South America

The country of Ecuador in South America is waiting patiently for the imminent eruption of the Tungurahua volcano, which has been spewing ash and smoke. Local authorities have already ordered the evacuation of more than 1,000 villagers who live near the foot of the volcano.

The evacuation of the roughly 300 families has been taken as a precautionary measure following the volcano's recent rumblings. The relocated families live in the ten hamlets located on the western slopes of the 5,000-meter volcano.

Representatives for the villagers are requesting that the government resettle the evacuated families in new locations so that they will not have to return to living in the danger zone.

The most recent reports from Ecuador's Geophysics Institute said that the volcano had been spewing ash, but that there was no sign of lava. However, it is expected to intensify over the next few days.

President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela turned back Venezuela's clocks by half an hour on Sunday. The adjustment to Venezuela's relationship with Greenwich Mean Time was a one-off thing, that Chávez says will put Venezuelans more biologically in tune with the sun.

"It's about the metabolic effect, where the human brain is conditioned by sunlight."

Many within Venezuela, however, question the move, and think of it more as a impulsive initiative of a leader hell-bent on changing just about everything. After all, this is the guy who renamed the country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela after Simón Bolívar, and who ordered the horse on the national flag to face left instead of right, in order to reflect his socialist orientation.

Some scientists, however, endorse the time change as a rational move, given that Venezuela's Caribbean coast is actually wide enough for two time zones. A few other countries worldwide, including India, Iran, and Afghanistan, have 30-minute variations from the standard hourly deviations from GMT. Nepal has an even rarer difference of 15 minutes.

The Venezuelan government has been studying the time change since it was first proposed in 1999. Venezuela had previously been four and a half hours behind GMT up until 1965, when the 30-minute variation was dropped for convenience.

At 15:43GMT Wednesday, a powerful earthquake measuring 7.7 on the Richter scale rocked northern Chile. There have so far been no immediate reports of injuries.

The earthquake occurred about 60km deep, and was centered about 106km west of the town of Calama. According to Carmen Fernandez, director of Chile's national emergency office, the quake stretched across nearly 2,000km, all the way from Chile's northern border with Peru to the capital, Santiago.

"It is a major quake," said Fernandez.

Cement cracked at an airport in Antofagasta, where staff had to be evacuated. The cities of Calama and Arica in the north lost electrical power, and panicked residents flood the streets.

As a result of the massive earthquake, U.S. officials have also issued a tsunami alert in the Pacific. The alert was issued by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, and covers areas "bordering the Pacific Ocean and adjacent seas" off the coasts of Chile and Peru.

Carlos Camejo, 33, of Venezuela was pronounced dead after a highway accident and taken to the morgue. At the morgue, examiners began an autopsy, but it was clear that something was horribly amiss when Camejo began bleeding.

The examiners rushed to sew up the incision on his face, as Camejo woke up in excruciating pain.

"I woke up because the pain was unbearable," Camejo told local newspaper El Universal.

It sounds like something straight out of a science-fiction movie, but it's not. After a what is believed to be a meteorite crashed into a southern Peruvian village over the weekend, locals have been struck with a mysterious illness.

The villagers heard an explosion and saw a fireball blazing across the sky on Saturday, which many at the time thought was an airplane about to crash. It was later discovered to be a meteorite, and later in the day residents began complaining of headaches and vomiting that was apparently brought on by a "strange odor" emanating from the meteorite.