After 8.8-magnitude quake hits the country Saturday, government estimates more than 2 million have been affected, writes The Santiago Times.

The death toll from Saturday’s devastating earthquake more than doubled Sunday to 700, sparking fears the true effects of the quake have yet to be measured.

Communication to the areas worst hit, especially Concepcion, Constitucion, Talca and Chillan, is nearly impossible; some desperately trying to reach family and friends have resorted to using radio channels.

An 8.8-magnitude earthquake rocked the country early Saturday morning, during what should have been the last hurrah of Chile’s summer vacation.

Yesterday, Sunday, the government estimated at least 700 dead and more than 2 million affected — many were left homeless, without water, electricity or communication to the outside world.  Reports have been limited to government statements and limited video images coming out of the area.

The epicentre of the quake, which struck just after 3:30 a.m. Saturday, was in the Bio-Bio area (Region VIII), more than 200 miles south of Chile’s capital city, Santiago.

Communities on the Pacific coast were hardest hit with whole neighbourhoods destroyed, hundreds of casualties and many reported to be trapped. The death toll is expected to climb.

The immediate effects were widely felt — most of the country was awoken early Saturday to the tremor, with several buildings collapsing in the capital city, including a parking lot which flattened, crushing around 50 cars between levels. Highways cracked, overpasses and bridges fell and Santiago’s airport suffered damaged and was forced to close, forcing incoming flights to divert to Argentina or Peru.  Churches and museums were also damaged, the streets covered in loose concrete and glass.

Chile’s current president Michelle Bachelet called for calm and declared a “state of catastrophe.”

“We’re doing everything we can with all the forces we have. Any information we will share immediately,” she said.

Bachelet and the President-elect Sebastian Piñera – who takes office March 11 – both flew south by helicopter to assess the damage.

Strong aftershocks, some up to 6 points on the Richter scale, continued into Sunday; dozens were recorded. Many people, even in Santiago, were reportedly too afraid to return to their homes and slept outside. Many city services got back on line as of Sunday evening, however, including Santiago’s metro service. And a limited number of flights were allowed to land at the international airport.

Meanwhile, at least 100 people continue to be trapped in a 14-storey building in Concepcion; more than 40 were already rescued as of Sunday morning. Elsewhere in the city, the large superstore Lider was looted for food, water, and electronics. And more than 200 prisoners escaped a prison in nearby Chillan.

Back in Santiago, many shelves were emptied of water late Saturday. Long queues outside call centers in the capital poured out into the streets, people trying to reach relatives in the south. But most cellphone networks were down and communication with those in the affected areas was nearly impossible.

Many countries immediately pledged aid — U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton has left the U.S. and was expected to arrive in Chile within a day on a previously scheduled visit — however Chile has not yet formally asked for foreign aid.

Read more here.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi on Tuesday praised the United States’ leadership of the relief effort in quake-hit Haiti in an attempt to soothe anger over riticism levelled by the Italian special envoy this weekend.

”In critical situations like the one in Haiti, organizational difficulties are inevitable,” Berlusconi warranted.

”But without the US’s intervention, managing the situation would have been much more difficult”.

”Everyone is doing their best in Haiti and right now, we need to stop being critical and focus our energies on the enormous task at hand,” he said.

Regarding remarks by Civil Protection Chief Guido Bertolaso who, during a Sunday telecast direct from Haiti, bemoaned a lack of central coordination, Berlusconi said that ”at times like these, it’s best to avoid making statements that could lead to misunderstandings”.

He added that Foreign Minister Franco Frattini had clarified the government’s position on Monday during talks in Washington with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Despite playing down criticism as ”armchair quarterbacking” during a joint press conference with Frattini, Clinton said Tuesday that she ”deeply resented” insinuations that the US had done less than it could.

”We have scrambled as quick as we could to do everything needed in the past two weeks,” she said.

While Clinton did not single out any detractors in particular, she did point out that the troops sent to Haiti were there to distribute food and medicine, a possible response to a remark by Bertolaso who accused the US of sending ”too many soldiers and not enough aid personnel”.

