South America

Nissan Motor Co., Japan's third-largest automaker, will supply cars for Chrysler to sell in South America and expand the U.S. carmaker's presence outside its home market. The agreement calls for Tokyo-based Nissan to provide Mexican-built versions of the Versa compact car starting in 2009, the companies said in a joint statement Friday. Financial terms and the number of vehicles weren't disclosed.

Anna Manzanarez was a picture of good health. But about a week after catching what she thought was a bad case of the flu, the 28-year-old waitress from the central California coastal community of Seaside collapsed getting out of the shower. The next day, despite intensive care at a hospital, she died.

Seaweed found at an inland settlement in Chile confirms that the village is one of the oldest inhabited sites in the Americas and demonstrates that residents had extensive contact with the coastline, 50 miles away, researchers said Friday. Radiocarbon dating of the seaweed shows that the samples are 14,100 years old, give or take 120 years.

The wily prehistoric hunters long considered the first people of the Americas were almost certainly latecomers to the continent, researchers have concluded. For 80 years, scholars were convinced that the people known as the Clovis colonized North and South America via a land bridge from Siberia, perhaps pursuing the mammoth they preyed on so skillfully.

Two Americans who left Alaska nine months ago aboard a firetruck equipped to filter and burn biofuels arrived at the tip of South America, ending their trek to promote alternative fuels. Seth Warren and Tyler Bradt completed their journey at the end of Highway 3, which dead-ends at the southern tip of South America. They made hundreds of stops on two continents to ask for people's used frying oil and animal fat, which powered their truck.

Even if terrorism suspect Russell Defreitas were no more than an angry man with vague notions of a spectacular attack, he was able to tap into a network of Islamic extremists in the Caribbean -- potentially dangerous and right in the backyard of the United States, authorities said Saturday.

After decades of contention, New Zealand researchers have provided the first direct evidence that Polynesians sailed across thousands of miles of the Pacific Ocean to reach South America long before the arrival of the Spanish around AD 1500. Their proof? Chicken bones. Using genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating of chicken bones found in Chile, the researchers showed that the fowl originated in Polynesia, not Europe as was previously believed, the researchers said Monday.

South Americans were raising crops at least 10,000 years ago, about 5,000 years earlier than previously thought and nearly contemporary with the emergence of agriculture in the Old World, based on new ages obtained for agricultural samples excavated from the Andes 20 years ago.

A magnitude 7.9 earthquake shook southern Peru on Wednesday, killing at least 48 people and injuring 350 others in the cities of Ica and Pisco and sparking tsunami warnings for the Pacific coast of South America and the distant Hawaiian Islands. Peruvian media reported that several people were killed when the bell tower of an 18th century church toppled in Ica, about 150 miles south of Lima.

The same forces that formed the Andes produced the magnitude 8 earthquake that struck Peru's southern desert region Wednesday evening: the collision of two massive tectonic plates along South America's western coast. The Nazca plate under the eastern Pacific Ocean is ramming into the larger South American plate at a rate of about 3 inches a year, one of the fastest rates in the world, according to geophysicist Paul Earle of the U.S. Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center.