First US-to-Cuba cruise in decades leaves Miami

Passengers set sail Sunday from Miami on an historic cruise to Cuba, the first in decades to depart from a U.S. seaport for the communist island nation.

Carnival Corp.’s 704-passenger Adonia left port at 4:24 p.m., bound for Havana. Carnival’s Cubacruises, operating under its Fathom brand, will also visit the ports of Cienfuegos and Santiago de Cuba on the seven-day outing. Several Cuba-born passengers, among hundreds of others, were aboard, it said.

The cruise comes after Cuba loosened its policy banning Cuban-born people from arriving to the country by sea, a rule that threatened to stop the cruises from happening.

Restarting the cruises was an important element of a bid by President Barack Obama’s administration’s to increase tourism to Cuba after the Dec. 17, 2014, decision to restore diplomatic relations and move toward normalization.

The most recent such cruise, from another U.S. port, was in 1978.

When it first announced the cruises, Carnival said it would bar Cuban-born passengers due to the government’s policy. But the Cuban-American community in Miami complained and filed a discrimination lawsuit in response. After that, the company said it would only sail to Cuba if the policy changed, which Cuba did on April 22.

Carnival said the Adonia will cruise every other week from Miami to Cuba. Bookings will start at $1,800 per person and feature an array of cultural and educational activities, including Spanish lessons, Carnival’s website says.

Seventy-three-year-old passenger Rick Schneider told The Sun-Sentinel that he had waited decades for the chance to make the journey. He bought a Cuban flag for the occasion, which he waved from the deck at protesters who opposed the cruises.

He said he once passed up taking a ferry trip to Cuba in 1957, adding “the time is now.”

The cruise is among the many changes in U.S.-Cuban relations since a thaw between the former Cold War foes began in late 2014. The thaw also led to a historic, two-day trip to Cuba in March by Obama, who met with Cuban counterpart Raul Castro and others.

The Cuban government says the shift in policy removes prohibitions enacted when Cuban exiles were launching attacks by sea after the first Cuban revolution.

On Sunday, Arnold Donald, Carnival’s president and CEO, said the company worked and prepared to make the cruises a reality despite the challenges.

“Times of change often bring out emotions and clearly the histories here are very emotional for a number of people,” Donald told reporters.

The Miami Herald reported that a boat carrying some activists protesting the trip to Cuba was nearby in Florida waters before the ship’s departure Sunday. The report said the boat pulled away before the Adonia set sail with an expected Monday arrival in Havana.

Mary Olive Reinhart, a retired parks service ranger, told the paper that she and some friends from the Philadelphia area were drawn to the voyage by the adventure of it all.

The Fathom brand said on its website that the trip was authorized under current people-to-people travel guidelines of the U.S. government and would include meetings with artists, musicians, business owners and families - along with Cuban shore excursions to traditional sites.

“It’s exciting to go places where we’re forbidden. For me, I want to be at home in the world - the whole world,” she added.

(AP)

Nearly two million Venezuelans sign on for Maduro recall

Venezuela's opposition presented reams of signatures to election authorities Monday calling for a referendum to remove President Nicolas Maduro, whom it blames for the country's crushing economic crisis.

Venezuelans fed up with food shortages, soaring inflation and now a paralyzing electricity crunchhave flocked to sign a petition for a recall referendum, according to the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD).

It said it had presented 1.85 million signatures -- more than nine times the number needed to launch the referendum process -- to the National Electoral Board.

MUD executive secretary Jesus Torrealba said 80 boxes packed with referendum petitions had been presented to the authorities.

However, board official Tania D'Amelio suggested Sunday on Twitter that the authorities might not start verifying the signatures until late May.

That drew opposition cries of bias in favor of Maduro and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

"There's no doubt about it... Tania D'Amelio is a supporter and unconditional activist of the PSUV and is working to prevent a recall referendum this year," said Henry Ramos Allup, the speaker of the opposition-controlled legislature.

Racing against clock

Opponents are racing to hold a recall referendum before the end of the year.

Under Venezuela's constitution, after January 2017 a successful recall vote would transfer power to Maduro's vice president rather than trigger new elections.

The constitution gives the authorities five days to verify the signatures collected by the opposition.

