Bangalore: India’s launch preparations for the ambitious Rs 450 crore Mars orbiter mission achieved a major milestone with the successful thermo-vacuum test of the spacecraft with its payloads. (zeenews.india.com)

It extensively tested the spacecraft under simulated space environment. The spacecraft would now undergo vibration and acoustic tests before being transported from here by month-end to the spaceport of Sriharikota, where the launch campaign has already commenced.

The spacecraft is slated to be launched by Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C25) during October 21-November 19.

India’s launch preparations for the ambitious Rs450 crore Mars orbiter mission achieved a major milestone with the successful thermo-vacuum test of the spacecraft with its payloads.

It extensively tested the spacecraft under simulated space environment. The spacecraft would now undergo vibration and acoustic tests before being transported from here by month-end to the spaceport of Sriharikota, where the launch campaign has already commenced.

The spacecraft is slated to be launched by Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C25) during October 21-November 19.

The first stage of PSLV-C25 with strap-ons has already been assembled, with the rocket ready for satellite integration by October ten, officials of Indian Space Research Organisation said.

ISRO said the primary objectives of the mission are to demonstrate India’s technological capability to send a satellite to orbit around Mars and conduct meaningful experiments such as looking for signs of life, take pictures of the red planet and study Martian environment.

The satellite will carry compact science experiments, totalling a mass of 15 kg. There will be five instruments to study Martian surface, atmosphere and mineralogy.

After leaving earth orbit in November, the spacecraft will cruise in deep space for 10 months using its own propulsion system and will reach Mars (Martian transfer trajectory) in September 2014.

The 1350 kg spacecraft subsequently is planned to enter into a 372 km by 80,000 km elliptical orbit around Mars.

“We want to look at environment of Mars for various elements like Deuterium-Hydrogen ratio. We also want to look at other constituents – neutral constituents”, ISRO Chairman K Radhakrishnan said recently.

“There are several things which Mars will tells us, this is what the scientific community thinks about the life on Mars”, he had said.

“Our (Mars mission) experiments are planned in such a way that you can decide when you want to put on each of these systems,” Radhakrishnan had said.

“If we succeed (in the mission), it positions India into group of countries who will have the ability to look at Mars. In future, certainly, there will be synergy between various countries in such exploration. That’s taking place. That time India will be a country to be counted”, he said.

• Government officials and their families and associates in Azerbaijan, Russia, Canada, Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand, Canada, Mongolia and other countries have embraced the use of covert companies and bank accounts.
• The mega-rich use complex offshore structures to own mansions, yachts, art masterpieces and other assets, gaining tax advantages and anonymity not available to average people.
• Many of the world’s top’s banks – including UBS, Clariden and Deutsche Bank – have aggressively worked to provide their customers with secrecy-cloaked companies in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore hideaways.
• A well-paid industry of accountants, middlemen and other operatives has helped offshore patrons shroud their identities and business interests, providing shelter in many cases to money laundering or other misconduct.
• Ponzi schemers and other large-scale fraudsters routinely use offshore havens to pull off their shell games and move their ill-gotten gains.

Millions of internal records have leaked from Britain’s offshore financial industry, exposing for the first time the identities of thousands of holders of anonymous wealth from around the world, from presidents to plutocrats, the daughter of a notorious dictator and a British millionaire accused of concealing assets from his ex-wife.

Sample offshore owners named in the leaked files include:

• Jean-Jacques Augier, François Hollande’s 2012 election campaign co-treasurer, launched a Caymans-based distributor in China with a 25% partner in a BVI company. Augier says his partner was Xi Shu, a Chinese businessman.

• Mongolia’s former finance minister. Bayartsogt Sangajav set up “Legend Plus Capital Ltd” with a Swiss bank account, while he served as finance minister of the impoverished state from 2008 to 2012. He says it was “a mistake” not to declare it, and says “I probably should consider resigning from my position”.

• The president of Azerbaijan and his family. A local construction magnate, Hassan Gozal, controls entities set up in the names of President Ilham Aliyev’s two daughters.

• The wife of Russia’s deputy prime minister. Olga Shuvalova’s husband, businessman and politician Igor Shuvalov, has denied allegations of wrongdoing about her offshore interests.

•A senator’s husband in Canada. Lawyer Tony Merchant deposited more than US$800,000 into an offshore trust.

He paid fees in cash and ordered written communication to be “kept to a minimum”.

• A dictator’s child in the Philippines: Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, a provincial governor, is the eldest daughter of former President Ferdinand Marcos, notorious for corruption.

• Spain’s wealthiest art collector, Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, a former beauty queen and widow of a Thyssen steel billionaire, who uses offshore entities to buy pictures.

• US: Offshore clients include Denise Rich, ex-wife of notorious oil trader Marc Rich, who was controversially pardoned by President Clinton on tax evasion charges. She put $144m into the Dry Trust, set up in the Cook Islands.

It is estimated that more than $20tn acquired by wealthy individuals could lie in offshore accounts. The UK-controlled BVI has been the most successful among the mushrooming secrecy havens that cater for them.

