More than 120 people were killed when the 8.8 magnitude quake struck the South American country early today.

It sent shockwaves out from the epicentre 70 miles from Chile’s second city Concepcion, causing buildings and bridges to collapse and catch fire.

The quake, the most powerful to hit the nation in 50 years, struck around 200 miles south west of the capital Santiago.

As powerful aftershocks caused further problems along the coast, tsunami warnings were issued in 53 countries around the Pacific Ocean – roughly a quarter of the globe.

The tsunami could strike any country in the Pacific, with the US state of Hawaii potentially facing its largest waves since 1964.

Asian, Australian and New Zealand shores were at risk along with the US West Coast and Alaska.

With the Chilean president declaring a “state of catastrophe” and the death toll continuing to rise, British aid organisations deployed teams to help in the aftermath.

Chile is at high risk of earthquakes because it lies on the boundary between the Pacific plate and the South American plate.

The latest quake happened after the Pacific plate pushed down on to the South American plate.

According to seismologists, there is usually around one quake of a magnitude of eight a year while one reaching 8.8 would only be expected every few years.

source :  http://www.independent.co.uk/

As Wednesday became Thursday, Barack Obama went where, in the memory of historians, none of his recent predecessors had been: to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the place where American soldiers killed in foreign wars are brought on their final return home. That night there were 18, all from Afghanistan.

His visit had been kept secret almost until the moment Mr Obama arrived by helicopter from the White House, half an hour after midnight. The small pool of reporters on the 100-mile journey were allowed to witness the “dignified transfer” – as the military call it – of only one of them: Sgt Dale Griffin from Indiana, who died on Tuesday when his vehicle was struck by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan.

But for each of the others the same sequence unfolded. Anxious to avoid implying that these occasions are anything other than bleak and empty, the military doesn’t call them a “ceremony”. But to all intents and purposes, a ceremony is what they are.

First the President walked slowly with an official party up a ramp into the belly of the great, grey C-17 cargo plane. Then the group emerged to form a line of honour, headed by Mr Obama. As he and the other officials saluted, the coffin was carried past, into a white van that would take it to the mortuary on the base. The ritual was repeated 17 times, before the President finally boarded his helicopter and returned to Washington, just before dawn.

Earlier this year the Pentagon relaxed a ban, in force since the 1991 Gulf War, on media coverage of returning war dead. It is now up to their families to decide whether to permit photos and television images of the flag-draped coffins of loved ones.

President George Bush, who ordered the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq, was anything but indifferent to the fate of the men he sent into battle. He spent much time with veterans and relatives of the fallen, and visited wounded soldiers, many of them amputees, in Walter Reed Army Hospital here. But he never went to Dover, and tightened the original ban on reporting from the base.

For Mr Obama the visit will only have underlined how war and its human cost are the toughest part of his, or any Presidency. “It is something I think about each and every day” he said yesterday. And few wars pose tougher challenges than Afghanistan. Sgt Griffin was only one of at least 55 soldiers to have died there in October, the bloodiest month yet.

But despite the sacrifice, this ever- more unpopular conflict has no end in sight. It has now lasted eight years, almost as long as direct US involvement in Vietnam, with which it is increasingly compared. Today, Mr Obama meets the chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff, as he moves towards his most fateful decision in the Oval Office: whether to accede to the request of General Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, for an extra 40,000 soldiers on top of the 65,000 already there.

In the process, he must resolve the uncertainty over why America is there in the first place: to defeat al-Q’aida, to win a war, or to build a nation? But, as he saw himself in the dark early hours of yesterday, whatever he decides, men will die.

In an interview with The Independent the country’s Prime Minister, Dean Barrow, has accused the billionaire Tory party deputy chairman of operating a monopoly and of trying to obscure his interests through a byzantine web of subsidiaries and trusts. Lord Ashcroft has rejected the claims, which he says are politically motivated. But Mr Barrow has vowed to pursue the peer and unpick a series of commercial deals that he claims he has used to “soak” the country in the manner of a colonial overlord.

In particular, he says Lord Ashcroft controlled both of the country’s telecoms firms, and brokered deals that, in effect, left Belize’s taxpayers subsidising his company’s profits.