But D'Amelio indicated that the five-day countdown would begin only once the full 30 days allotted for circulating the petition had lapsed.

The opposition insists there is no need to wait until the end of the 30-day period because it already surpassed the required 200,000 signatures "in record time."

If the electoral board accepts the signatures as valid -- far from a sure bet -- the opposition will then have to collect four million more for the board to organize the vote.

New time zone

Adding to Venezuela's woes, Maduro's government has taken a series of drastic measures to deal with the electricity crisis, instituting four-hour daily blackouts across most of the country, reducing the public-sector workweek to two days and closing schools on Fridays.

The power cuts sparked riots and looting last week in Venezuela's second-largest city, Maracaibo.

On Sunday the country also set its clocks forward half an hour in an attempt to curb evening electricity demand.

Maduro blames the power crunch on the El Nino weather phenomenon, which has unleashed the worst drought in 40 years, reducing the reservoirs at Venezuela's hydroelectric dams.

But the opposition says mismanagement is to blame for the power crisis as well as the recession and shortages.

Maduro warns of 'rebellion'

Maduro defiantly urged his supporters on Sunday to launch a "rebellion" if the opposition succeeds in ousting him.

"If the oligarchy someday does something against me and manages to take this palace, I order you to declare yourselves in rebellion and decree an indefinite general strike," he told supporters massed outside the presidential palace in a fiery May Day speech.

A recent poll found that more than two-thirds of Venezuelans want Maduro, elected president by a razor-thin margin in 2013, to leave office.

Once-booming Venezuela, which has the world's largest proven oil reserves, has plunged into economic chaos as global crude prices have collapsed.

The import-dependent country faces acute shortages of food and basic goods like toilet paper due to a lack of foreign currency, more than 96 percent of which it gets from oil sales.

The economy, which has been in recession since 2013, shrank 5.7 percent last year. The government said inflation came in at more than 180 percent last year.

Analysts however estimate the inflation rate is much higher. The International Monetary Fund forecasts it will hit 700 percent this year.

Maduro has nevertheless vowed to press on with the socialist "revolution" launched in 1999 by his predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez.

Poll says Trump, Clinton are in race to be least unpopular

It’s the paradox of the 2016 US presidential elections: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are virtually assured of facing off against each other in November, and yet both are widely unpopular.

Two thirds (65 percent) of voters have unfavorable opinions of the Republican billionaire, and only a quarter (24 percent) think positively of him, according to a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC survey.

In Clinton’s case, 56 percent are down on her, while only 32 percent see her in a favorable light, the same poll found.

A CNN poll this week put their unpopularity at 56 percent and 49 percent respectively.
“Historically, we haven’t seen this kind of thing before,” said Jeanne Zaino, a political scientist at Iona College. “It would be one thing if you had one, but this is... the two frontrunners.”

Trump, 69, an unpredictable political outsider who has never held elected office, has antagonized substantial portions of the electorate with his insults against women, Mexicans and Muslims.

The very experienced and circumspect Clinton, meanwhile, has struggled to win over many voters who have trouble relating to the 68-year-old White House aspirant.
How in the world did these two become their party’s presumptive nominees?

“It has to do with the way we select candidates,” said Columbia University professor Robert Shapiro.

In 2012, only about 16 percent of Americans eligible to vote participated in party primaries.

“Those who vote in primaries and caucuses are more often activists and extremists within the party. The average American barely votes,” Shapiro said.

With 17 candidates in the race for the Republican nomination, Trump only needed “a very small segment of the American electorate” to become his party’s standard bearer, he added.

Strong opinions

Hillary Clinton profited from the fact that she had little competition, except from Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who continues to nip at her heels.

“Other capable Democrat candidates decided not to run, because this is a bad year for Democrats to run for president,” said Shapiro, alluding to the difficulty of getting elected to succeed a two-term president from the same party.

Trump and Clinton also suffer from the fact that they are so well known, said Zaino.

“These are two people who have been around a long time, so people have very strong opinions about them on both sides of the aisle,” she said.

Americans know all about them—their strengths, their weaknesses, the trajectory of their lives.