The Caribbean micro-state has incorporated more than a million such offshore entities since it began marketing itself worldwide in the 1980s. Owners’ true identities are never revealed.

Even the island’s official financial regulators normally have no idea who is behind them.

The British Foreign Office depends on the BVI’s company licensing revenueto subsidise this residual outpost of empire, while lawyers and accountants in the City of London benefit from a lucrative trade as intermediaries.

They claim the tax-free offshore companies provide legitimate privacy. Neil Smith, the financial secretary of the autonomous local administration in the BVI’s capital Tortola, told the Guardian it was very inaccurate to claim the island “harbours the ethically challenged”.

He said: “Our legislation provides a more hostile environment for illegality than most jurisdictions”.

Smith added that in “rare instances …where the BVI was implicated in illegal activity by association or otherwise, we responded swiftly and decisively”.

The Guardian and ICIJ’s Offshore Secrets series last year exposed how UK property empires have been built up by, among others, Russian oligarchs, fraudsters and tax avoiders, using BVI companies behind a screen of sham directors.

Such so-called “nominees”, Britons giving far-flung addresses on Nevis in the Caribbean, Dubai or the Seychelles, are simply renting out their names for the real owners to hide behind.

The whistleblowing group WikiLeaks caused a storm of controversy in 2010 when it was able to download almost two gigabytes of leaked US military and diplomatic files.

The new BVI data, by contrast, contains more than 200 gigabytes, covering more than a decade of financial information about the global transactions of BVI private incorporation agencies. It also includes data on their offshoots in Singapore, Hong Kong and the Cook Islands in the Pacific.

Dozens of journalists sifted through millions of leaked records and thousands of names to produce ICIJ’s investigation into offshore secrecy ­( from icij.org )

A cache of 2.5 million files has cracked open the secrets of more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts, exposing hidden dealings of politicians, con-men and the mega-rich.

The secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists lay bare the names behind covert companies and private trusts in the British Virgin Islands, the Cook Islands and other offshore hideaways.

They include American doctors and dentists and middle-class Greek villagers as well as families and associates of long-time despots, Wall Street swindlers, Eastern European and Indonesian billionaires, Russian corporate executives, international arms dealers and a sham-director-fronted company that the European Union has labeled as a cog in Iran’s nuclear-development program.

The leaked files provide facts and figures — cash transfers, incorporation dates, links between companies and individuals — that illustrate how offshore financial secrecy has spread aggressively around the globe, allowing the wealthy and the well-connected to dodge taxes and fueling corruption and economic woes in rich and poor nations alike.

The records detail the offshore holdings of people and companies in more than 170 countries and territories.

The hoard of documents represents the biggest stockpile of inside information about the offshore system ever obtained by a media organization. The total size of the files, measured in gigabytes, is more than 160 times larger than the leak of U.S. State Department documents by Wikileaks in 2010.

To analyze the documents, ICIJ collaborated with reporters from The Guardian and the BBC in the U.K., Le Monde in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Norddeutscher Rundfunk in Germany, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and 31 other media partners around the world.

Eighty-six journalists from 46 countries used high-tech data crunching and shoe-leather reporting to sift through emails, account ledgers and other files covering nearly 30 years.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. This secret world has finally been revealed,” said Arthur Cockfield, a law professor and tax expert at Queen’s University in Canada, who reviewed some of the documents during an interview with the CBC. He said the documents remind him of the scene in the movie classic The Wizard of Oz in which “they pull back the curtain and you see the wizard operating this secret machine.”
Mobsters and Oligarchs

The vast flow of offshore money — legal and illegal, personal and corporate — can roil economies and pit nations against each other. Europe’s continuing financial crisis has been fueled by a Greek fiscal disaster exacerbated by offshore tax cheating and by a banking meltdown in the tiny tax haven of Cyprus, where local banks’ assets have been inflated by waves of cash from Russia.

Anti-corruption campaigners argue that offshore secrecy undermines law and order and forces average citizens to pay higher taxes to make up for revenues that vanish offshore. Studies have estimated that cross-border flows of global proceeds of financial crimes total between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year.

ICIJ’s 15-month investigation found that, alongside perfectly legal transactions, the secrecy and lax oversight offered by the offshore world allows fraud, tax dodging and political corruption to thrive.

Offshore patrons identified in the documents include:

Individuals and companies linked to Russia’s Magnitsky Affair, a tax fraud scandal that has strained U.S.-Russia relations and led to a ban on Americans adopting Russian orphans.

A Venezuelan deal maker accused of using offshore entities to bankroll a U.S.-based Ponzi scheme and funneling millions of dollars in bribes to a Venezuelan government official.

A corporate mogul who won billions of dollars in contracts amid Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s massive construction boom even as he served as a director of secrecy-shrouded offshore companies owned by the president’s daughters.

Indonesian billionaires with ties to the late dictator Suharto, who enriched a circle of elites during his decades in power.

The documents also provide possible new clues to crimes and money trails that have gone cold.

