The British governor of the Falkland Islands says he hopes Argentina may ease tensions in its dispute with Britain over the archipelago.

Gov. Nigel Haywood told The Associated Press in an interview on Tuesday that restrictions on trade imposed by Argentina are complicating shipments of food and other provisions. But he said the islands are able to fly in supplies and still have access to Brazil by ship.

“I’m still disappointed that the tone we get is one of aggression, really, towards the Falkland Islands and to the people of the Falkland Islands,” Haywood said in the interview at his office. “We’ve done nothing to take things, to escalate the situation at all. I mean, this has largely been Argentina raising and raising the temperature by first of all a number of statements and secondly a number of actions.”

Tensions have grown as both nations this week marked the 30th anniversary of Argentina’s invasion of the islands, which Argentines say Britain has long illegally occupied.

Argentina has increasingly sought to isolate the South Atlantic islands by barring trade, ships and planes from adjacent Argentine territory and waters. That has led to shortages of some types of produce, such as bananas, in island stores.

Islanders say the scarcer shipments arriving in Port Stanley have also pushed up prices of some products, and some residents have turned to relying on their own vegetable gardens instead.

“We’re just trying to get on with life down here really, and from a diplomatic viewpoint we’re trying to do everything we can to enable us to get on with life,” Haywood said. “I very much hope that Argentina will decide itself that it’s time to de-escalate things and actually move towards a rather more normal relationship between Argentina and the islands.”

Britain, which has controlled the Falklands since 1833, sent forces to the islanders’ defense when Argentine forces invaded on April 2, 1982. The 74-day war ended when British troops routed the Argentines. In all, 255 British soldiers, 649 Argentines and three islanders were killed.

Argentina’s claim to the islands, which are known in Latin America as the Islas Malvinas, has widespread support across the region, and President Cristina Fernandez’s government has recently stepped up both diplomatic and economic pressure.

Argentina also received moral backing last week from a group of Nobel Peace Prize winners who scolded Britain for ignoring U.N. resolutions urging talks on the islands.

As for the trade restriction imposed by Argentina, Haywood said they “do make some difficulties, because obviously there’s a sort of limitation to the amount of food and … provisions and so on that come through.”

“But that said, the air link still works perfectly well. We can still have access to Punta Arenas (Chile) and access to Montevideo (Uruguay), access to Brazil by ship. So we get along OK,” Haywood said.

While Argentina considers the islands an illegal British colony, the British government says the Falklands have long been a self-governing British territory. Haywood, as Britain’s representative in Stanley, still has veto power over the Falkland Islands government.

Haywood encouraged people to visit the Falklands, where islanders overwhelmingly say they want to remain British.

“My message to the world is: Come and look at us. Don’t just listen to what Argentina tells you. Come and see for yourself,” he said.

USHUAIA, Argentina (AP) — President Cristina Fernandez’s campaign to force Britain to hand over the Falkland Islands may have reached its high point with Monday’s 30th anniversary of Argentina’s failed occupation of the remote South Atlantic archipelago.

Fernandez prepared to lead hundreds of patriotic rallies nationwide with another major speech urging Britain to concede sovereignty of the islands Latin Americans know as “Las Malvinas,” insisting on a peaceful resolution even as leftist groups prepared to confront riot police outside the British embassy in Buenos Aires.

The campaign has been multifaceted, with Nobel Peace Prize winners and Argentina’s Latin American allies accusing Britain of militarizing the dispute even as Fernandez pursues what islanders consider to be economic warfare against them.

A union threat to boycott of British cargo and refuse British-flagged cruises has complicated shipping, while Argentina’s refusal to allow more than one weekly flight through its air space has limited airborne commerce. The Fernandez government has urged companies to find alternatives to British imports, threatened to sue British investors and banks, and tried to block offshore oil development.

The moves have made life more difficult for the islanders, but none seem to be bringing Argentina any closer to recovering the territory it claims British forces stole from them in 1833 and ran as a colony for 150 years.

Britain says there is nothing to negotiate: The islands are now a self-governing British Overseas Territory and the people who have lived there for generations will determine their own fate. The islanders themselves overwhelmingly say they want to remain British.

With no real progress to be made, the rhetoric has only become more intense. Feelings on both sides have hardened.

