Free Republic

Snippet: "Iran and its terrorist proxy groups’ influence in Latin America remains a troubling security threat to the region and world, experts said at a congressional hearing on Tuesday."

Chili tastes are highly personal, often inflexible and loaded with preconceptions — the political party of culinary offerings. For some people raised in Texas, the notion of beans is akin to cat food, dismissed with derision as filler. Some chili cooks believe flavor rises and falls on cumin levels; others say the story begins and ends with dried chiles. Some like a rich beefy stock, and there are those who extol the entanglement of bacon. Poultry and venison have their place (beef purists blanch), and vegetarian chili is met largely with guffaws except by the people who smilingly bring it...

NASA Video Captures Stunning Volcano Eruption View from Space

Explanation: There is a road that connects the Northern to the Southern Cross but you have to be at the right place and time to see it. The road, as pictured above, is actually the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy; the right place, in this case, is dark Laguna Cejar in Salar de Atacama of Northern Chile; and the right time was in early October, just after sunset. Many sky wonders were captured then, including the bright Moon, inside the Milky Way arch; Venus, just above the Moon; Saturn and Mercury, just below the Moon; the Large and...

My augmentation is "purely" spirit led and guided every step of the way FOR MY WORD IS IN YOU , nothing lacking or missing FOR I AM THE WORD AND THE SPIRIT so do not be anxious that something is missing FOR I AM WITH YOU and will "never" forsake you and this is why I AM your Yes and Amen to all you do in and through Me! Acts 17:27-29 Amplified Bible (AMP) 27 So that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after Him and find Him, although He is not far from each...

A soccer shirt is igniting a war of words between Chile’s Jewish and Palestinian communities, after a local club brought politics to the football field and offended the country’s Jews. […] Many are outraged because shirts that include the number “1” show the numeral in the shape of Israel and the Palestinian territories, implying all the land is Palestinian and basically ignoring the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. …

Explanation: From a radiant point in the constellation of the Twins, the annual Geminid meteor shower rained down on planet Earth over the past few weeks. Recorded near the shower's peak over the night of December 13 and 14, the above skyscape captures Gemini's shooting stars in a four-hour composite from the dark skies of the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. In the foreground the 2.5-meter du Pont Telescope is visible as well as the 1-meter SWOPE telescope. The skies beyond the meteors are highlighted by Jupiter, seen as the bright spot near the image center, the central band of...

Chile’s former president Michelle Bachelet won in a runoff election this Sunday, afterfailing to obtain a majority of votes in November’s first round. She has now cleared the path to a second term as president of Chile, with 62 percent of the vote, bettering the 37 percent garnered by her childhood playmate, economist, and recent minister of labor and social security, Evelyn Matthei. She did win a majority of votes on Sunday, but that’s only half the story. As US author and humorist Mark Twain famously mused, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Leftism: Chile has long been a global model of free-market economics. But on Sunday, it elected socialist Michelle Bachelet, who ran on a platform of tax hikes and "free" education. What drives a country to reject success? Bachelet took an astonishing 62% of the vote against her more conservative rival, Evelyn Matthei, who drew just 38%. It wasn't entirely surprising: Bachelet projected a cheery, confident, maternal demeanor and made few gaffes, quite unlike the less polished Matthei. She also had a good record: As president from 2006 to 2010, she left office with a phenomenal 84% popularity rating — in...

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) - Chile's once and future leader Michelle Bachelet easily won Sunday's presidential runoff, returning center-left parties to power by promising profound social changes in response to years of street protests. Bachelet won 62 percent of the vote, the most decisive victory in eight decades of Chilean elections. Her conservative rival, Evelyn Matthei only got 37 percent of the vote and conceded defeat in the worst performance for the right in two decades. Bachelet needs the momentum of her resounding victory to strengthen her mandate and try to overcome congressional opposition to fulfill her promises. The 62-year old...

This Sunday, Chileans will head to the polls for the final round of voting in this year’s presidential elections. Constituents choosing to participate will vote for the second time in less than a month, in a runoff election between socialist candidate Michelle Bachelet and the recent minister of labor and social security, Evelyn Matthei.

