The extent of the damage isn't yet clear and the six deaths reported so far may be followed by news of other fatalities.
But on the morning after a massive, 8.2 magnitude earthquake off the coast of northern Chile there are sighs of relief there and in neighboring Peru.
"At a time when horrific natural disasters have become an everyday part of the news cycle, it appeared one finally missed," The Washington Post writes.
i i
The birth mother of Amber Marie Rose, the teen whose 2005 death was the first linked to an ignition switch problem that's triggered a massive recall of General Motors vehicles, says that through a Facebook group for families of victims, she's identified at least 29 fatalities due to the defect. GM only acknowledges 13 deaths.
"I found 29 so far myself," Laura Christian tells All Things Considered. She said she's determined the additional fatalities using crash data, police reports or eyewitnesses [who reported] the airbags did not deploy."
GM has announced the recall of 2.6 million vehicles to search for the faulty ignition switches.
Christian was reunited with Amber, her biological daughter, a year before the girl's fatal accident at age 16.
Amber's accident was attributed to a faulty ignition switch in her Chevrolet Cobalt, which apparently shut off the engine while the car was in motion – cutting power to the air bags, which didn't inflate when the car hit a tree in Dentsville, Md.
But alcohol and excessive speed were also cited as factors in the crash, although Christian insists she's "very confident" that her daughter would have survived if airbags had deployed as designed.
"I spoke to the EMTs shortly after [the accident] and they told me that had the airbags deployed that she would have been injured, but she would have been alive today," she tells ATC host Robert Siegel.
Christian believes that Congress should increase the maximum of $35 million penalty for delaying the reporting of potentially life-threatening problems.
"That may sound like a lot to us as individuals, but to a corporation like GM, who made over $3 billion last year, that's nothing. It's hardly a deterrent," she says.
She also wants passage of a bill sponsored by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal to require earlier reporting of defects to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, or NHTSA.
"It shouldn't come to a fatality, especially when it's coming from a car that has a defective part," Christian says. "GM knew about this defect, they knew about it in 2001, they OK'd it going forward. They should have been required to pass on that information to the NHTSA from day one."
In testimony on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, GM CEO Mary Barra expressed "sincere apologies to everyone who has been affected by this recall ... especially to the families and friends of those who lost their lives or were injured."
"I cannot tell you why it took years for a safety defect to be announced," Barra said in her opening testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "I can tell you that we will find out."
On how Brad Katsuyama — who worked in New York for the Royal Bank of Canada — discovered the system was rigged
He has 25 traders working for him, he deals in hundreds of millions of dollars of shares every day, he takes risk in the market — and it's in early 2008 he senses something's wrong. What he senses is, when he looks at his trading screens ... his screens will tell him say, that there are 10,000 shares of Microsoft offered at $30 a share if he wanted to buy them.
And normally, up to this point in his life, if he hit his button and said "buy" he'd get the shares for $30 a share, but all of a sudden, when he hits the button on his computer terminal, the shares disappear. It's like someone knows he's trying to buy Microsoft and the price of Microsoft goes up before he can get it. He doesn't understand why this is happening and that's the beginning of the story.
More On High-Frequency Trading
All Tech Considered
The Mystery Of $600 Million Traded In The Blink Of An Eye
China's anti-corruption campaign has expanded its reach to the country's military, with a former top general being charged and news that widespread wrongdoing had been uncovered at key units of the People's Liberation Army.
Former Gen. Gu Junshan, who served as the PLA's deputy logistics chief, has been charged of "suspicion of corruption, bribery, embezzlement and abuse of power," state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Monday. Until now, it has been extremely rare for high-ranking military figures to be caught up in such probes. A guilty verdict is considered a near certainty.
The BBC quotes Chinese investigative magazine Caixin, as reporting that Gu's apparently lavish lifestyle includes "several properties, including a home in Henan province modelled on China's former imperial palace, with several gold art pieces or statues."
The ex-general's indictment was followed on Tuesday by a statement from China's Defense Ministry that inspectors, working on orders of China's President Xi Jinping, found evidence among Beijing-area units of problems with the handling of promotions, poor discipline of officers, illegal land transfers, and corruption in construction and military medical services.
According to the AP:
"The ministry said those cases would be further investigated and publicized 'for their deterrent effect,' raising the likelihood that offenders would be brought before military courts.
"The PLA has long been dogged by a culture of bribery, corruption and power abuse. Promotions and plum assignments are sometimes secured by providing payments or favors to higher ranking officers and military assets, especially land, used for private economic benefit.
"Officers enjoy official vehicles, housing and generous benefits in return for pledging their loyal to the ruling party, rather than to the Chinese state."