Clinton, who has long dreamt of being the first woman president of the United States, has been in the public eye for more than 20 years: she was first lady during Bill Clinton’s 1993-2001 presidency, senator from New York from 2001 to 2009, and secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Trump has been a celebrity even longer, famed for his wealth, his skyscrapers, his two divorces and a hit reality TV show, “The Apprentice,” which he hosted for more than 10 years.

“A lot of Democrats feel like the Democratic party has become the party of the Clintons and a lot of people are not happy with that,” said Sam Abrams, an expert at Sarah Lawrence College.

“For many of my students, they have never known an era when a Clinton or a Bush was not president or dominating national politics,” he said.

Something else

Which explains the yearning for something else, particularly among young voters who prefer the 74-year-old Sanders to Clinton by a wide margin.

And while three quarters of Americans say they are unhappy with their political leaders, the White House frontrunners have been battered by their rivals and the bitterness of the campaign itself.

Before calling it quits Tuesday evening, Republican candidate Ted Cruz went so far as to accuse Trump of being a “serial philanderer,” a “pathological liar,” and a “narcissist.”

Sanders, meanwhile, continues to denounce Clinton’s ties to Wall Street and the hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees that she has received from big banks and corporations.

The battle between Clinton and Trump is certain to be at least as brutal.
But on election day, all this will count for little.

That is because Americans will vote, first and foremost against the other side: 51 percent of Democrats who intend to vote for Clinton say they will do it to stop Trump, and only 48 percent to support her candidacy.

And 57 percent of Republicans would vote for Trump to oppose Clinton, and only 43 percent because they want the billionaire to win, according to the CNN poll.

In pictures: Ecuador races to find quake survivors

The death toll from Ecuador’s worst earthquake in decades rose to at least 413 on Monday while traumatized survivors slept amid the rubble of their homes and rescuers dug for survivors in the Andean nation’s shattered coastal region. 

"Sadly we have to inform you that there are about 350 people killed. The number of people injured has also risen" from an earlier toll of 2,068, Security Minister Cesar Navas said on television Monday.

Saturday’s 7.8 magnitude quake ripped apart buildings and roads, knocked out power, and injured thousands in the largely impoverished country.

In the devastated beach town of Pedernales, shaken survivors curled up for the night on mattresses or plastic chairs next to the rubble of their homes. Soldiers and police patrolled the hot, dark streets while pockets of rescue workers ploughed on.

Late on Sunday, firefighters entered a partially destroyed house to search for three children and a man apparently trapped inside, as a crowd of 40 gathered in the darkness to watch.

“My little cousins are inside, before there were noises, screams. We must find them,” pleaded Isaac, 18, as the firemen combed the debris.

Pedernales Mayor Gabriel Alcivar estimated that there were up to 400 more dead yet to be confirmed, many buried under the rubble of collapsed hotels.

"Pedernales is devastated. Buildings have fallen down, especially hotels where there are lots of tourists staying. There are lots of dead bodies," he told local media.

Tents sprung up in the town’s still-intact stadium to store bodies, treat the injured, and distribute water, food and blankets to survivors. People wandered around with bruised limbs and bandaged cuts, while patients with more serious injuries were evacuated to hospitals.

Death toll ‘will certainly rise’

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa, who cut short a visit to Italy, surveyed the damage in the coastal province of Manabi on Sunday night. 

Ecuador has been hit tremendously hard,” Correa said in a televised address, his voice breaking.

Correa warned that the death toll "will certainly rise and probably in a considerable way" in the hours ahead.

"There are still lots of bodies in the rubble," he said. "These are extremely difficult times, the biggest tragedy in the last 67 years."

Correa made reference to the August 1949 earthquake near the central Ecuadoran city of Ambato that killed some 5,000 people and caused widespread destruction.

While the full extent of the damage remains unclear, the disaster will likely worsen the OPEC nation’s economic performance this year.

The small, oil-dependent country has already been battered by the tumble in crude prices.

Its crucial energy industry appears largely intact after the quake, though its main refinery of Esmeraldas was closed as a precaution. However, exports of bananas, flowers, cacao and fish could be slowed by ruined roads and delays at ports.

The quake could also alter political dynamics ahead of next year’s presidential election.

After the aftershocks

About 230 aftershocks have rattled survivors who, huddled in the streets, worried the flow of tremors could topple their already cracked homes.

