South America

Brazil Trade Surplus Doubles

Friday, 22 October 2004

Direct foreign investments in Brazil have risen sharply in October and should reach US$ 1.6 billion, up from US$ 646 million in September.
The forecast was made by the head of Brazil's Economic Department at the Central Bank, Altamir Lopes, who reports that up to October 20 total inflow of foreign investments had already reached US$1.1 billion.
Lopes went on to say that the now constant surpluses in Brazil's current transactions have established what he called "a very calm situation allowing us to even reduce our foreign debt."
He also pointed out that private sector debt is down, a factor which alleviates the country's vulnerability to shocks coming from abroad.
September was the fifth consecutive month that Brazil registered a trade surplus of more than US$ 3 billion.
That has a positive impact on current transaction, with the result that the balance of payments surplus is now running at over US$ 9.6 billion, more than double what it was for the whole of 2003 (US$ 4 billion).
In conclusion, Lopes says the outlook is good, even though a lot of interest payments fall due this month.
He says the Central Bank is forecasting a balance of payments surplus of US$ 900 million.

BDWN

Chile Escondida 9Mo Copper Output +17.5% At 892,895 Tons

Friday October 22, 2004

SANTIAGO - Chile's Escondida mine, the world's largest privately- held copper supplier, produced 892,895 metric tons of copper in the first nine months of 2004, up 17.5% on the year, the BHP Billiton PLC (BHP) unit said Friday.
In the third quarter, it produced 294,902 tons of copper, with 256,878 tons in concentrates and 38,024 tons in cathodes.
Escondida produced 53,159 ounces of gold in concentrates during the third quarter and 166,200 ounces from January through September, it added without providing comparative data.
Escondida is owned 57.5% by Anglo-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton, 30% by Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto PLC (RTP), 10% by a Mitsubishi-led Japanese consortium, and 2.5% by the International Finance Corporation.

BDWN

Hale man killed on trip to Bolivia

22-10-2004 :A B&Q worker from Farnham was killed when he was thrown from a quad bike while on a work trip to Bolivia, an inquest heard on Monday.
Graham Reeves, 36, was with a colleague sampling garden furniture at a factory in Santa Cruz when one of the officials there took them out for a four-hour ride in the forest on the machines.
A coroner heard they were nearly back when Mr Reeves, of Folly Lane, Upper Hale, veered off the road and was catapulted from the bike, landing on his head in a concrete ditch.
Gerard Magill said he was on the trip with Mr Reeves, who had been to Bolivia before, and said he had always wanted to go out quad biking, if he ever returned.
He said in a statement to Basingstoke Coroner’s Court that on the journey back he noticed his colleague driving alongside him getting into difficulties.
He said: “I looked over at Graham as he veered off to the left. He was standing up on the bike as though he was trying to ride it out. The bike went nose down and flipped over. It would have been travelling at about 20 – 30 mph.”
He said that he tried to give Mr Reeves heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but could find no pulse.
Coroner Andrew Bradley, who recorded a verdict of accidental death, said: “The only comfort that can be taken was that he was having a good time and died doing something he enjoyed.
“That was snatched from him ,but he would have had very little knowledge of what happened.”

BDWN

Update 1: Brazil Unemployment Falls to 10.9 Percent

10.22.2004

Unemployment in Brazil fell to 10.9 percent in September, the lowest rate so far this year, the government's statistics institute said Friday.
The September unemployment rate was down from the 11.4 percent registered in August.
The result marks the resumption of a steady decline in unemployment begun in the second quarter as Brazil's economy started to pick up steam. The jobless rate had unexpectedly risen in August, catching economists off-guard and disappointing Brazilians hoping the growing economy will mean a steady increase in jobs.
Brazil's economy is expected to grow over 4 percent this year after a string of interest rate cuts unleashed a wave of growth in the second quarter. However, inflation pressures forced Brazil's central bank to start raising interest rates again last month, and some economists worry the tighter credit could slow the economy in 2005.