And according to the Belize’s foreign minister and mission staff, one of Lord Ashcroft’s closest business associates, Mel Flores, has been thrown out of the Belize mission to the United Nations in New York, after the US authorities questioned whether he was a real diplomat.

Mr Barrow, a former lawyer for Lord Ashcroft and the recipient of his political contributions, says he turned on his former ally after discovering the existence of sweetheart deals that the peer negotiated with the previous administration.

“He is a colossus here,” Mr Barrow told The Independent. “It’s never been my understanding that because you contribute to a politician, you own that politician, and I will always do my best to defend the interests of the people of Belize. When that conflicts with any expectations that some political donor might have of me, well I’m sorry for that political donor.”

Lord Ashcroft is one of the Conservative party’s biggest donors and has used his money to fund a highly targeted campaign to win key marginal constituencies for the party.

His problems in Belize are an unwelcome distraction at a time when the peer – who is also the Conservative’s deputy party chairman – is preparing for an election early next year.

The Prime minister of Belize specifically used Lord Ashcroft’s high profile role in the UK to attack the peer: “You would think that government in the UK is so powerful and so diverse that he could not exercise the kind of influence he has been able to here. But there must be a warning in this: if he can he will. Based on my experience, he fully expects that he who pays the piper plays the tune.”

In turn, Lord Ashcroft has turned on the Government of his adopted homeland, accusing the Prime Minister of lying to score party political points. He has no economic interest in telecoms in Belize, he says, and has not had any since selling out in 2003.

The row focuses on Belize’s two telecoms companies – Telemedia, which once had a monopoly in the country, and SpeedNet, a newer rival. The ownership of both firms is obscured by a series of trusts, but in Parliament Mr Barrow claimed both are “ultimately controlled” by Mr Ashcroft.

An agreement in 2005 with a previous Belize government guaranteed Telemedia a certain level of profitability, and the ability to claw back tax if it didn’t reach it. Mr Barrow alleges that since then SpeedNet has been undercharged for using Telemedia’s cell towers and for routing calls through Telemedia’s infrastructure.

In other words, according to the government, SpeedNet’s profits were inflated at Telemedia’s expense, safe in the knowledge that any reduction in profitability at Telemedia can be clawed back from the public purse.

Mr Barrow says he has followed a paper trail that shows that Lord Ashcroft ultimately controls SpeedNet: “77.38% of Speednet is owned by three companies – Callerbar Limited, Riddermark Ventures Limited, and Heaver Holdings Limited. These three companies are … controlled by two of the now notorious Trusts owned by Michael Ashcroft.

The peer’s spokesman, Alan Kilkenny, refused to answer questions about Lord Ashcroft’s relationship with Telemedia and SpeedNet, except to say that Telemedia had been owned by trusts acting for the benefit of charities and its employees.

Last night he launched a personal attack on Mr Barrow. “Normal standards of behaviour, where you can believe what a prime minister says, have gone out the window in Belize,” he said. “You should not believe that Lord Ashcroft is in any way connected. He has had no economic interest in telecoms in Belize for years. If you start from the assumption that Lord Ashcroft is inextricably involved, you are going to end up in completely the wrong place. The Prime Minister knows what the position is. This is a man who has put his son on the new board of the telecoms company. Nothing should be taken at face value.”

The row over Lord Ashcroft’s power in Belize has upended politics in the country. He has been a major figure there since the 1980s, having falling in love with it as a child, when his father, a diplomat, had been posted there by the Foreign Office. The peer made his fortune in the security business, through buying and selling companies, including selling the firm ADT to Tyco International of the US for $5.6bn.

He took citizenship in Belize and his businesses here include the most luxurious hotel complex in the financial capital, Belize City, and the country’s largest bank.

Mr Flores, who has sat on corporate boards and been a trustee for Lord Ashcroft, was trying to renew his diplomatic passport in the spring but officials from the State department’s office of foreign missions telephoned to query his status as an attaché. Mr Flores is described as a “financial consultant” in documents filed by Lord Ashcroft’s companies at the London Stock Exchange.

Mr Barrow said Mr Flores’ diplomatic status was “a fiction” and that he had been using the mission as a business office since Lord Ashcroft was the country’s representative to the UN and funded the office himself. He ruled that the mission should not pursue the renewal of Mr Flores’ diplomatic passport, and he departed in July. He did not return a message left for him in the Turks and Caicos islands yesterday.