The Secretary of State added that she had nothing against ”constructive criticism”, but that the US had been judged unfairly by many voices abroad.

Read more here.

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• Italy Distances Self From Criticism Of US In Haiti (huffingtonpost.com)
• Italy distances self from criticism of US in Haiti (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Italian Civil Protection chief Guido Bertolaso

The Italian government on Monday distanced itself from remarks by its special envoy to Haiti, Civil Protection chief Guido Bertolaso, who described the international earthquake relief effort there as ”pathetic”.

On a state visit to Washington to meet with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini underlined that ”the Italian government does not stand by that assessment”.

Frattini granted that ”Bertolaso has made some important recommendations to the Haitian government regarding sheltering orphans and conducting evacuations”. But he stressed that Bertolaso was not speaking for the Italian government when he slammed the international aid machine at work in Haiti, which is largely being directed by the United States.

During an Italian TV broadcast from Port-au-Prince on Sunday, Bertolaso was asked to describe the situation there two weeks after the Caribbean nation was devastated by an earthquake estimated to have claimed as many as 350,000 lives.

The civil protection chief, who headed up the relief effort after the April 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, responded with a broadside against the lack of central coordination among the various relief agencies present.

”A lot of them are more interested in parading in front of the cameras than rolling up their sleeves and going to work to find survivors,” he said.

”It’s like the bonfire of the vanities”. Bertolaso also said the US had done a poor job of spearheading the relief effort, sending too many troops and not enough people trained in disaster management.

”What’s really needed here is a person like (President Barack) Obama to come and take charge of the emergency”. ”Instead, they sent in a bunch of starlets,” he said in an apparent reference to a handful of celebrities, such as actor Sean Penn, who have made their way to the island over the past week.

Read more here.

The 28-year-old Somali who attacked the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard was recently in prison for seven weeks in Kenya, reports Denmark’s Politiken.

The formal reason for his incarceration was that a Kenyan police checkpoint found him without travel documents.

At the time of his arrest, Kenyan police was investigating reports of plans to carry out a terrorist attack against, among others, the American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was due in the country.

The Kenyan media has linked the man’s arrest with the terrorist plans, a link that intelligence sources have confirmed. The Danish Security and Intelligence Service has previously said in a release that the man ‘is suspected of having been involved in terror-related activities during his time in East Africa’.

In Kenya, Denmark’s Ambassador Bo Jensen has declined to confirm or deny Politiken’s information that the Danish-Somali who has now been remanded in custody in the Westergaard case, is identical with the man who was detained in Kenya.

But he says that it is highly unusual to be detained in prison for seven weeks as a result of problems with a passport.

Read more here.

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Wealthy nations at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen appear to be coalescing around the number 100 billion as their final offer to the developing world including China – although whether a dollar, pound or euro sign comes in front of the figure despite the variance in currency valuations is another story.

On Thursday, in attempt to push forward stalled talks in the Danish capital, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said Washington was ready to embrace the idea of $100 billion (€70 billion) in funds to developing countries to help them tackle climate change.

“The US is prepared to work with other countries to jointly mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020,” Ms Clinton told reporters.

The number, if not the actual sum, echoes the EU’s offer of €100 billion for the third world on the table since the autumn and Britain’s suggestion dating back to July of £100 billion (€112 billion).

But where the EU figure has been offered without conditions, the American number requires a quid pro quo from other powers, notably China and other emerging countries such as India and Brazil.

“In the absence of an operational agreement that meets the requirement that I outlined there will not be the final commitment that I outlined – at least from the United States,” warned Ms Clinton.

The US wants at least the more advanced developing countries to commit to promises of steeper reductions in greenhouse gas emissions growth and in particular to a process that verifies the cuts have actually been made.

The developing world says they are happy to move to a low-carbon development path, but they say that those responsible for the crisis must pay for this transition and that only those actions taken that are funded by the west should have to be reviewed in this way and that any supplementary measures taken should not.

China has promised reductions of between 40 and 45 percent in their “carbon intensity” in relation to their GDP growth, but what this actually means remains unclear.

The EU wants more transparency from China in this regard in terms of which greenhouse gases they mean, which industrial sectors this will apply to and what sort of GDP metrics.

