Drill reaches in Chile mine...[ 1816 ]

Drill reaches trapped men in Chile mine

 

The rescue operation is still expected to take several weeks

 

BBC., 17 September 2010 Last updated at 16:37 GMT 

A drill boring a rescue hole has now reached the 33 Chilean miners trapped since 5 August, officials have said.

However, it will take weeks for the 630m (2,060ft) deep hole to be redrilled to allow the miners to be pulled out. The width is now 30cm (12in) and will need to be about 70cm.

It is hoped the men can be freed by early November.

They were trapped when the main access tunnel to the San Jose copper and gold mine near Copiapo collapsed.

The 32 Chileans and one Bolivian have survived longer than any other group trapped underground.

Three bore holes have already reached the men to supply them with food, water and medicine.

Camp Hope

Atacama region Governor Ximena Matas confirmed that the Schramm T-130 probe had reached the cavern holding the trapped miners.

The T-130 is Plan B of three drilling operations and is expected to be the fastest.

The T-130 has had its problems, breaking a drill bit last week. The operation resumed on Tuesday.

Plan A is the Strata 950 and is expected to reach the men by Christmas.

Assembly of Plan C, the giant RIG-422 drill, was completed on Thursday but it has not yet started drilling. It has a two-month rescue timetable.

Chile celebrates its bicentennial independence celebrations on Saturday and the miners and their families are expected to raise the Chilean flag and sing the national anthem.

The men were found to be alive 12 days after the collapse and relatives have since set up Camp Hope at the pithead.

Viva México! Viva la Independencia!..[ 1815 ]

 Mexico Celebrates 200 Years of Independence from Spain 

September 16th, 2010

Question: On what day is Mexican independence celebrated?

If you said Cinco de Mayo, a national holiday in Mexico in honor of a military victory in 1862 in Battle of Puebla over the French forces of Napoleon III, you’d be in good company, but you’d also be wrong.

On this day in 1810 Miguel Hidalgo issued El Grito de Dolores, the battle cry of Mexican independenceThe day celebrated as Mexican Independence Day is September 16 and predates Cinco de Mayo by 52 years. It was 200 years ago today, on September 16, 1810, that Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, called the Father of Mexican Independence, issued his famous Grito de Dolores (the “Cry of Dolores”), which became the battle cry of the Mexican War of Independence from Spain. In commemoration of his cry, on the eve of Mexican Independence Day the president of Mexico shouts a version of “el Grito” from the balcony of the National Palace in Mexico City: “Viva México! Viva la Independencia! Vivan los héroes!”

So, what is the context of el Grito and what did Hidalgo accomplish? As Britannica’s article on Mexico discusses,

Warning that the Spaniards would deliver Mexico to the “godless” French, Hidalgo exhorted his followers to fight and die for the Mexican Virgin, Our Lady of Guadalupe. When Hidalgo left his tiny village, he marched with his followers into Guanajuato, a major colonial mining centre peopled by Spaniards and Creoles. There the leading citizens barricaded themselves in a public granary. Hidalgo captured the granary on September 28, but he quickly lost control of his rebel army, which massacred most of the Creole elite and pillaged the town.
Reports of the chaos in Guanajuato fed the support for the viceroy’s efforts to crush the rebellion, lest a full-scale caste war ensue. Royalist forces defeated Hidalgo at the Bridge of Calderón on Jan. 18, 1811, and captured him along with other major insurgent leaders on March 19. On July 31 Hidalgo was executed, ending the first of the political civil wars that were to wrack Mexico for three-fourths of a century.
The Hidalgo cause was taken up by his associate José María Morelos y Pavón, another parish priest. With a small but disciplined rebel army he won control of substantial sections of southern Mexico. The constituent congresses, which Morelos called at Chilpancingo in 1813, issued at Apatzingán in 1814 formal declarations of independence and drafted republican constitutions for the areas under his military control.
At about the same time, Napoleonic troops were withdrawing from Spain, and in 1814 Ferdinand VII returned from involuntary exile. One of his first acts was to nullify Spain’s liberal 1812 constitution. Spanish troops, which were no longer needed to fight the French, were ordered to crush the Morelos revolution. Captured and defrocked, Morelos was shot as a heretic and a revolutionary on Dec. 22, 1815. Scattered but dwindling guerrilla bands kept alive the populist, republican, nationalist tradition of Hidalgo and Morelos.
Mexican independence came about almost by accident when constitutionalists in Spain led a rebellion that, in 1820, forced Ferdinand VII to reinstate the liberal constitution of 1812. Conservatives in Mexico, alarmed that anticlerical liberals would threaten their religious, economic, and social privileges, saw independence from Spain as a method of sparing New Spain from such changes. They found a spokesman and able leader in Agustín de Iturbide, a first-generation Creole. Iturbide, who had served as a loyal royalist officer against Hidalgo and others, had been given command of royal troops with which he was to snuff out remnants of the republican movement, then headed by the future president Vicente Guerrero.
While ostensibly fighting Guerrero, however, Iturbide was in fact negotiating with him to join a new independence movement. In 1821 they issued the so-called Iguala Plan (Plan de Iguala), a conservative document declaring that Mexico was to be independent, that its religion was to be Roman Catholicism, and that its inhabitants were to be united, without distinction between Mexican and European. It stipulated further that Mexico would become a constitutional monarchy under Ferdinand VII, that he or some Spanish prince would occupy the throne in Mexico City, and that an interim junta would draw up regulations for the election of deputies to a congress that would write a constitution for the monarchy.
United as the Army of the Three Guarantees (independence, union, preservation of Roman Catholicism), the combined troops of Iturbide and Guerrero gained control of most of Mexico by the time Juan O’Donojú, appointed Spanish captain general, arrived in the viceregal capital. Without money, provisions, or troops, O’Donojú felt himself compelled to sign the Treaty of Córdoba on Aug. 24, 1821. The treaty officially ended New Spain’s dependence on Old Spain, renamed the nation the Mexican Empire, and declared that the congress was to elect an emperor if no suitable European prince could be found. In one of the ironies of history, a conservative Mexico had gained independence from a temporarily liberal Spain.

