Rockhopper Exploration said that initial data collected from one well “indicated an oil discovery”.

The find would be the first in North Falkland Basin, the area north of the islands currently being explored.

Earlier this year, another exploration company, Desire Petroleum, said its drilling programme had disappointed.

It is currently drilling further wells after it decided to abandon its first oil well.

UK-based Rockhopper said further tests now needed to be carried out on the well.

“We are extremely excited by the results of this well,” said Samuel Moody, managing director of Rockhopper.

Argentina disputes ownership of the islands with the British government, although not many seriously fear a second Falklands War (but not many expected the first one either).

The astonishing argument from U.S. drug warriors to the violence in Juárez to this point has been: the bloodshed means we’re winning. Or put another way, “If thousands of Mexican need to die to keep Americans from getting high, by golly I, American drug war official, am willing to step up and make that sacrifice.” Now that a few Americans have been killed too, that argument will get more difficult to make.

But as O’Grady writes, don’t expect that to lead to any common sense changes in policy. To this point, the Obama administration and the leadership in Congress have made it clear that the only acceptable drug policy in Mexico is more militarization, more force, and more American funding and weapons with which to do it. If thousands more Mexicans have to die on the front lines so America’s politicians can make it marginally more difficult for Americans to ingest mind-altering substances, so be it.

Radley Balko, “Mary O’Grady on Mexico’s Drug War”, The Agitator, 2010-03-22

But to me the strangest and most alarming passage was this one, on page 617. Referring to the optimal speed of transition for countries exiting communism, English writes: “Trudeau’s concerns about making haste too quickly, with potentially disastrous results for the health of any society, were apparent in the mid-Nineties, when Castro’s Cuba, reeling from the impact of the abrupt end of financial support from the Soviet Union, considered opening up its rigid state socialist system. Because of its historic economic ties with Cuba, Canada became involved in discussions with the Cuban government. James Bartleman, then the chief foreign policy advisor to prime minister Jean Chrétien, later indicated that Castro abandoned his plan to loosen socialist restraints after a conversation with Trudeau, who cautioned him about its impact on the social health of his country. No record of Trudeau’s conversation is available, but Bartleman’s account rings true because of Trudeau’s friendship with Castro and his respect for the gains achieved by Cuba in the areas of health and education.”

Fidel must have been deeply grateful for Trudeau’s advice; the Cuban people, not so much.

It must be said that Castro probably welcomed Trudeau’s advice partly because it aligned closely with his preferences anyway . . .

Courtesy of Strategy Page, that’s the USS Bunker Hill (note the deliberate anti-British choice of name for the ship) and the Argentinian frigate ARA Gomez Roca together for operations recently.

With the death toll unchanged at about 800 and aid flowing to southern cities, Chile today began to assess the industrial and economic cost of its earthquake.

After meeting business leaders, President Michelle Bachelet announced a grim summary of damaged industrial plants, ports and destroyed bridges. The cost could be as high as $30bn.

Significant amounts of damage impacted the grape growing areas, as they were in the middle of harvesting the grapes when the quake struck:

Southern ports were closed and inside dozens of bodegas, or wine stores, a river of wine soaked into the soil, raising concerns about damage to the industry. Initial estimates put the quantity of lost wine at 100m bottles, or roughly a sixth of the country’s annual export. Antonio Larrain, general manager of the Chilean Wine Corporation, estimated that 20% of Chile’s stored wine may have been lost. He calculated the value at $300m, which did not include the widespread damage to infrastructure ranging from underground irrigation tubing to warehouses.

Wines of Chile, an industry group, held an emergency meeting today and announced that 12% of the country’s wine production had been lost. Reports from individual wineries suggest that does not represent the true scale of the disaster. “Many wineries that lost 80% of their production are publicly saying just 15% was lost,” said one wine executive who asked not be named, citing the fear that distributors would terminate distribution contracts with wineries most heavily damaged. “This is an incredibly touchy subject,” he said.

The Chilean wine export trade has been a huge growth sector over the last twenty years, and the potential lost revenues could make recovery even more difficult.

Update, 4 March: Ironically, the LCBO’s latest issue of their Vintages magazine features Chilean wine:

The UK has made “all the preparations that are necessary” to protect the Falkland Islands, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said.

Argentina has brought in controls on ships passing through its waters to the islands over UK plans to drill for oil.

Shadow foreign secretary William Hague told the BBC the Royal Navy’s presence in the region should be increased.

The Ministry of Defence has denied reports a naval taskforce is on its way to the Falklands.

While it’s unlikely that we’ll see a re-run of the 1982 Falkland war, recall that it was a reduction in British force in the region that gave Argentina’s military junta the opportunity to invade. Britain appears to have learned from that mistake.

Wildly conflicting death tolls from Haitian officials have raised suspicions that no one really knows how many people died in the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The only thing that seems certain is the death toll is one of the highest in a modern disaster.

A day after Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue raised the official death toll to 230,000, her office put out a statement Wednesday quoting President Rene Preval as saying 270,000 bodies had been hastily buried by the government following the earthquake.

A press officer withdrew the statement, saying there was an error, but then reissued it within minutes. Later Wednesday, the ministry said there was a typo in the figure — the number should have read 170,000.

Even that didn’t clear things up. In the late afternoon, Preval and Lassegue appeared together at the government’s temporary headquarters.

Preval, speaking English, told journalists there were 170,000 dead, apparently referring to the number of bodies contained in mass graves.

Lassegue interrupted him in French, giving a number lower than she had given the previous day: “No, no, the official number is 210,000.”