The issue of climate finance has been one of the biggest – although by far not the only – stumbling block in negotiations.

Read more here.

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Three days ago, one of Amanda Knox’s aunts said that the US state department would look into the US student’s conviction for murder, reports Corriere della Sera.

Amanda Knox was convicted last Friday for the murder of her room mate, British exchange student Meredith Kercher in their house in Perugia, Italy.

It sounded more like wishful thinking than a news item. But the Knox family’s relentless campaign to mobilise support has reached into the heart of political Washington at the highest level. In an interview with ABC, the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said that she would “meet with anyone who has a concern” over how the Amanda case was handled. She did, however, add that for the time being, she had not expressed “concerns” to the Italian government.

The statement came in answer to a question from journalist George Stephanopoulos, who referred to the harsh comments on the Italian judicial system from Democratic senator Maria Cantwell.

Adding her voice to the chorus of protests over the verdict, Senator Cantwell had claimed that the guilty verdict was reached despite not enough evidence having been presented and the obvious anti-Americanism of Italian public opinion. Senator Cantwell repeated her views yesterday and also said she was disappointed because she had been confident of a not guilty verdict.

An almost apologetic (but what for?) Hillary Clinton said that she hadn’t had time to go into the Amanda case because she was “immersed in what we’re doing in Afghanistan”. But the secretary of state wants to make up for lost time: “Of course, I’ll meet with Senator Cantwell, or anyone who has a concern, but I can’t offer any opinion about that at this time”. News of the pledge is understood to have been communicated to Amanda at Capanne prison by her family.

Amanda’s parents hope that the secretary of state will support her innocence and bring the superpower’s political weight to bear on its ally. “Now I do want the government involved and I would be very, very disappointed if they did not get involved”, said Amanda’s father, Curt Knox. The appeal is in line with some of the television coverage of the past few months along the lines of “What’s America waiting for to send in the Marines and free the poor woman?” As if Amanda was in the clutches of some despotic regime.

But such language is light years away from Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic caution. Meanwhile over the past few months, the friends of Amanda have been hard at work to dispel her negative image and rebut the charges. Amanda’s family, the glory-hunting self-styled private investigators and her lawyers have found willing listeners in the media. Television coverage has been almost entirely one-sided and studio guests have presented the Seattle woman as the victim of an arcane legal system.

In effect, this has turned the case into a face-off between Italy and the United States, leaving to one side Amanda’s curious behaviour after the crime and forgetting that the very Italian Raffaele Sollecito was also convicted with her. Perugia has been depicted as a small, provincial town with a blinkered mindset. Experts predict that the media offensive will go on until the appeal hearing, where the friends of Amanda are confident of an acquittal.

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UPDATE:

Honduran legislators have the final say over a U.S.-brokered agreement that could return deposed Honduras President Manuel Zelaya to power, and diplomats urged them not to delay. All sides in the 4-month-old dispute spawned by Zelaya’s military-backed ouster on June 28 declared the negotiated solution a victory, and it drew praise from figures as diverse as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Venezuela ’s Hugo Chavez.

Zelaya hopes to be back in office anytime now, but the Honduran Congress, which received the plan on October 30th, has not set a date for voting on his return. Meanwhile, preparations for the Presidential elections on November 29th continue.

Negotiators for ousted Honduras President Manuel Zelaya and current Honduras President Roberto Micheletti last week reached an agreement to bring an end to a months-long political standoff triggered by the June 28 events that led to the departure of Zelaya, says the Latin American Herald Tribune.

The deal, set to be signed on Friday, leaves it up to Congress to decide on Zelaya’s reinstatement — with a recommendation from the Supreme Court — and also includes several points contained in a proposal made by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias in his role as mediator in the crisis.

The deal could allow the ousted president to serve out the remaining three months of his term. If Congress agrees, control of the army would shift to the electoral court, and the presidential election set for Nov. 29 would be recognized by both sides.

On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the deal “an historic agreement.”

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A car bomb tore through a packed market in Peshawar on Wednesday, killing 95 people and trapping casualties under pulverised shops, in one of Pakistan’s deadliest attacks.