After learning ICIJ had identified the eldest daughter of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Maria Imelda Marcos Manotoc, as a beneficiary of a British Virgin Islands (BVI) trust, Philippine officials said they were eager to find out whether any assets in the trust are part of the estimated $5 billion her father amassed through corruption.

Manotoc, a provincial governor in the Philippines, declined to answer a series of questions about the trust.
Politically connected wealth

The files obtained by ICIJ shine a light on the day-to-day tactics that offshore services firms and their clients use to keep offshore companies, trusts and their owners under cover.

Tony Merchant, one of Canada’s top class-action lawyers, took extra steps to maintain the privacy of a Cook Islands trust that he’d stocked with more than $1 million in 1998, the documents show.

In a filing to Canadian tax authorities, Merchant checked “no” when asked if he had foreign assets of more than $100,000 in 1999, court records show.

Between 2002 and 2009, he often paid his fees to maintain the trust by sending thousands of dollars in cash and traveler’s checks stuffed into envelopes rather than using easier-to-trace bank checks or wire transfers, according to documents from the offshore services firm that oversaw the trust for him.

One file note warned the firm’s staffers that Merchant would “have a st[r]oke” if they tried to communicate with him by fax.

It is unclear whether his wife, Pana Merchant, a Canadian senator, declared her personal interest in the trust on annual financial disclosure forms.

Under legislative rules, she had to disclose every year to the Senate’s ethics commissioner that she was a beneficiary of the trust, but the information was confidential.

The Merchants declined requests for comment.

Other high profile names identified in the offshore data include the wife of Russia’s deputy prime minister, Igor Shuvalov, and two top executives with Gazprom, the Russian government-owned corporate behemoth that is the world’s largest extractor of natural gas.

Shuvalov’s wife and the Gazprom officials had stakes in BVI companies, documents show. All three declined comment.

In a neighboring land, the deputy speaker of Mongolia’s Parliament said he was considering resigning from office after ICIJ questioned him about records showing he has an offshore company and a secret Swiss bank account.

“I shouldn’t have opened that account,” Bayartsogt Sangajav, who has also served as his country’s finance minister, said. “I probably should consider resigning from my position.”

Bayartsogt said his Swiss account at one point contained more than $1 million, but most of the money belonged to what he described as “business friends” he had joined in investing in international stocks.

He acknowledged that he hasn’t officially declared his BVI company or the Swiss account in Mongolia, but he said he didn’t avoid taxes because the investments didn’t produce income.

“I should have included the company in my declarations,” he said.
Wealthy Clients

The documents also show how the mega-rich use complex offshore structures to own mansions, art and other assets, gaining tax advantages and anonymity not available to average people.

Spanish names include a baroness and famed art patron, Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, who is identified in the documents using a company in the Cook Islands to buy artwork through auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s, including Van Gogh’s Water Mill at Gennep.

Her attorney acknowledged that she gains tax benefits by holding ownership of her art offshore, but stressed that she uses tax havens primarily because they give her “maximum flexibility” when she moves art from country to country.

Among nearly 4,000 American names is Denise Rich, a Grammy-nominated songwriter whose ex-husband was at the center of an American pardon scandal that erupted as President Bill Clinton left office.

A Congressional investigation found that Rich, who raised millions of dollars for Democratic politicians, played a key role in the campaign that persuaded Clinton to pardon her ex-spouse, Marc Rich, an oil trader who had been wanted in the U.S. on tax evasion and racketeering charges.

Records obtained by ICIJ show she had $144 million in April 2006 in a trust in the Cook Islands, a chain of coral atolls and volcanic outcroppings nearly 7,000 miles from her home at the time in Manhattan.

The trust’s holdings included a yacht called the Lady Joy, where Rich often entertained celebrities and raised money for charity.

Rich, who gave up her U.S. citizenship in 2011 and now maintains citizenship in Austria, did not reply to questions about her offshore trust.

Another prominent American in the files who gave up his citizenship is a member of the Mellon dynasty, which started landmark companies such as Gulf Oil and Mellon Bank. James R. Mellon – an author of books about Abraham Lincoln and his family’s founding patriarch, Thomas Mellon – used four companies in the BVI and Lichtenstein to trade securities and transfer tens of millions of dollars among offshore bank accounts he controlled.

Like many offshore players, Mellon appears to have taken steps to distance himself from his offshore interests, the documents show. He often used third parties’ names as directors and shareholders of his companies rather than his own, a legal tool that owners of offshore entities often use to preserve anonymity.

Reached in Italy where lives part of the year, Mellon told ICIJ that, in fact, he used to own “a whole bunch” of offshore companies but has disposed of all of them. He said he set up the firms for “tax advantage” and liability reasons, as advised by his lawyer. “But I have never broken the tax law.”

Of the use of nominees, Mellon said that “that’s the way these firms are set up,” and added that it’s useful for people like him who travel a lot to have somebody else in charge of his businesses. “I just heard of a presidential candidate who had a lot of money in the Cayman Islands,” Mellon, now a British national, said, alluding to former U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

“Not everyone who owns offshores is a crook.