Preval dismissed her. “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said, again in English.

What is not in dispute is that the death toll was very high, and that even with all the disaster relief efforts from other countries, there will still be many more deaths in the quake’s aftermath. Food, water, and medical aid is still not reaching everyone. That fact reduces the importance of the squabble over macabre numbers to a little bit of political theatre.

Update, 24 February: Radio Netherlands is claiming that the death toll has been vastly over-estimated and thinks the number of casualties will be under 100,000:

Haiti has buried an estimated 52,000 victims since the earthquake on 12 January 2010. More bodies still lie under the rubble, but the total number of casualties will not surpass 100,000 — that’s according to observation and research on the ground in Haiti, carried out by Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

This number is considerably smaller than the number of 217,000 victims the Haitian government claims to have counted so far, and far fewer than the estimated final count of 300,000 mentioned by President René Préval just last Sunday.

NASA’s radar-equipped jet has returned its first 3-D image of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. This false-color image clearly shows the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault extending east of the city.

The image supports a Jan. 21 U.S. Geological Survey report that suggested the section of the fault (indicated by the black arrow above) nearest to Port-au-Prince (yellow arrow) did not slip significantly in the magnitude 7 Jan. 12 earthquake.

The new image, taken by JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar attached to a modified Gulfstream III jet, shows that the ground rupture moved westward from the epicenter. The section of the fault in the image did not rupture, a situation that increases the risk of another significant earthquake in the future.

[. . .]

The colors in the image, which shows a swath of about 12.5 miles, are the result of three different radar polarizations that make vegetation appear green, water appear blue and urban areas look reddish.

I’ve spotted two Haiti-oriented NGOs that readers should stay away from, for reasons of corruption. Simply put, not enough money given to these NGOs actually winds up helping Haitians — too much is spent on lavish luxuries for NGO staff and managers.

[. . .]

I love Wyclef Jean’s sound, but I wouldn’t give a cent to his charity. Jean has been ubiquitous these past weeks raising money for Haiti, and no doubt his tears are real. But financial records from Yele Haiti show that Jean has made sure the first person to get paid from Yele Haiti events was himself — including a staggering $100,000 fee for him to perform at one of his own events (that benefit was cancelled because of his demands) and other gigs that poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into companies he controlled. Here’s one where he took nearly $100,000 out of $150,000 raised. Even if Jean’s fading star could still fetch that on the open market (he can’t — here’s a contract showing he performs for a fraction of that), it’s still outrageous that people donating to Yele Haiti are told the money is going to help Haitians, when the poor Haitian benefiting the most is Wyclef himself.

Best to take Jean for who he is — a talented musician who has helped spread the Haitian creole sound around the world — but put your trust (and money) into accredited charities that take only a modest sum for administration and overhead. The Red Cross is probably your best bet.

I came to the same conclusion, and my donation went to the Canadian Red Cross.

Another corrupt NGO that donors should stay away from is Rights and Democracy (R&D), the ironically-named Canadian government-funded NGO that has recently been rocked by scandal for donating money to a Palestinian terrorist.

R&D has a Haiti program, but like Yele Haiti, an inordinate amount of money received by R&D is spent on their own jet-setting staff. Here’s a 22-page internal audit memo from just two years ago, for example, that looks into a raft of corruption allegations — and unfortunately finds many of them to be true. The review, conducted by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Foreign Affairs found “weak internal controls” over money.

Food handouts were shut off Tuesday to thousands of people at a tent city here when the main U.S. aid agency said the Army should not be distributing the packages.

It was not known whether the action reflected a high-level policy decision at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) or confusion in a city where dozens of entities are involved in aid efforts.

“We are not supposed to get rations unless approved by AID,” Maj. Larry Jordan said.

Jordan said that approval was revoked; water was not included in the USAID decision, so the troops continued to hand out bottles of water. The State Department and USAID did not respond to requests for comment.

Surely not even the most pig-headed rules-lawyer would have required this . . . I hope.

H/T Castle Argghhh.

Update, 21 January: For reasons of incompetence, I forgot to actually include the URL in that link to Castle Argghhh. Fixed now.

While I’m updating the post, this may be relevant:

The MRE (Meals Ready to Eat, in a pouch) are frequently used as emergency rations. The MRE has evolved from its initial introduction in 1983 (12 separate entrees) to today (24 menu entrees). The MREs change from year to year, and new entrees are added in place of others. The U.S. military has generally switched out entrees each year (apparently the notion that such a deal is a zero-sum game seems to persist, as opposed to just adding new ones). This constant evolution has done much to diminish the bad reputations MREs had early on. Back then, the MRE (officially, “Meals, Ready to Eat”) was often called “Meals Rejected by Everyone”.

The United States also has other rations, including variants for cold weather (which has a higher calorie count than the regular MRE – 1540 per meal compared to 1250 for an MRE), and a kosher/halal variant for Jewish and Moslem soldiers (both religions, for instance, forbid the consumption of pork). Vegetarian entrees are provided, as well. The United States also has developed the Humanitarian Daily Ration (HDR), which has three meals and is based on vegetarian entrees to provide a low chance of offending cultural sensibilities. Many of these HDRs were dropped over Afghanistan in late 2001. Several hundred thousand HDRs are stockpiled for disaster relief, and production can be ramped up quickly. MREs and HDRs are particularly attractive because they provide uncontaminated food that does not require refrigeration, in a compact package. The UN, and many other food aid organizations, use the HDR for situations like Haiti.