Chilean presidential candidate, Evelyn Matthei, recently met with evangelicals to discuss her biblically conservative agenda, which she vows to maintain if elected president during the nation's Dec. 15 election. "I pledge to continue with the future of our government and God willing if I get there, nothing will be done that goes against what the Bible says," said Matthei, during her speech, according to her campaign website. "Marriage is between a man and a woman, and life is cared for from the moment of conception until natural death. No to abortion, no to euthanasia. That is a commitment I make...

Only a few years ago it seemed that the free market changes in Chile had created an irreversible positive change. Over the last 30 years I have traveled frequently to the area and have witnessed that no other country in the region can boast of similar positive changes. Also, since the return to democracy, the presidential elections have been very competitive. Although the candidates have varied on their economic ideas, the differences between them were negligible. The left-center coalition that won last week’s election, however, has enough bad ideas and power in congress to put an end to the positive...

Highly secretive trade agreement have been published on the WikiLeaks website with 95 pages that were taken from the recent TPP or better known as Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The main aim of the TPP is to unite nations such as the United States, Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, New Zealand and Brunei that combine with itself about 40% of gross domestic product. Barack Obama and other leaders of the outstanding 11 states were keeping the TPP in secrecy for a lot of years. According to the officials, the agreement would stir up the economies of those...

The results are finally in regarding the death of Nobel-Prize winning poet Pablo Neruda — he was not murdered. Friends of the poet launched an investigation based on the testimony of his former driver Manuel Arayas in 2011. According to Arayas, Neruda had been poisoned in September 1973 by agents of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship and the official documents, which claimed he died from cancer, were hiding the truth. Judge Mario Carroza picked up the case, ordering the exhumation of Pablo Neruda in April of this year. After a long list of tests and forensic procedures, including those conducted...

President Obama and his senior cabinet officials are mounting a big push to bolster foreign direct investment in the US – amid evidence that America is falling behind other countries in the race for global capital. The evidence? How about the USA being near the bottom in the Americas with Chile leading and the USA down at the bottom with Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela. Even Paraguay has a higher FDI as a percentage of GDP! fdiamericas “On the heels of the manufactured crises in Washington, it’s time for folks to come together and focus on doing everything we can...

IRGC and the spiritual vacuum of Latin American leftists The following is a glimpse of the kind of thing I often see while researching the activities of the IRGC (writ large) in Latin America. Communism fails to provide for the spiritual needs of leftwing political activists, and the Islamic Republic of Iran seems to have done a pretty good job of inserting themselves and the Khomeinist version of Shiism into that void. (Either that or the IRI is throwing lots of money around and the leftists are whores, which is certainly possible, but for the moment I'll take the more...

Pensions: In Chile, a major study shows the nation's private retirement accounts provide workers pensions worth 87% of their salaries, 73% of that from profits on savings. So much for the canard about the perils of markets. The story was front-page news in Chile's largest newspapers, El Mercurio and La Tercera, on Sept. 3, a powerful affirmation of what former Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain called "The Chilean Model" of private retirement accounts. The study of 28,000 households by Dictuc, a consultancy affiliated with the Catholic University of Chile, showed that male workers who contributed just 10%...

Songs by the Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias were used "to inflict psychological and physical damage" on prisoners detained during the military dictatorship of Chile's Augusto Pinochet. Dr Katia Chornik, a researcher at Manchester University, has looked into how the military dictator employed songs by Spain's most internationally celebrated singer as part of a "torture soundtrack". Other songs by former Beatle George Harrison, Italian pop artist Gigi l'Amoroso and the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange were played over and over again at high volume in the countless torture houses and concentration camps of Chile's dictatorship years. "Pinochet's system used...

On September 11, 1973 the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet slapped Fidel Castro so smartly that his Stalinist regime (and its dutiful U.S. Media minions) are still sniveling and sniffling and wiping away tears of shock, pain and humiliation. True to form, The New York Times leads the sniveling. They just published an article decrying the Chilean “tragedy” (i.e. Chile saving itself from Castroism with a military coup and today the richest and freest nation in Latin America.) The article’s author Ariel Dorfman is a former advisor to Chile’s Marxist president and Castro acolyte Salvador Allende. This same...