Offshore growth

The anonymity of the offshore world makes it difficult to track the flow of money. A study by James S. Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company, estimates that wealthy individuals have $21 trillion to $32 trillion in private financial wealth tucked away in offshore havens — roughly equivalent to the size of the U.S. and Japanese economies combined.

Even as the world economy has stumbled, the offshore world has continued to grow, said Henry, who is a board member of the Tax Justice Network, an international research and advocacy group that is critical of offshore havens. His research shows, for example, that assets managed by the world’s 50 largest “private banks” — which often use offshore havens to serve their “high net worth” customers — grew from $5.4 trillion in 2005 to more than $12 trillion in 2010.

Henry and other critics argue that offshore secrecy has a corrosive effect on governments and legal systems, allowing crooked officials to loot national treasuries and providing cover to human smugglers, mobsters, animal poachers and other exploiters.

Offshore’s defenders counter that most offshore patrons are engaged in legitimate transactions. Offshore centers, they say, allow companies and individuals to diversify their investments, forge commercial alliances across national borders and do business in entrepreneur-friendly zones that eschew the heavy rules and red tape of the onshore world.

“Everything is much more geared toward business,” David Marchant, publisher of OffshoreAlert, an online news journal, said. “If you’re dishonest you can take advantage of that in a bad way. But if you’re honest you can take advantage of that in a good way.”

Much of ICIJ’s reporting focused on the work of two offshore firms, Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet and BVI-based Commonwealth Trust Limited (CTL), which have helped tens of thousands of people set up offshore companies and trusts and hard-to-trace bank accounts.

Regulators in the BVI found that CTL repeatedly violated the islands’ anti-money-laundering laws between 2003 and 2008 by failing to verify and record its clients’ identities and backgrounds. “This particular firm had systemic money laundering issues within their organization,” an official with the BVI’s Financial Services Commission said last year.

The documents show, for example, that CTL set up 31 companies in 2006 and 2007 for an individual later identified in U.K. court claims as a front man for Mukhtar Ablyazov, a Kazakh banking tycoon who has been accused of stealing $5 billion from one of the former Russian republic’s largest banks. Ablyazov denies wrongdoing.

Thomas Ward, a Canadian who co-founded CTL in 1994 and continues to work as a consultant to the firm, said CTL’s client-vetting procedures have been consistent with industry standards in the BVI, but that no amount of screening can ensure that firms such as CTL won’t be “duped by dishonest clients” or sign on “someone who appears, to all historical examination, to be honest” but “later turns to something dishonest.”

“It is wrong, though perhaps convenient, to demonize CTL as by far the major problem area,” Ward said in a written response to questions. “Rather I believe that CTL’s problems were, by and large, directly proportional to its market share.”

ICIJ’s review of TrustNet documents identified 30 American clients accused in lawsuits or criminal cases of fraud, money laundering or other serious financial misconduct. They include ex-Wall Street titans Paul Bilzerian, a corporate raider who was convicted of tax fraud and securities violations in 1989, and Raj Rajaratnam, a billionaire hedge fund manager who was sent to prison in 2011 in one of the biggest insider trading scandals in U.S. history.

TrustNet declined to answer a series of questions for this article.

Blacklisted

The records obtained by ICIJ expose how offshore operatives help their customers weave elaborate financial structures that span countries, continents and hemispheres.

A Thai government official with links to an infamous African dictator used Singapore-based TrustNet to set up a secret company for herself in the BVI, the records show.

The Thai official, Nalinee “Joy” Taveesin, is currently Thailand’s international trade representative. She served as a cabinet minister for Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra before stepping down last year.

Taveesin acquired her BVI company in August 2008. That was seven months after she’d been appointed an advisor to Thailand’s commerce minister — and three months before the U.S. Department of Treasury blacklisted her as a “crony” of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe.

The Treasury Department froze her U.S. assets, accusing her of “secretly supporting the kleptocratic practices of one of Africa’s most corrupt regimes” through gem trafficking and other deals made on behalf of Mugabe’s wife, Grace, and other powerful Zimbabweans.

Taveesin has said her relationship with the Mugabes is “strictly social” and that the U.S. blacklisting is a case of guilt by association. Through her secretary, Taveesin flatly denied that she owns the BVI company. ICIJ verified her ownership using TrustNet records that listed her and her brother as shareholders of the company and included the main address in Bangkok for her onshore business ventures.

Records obtained by ICIJ also reveal a secret company belonging to Muller Conrad “Billy” Rautenbach, a Zimbabwean businessman who was blacklisted by the U.S. for his ties to the Mugabe regime at the same time as Taveesin. The Treasury Department said Rautenbach has helped organize huge mining projects in Zimbabwe that “benefit a small number of corrupt senior officials.”

When CTL set Rautenbach up with a BVI company in 2006 he was a fugitive, fleeing fraud allegations in South Africa. The charges lodged personally against him were dismissed, but a South African company he controlled pleaded guilty to criminal charges and paid a fine of roughly $4 million.