The explosion detonated in a crowded street in the Meena Bazaar of Peshawar, one of the most congested parts of the volatile northwest city, sparking a huge blaze and ending in carnage routine shopping trips for scores of people.

The attack underscored the scale of the militant threat in Pakistan just hours after US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in Islamabad for three days of talks with political and military leaders.

‘There was a huge blast. There was smoke and dust everywhere. I saw people dying and screaming on the road,’ witness Mohammad Siddique told Dawn.

Angry flames leapt out of burning wreckage and smoke billowed in the air as a building collapsed into dust and rubble. Police evacuated panicked residents from the smouldering wreckage and firemen hosed down the flames.

‘It was a car bomb. Some people are still trapped in a building. We are trying to rescue them,’ bomb disposal official Shafqat Malik told reporters.

‘We have received 86 dead bodies, 213 people were injured, we are facing a shortage of blood,’ said Doctor Hamid Afridi, head of the Peshawar’s main Lady Reading Hospital.

Peshawar, a teeming metropolis, is a gateway to Pakistan’s northwest tribal belt, where the military is pressing a major offensive against Pakistani Taliban militants blamed for some of the worst of the recent carnage.

Tensions have soared across Pakistan following a spike in violence blamed on Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked extremists in which more than 240 people have died this month.

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Clinton and Lavrov push the 'reset button'

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has arrived in Moscow. Today, she will hold talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, with whom she met and pushed a symbolic ‘reset button’ to jump-start new relations. She will also meet with President Dmitry Medvedev. After visiting Russia’s capital, the chief American diplomat will become the first high ranking American to visit the Russian Republic of Kazan, writes Izvestiya.

This will be Hillary Clinton’s first trip to Moscow as Secretary of State. In the summer, she was not able to accompany President Barack Obama on his visit to the Russian capital due to an elbow injury, which occurred after a fall in the State Department building. Now, Moscow is her final stop on a one-week European tour, during which she visited Switzerland, Great Britain, and Ireland.

According to Sergey Lavrov, there are many questions on the agenda for his talks with Ms. Clinton. “We would like to hear a report on the progress that has been achieved in regards to both strategic offensive weapons and Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) issues,” he said. On the eve of the talks between the two heads of diplomatic offices, Russo-American consultations on anti-ballistic missile defense took place in Moscow. Special emphasis was placed on the new approach of the White House to issues relating to BMD.

“This visit may become a true breakthrough in the Russo-American relations,” Vadim Kozyulin, professor at the Academy of Military Sciences, told Izvestia. “After Obama announced his refusal to deploy American BMD systems in Eastern Europe, it became clear that the new White House administration not only took the Kremlin’s opinion into consideration, but also is ready to turn the page on Russo-American relations.”

Clinton told reporters that “a very broad agenda” has been planned. In Moscow, the head of the State Department intends to visit representatives of the Boeing Company, as well as listen to Sergey Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges” opera performed on the New Stage of the Bolshoi Theater. She, along with Sergey Lavrov, is expected to dedicate a monument to American poet Walt Whitman and meet with students of Moscow State University. Then, she will head to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan.

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Are we witnessing an “Affaire Polanski”?

Since September 26th, when the famous director was arrested in Zurich on the basis of an accusation dating back to 1977, the reaction of the intellectual elites reminded me very much of the one started in 1894 for Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish officer of the Army falsely accused of high treason.

With an apparent small difference, of course: this time the subject in question has pleaded guilty and very likely is. Zola would feel less comfortable writing a J’accuse in this case.

Here are the facts, as reported by Le Monde, the main newspaper of Polanski’s adoptive country:

Samantha Geimer, a 13 year old, is doing a photo shoot with Polanski in Jack Nicholson’s villa on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. According to Geimer, after the shoot, Polanski brought the girl to the jacuzzi, where he convinced her to take a sedative (Quaalude) and utlimately had sex with her, though the girl repeatedly said “No.”