El Grito kicked off more than a decade of struggle in which much of Latin America received its independence from Spain, and mid-September to mid-October is a month set aside to honor the achievements of Latinos. In honor of that month, Britannica presents Hispanic Heritage in the Americas, a special feature, which explores the people, places, events, and traditions that have shaped—and continue to shape—the vibrant Hispanic culture that thrives today in South, Central, and North America.

Photo credits (from top to bottom): Encyclopaedia Britannica; Ann Ronan Picture Library/Heritage-Images; The Granger Collection.

NASA Image of the Day, Sep 16th,,[ 1814 ]

The latest NASA "Image of the Day" image.

Celestial Wonderland

This high forward oblique view of Rima Ariadaeus on the moon was photographed by the Apollo 10 crew in May 1969. Center point coordinates are located at 17 degrees, 5 minutes east longitude and 5 degrees, 0 minutes north latitude. 

The Apollo 10 crew aimed a hand-held 70mm camera at the surface from lunar orbit for a series of images of this area. 

Image Credit: NASA

Πέμπτη, 16 Σεπτέμβριος 2010 7:00:00 πμ

Japan, Selected Columns..[ 1813 ]

Japan, give us a break!

Commuters crowd Nishitetsu Fukuoka Station in Fukuoka on Aug. 17, after the end of the obon holiday. (Mainichi)

(Mainichi Japan) September 16, 2010

Last week my partner came home and said that she may no longer be able to take a lunch break at work.

Apparently, there is resentment among her co-workers that she leaves the office, while they have to stay and eat "bento."

Why can't they leave too? -- Because someone has to answer the phones during the break.

So why not set up a daily rotation system, allowing most to go out while one person stays behind?

Well, that won't work either because everyone is trying to prove how hard they work.

There isn't the space in these columns to discuss issues in depth, so I'm afraid this will sound like a rant. But please Japan -- give me a break.

Time after time I've been in offices here where people feel under pressure not to take time off, for lunches or anything else.

According to a report by Harris Interactive this year, Japanese workers took off an average of 9.3 of their 16.6 legally mandated vacation days.

As anyone who works here knows, even that remarkable statistic hides a lot of pain. Most office workers contribute dozens of hours per month in unpaid overtime. Many don't get proper dinner breaks and toil away into the evening. More than once I've seen friends arrive at 9 p.m. and congratulate themselves on getting home early.

Is it because everyone is so busy they can't afford time off? Of course not -- productivity in Japanese offices is low. Most people could easily do the work they're assigned in half the time.

The really distressing thing is that bosses don't even have to demand this masochistic behavior from employees here -- workers police themselves.

In my partner's offices, as in many, there's a sort of discreet bullying that keeps everyone in line. A "nani-sama" -- who-does-she-think-she-is -- approach that pulls everyone down to the same miserable level.

It made me sad to walk through Tamachi Station in August after the obon holidays and see the grim faces of people who had managed to extract only three days of holiday from their firms before returning to work.

As the economy declines here, this phenomenon is worsening. And that's very unfortunate because decent breaks and holidays could help Japan.

Reformers in Britain and elsewhere discovered over a century ago that happy employees are motivated, productive employees.

Economists say one of Japan's biggest structural problems is chronic underconsumption, in part because millions of workers have so little opportunity to spend their hard-earned cash.

And one more thing: Giving reasonable working hours to men and women would give them more time to meet, fall in love and rescue Japan from its marriage and fertility crisis.

So what's the downside? If there is one, I can't see it. 

(By David McNeill)

(Profile)

David McNeill writes for The Independent and Irish Times newspapers and the weekly Chronicle of Higher Education. He has been in Japan since 2000 and previously spent two years here, from 1993-95 working on a doctoral thesis. He was raised in Ireland.

BP May Plug Its Gulf of Mexico Well..[ 1812 ]

BP May Plug Its Gulf of Mexico Well in Four Days

By Jim Polson - Sep 15, 2010 8:04 PM GMT+0300 Wed Sep 15 17:04:56 GMT 2010

BP Plc may permanently plug in four days the Gulf of Mexico well that caused the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, National Incident Commander Thad Allen said.

A relief well is less than 25 feet (8 meters) from intercepting the damaged Macondo well and is expected to reach the outer cement shell within 24 hours, perhaps earlier, Allen said at a press conference today in Kenner, Louisiana. The relief well will be used to inject mud and cement into any remaining gaps, permanently killing Macondo. Injecting and testing the cement plug may take as long as four days, he said.

“They are almost touching the well,” Allen said. Operators aboard Transocean Ltd.’s Development Driller III rig are testing a new tool intended to measure the distance to the well while drilling. BP said yesterday the drilling bit had been temporarily withdrawn to check the distance using sensors.

The well began leaking oil after an April 20 explosion and fire that killed 11 workers aboard Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. The well gushed an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil before BP capped it on July 15.

BP, based in London, plugged the well’s steel casing with cement in August, and Allen said he wants to assure the space between that casing and the wall that surrounds the hole also is blocked with cement.

Allen also said he’s ordered a “task force” of government, private and academic research vessels to survey a layer of oil more than 3 centimeters (1 inch) thick found Sept. 5 about 16 nautical miles (30 kilometers) from the well by researchers including Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia professor.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jim Polson in New York at jpolson@bloomberg.net