Rautenbach denies U.S. authorities’ allegations, contending that they made “significant factual and legal errors” in their blacklisting decision, his attorney, Ian Small Smith, said. Smith said Rautenbach’s BVI company was set up as “special purpose vehicle for investment in Moscow” and that it complied with all disclosure regulations. The company is no longer active.
‘One Stop Shop’

TrustNet Thousands of offshore entities are headquartered on this building’s third floor, which houses TrustNet’s Cook Islands office.

Offshore’s customers are served by a well-paid industry of middlemen, accountants, lawyers and banks that provide cover, set up financial structures and shuffle assets on their clients’ behalf.

Documents obtained by ICIJ show how two top Swiss banks, UBS and Clariden, worked with TrustNet to provide their customers with secrecy-shielded companies in the BVI and other offshore centers.

Clariden, owned by Credit Suisse, sought such high levels of confidentiality for some clients, the records show, that a TrustNet official described the bank’s request as “the Holy Grail” of offshore entities — a company so anonymous that police and regulators would be “met with a blank wall” if they tried to discover the owners’ identities.

Clariden declined to answer questions about its relationship with TrustNet.

“Because of Swiss banking secrecy laws, we are not allowed to provide any information about existing or supposed accountholders,” the bank said. “As a general rule, Credit Suisse and its related companies respect all the laws and regulations in the countries in which they are involved.”

A spokesperson for UBS said the bank applies “the highest international standards” to fight money laundering, and that TrustNet “is one of over 800 service providers globally which UBS clients choose to work with to provide for their wealth and succession planning needs. These service providers are also used by clients of other banks.”

TrustNet describes itself as a “one-stop shop” — its staff includes lawyers, accountants and other experts who can shape secrecy packages to fit the needs and net worths of its clients. These packages can be simple and cheap, such as a company chartered in the BVI. Or they can be sophisticated structures that weave together multiple layers of trusts, companies, foundations, insurance products and so-called “nominee” directors and shareholders.

When they create companies for their clients, offshore services firms often appoint faux directors and shareholders — proxies who serve as stand-ins when the real owners of companies don’t want their identities known. Thanks to the proliferation of proxy directors and shareholders, investigators tracking money laundering and other crimes often hit dead ends when they try to uncover who is really behind offshore companies.

An analysis by ICIJ, the BBC and The Guardian identified a cluster of 28 “sham directors” who served as the on-paper representatives of more than 21,000 companies between them, with individual directors representing as many 4,000 companies each.

Among the front men identified in the documents obtained by ICIJ is a U.K.-based operative who served as a director for a BVI company, Tamalaris Consolidated Limited, which the European Union has labeled as a front company for the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Line. The E.U., the U.N. and the U.S. have accused IRISL of aiding Iran’s nuclear-development program.

‘Zone of Impunity’

International groups have been working for decades to limit tax cheating and corruption in the offshore world.

In the 1990s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development began pushing offshore centers to reduce secrecy and get tougher on money laundering, but the effort ebbed in the 2000s. Another push against tax havens began when U.S. authorities took on UBS, forcing the Swiss bank to pay $780 million in 2009 to settle allegations that it had helped Americans dodge taxes. U.S. and German authorities have pressured banks and governments to share information about offshore clients and accounts and UK Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to use his leadership of the G8, a forum of the world’s richest nations, to help crack down on tax evasion and money laundering.

Promises like those have been met with skepticism, given the role played by key G8 members — the U.S., the U.K. and Russia — as sources and destinations of dirty money. Despite the new efforts, offshore remains a “zone of impunity” for anyone determined to commit financial crimes, said Jack Blum, a former U.S. Senate investigator who is now a lawyer specializing in money laundering and tax fraud cases.

“Periodically, the stench gets so bad somebody has to get out there and clap the lid on the garbage can and sit on it for a while,” Blum said. “There’s been some progress, but there’s a bloody long way to go.”

Grieving and stunned supporters of deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez took to the streets on Tuesday weeping, chanting slogans and vowing to continue their hero’s revolution.(from reuters.com)

Gathering in streets and squares across the South American nation of 29 million people, backers of the socialist leader shouted: “Chavez lives forever!” and “The fight continues!”

“We have to show that what he did was not in vain,” said Jamila Rivas, 49, crying outside the military hospital where Chavez died. Hundreds of supporters flocked there.

Venezuelans have been tracking the ups-and-downs of Chavez’s two-year battle against cancer, but some supporters felt a sense of disbelief that the flamboyant leader was gone.

“He was our father. ‘Chavismo’ will not end. We are his people. We will continue to fight!” said Nancy Jotiya, 56, in Caracas’ downtown Bolivar Square, named for Venezuela’s independence hero and Chavez’s idol, Simon Bolivar.

“I admired him. He was a great man,” said housewife Aleida Rodriguez, 50, who heard the news as she emerged from Caracas’ underground transport system.

Venezuela’s opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, offered condolences and called for unity.