BDWN

Brazil Fights for Right to Produce Nuclear Fuel

The publicity stirred up around the inspection of a Brazilian uranium enrichment plant is a ”fabricated controversy” that could be aimed at hindering the national development of the nuclear power industry, says a University of Sao Paolo physicist.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 (IPS) - The publicity stirred up around the inspection of a Brazilian uranium enrichment plant is a ”fabricated controversy” that could be aimed at hindering the national development of the nuclear power industry.
This allegation, put forward by physicist Aquilino Senra Martínez, is based on his contention that the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could monitor Brazil's production of nuclear fuel without visually inspecting all of the equipment involved in the process.
At the moment, Brazil's refusal to allow inspectors access to certain equipment in the plant could prevent it from receiving the IAEA approval it needs to move forward with its nuclear power program.
Past experience has also contributed to these suspicions. Martínez, a graduate school professor of engineering at the University of Sao Paolo, told IPS about the difficulties faced by Brazil in the 1980s in purchasing supercomputers, due to claims that they could be used for the production of long-range nuclear weapons.
The U.S. ban on the sale of this technology to Brazil seriously hampered the development of the South American nation's aeronautical industry. The country was also forced to install the headquarters of its meteorological forecasting centre outside Sao José dos Campos, the Brazilian aerospace technology capital, 100 kilometres from Sao Paolo, in order to have access to a supercomputer.
Brazil has developed new technology for enriching uranium that is still at the pilot, not commercial, stage, Martínez stressed. In order to produce enough fuel to supply all of the country's nuclear power plants, thousands of the new Brazilian-designed centrifuges would be needed, and this would require importing a great many components, he added.
The doubts raised as to the purely peaceful objectives of Brazil's nuclear programme could hinder its ability to import the necessary equipment and components, and this, Martínez believes, is the whole reason behind the ”fabricated controversy”.
Three IAEA inspectors concluded a three-day visit to Brazil's nuclear facilities on Wednesday. They held meetings with the country's National Nuclear Energy Commission, and spent over six hours on Tuesday at the plant in Resende, 160 kilometres from Rio de Janeiro, where uranium is enriched to produce fuel.
The Brazilian government, however, would not allow a visual inspection of the centrifuges used in the enrichment process, arguing the need to protect industrial secrets. The innovative, cost-reducing technology was hidden behind panels during the inspectors' visit so as not to reveal the number, size and shape of the machines.
Now the IAEA will have to decide, based on the inspectors' report, whether it will accept the restrictions imposed by Brazil and move on to the next stage, a more detailed inspection two weeks from now to fully determine that the plant is used solely to produce energy, and not for nuclear weapons.
Brazil has been refusing an unrestricted inspection since April, and this has led to speculation over possible irregularities, such as the illegal acquisition of ”black market” components from Pakistan. The government hopes that the small concessions made to the inspection team will be enough to satisfy the U.N. agency.
Without IAEA approval, which the government hopes to receive next month, Brazil would not be able to produce fuel for its two nuclear power plants.
Edson Kuramoto, the director of the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Association, which represents 1,200 technicians from this sector, told IPS that Brazil has the right to protect its technology. The country has never opposed an inspection, he explained, but is simply negotiating the procedures involved, something that is perfectly normal in the case of new facilities.
The initial goal for Brazil's uranium enrichment programme is to achieve self-sufficiency in supplying fuel for its own nuclear power plants, which would allow it to save the 14 million dollars annually that are currently spent on importing fuel.
The construction of a third nuclear power plant, currently under study by the government, would increase domestic demand to a scale that would make it economically viable to carry out the entire nuclear cycle, from mining to enriching the uranium for use as fuel, right in Brazil. This has long been a goal of the sector, Kuramoto noted.
Brazil has been insisting on the right to keep its new technology a secret because it claims that the centrifuges it has developed are more efficient and consume less energy.
There are currently only five countries in the world -- the United States, Canada, France, the United Kingdom and Russia -- that produce nuclear fuel, Kuramoto noted, and their plants have been in operation for many years.
Because Brazil's uranium enrichment plant is much more recent and uses brand new technology, it is only natural that it would be more efficient, he asserted.
For his part, Martínez paraphrased, ”He who does it last does it best,” whether in computers or any other industry. As a result, the entry of a new competitor like Brazil into this exclusive club poses a threat to those who currently control the market, and will obviously meet with resistance, he added.
Given its large uranium deposits, Brazil has the potential to be a major player in the world nuclear fuel market, he said.