Through email and social networks, Argentines accuse islanders of being “pirates” or deride them as “kelpers.” One urged a “Penguin News” editor to “move to England, or if you want to be a Martian, hop on a rocket and head toward Mars.” Another reached out to a bed-and-breakfast owner for a reservation, then wrote: “YOU GUYS STOLE THE ISLANDS FROM ARGENTINA … you are arrogant people, greedy, criminals … just wait. And you think you deserve to decide over the Malvinas??? You stoled from our backyard??? fff … all you!!!”

Editor Lisa Watson at the islands’ weekly Penguin News has fired back through public Twitter messages, attempting to find the right tone, but it didn’t help when Argentines noticed that an online news photo of President Fernandez had been saved under a crude insult.

“It never occurred to us that the filename would be so transparent. It was hugely embarrassing, particularly now as we were seemingly winning the image war,” Watson’s colleague John Fowler said. “Before that, Lisa had been pretty continuously receiving hundreds and hundreds of nasty sexually insulting messages a day.”

Argentina has variously tried to charm, occupy, negotiate and threaten its way back into the islands in the last four decades. In the 1970s, it established a direct air link with Buenos Aires, supplied them with gasoline, paid to educate island children and otherwise tried to build ties. Britain was lobbying the islanders to accept a Hong Kong-style handover before the junta decided to invade on April 2, 1982.

Led to believe they would be welcomed as liberators, Argentine troops instead discovered that islanders wanted to stay British — and that a flotilla was on its way from England to seize the islands back. The junta rushed in thousands of newly drafted troops without logistical support or even warm clothes. They fought bravely, British soldiers said, but hardly stood a chance.

Argentine forces surrendered on June 14, after battles that cost 649 Argentine and 255 British soldiers’ lives, along with three islanders killed by friendly British fire.

There were other attempts to build ties in the 1990s — a series of agreements on shared fishing and oil rights, shipping and air links and other exchanges. But nearly all those deals were abandoned in 2003, after Fernandez’ late husband, Nestor Kirchner, became president and began trying to isolate the islands instead.

Those efforts have intensified ever since.

“Thirty years and now we find it again, we are worried we are going to go through it all again, another invasion. We do not, we do not want to see this again,” islander Mary Lou Agman said as several hundred of the islands’ 3,000 residents turned out Sunday for a commemorative march by the small Falkland Islands Defence Force.

Among those who yearn for common ground are a small group of Argentine war veterans who were spending Monday in the islands, holding a quiet ceremony at the cemetery where hundreds of Argentine soldiers remain buried.

“To return to this little piece of land, which for me is a little bit of my country and apart from that, being here is so pleasing, to be among the people that were once our enemies, that which we can now live together with — it’s just really proof that we human beings are not like animals,” said Juan Carlos Lujan, one of the veterans.

James Peck, a 43-year-old islander and artist who now has dual Falklands-Argentine nationality after marrying an Argentine and moving to Buenos Aires, said he has tried to keep a low profile, but told The Associated Press that he wrote a brief essay urging dialogue ahead of the anniversary because he saw this war of words “fueling itself and becoming hysterical.”

“I didn’t really want to join in the noise,” Peck explained, but he said someone has to speak out for common sense. “For me Argentina has real dignity these days, and I’m amazed that grown up politicians cannot sit down and talk civilly to each other. I think that’s really sad. Not everybody’s getting stoked up by all this, I’m sure they’re not.”

—

Paul Byrne contributed from Stanley, Falkland Islands, and Michael Warren contributed from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Argentina’s occupation of the Falklands Islands in 1982 lasted just 74 days but, 30 years on, the ensuing conflict continues to play a very real part in the daily life of the Islands.

The story went out around the world including this broadcast which lead China’s CCTV Daily News

Argentina’s deadliest train accident in decades was foreseeable and preventable, the nation’s auditor general complained Thursday, saying years of failed safety tests and other problems had given the government more than enough reason to cancel the train operator’s concession.

Others pointed to high-level corruption: years-old allegations still awaiting trial that a former transportation secretary took free vacations and other gifts from executives of the Trains of Buenos Aires company in exchange for favorable treatment.

The TBA blamed government price controls, saying that keeping fares to less than 25 cents a ride made it impossible to finance improvements.

Rail safety experts, meanwhile, said modern trains are built to withstand the kind of hard stop that killed 50 passengers and injured more than 700 Wednesday.

Newer cars resist the accordion-like crumpling that shoved hundreds into a jumbled mass of limbs, metal and blood in the first two cars when the commuter train hit a shock-absorbing barrier at less than 12 mph (20 kph). But these cars were more than four decades old, “Toshiba Classics” that were refurbished after being cast off by other urban systems.