Some opponents could not hide their happiness at the end to a rule they viewed as a cruel dictatorship.

“At last!” shouted some women, coming out of their homes in one upscale neighborhood.

Hatred for Chavez ran deep among the wealthier members of Venezuela’s population.

Some openly celebrated his death on Twitter.

There were reports of isolated incidents of looting and violence, including the burning of tents belonging to students who had been protesting in a Caracas street for the last week against secrecy over Chavez’s condition.

Around Latin America and the Caribbean, where Chavez’s oil-fueled largesse was a source of support for various leftist governments, tributes and condolences poured in.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, a close personal friend, wept as he spoke of Chavez.

Brazil’s Congress held a minute of silence.

“President Chavez has always been a friend of Brazil, regardless of his political position,” said Renan Calheiros, president of the Brazilian Senate.

Colombia, whose pro-U.S. conservative governments have clashed fiercely with Chavez in the past, also paid homage.

“I think in the last two years … our relations with Venezuela advanced really well, and he was also a very important support for the current peace process,” Foreign Minister Maria Angela Holguin said, referring to her government’s rapprochement with Chavez and ongoing peace talks with leftist rebels.

“Hopefully he’ll find peace.”

Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien told CBC television he met Chavez several times, was quite fond of him, and acted as a facilitator between Chavez and former U.S. President George W. Bush at a 2001 Summit of the Americas.

“He was a great baseball fan and player and he always told me that if I were to visit him in Venezuela we would go to a baseball field and he would throw balls to me for me to hit them,” he said. “And we never had the occasion to do that.”

In this episode, Scientific American editor Christine Soares talks with Duke University neuroengineer Miguel Nicolelis about his groundbreaking work in controlling robot movement using only thoughts, as well as efforts to create science cities in Brazil and national development through education, especially in science and technology. Plus we’ll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news. (transcript)  (from scientificamerican.com)

Steve: Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American for the seven days starting January 16th, 2008. I’m Steve Mirsky. Last week, the mind of a monkey in North Carolina controlled a walking robot in Japan. The mind that created interfaces between intelligent beings and robotic limbs belongs to Miguel Nicolelis. Scientific American editor Christine Soares recently sat down for a conversation with Nicolelis in his office at Duke University, where he is the codirector of the Center for Neuroengineering. They talked about the organic, robotic neural interface research and its implications for prosthetics; as well as some exciting plans for a grand sociological experiment in Brazil, the creation of an entire science city.

Soares: In 2004 you gave [a] really impressive demonstration of how your work could lead to prosthetics controlled by the brain. Your star monkey, Aurora, learned to play a simple videogame with a joystick, but you were also essentially downloading the neural signals from her brain to control the robot arm.

Nicolelis: Yeah! In that sense what we were doing was to record the brain activity that Aurora was producing to generate arm movements and after a little bit of training, both Aurora and I, we were able to basically get these signals to be decoded in real time and translated into digital commands that could be used by a robotic arm to generate movements that Aurora was imagining. So at a certain point, Aurora realized that she didn’t need to move anymore, she could just imagine the movements and this interface that we created, this brain-machine interface that we created was able to enact her will and generate the movements that she needed to produce to win the video game.

Soares: So this could really be an example of how the language of the brain can be translated to move a prosthetic for a person who is a paralyzed?

Nicolelis: Yeah, that was one of the ideas. First we were interested in understanding how this language of the brain is produced and what is the code and that’s what we were doing at that time; and we learnt that by using the simple algorithms we could read these signals and control a mechanical device, so there opened the possibility in the future for patients who are paralyzed to use their brain activity to directly control a variety of devices.

Soares: So it’s some very fundamental neuroscience questions that you are answering, but also some very practical applications?

Nicolelis: Yes. The idea was to design a prototype that could handle both issues, how do you address fundamental questions about how brain signals operate and how can you actually use this knowledge and this information in technology developed to address this issue to generate some practical application.

Soares: And how’ve you been following up on the Aurora performance?

Nicolelis: Yeah! Well, we have now used the same idea to study other types of behaviors. For instance, locomotion and we’ve learned that we can do the same. We can read signals from motor and sensory areas in the brain that are involved in the generation of the motor program to walk, and we’re able to read this [these] signals, decode them and send them to a device—a robot, a bipedal robot that actually starts walking like the monkey. And we are planning to do now a series of experiments that will demonstrate the power of this interface by getting the monkey not only to control in real time this robot—that is not going to be here in the United States, it’s going to be in Japan, in Kyoto, the ATR Robotics Lab—but also get feedback signals from the robot back to the monkey, to see how the monkey interpret[s] the fact that she is now or he is now controlling a device about 10,000 miles away in real time.

Soares: That’s pretty impressive. I think with Aurora, the robot arm was in the next room.