BDWN

ARGENTINA: City's Coke sales banned in tax battle

22 Oct 2004

A city in the north of Argentina has banned the sale of Coca-Cola, according to reports from local news agencies.
The city of La Rioja has fallen out with Coke over a tax dispute with a local distributor, EFE News Service reported today.
The Catamarca Rioja Refrescos company is apparently refusing to pay any of the “entry tax” the municipal government is levying on Coca-Cola products they sell.
The ban on Coke sales has been in place since Tuesday the report said.
La Rioja is taxing the distributor 0.3 pesos (10 cents) on every litre of Coca-Cola soft drinks it stocks in its jurisdiction.
“The entry tax is an internal tariff and that is expressly prohibited by the national constitution,” Argentine Coca-Cola Bottlers Association chief Wenceslao Luiggi Arias told the business daily Infobae.

BDWN

Southern Peru Copper Corp 3Q Net $131.9M Vs $36.1M

Fiday October 2004

LIMA (Dow Jones)--Robust metal prices and stronger sales helped lift Southern Peru Copper Corp.'s (PCU) third quarter net earnings to $131.9 million, well above the $36.1 million net earning posted in the same quarter a year before.
Sales of products were $428.1 million in the third quarter compared with $ 209.5 million in the same quarter of the previous year, the company said in a press release Friday.
For the third quarter, earnings per share were $1.65 compared with earnings per share of $0.45 for the same quarter of 2003.
"The improvement in earnings for the third quarter of 2004 is principally due to the continued robust metal prices and the slight increase in sales of company products," company chief executive Oscar Gonzalez Rocha said.
The third quarter earnings were higher than expected.
Brokerage Centura SAB had forecast that Southern Peru Copper would post third quarter net earnings of $115.3 million, while Banco de Credito had said expected Southern Peru Copper to post a third-quarter net profit of $129.7 million.
For the first nine months of 2004, net earnings were $339.7 million, or diluted earnings per share of $4.25, compared to $76.1 million, or diluted earnings per share of 95 cents after the cumulative effect of a change in accounting principle, which reduced earnings per share by two cents for the first nine months of 2003, the company said.
Sales were $428.1 million in the third quarter of 2004 compared with $209.5 million in the third quarter of 2003.
Sales for the nine months of 2004 totaled $1.09 billion compared with $552.7 million for the same period of the previous year.
Mine copper production increased 4.1% to 226.0 million pounds in the third quarter of 2004 compared with the third quarter of last year.
"This increase of 8.8 million pounds included 7.2 million pounds from the Toquepala mine, 4.5 million pounds from the Cuajone mine and a decrease of 2.9 million pounds in solvent extraction/electrowinning (SX/EW) production," it said.
The increase in output from the Toquepala and Cuajone mines was mainly due to higher ore grades in the 2004 period, it added.
"The principal reason for the 2.9 million pound decrease in SX/EW production was lower grade of PLS (pregnant leaching solution)," it said.
Mine molybdenum production increased 15.5% to 6.3 million pounds in the third quarter of 2004 compared with the third quarter of last year, mainly due to higher ore grade.
Gonzalez Rocha added that: "The Ilo smelter modernization project is moving ahead on schedule with detailed engineering and construction work in process in order to finish by the end of 2006. Additionally, the company's leaching dumps, crushing and conveying project at the Toquepala mine is also progressing on schedule. The leaching dumps project investment through September 2004 is on schedule. The total budgeted investment for this project is $70 million and is planned for completion in mid-2005 with projected annual operating cost savings of $25 million."
Southern Peru Copper also said that it has executed a merger agreement with Americas Mining Corporation, a subsidiary of Grupo Mexico S.A. de C.V. (GMX.MX)
Southern Peru Copper operates mines, smelting and refining capacities in Peru, producing mainly copper but also smaller amounts of silver and molybdenum.
Grupo Mexico owns 54.2% of Southern Peru Copper Corp, while other shareholders include Cerro Trading Co. with 14.2% and Phelps Dodge Overseas Capital Corp. ( PD) with 14.0%.

