Sunday, April 29, 2007

Can you move our town back please

The Government of Chile wants Google to fix its earth geographical search program because it places a Chilean village in Argentina. The satellite image shows Villa O'Higgins, a tiny hamlet 1,600 kilometres south of the Chilean capital, Santiago, on the Argentine side of the border.

"Chile has asked for this to be rectified, and it can only be hoped they do it soon," a Foreign Ministry spokesman in Santiago said. He declined to say when the complaint was filed.

Chile and Argentina share the southern cone of South America, where the border between the two nations runs through a complex landscape of islands, fjords and mountains.

The two countries nearly went to war in the late 1970s over ownership of remote islands in the south. The dispute was resolved with the intervention of the Pope.

"We have received the request and are working with our partners to get more precise data for the region," Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn said. "We're constantly working to improve the quality and accuracy of our maps. This is an ongoing process as we receive new information from third party data providers and as names and borders around the world continue to evolve."

The village was named after Chilean independence hero Bernardo O'Higgins.

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