President Cristina Fernandez declared two days of mourning and sent at least four Cabinet ministers out to give news conferences describing the government’s response to the tragedy. None took questions.

One man who might explain why passengers said he repeatedly struggled with the train’s brakes before the accident — motorman Marcos Antonio Cordoba, 28 — remained in intensive care and had yet to make a statement.

The current transportation secretary, Juan Pablo Schiavi, said the train’s speed while approaching its final stop at the busy downtown Once station was normal, that the motorman was already slowing and that he should have been able to stop during the final 130 feet (40 meters) from the point where the speed was last recorded.

“Those last 40 meters today remain a mystery,” Schiavi said.

The crash happened after Cordoba had traveled the length of the Sarmiento line — 14 stations. Before him, another motorman had driven the same route 10 times, since 2:45 a.m. Wednesday morning. Union leaders said the train was in good condition when checked the day before.

Auditor General Leandro Despouy, however, said TBA had been failing safety requirements since 2002. Many of these compliance problems were raised in an extremely critical report in 2008, which recommended ending the concession granted to TBA in 1995 during Argentina’s privatization era.

“Back in 2008 we had verification of dramatic and alarming brake problems,” Despouy said.

Roque Cirigliano, TBA’s trains director and a cousin of the company’s owners, discounted the possibility of brake failure and said human error might have caused the crash. He called the trains safe for travel, and said TBA has spent more on maintenance than other Argentine railroad companies, despite company complaints that government limits on ticket prices have depressed revenues.

On its website, TBA says low ticket prices mean passengers don’t cover even half the salaries and benefits of its 4,500 workers. Because the government keeps prices low as a benefit to working-class Argentines, the company struggles to cover operating costs, provide higher quality service, and attract private financing to fund improvements, it says.

The train company has been tied to allegations of government corruption.

Former Transport Secretary Ricardo Jaime awaits trial for allegedly approving millions of dollars in government train subsidies after accepting free Brazilian vacation flights from businessman Claudio Cirigliano. Cirigliano’s Grupo Plaza holding company owns both TBA and competing bus lines.

The judge in the corruption case, Claudio Bonadio, is now in charge of the accident investigation.

Schiavi said Thursday’s news conferences and the government’s support of a thorough crash probe by Bonadio proves Fernandez’s administration is acting responsibly.

The train’s “black box” recordings of conversations between the motorman and control room were already in the judge’s hands, and other evidence abounds, from GPS data to cameras and other recordings as well as physical evidence from the wrecked train, he said.

With 703 injuries among the estimated 1,500 passengers, thousands of people desperately rushed around Buenos Aires checking lists of survivors and hoping their loved ones weren’t in the morgue.

Many of the dozen or more hospitals that treated the injured said they had no unidentified patients, and by Thursday afternoon the morgue had identified all 50 fatalities.

The Bolivian Embassy announced that a pregnant consular official, Nayda Tatiana Lezano Alandia, was among the dead. She left behind three daughters, Argentina’s state-run Telam news agency reported.

Sabrina Espindola, 29, who worked downtown by day and studied to be a surgical assistant until midnight each night, was pulled from the first car, her husband, X-ray technician Ezequiel Mercado, told The Associated Press. “She was getting her degree this year,” he said, sobbing at the thought of retrieving her body at the morgue.

The body of Sofia Peralta, 19, also turned up at the morgue, while her brother Fernando, 18, was hospitalized with multiple leg fractures and damage to his arm and face.

“When he woke up, he remembered first his sister. We told him Sofia was gone. He looked at us for a while, then he went very quiet,” their uncle Daniel Peralta said.

The siblings worked together as telemarketers at Nextel and took the train together every day, he said. “They were always together,” Peralta said.

With the crash still unexplained, Thursday’s commute was unnerving for some of the millions of people who have to ride the city’s trains each day.

A woman who gave only her first name, Marta, said she abandoned one train after the motorman complained to passengers that he couldn’t get the engine to work, followed by a lengthy delay and then lurching stops.

“I got down with the kid and said to myself: ‘No, that’s enough. I’m getting out of here,’” she said.

___

Associated Press writers Debora Rey, Paul Byrne and Roger Dwarika contributed to this report.

Hundreds of activists have descended on the British Embassy in the Argentine capital Buenos Aires to call on Britain to relinquish its sovereignty of the Falkland islands….