BDWN

Ecuador's glacier meltdown linked to El Niño

22 October 2004

Andean glaciers are "ultra-sensitive" indicators of climate change, capable of recording variations that occur even within a decade, says a team of Ecuadorian and French researchers.
Bernard Francou, of the French Institute of Research for Development, and colleagues spent eight years documenting the relationship between the El Niño - Southern Oscillation (ENSO) — a periodic warming and cooling of the Pacific Ocean and associated changes in air pressure — and the erosion of glaciers in Ecuador.
Their results, published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research, indicate that there is a tight and quantifiable link between ENSO events and the accelerated melting of the Andean glaciers.
Neil Glasser, of the University of Aberystwyth, United Kingdom, says the findings themselves are unsurprising and confirm a previous 'hunch' held by glaciologists.
More importantly, he says, the researchers' "huge effort" in maintaining an eight-year monitoring programme in a difficult environment suggests that past El Niño events could be precisely read in Andean ice cores.
Since understanding past climate change is essential to predicting future events, this could be an invaluable tool. Currently, data on past El Niño events has come from meteorological measurements and records of sea-surface temperatures. But data recorded this way covers only the past few decades.
The sort of data that could be extracted from ice cores, however, would provide information on events that happened from a century ago up to the present day.
Francou agrees with Glasser on this point, but cautions that this will require more research, as 'reading' the indicators in high-altitude ice cores can be very complex.
In the short term, says Glasser, the melting of the glaciers could be seen as good news for the communities living on the slopes beneath them who rely of melting ice for water supplies. In the long term, however, it means that their water supply will gradually dry up as the glaciers are melting faster than the ice is reforming.
Commenting on the value of Francou's team's measurements, Glasser said they would help predict the future rate of run-off from the glaciers. This could in turn help communities plan their water usage.

BDWN

The Virgo Cluster of Galaxies in the Making
VLT Observations of Planetary Nebulae Confirm the Dynamic Youth of Virgo

22-10-2004 -- An international team of astronomers [2] has succeeded in measuring with high precision the velocities of a large number of planetary nebulae [3] in the intergalactic space within the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. For this they used the highly efficient FLAMES spectrograph [4] on the ESO Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory (Chile).
These planetary nebulae stars free floating in the otherwise seemingly empty space between the galaxies of large clusters can be used as "probes" of the gravitational forces acting within these clusters. They trace the masses, visible as well as invisible, within these regions. This, in turn, allows astronomers to study the formation history of these large bound structures in the universe.
The accurate velocity measurements of 40 of these stars confirm the view that Virgo is a highly non-uniform galaxy cluster, consisting of several subunits that have not yet had time to come to equilibrium. These new data clearly show that the Virgo Cluster of galaxies is still in its making.
They also prove for the first time that one of the bright galaxies in the region scrutinized, Messier 87, has a very extended halo of stars, reaching out to at least 65 kpc. This is more than twice the size of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
A young cluster