In the hard-hit city of Portoviejo, the stench of decaying bodies began to fill the tropical air as rescuers raced to find survivors.

“We’re scared of being in the house,” said Yamil Faran, 47, surrounded by some 30 people in the middle of a street in the city. “When this improves and the aftershocks stop we’re going to see if we can repair it.”

The destruction caused by the quake to the country’s infrastructure was further hampering rescue efforts, said FRANCE 24’s correspondent in Quito, Carolina Loza-Leon.

“A lot of the roads have been completely destroyed in the hardest hit areas,” she said. “[There is] Inadequate infrastructure to reach the people who need help the most.”

Some 130 inmates in Portoviejo took advantage of the quake’s destruction and chaos to climb over the collapsed walls of the low-security El Rodeo prison. More than 35 prisoners had been recaptured, authorities said on Sunday night.

About 13,500 security personnel were mobilised to keep order. Beyond a handful of unconfirmed reports of theft and looting, the country appeared calm.

Some $600 million in credit from multilateral lenders was immediately activated for the emergency, the government said.

Domestic aid funds were being set up and Venezuela, Chile and Mexico were sending personnel and supplies. The Ecuadorean Red Cross mobilised more than 800 volunteers and staff, and medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said it was sending a team from Colombia.

The tremor followed two large and deadly quakes that struck Japan since Thursday.

Both countries are located on the seismically active “Ring of Fire” that circles the Pacific, but according to the US Geological Survey large quakes separated by such distances are probably not related.

Brazil’s leader vows long battle against impeachment

Embattled Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff vowed Monday to wage a ”long” fight against impeachment as Congress moved closer to putting her on trial in a deepening political crisis. 

The 68-year-old leftist leader was in a combative mood in her public response since the lower house of Congress overwhelmingly voted late Sunday to send her case to the Senate.

”I am outraged by the decision,” Rousseff told a news conference carried live on television.

Rousseff invoked her survival story under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, when she was tortured as a young member of a violent guerrilla group.

”I have strength, spirit and courage. I will not be beaten, I will not be paralyzed. I will continue to fight and I will fight as I did all my life,” she said.

”This is not the beginning of the end. The battle has begun. This fight will be very long and memorable,” she said.

Rousseff faces charges of illegally manipulating government accounts during her 2014 reelection to mask the scale of budget holes.

But Rousseff said that deputies in the house had failed to provide any evidence that she’d committed an impeachable crime, calling the process instead a “coup d’etat.”

She branded her Vice President, Michel Temer, a traitor who had conspired against her. He would take over if she’s impeached.

Monday’s newspapers printed pictures of him smiling as he watched the vote.

Senate battle looms

The president spoke after House Speaker Eduardo Cunha personally delivered the impeachment documents to the Senate.

Senators are expected to vote by mid-May on whether to open the proceedings and suspend Rousseff for up to six months.

The political showdown comes as Latin America’sbiggest economy is mired in a deep recession and a corruption scandal at state oil giant Petrobras, with the Rio Olympics approaching in August.

After meeting with Cunha, Senate President Renan Calheiros said the upper chamber would begin reading the impeachment documents on Tuesday but that there would be no rush.

”There are requests to speed up the process, but we won’t be able to accelerate it in a way that appears hurried. We can’t put it off either. We will defend the legal process,” Calheiros said.

Calheiros said Rousseff requested a meeting with him later Monday.

Cunha, on the other hand, wants the process to move quickly.

”Today we have a half-government and that’s not good for anybody,” said Cunha, who like Temer and Calheiros is a member of the center-right PMDB party that abandoned Rousseff’s coalition.

All three face various allegations of misdeeds themselves.

Lindbergh Farias, a senator from Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, said the initial Senate vote should take place on May 11 and warned that his group would go to the Supreme Court if there’s pressure to speed things up.

Farias described the rowdy debate in the lower house of Congress as a ”horror show.”

The opposition threw celebratory confetti after getting well over two thirds of the majority needed to move the case forward, with 367 of 513 deputies voting “yes.”

Surveys by Brazilian media indicate that the opposition has the simple majority necessary to open the trial in the 81-member Senate.

A two-thirds majority would be needed for her definitive ouster.

