Just two weeks ago Chile was desperately combating with foreign support thousands of acres of bushfires out of control, but now over the weekend rainstorms and landslides killed four and contaminated a major river, forcing authorities to cut off drinking water to four million people in the capital Santiago, authorities said.
The Chilean Navy rescued 61-year-old Australian skipper Shane Freeman after his yacht Mushka was knocked down and dismasted 300 nautical miles west of Chile. The Australian was on his way to the Sunday Times Golden Globe race’s start line in the UK in his Tradewind 35 class yacht when the incident happened on 18 February 2017.
Punta Arenas is enjoying a record cruise season with over 20.000 visitors in the last week according to the numbers released by the port's authority. This includes the 4.000 which landed over the weekend from the Silver Spirit, Queen Victoria and Stella Australis.
Greenpeace has urged Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi to stop expanding its salmon farming operations in Magallanes, as part of its new global campaign focused on protecting the seas of Chilean Patagonia. The launch of the campaign, “Save the seas at the end of the world,” brought together people and activists who gathered in lighthouses along Chile's nearly 4,000 kilometres coastline to claim protection for ecosystems of the southern seas.
Workers at BHP Billiton's Escondida copper mine in Chile, the world's largest, walked off the job on Thursday in a strike that threatens to disrupt the international supply of the widely used metal. It said no miners arrived for morning work aboard buses that normally carry upwards of 1,200 workers per shift to the vast deposit, which accounted for about 6% of global production in 2015.
An estimated 149,000 salmon that were being transported to a site of Nova Austral located in the Magallanes Region of Chile, to be stocked, presumably died because of a toxic microalga.The company's general manager, Nicos Nicolaides, said that the death of 105,000 fish of 210 grams that were transported by the ship Don Pedro and another 44,000 fish of 420 grams carried by the ship Maria Ines, occurred near Gulf Penas.
A Chilean professor from the Chilean British University in Santiago will be arriving in the Falkland Islands on Saturday to begin the implementation process of the MOU signed between the Islands government and the university to have Chilean students complete their degree levels in Falklands.
The alfonsin, the orange roughy and the cod, as well as a variety of species of fragile environments, are part of the ecosystem that is now located in the new Coastal Marine Protected Area of Multiple Uses (AMCP-MU) called Mar de Juan Fernandez, placed in the archipelago of the same name.
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet on Wednesday denied reports she received financial support for her 2013 campaign from a construction conglomerate that is involved in Brazil's huge Petrobras corruption scandal. Grupo OAS is among dozens of Brazilian companies that are embroiled in a kickback scheme that is the biggest corruption scandal in Brazil's history.
Authorities in Chile have detained 43 people suspected of stoking some of the deadly forest fires that have killed 11 people and destroyed large swaths of land, according to President Michelle Bachelet.