At a distance of approximately 50 million light-years, the Virgo Cluster is the nearest galaxy cluster. It is located in the zodiacal constellation Virgo (The Virgin) and contains many hundreds of galaxies, ranging from giant and massive elliptical galaxies and spirals like our own Milky Way, to dwarf galaxies, hundreds of times smaller than their big brethren. French astronomer Charles Messier entered 16 members of the Virgo cluster in his famous catalogue of nebulae. An image of the core of the cluster obtained with the Wide Field Imager camera at the ESO La Silla Observatory was published last year as PR Photo 04a/03.
Clusters of galaxies are believed to have formed over a long period of time by the assembly of smaller entities, through the strong gravitational pull from dark and luminous matter. The Virgo cluster is considered to be a relatively young cluster because previous studies have revealed small "sub-clusters of galaxies" around the major galaxies Messier 87, Messier 86 and Messier 49. These sub-clusters have yet to merge to form a denser and smoother galaxy cluster.
Recent observations have shown that the so-called "intracluster" space, the region between galaxies in a cluster, is permeated by a sparse "intracluster population of stars", which can be used to study in detail the structure of the cluster.
Cosmic wanderers

The first discoveries of intracluster stars in the Virgo cluster were made serendipitously by Italian astronomer, Magda Arnaboldi (Torino Observatory, Italy) and her colleagues, in 1996. In order to study the extended halos of galaxies in the Virgo cluster, with the ESO New Technology Telescope at La Silla, they searched for objects known as "planetary nebulae" [3].
Planetary nebulae (PNe) can be detected out to large distances from their strong emission lines. These narrow emission lines also allow for a precise measure of their radial velocities. Planetary Nebulae can thus serve to investigate the motions of stars in the halo regions of distant galaxies.
In their study, the astronomers found several planetary nebulae apparently not related to any galaxies but moving in the gravity field of the whole cluster. These "wanderers" belonged to a newly discovered intracluster population of stars.
Since these first observations, several hundreds of these wanderers have been discovered. They must represent the tip of the iceberg of a huge population of stars swarming among the galaxies in these enormous clusters. Indeed, as planetary nebulae are the final stage of common low mass stars - like our Sun - they are representative of the stellar population in general. And as planetary nebulae are rather short-lived (a few tens of thousand years - a blitz on astronomical timescales), astronomers can estimate that one star in about 8,000 million of solar-type stars is visible as a planetary nebula at any given moment. There must thus be a comparable number of stars in between galaxies as in the galaxies themselves. But because they are diluted in such a huge volume, they are barely detectable.
Because these stars are predominantly old, the most likely explanation for their presence in the intracluster space is that they formed within individual galaxies, which were subsequently stripped of many of their stars during close encounters with other galaxies during the initial stages of cluster formation. These "lost" stars were then dispersed into intracluster space where we now find them.
Thus planetary nebulae can provide a unique handle on the number, type of stars and motions in regions that may harbour a substantial amount of mass. Their motions contain the fossil record of the history of galaxy interaction and the formation of the galaxy cluster. Measuring the speed of dying stars