Nicolelis: Yes. The Aurora’s arm was in the next room. We had done experiments before Aurora with [a] couple of other monkeys in which one robotic device was at M.I.T., while the monkeys were in Durham, so we learned a little bit about how to do that. The challenge here we discovered in Kyoto is much larger because we are talking about a lot more information being transmitted; and is [it’s] different from the experiments we did in 2000 with M.I.T. This is now going to be a bidirectional connection. So, it will be really a blend of the monkey’s brain with this robotic device.

Soares: Great—you are going to be feeding sensory information back to the monkey.

Nicolelis: Yes. We are going to get sensors that are located in [the] feet of this robot to send feedback information back to the monkey, and we are going to give the monkey an opportunity to experience what it is to control a device that is in a different continent.

Soares: That’s incredible! We look forward to seeing those results and that video (laughs).

Nicolelis: Sure; it’s going to be fun.

Soares: You’re also working on counteracting the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, or at least understanding them.

Nicolelis: Yes, we—in collaboration with the lab of a good friend of ours, Marc Caron here at Duke—we have actually looked into the brain of transgenic animals that Marc created that can do, you know, to certain manipulations that it can [be] induce[d] by first genetic and then pharmacological [means]; you can actually produce symptoms that are similar—some of them are similar—to what you’re seeing in Parkinsonian patients, and you can treat these mice and actually get these mice everyday to express these symptoms and recover. By recording the brains, you know, since they are normal until the moment in which they become Parkinsonian, we actually learned what happens in that transition; and since the transition happens in 45 minutes, you know, everyday, we actually accumulate a lot of information [on]and how a normal brain evolves to become Parkinsonian or at least Parkinsonian-like. And now we realize that there are ways to measure this brain activity, for instance, in a motor cortex and find that these cells are becoming more synchronous, they are fighting more together than they used to be, almost like a mild seizure, a mild epileptic seizure; it is not a seizure, but the synchronous fighting resembles that. So we started testing a lot of ideas now on how to treat that, and we are just finding that we may have an opportunity to desynchronize these neurons and get these animals to improve. And that’s what we’re studying right now, we’re trying to come up with methods that to some degree link this research to the prosthetic research to desynchronize this [these] neurons and get the mice, you know, to be able to move and to get rid of this [these] Parkinson symptoms by doing so.

Soares: So, is there a common thread in all the different things you’re working on?

Nicolelis: Yeah, I think the common thread of all these stories is the attempt to understand how the brain works by looking at the population level and the neuronal circuit level. I mean, of course, neuroscientists have been devoting almost a century of work to understand how single neurons operate, the physiology of single cells; but what we realized lately in the last couple of decades is that to obtain behaviors, to generate behaviors, the brain basically needs to recruit populations of neurons, this [that] stood across many structures that come together for a moment in time to generate an output. And actually the game seems to be there, you know, so what we have been doing in all these lines of research is to focus on the operation, the physiological operation of circuits, not single neurons, and try to understand what the emergent properties [are] that come from a combination of hundred of cells at once.

Soares: The whole system!

Nicolelis: The whole system. Yeah, instead of just looking piecemeal one at a time or each structure of the brain at a time, we want to basically measure and quantify the operation of the whole brain or most of it, as it happens, you know, that (unclear 8:32) in the case of the motor control, in those 300 to 500 milliseconds that precede the onset of movement. And we really wanted to see how the circuit comes together and generates the signals that are required for movement to emerge.

Soares: And you’re not just doing this at Duke; you actually have several labs around the world, right?

Nicolelis: Yeah! Right now, we have like a network of laboratories that we have established to work on these projects. We have laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne—E.P.F.L.—in Switzerland that is doing some work like that in locomotion in rodents. And we have two major laboratories in Brazil, one in São Paulo and Sírio-Libanês Hospital that is participating in a collaboration with us; and, of course, two laboratories in Natal in the northeastern Brazil where we are creating an institute, an international neuroscience institute.

Soares: Great! And that’s happened pretty quickly just in the past few years?

Nicolelis: Yeah, basically this idea of creating this global network of collaborators and labs is basically unfolding in the last three to four years, particularly to[the] Brazil effort in the last four years.

Soares: Yes. You just inaugurated earlier this year a school and a health clinic and the institute itself, the research labs.

Nicolelis: Yeah! So, because the institute in Brazil—the Edmond and Lily Safra International Institute—is basically, it’s not only about neuroscience and not only about doing research like we do here at Duke or in other institutes around the world; it’s about using science as an agent to social transformation of a community. And so in addition to creating a neuroscience institute that is linked to the best neuroscience institutes in the world, we created the first science education school in Brazil for children; that [which] is now enrolling 800 kids from the worst school district in Brazil, or one of the worst, and hopefully by the end of the year we’ll have around thousand kids participating[in] this after-school science education program. We just completed the construction of [a] women’s and child[ren’s] clinic that is next to that school to basically also act on translating all sorts of ideas in medicine and in neurology to healthcare services to the community. And now we are starting the construction of what we would like to call “the campus of the brain” that we consolidate all these activities and create the whole mission of the institute.

Soares: Talk about the area where you’re building this. It’s a very poor region in northeastern Brazil. Why did you choose that area?