”Dilma Rousseff yesterday started to say goodbye to the presidency of Brazil,” wrote the leading newspaper O Globo.

Carla Selman, an analyst at IHS Country Risk, a consultancy, said that events could move quickly given the decisive nature of the lower house vote.

”This is likely to accelerate a vote in the Senate, where the
pro-impeachment camp is also expected to win,” Selman said.

VP eyes big job

Financial markets have been betting heavily on Rousseff’s exit and the advent of a more business-friendly government to kickstart Brazil’s economy.

The worst recession for decades and political paralysis in the capital has prevented reforms that might attract back foreign investors, scared off by Brazil’s junk credit ratings.

While Temer is already eyeing his potential presidency, he would inherit a country wallowing in economic disarray and a dysfunctional political scene where Rousseff’s Workers’ Party vows revenge.

”It will not be easy” for Temer, said Andre Cesar, an independent political analyst. “It will be a nightmare.”

Rousseff’s backers also point out that Temer could face impeachment himself because he backed her policies as vice president, while his PMDB party’s other heavyweights, Cunha and Calheiros, also face corruption allegations.

Huge opposition rallies in recent months have played a big role in turning pressure against Rousseff into an unstoppable avalanche.

Now anger on the streets could again play a role as the stakes in the crisis rise even higher.

”Whoever loses will keep protesting in the streets,” said Sylvio Costa, who heads the specialist politics website Congresso en Foco. ”What’s certain is that the crisis will not end today.”

Deadly explosion hits Mexico oil plant

A massive explosion rocked a major petrochemical facility of Mexican national oil company Pemex in the Gulf state of Veracruz on Wednesday, killing at least three people, injuring dozens more, and pumping a cloud of noxious chemicals into the sky.

Luis Felipe Puente, head of federal emergency services, told Reuters that three people had died in the blast. Pemex confirmed that three of its workers had died, and said another 136 were injured, of which 88 were still in the hospital.

The firm said the explosion, which sent a huge, dark plume of smoke billowing upwards, occurred just after 3 p.m. (2000 GMT) at the facility's chlorinate 3 plant near the port of Coatzacoalcos, one of the company's top oil export hubs.

Local emergency officials said hundreds of people had been evacuated from the site. Television footage showed an initial burst of flames followed by a tower of thick smoke. A company official said local oil exports were unaffected.

What caused the blast was unclear, but Pemex initially warned local residents to keep away from the site due to what it described as a dissipating cloud of toxic fumes. TV footage showed rain clouds gathering above the plant as evening fell.

"The current situation at the plant... is under control and there is no risk to the population," Pemex said later in the evening on its official Twitter account.

Pemex Chief Executive Jose Antonio Gonzalez traveled to Coatzacoalcos late on Wednesday to oversee the response.

Petroquimica Mexicana de Vinilo, or PMV, a vinyl petrochemical plant that is a joint venture between Pemex's petrochemical unit and Mexican plastic pipe maker Mexichem was the facility hit by the blast.

Operated by Mexichem, the plant lies within Pemex's larger Pajaritos petrochemical complex. Mexichem said in a statement the explosion occurred in an ethylene unit at the plant. The company could not be immediately reached for further comment.

In February, a fire killed a worker at the PMV plant, which makes vinyl chloride monomer, also known as chloroethene, an industrial chemical used to produce plastic piping.

The incident occurred just weeks after three workers were killed and seven injured when a fire broke out on a Pemex oil-processing platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

It also came as Pemex implements deep cost cuts to cope with the rout in oil prices, and seeks to stem a slide in output. 

Mexico is in the midst of a historic push to lure private investors to revive its oil industry.

Pemex, which enjoyed a decades-long monopoly over Mexico's oil and gas industry until an energy reform opened up the sector in 2014, has experienced a series of high-profile accidents.

In 2013, at least 37 people were killed by a blast at its Mexico City headquarters, and 26 people died in a fire at a Pemex natural gas facility in northern Mexico in September 2012.

A 2015 fire at its Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche affected oil output and cost the company up to $780 million.

Pemex said last year it had reduced its annual accident rate in 2014 by more than 33 percent. But a Reuters investigation found that Pemex was reducing its accident rate by including hours worked by office staff in its calculations.