The international team of astronomers [2] went on further to make a detailed study of the motions of the planetary nebulae in the Virgo cluster in order to determine its dynamical structure and compare it with numerical simulations. To this aim, they carried out a challenging research programme, aimed at confirming intracluster planetary nebula candidates they found earlier and measuring their radial velocities in three different regions ("survey fields") in the Virgo cluster core.
This is far from an easy task. The emission in the main Oxygen emission line from a planetary nebula in Virgo is comparable to that of a 60-Watt light bulb at a distance of about 6.6 million kilometres, about 17 times the average distance to the Moon. Furthermore intracluster planetary nebula samples are sparse, with only a few tens of planetary nebulae in a quarter of a degree square sky field - about the size of the Moon. Spectroscopic observations thus require 8 metre class telescopes and spectrographs with a large field of view. The astronomers had therefore to rely on the FLAMES-GIRAFFE spectrograph on the VLT [4], with its relatively high spectral resolution, its field of view of 25 arcmin and the possibility to take up to 130 spectra at a time.
The astronomers studied a total of 107 stars, among which 71 were believed to be genuine intracluster planetary candidates. They observed between 21 and 49 objects simultaneously for about 2 hours per field. The three parts of the Virgo core surveyed contain several bright galaxies (Messier 84, 86, 87, and NGC 4388) and a large number of smaller galaxies. They were chosen to represent different entities of the cluster.
The spectroscopic measurements could confirm the intracluster nature of 40 of the planetary nebulae studied. They also provided a wealth of knowledge on the structure of this part of the Virgo cluster.
In The Making
In the first field near Messier 87 (M87), the astronomers measured a mean velocity close to 1250 km/s and a rather small dispersion around this value. Most stars in this field are thus physically bound to the bright galaxy M87, in the same way as the Earth is bound to the Sun. Magda Arnaboldi explains: "This study has led to the remarkable discovery that Messier 87 has a stellar halo in approximate dynamical equilibrium out to at least 65 kpc, or more than 200,000 light-years. This is more than twice the size of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and was not known before."
The velocity dispersion observed in the second field, which is far away from bright galaxies, is larger than in the first one by a factor four. This very large dispersion, indicating stars moving in very disparate directions at different speeds, also tells us that this field most probably contains many intracluster stars whose motions are barely influenced by large galaxies. The new data suggest as a tantalizing possibility that this intracluster population of stars could be the leftover from the disruption of small galaxies as they orbit M87.
The velocity distribution in the third field, as deduced from FLAMES spectra, is again different. The velocities show substructures related to the large galaxies Messier 86, Messier 84 and NGC 4388. Most likely, the large majority of all these planetary nebulae belong to a very extended halo around Messier 84.
Ortwin Gerhard (University of Basel, Switzerland), member of the team, is thrilled: "Taken together these velocity measurements confirm the view that the Virgo Cluster is a highly non-uniform and unrelaxed galaxy cluster, consisting of several subunits. With the FLAMES spectrograph, we have thus been able to watch the motions in the Virgo Cluster, at a moment when its subunits are still coming together. And it is certainly a view worth seeing!"

Notes

[1]: The University of Basel Press Release on this topic is available at http://www.zuv.unibas.ch/uni_media/2004/20041022virgo.html.

[2]: The members of the team are Magda Arnaboldi (INAF, Osservatorio di Pino Torinese, Italy), Ortwin Gerhard (Astronomisches Institut, Universität Basel, Switzerland), Alfonso Aguerri (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Spain), Kenneth C. Freeman (Mount Stromlo Observatory, ACT, Australia), Nicola Napolitano (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, The Netherlands), Sadanori Okamura (Dept. of Astronomy, University of Tokyo, Japan), and Naoki Yasuda (Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo, Japan).
[3]: Planetary nebulae are Sun-like stars in their final dying phase during which they eject their outer layers into surrounding space. At the same time, they unveil their small and hot stellar core which appears as a "white dwarf star". The ejected envelope is illuminated and heated by the stellar core and emits strongly in characteristic emission lines of several elements, notably oxygen (at wavelengths 495.9 and 500.7 nm). Their name stems from the fact that some of these nearby objects, such as the "Dumbbell Nebula" (see ESO PR Photo 38a/98) resemble the discs of the giant planets in the solar system when viewed with small telescopes.
[4]: FLAMES, the Fibre Large Array Multi-Element Spectrograph, is installed at the 8.2-m VLT KUEYEN Unit Telescope. It is able to observe the spectra of a large number of individual, faint objects (or small sky areas) simultaneously and covers a sky field of no less than 25 arcmin in diameter, i.e., almost as large as the full Moon. It is the result of a collaboration between ESO, the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, the Observatoire de Genève-Lausanne, and the Anglo Australian Observatory (AAO).

BDWN