Nicolelis: Yeah! That is a very important part of the whole project is the idea that by taking science or a big scientific project to a part of Brazil that was underdeveloped and that had not received the attention that other regions of the country had in terms of scientific investments, we could actually test this notion that science can be a driving agent of transformation; not only economic transformation like we know here in the United States and Europe, but also social transformation—that the values, the ethical, the ludic values that scientists apply to their daily life could actually be used to drive a whole educational program, a whole healthcare program and even a self-sustainable economic model that has science at the core. And the values of science [are in] the philosophy and that will, you know, help to find the scaffolding of a development plan. So it is in experiment, it is almost like a sociological experiment: How could science go there, get roots, and in working with the community, help develop series of fundamental issues like education and healthcare to a community that had not been in the radar screen, you know, of science in Brazil?

Soares: So, not just a self-contained institute where science is going on, but where it really actually affects the community and benefits the community.

Nicolelis: Yes, the idea is an open institute, an institute that has porous walls where the knowledge that is being generating [generated] inside can easily migrate to the outside world and reach the public education system, the healthcare system and the economic development planning of the region; and transform the region in[to] a magnet for knowledge-based initiatives and that involves everything. You know, for instance we’re going to have the first school in Brazil—and probably one of the first in the world—where kids go to school before they are born. Their mothers go to school, they return to school and when their kids are born, they enroll automatically in a fellowship that we’re calling fellowship for life. They get a fellowship to be in that school from the early age all the way to the end of high school; we’ve a very empirical science-based curriculum guiding the whole education process of these children.

Soares: And the goal is not just to, maybe, train some future scientists, but also to have that way of thinking that basically benefit them, no matter what they do in life.

Nicolelis: Absolutely. The ambition is not to create a factory of scientists. Actually the goal is to allow these children to become critical thinkers and to develop their potential [in] and whatever [their] potential is. In fact, we are creating a school where kids they have, you know, normal health and kids that are disabled in anyway study together, they are in the same classroom and they’re basically developing at their own pace to reach whatever potential and dreams they have, whatever they are. So we just want to instill in them this idea that you can touch the impossible, you know, you can really pursue it, you may not even get there, but you’re actually the pursuer of it; is [it’s] a great adventure, whatever you want to do in life.

Soares: You’re just giving them the opportunities.

Nicolelis: Yes, giving [them] the tools and the opportunity to flourish.

Soares: The next stage in the process: You want to see a biotechnology park built around this area.

Nicolelis: Yeah, in our attempts to develop a self-sustainable business plan for this project, we thought that the first major step after the construction of the institute and the establishment of social programs was the elaboration of a plan in which science, not only the science that is produced in the institute, but high[-end] in science could be used as a way to generate wealth that could sustain all these activities, the basic research and the social programs. So, we are working in close collaboration with the Brazilian government in the state Rio Grande do Norte, where Natal is located, to elaborate a whole set of bills that will create a free enterprise only in that area, which is strategically located; you know, Natal is on northeast, close to the equator, at the tip of Brazil, [the] northeast tip of Brazil. So, it’s the closest point to Europe, [the] United States and Africa, so [the] federal government of Brazil is investing, creating a huge cargo airport and a harbor there. So, what we want is to create really a serious science park, [a] free-enterprise zone, in which you can bring companies, both big and small, to produce scientific products for exploring. And surrounding this, you can create a service park that can allow a bidirectional interaction between the free enterprise zone and the City of the Brain of Natal in a way that you actually allow the community to benefit from the creation of such a mega-industrial structure. So, it’s almost like a research triangle park here in North Carolina, but with a social mission, something that is rare to see in and around the world.

Soares: That is the difference. There are quite a few cities or, you know, communities that have been built by governments based on technology and science. But that is the difference in this one, — is the connection to the community, building a community at the same time.

Nicolelis: Yes. And basically allowing the community around, you know, Natal and the outskirts of the city to take advantage of that both economically and socially; you know, as I said, a bilateral interaction, where we can show to society that science has many more benefits than IP in creating a business. You know, you really can use science for many other things. One of our goals once Natal is built is to clone it, to clone [it] among other areas of Brazil, and hopefully if the experiment works, to take it to other places in the world.

Soares: Now pretty soon, you’re going to be addressing some very prominent audiences: the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

Nicolelis: At Davos, I think I’m going to talk primarily about the model of doing science—how you can today really have a global lab and not only one lab, but how institutes in countries can belong to networks that can maximize tremendously the resources available to produce science; and basically connect the best minds in a field or in a discipline almost instantaneously to work together in projects that can really transform a society. And I think that’s the future of science— — isa global science, is a science without frontiers. This is already part of the history of science, of course scientists perhaps would first want to propose the globalization as a good thing, but now we can see clearly that this may be the best business model to do science. So I want Davos to present the idea of the network of institutes in Brazil and how they could be translated into a network of institutes around the world, which we are already starting in neuroscience; but [it] could be much bigger than that.

Soares: Good luck with all of it.

Nicolelis: Thank you; thank you very much.