My most video report as part of AP’s coverage from Buenos Aires of the escalating bilateral tensions related to the tiny south atlantic archipelago. The report went out around the world including this short edit of EURONEWS

My video report from the Argentine town of San Antonio de Areco which every year stages a five-day annual festival celebrating the customs of the nomadic ranchers known as gauchos.

Although gaucho lifestyle started to fade in the 19th Century, local residents preserve a great number of their traditions.

The story went out around the world including this broadcast which lead BBC Travel

About 74 passengers and crew among the more than 3,500 people on board were reported ill with norovirus, 20 of them with symptoms like vomiting and diarrhea.

Briton John Sturgeon and his wife had been looking forward to the visit as one of the highlights of the South American cruise, saying they wanted to see the islands to remember the upcoming 30th anniversary of Argentina’s invasion of the colony. Argentina and Britain continue to be in a diplomatic row over the islands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas.

“I had already booked a tour with someone in the Falklands,” he said as the couple disembarked for a stop in Buenos Aires. Sturgeon said the ship’s captain considered the refusal to allow them to dock “very unreasonable and unprecedented.”

There were also several hundred Argentines among the passengers, who had paid thousands of dollars for the cruise in order to visit the graves of their fathers. A cemetery on the island is filled with the tombs of Argentine draftees killed in the ill-fated 1982 war.

Argentine passenger Liliana Rodriguez said some of the passengers had been planning to pay respects to loved ones buried on the island.

“There was a young guy who brought a shield for the tomb of his father there,” Rodriguez said. “There was all of these people and so many more, because we didn’t get the chance to have contact with everyone because there were at least 300 Argentines.”

The Falklands has defended its decision as being made “in the wider interests of the public and tourism industry,” according to a statement from the island’s chief medical officer. “An outbreak in the Falkland Islands would put enormous pressure on our limited medical resources and jeopardize other scheduled cruise visits,” the statement said.

Norovirus is highly contagious and spreads through the stool or vomit of infected people. The virus can linger on surfaces like door handles, carpets and tabletops. It can also spread when people share the food, drinks or eating utensils of an infected person.

But Norman Noah, an infectious diseases expert at London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, described the Falklands’ decision as “over the top.”

He has previously investigated norovirus outbreaks and said the illness normally passes within a couple of days and is unlikely to overwhelm hospitals.

Princess Cruises has called the decision “totally unwarranted.”

The virus is the most common cause of gastroenteritis in the U.S. About 1 in 5 of norovirus outbreaks reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention occurred on cruise ships or in vacation settings. The CDC has documented about a dozen outbreaks a year on cruise ships worldwide.

The U.S. CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program never advises that ships cannot dock, though they might issue a “no sail order” in the case of repeated or large outbreaks with little controls in place. That doesn’t seem to be the case with the Star Princess, which according to CDC records, hasn’t had a norovirus outbreak since 2003.

Even if the ship had been allowed to dock in the Falklands, experts weren’t sure the infected passengers would have spread the virus very far.

According to guidance from Britain’s Health Protection Agency, any passengers on board a ship who have norovirus should be isolated in their own cabin until at least 24 hours after their symptoms have passed. There are more stringent recommendations for sick crew members.

The agency does not advise that ships with infected patients be prevented from docking, but says certain measures should be in place when the ship arrives into port, like thoroughly cleaning and disinfecting the vessel before it sails on.

“If you’re suffering from vomiting and diarrhea, you probably won’t be sightseeing,” Noah said. “Chances are you’ll be staying in your cabin by yourself.”

___

Associated Press writers Paul Byrne in Buenos Aires, Mike Stobbe in Atlanta and Cheng in London contributed to this report.

A decade ago Argentina declared the largest debt default in history, sparking political upheaval, a mass exodus of professionals, and continuing social unrest. As the ten year anniversary of the monetary meltdown approaches, analysts say Europe could learn some lessons from the South American country’s economic recovery. Paul Byrne reports from Argentina.

Unvoiced package

Addressing the economic faculty of the University of Buenos Aires alongside current Argentine Minister of Economy (soon to be Vice President) Joseph Stiglitz the renowned Nobel prize winning economist makes several references to the economic plight of Ireland whilst mapping out the global financial crisis

Please get in touch if you want more of the interview and full broadcast quality

As part of the Shell sponsored ‘Powerland’ series for GlobalPost I put together this report exploring how a long scorned population of waste scavengers are now being embraced by the municipal government of Buenos Aires in a citywide waste-management programme.