The director, in his biography Roman by Polanski, published in 1984, only denied the part about the drugs and the clear lack of consent of the girl (both claimed by Geimer), but confirmed the rest. In fact, after the victim brought these facts in front of the court, to avoid a process that would have traumatized her, Polanski’s lawyers, Judge Laurence Rittenband, and the District Attorney arranged for a plea bargain: Polanski would have pleaded guilty to statutory rape, and all the other charges (rape with use of drugs, perversion and sodomy) would have been dropped.

But the night before the trial, the director, fearing that Judge Rittenband may renege on the deal, fled America. American law does not have a statue of limitations for those who have escaped arrest or trial and go on the run. But as his decision to leave the United States was final, Polanski lived for more than 30 years in France, where he raised a family and became the artist we know…. until the 26^th of September, when, invited to a Swiss film festival, he was arrested at the airport of Zurich.

The reactions from around the world have varied greatly with the most interesting coming from Switzerland. Many are asking why did the authorities arrest Polanski only now after a 30 year hiatus. The director even owned a chalet in Gstaad where he could easily have been apprehended by the authorities on many occasiones.

However, according to Swiss police statements obtained by La Tribune de Genéve, it now appears that the police only learned of the Gstaad chalet when it was already too late.

A better understanding of the Swiss situation can be reached reading Public Prosecutor Bertrand Bertossa statements on Le Temps, the most widely read Geneva-based newspaper.

According to Bertossa, the collaboration between the United States and Switzerland on extradition matters is an old one. Bertossa, in fact, says that Switzerland never refuses to cooperate on extraditions. Swiss law stipulates that only national security matters can prevent an extradition from happening and Bertossa underlines that this would not have been the case for Polanski. In his opinion, Polanski is subject to the law as everyone else is and to ask to be exempt from a conviction for being a famous artist is, in his words, ”shocking.”  Most Swiss agree that Polanski should be extradited. We shall not forget that Polanski’s ‘affaire’ comes at a particularly sensitive moment for Switzerland following the passing of legislation which denies any statute of limitations for crimes related to pedophilia.

This position is mirrored also by French web forums where users seem to agree on the fact that Polanski should be judged as everyone else for what he did, and that any mobilization for him would simply be by “arrogant, exhibitionist elites fighting on a white horse for a V.I.P. pedophile.”

Simultaneously, we have the French elite’s reaction which, in all fairness, is quite a peculiar one.

Bernard Kouchner, the French Minister of Foreign and European Affairs, asked US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to intervene in freeing the director. Mrs. Clinton refused only to have the French Minister of Culture, Fréderic Mitterand, point out that the ‘bad guy’ in this story would be the “scary face of America” that imprisoned Polanski, as opposed to the “generous” one that would let him go.

Furthermore, a petition to release Polanski was signed by a global committee of artists including Martin Scorsese, Julian Schnabel, Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch.

Another point of view comes from Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of France’s liberal Green Party, who has become a voice of opposition against the cultural environment defending Polanski. In an interview with Le Monde, Cohn-Bendit said that to state that the 60s and 70s were “a completely different time” to which today’s rules and laws are not applicable is not correct. The drugging and raping of a child was a crime even then, he says.

Luc Chatel, a French government spokesman, underlined the desire to not interfere with the Swiss and American judicial systems, but also expressed concern over the “emotion” caused by this belated arrest. In fact, there appears to be growing unease within the UMP, the conservative party of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Nadine Morano, French Secretary of State for Family Affairs, has refrained for issuing any statements on the Polanski affair while two MPs from the UMP vocally expressed their concern about the institutional support that Roman Polanski has been receiving.

However, the pro-Polanski endorsements seem to be abating.

Popular outcry has silenced most of Polanski supporters. While in France and Switzerland web communities, newspapers and certain politicians voiced their outrage, the most effective example of ’shutting-up’ the Polanksi supporters was seen in America. After stating on ABC’s The View that what Polanski did “wasn’t rape-rape,” (Watch video below) TV personality Whoopi Goldberg was forced to apologize and recant her statement.

The case is most likely to find its end in America anyway. But until now, it has provided an in-depth account on the relations between public opinion and cultural elites from France to the United States.

And those relations are, as incredible as it may seem, very similar indeed.