: Several million Brazilian residents were affected by blackouts that hit parts of the country, and that occurred amid record heat and low reservoir levels at the country's hydroelectric plants.

* Peru: Autopsy results could explain the cause of death of over 400 deceased dolphins that washed up on the coast of northern Peru in January.

Video Source - euronews via YouTube ("Government authorities in the Mexican state of Michoacan signed a deal (last week) allowing the police to work with local vigilante "self-defence" volunteer groups.")

Online Sources- GlobalPost; Reuters; ABC News; The Guardian

Blackout Hits Most of Venezuela

At least nineteen of Venezuela’s twenty-four states and several major cities have been affected by a blackout on Tuesday.

“The blackout started at approximately 12:30 PM on one of the main transmission lines, which caused a disruption in electric service to a good part of the country’s western and central areas,” said Franco Silva, the deputy minister for the government’s energy department.

“It will take several hours for the generator plants to restart and reestablish electric service nationwide,” added Silva in remarks made this afternoon to the state-run VTV network.

Residents of the capital city of Caracas reportedly tweeted that subway service had been partially disrupted while traffic has ground to a halt due to nonworking streetlights.

”All day without light.  What a joke,” opined one Venezuelan Twitter user while another user posted a photo of a darkened Venezuela with the caption “We’re not in mourning.  We’re without light!”

Authorities in the Chacao neighborhood of Caracas ordered a “preventative evacuation” of shopping malls and offices while the area’s police chief told the local press that heavy traffic has congested streets and avenues.

According to the Venezuelan press, the situation in the blacked out city of San Cristóbal is one of “chaos” with massive traffic jams, closed businesses and disruptions in the cell phone and banking services.

Though transportation nationwide has allegedly been normal, delays hit the main international airport in Puerto La Cruz after it experienced thirty minutes without power.

Energy Minister Rafael Ramírez claimed that the Venezuelan oil industry is performing “absolutely normal” and, thus, there is a “guaranteed domestic market supply” of crude oil.  Furthermore, Health Minister Isabel Iturria said that hospitals are functioning normally since their “vital areas are running on generator power.”

While investigators are looking into the causes of the blackout, several senior officials have publicly blamed the opposition for causing the interruption in electrical service.

Daily Headlines: November 27, 2009

* Latin America: Ecuador’s LDU Quito are ninety minutes away from winning the Copa Sudamericana after whipping Brazilian side Fluminense 5-1 in the first leg of the final.

* Brazil: Some of Rio de Janeiro’s upper-class neighborhoods were hit with a blackout on Tuesday less than two weeks after a massive outage left over 60 million Brazilians briefly in the dark.

* Peru: The country’s Shining Path rebels may form a political group and post candidates for the 2011 general elections.

* Chile: According to a recent autopsy on Victor Jara, the Chilean folk singer and activist was tortured and shot to death shortly after the infamous 1973 military coup.

Image – Soccerway (Edison Mendez’ hat trick helped LDU Quito inch ever so close to winning the Copa Sudamericana).
Online Sources- USA TODAY, The Latin Americanist, Reuters, LAHT, MSNBC

Brazil recovering from blackout

Parts of Brazil including the major cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are gradually resuming power after a major blackout left these areas without electricity last night:

As mentioned in the above video, officials have laid blame on a problem at the Itaipu hydroelectric dam. There was a "99-percent chance the blackout happened because of a storm" said the head of the agency in charge of the dam to CNN. Traffic lights were knocked out in Sao Paulo and most travel ground to a halt in Rio as residents waited out the outage.

The Itaipu dam is the world's second biggest hydroelectric producer and exports energy to neighboring countries. Thus, it should come as no surprise that there was a 30-minute interruption of electricity in Paraguay.

The outage has raised questions over the viability of Brazil’s electrical grid, especially in anticipation of a pair of major sporting vents (the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Rio). "We don't need this to happen. I don't know how it could get worse," said one Rio resident to the AP over how the outage could have a negative impact on his city’s global image.

Brazil had previously suffered two major blackouts in 2005 and 2007 which “60 Minutes” claimed to have been caused by hackers. However, government investigators subsequently concluded that the 2007 outage was caused by the “utility company’s negligent maintenance of high voltage insulators on two transmission lines.”

Online Sources- Huffington Post, wired.com, Bloomberg, CNN, Wikipedia, NPR, YouTube

Dominican blackouts to improve

After nearly 2 weeks of irregularly long and widespread blackouts in the Dominican Republic, authorities have announced that a power upgrade to the Dominican Corporation of State Electricity Companies (CDEEE) will go a long way towards improving the situation.

From yesterday's Dominican Today:

Power companies were instructed to maintain their output at 85 percent so the sectors which receive the least energy get 18 hours of service. The national energy demand is around 2,000 megawtts and the current generation is of around 1,700 megawatts. Today the CDEEE will pay US$4 (million) of the US$16 million owed to the power company Cogentrix, which contributes 300 megawatts to the system and which had shut down several plants. Since yesterday several plants around the country began to enter the system, after debts were paid and failures corrected, Segura said. He said another factor affecting the power grid is that the hydroelectrics, which contribute almost 200 megawtts, have been generating less as the lack of rain maintains their waters levels low.

In today's Listin Diario, Radhames Segura, of the CDEEE, explained that the recent spate of blackouts across the urban sectors of the country was the result of a particularly rough patch of increasing energy needs, rising cost of production, and faltering customer payments.

Sources: Dominican Today, Listin Diario, CDEEE, Wikipedia