Brazil said on Friday it recalled its ambassador from Quito after Ecuador contested a US$243 million loan it took from Brazil’s state-owned BNDES bank to build a power plant that broke down a year after it was completed.
“The government was very concerned over Ecuador’s decision ... [so] we are recalling our ambassador to Ecuador for consultations, and everybody who knows something about diplomacy knows what that means,” Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin told a press conference.
He said “eventually we will take other actions and we’ll review trade cooperation with Ecuador.”
It was the first time Brazil recalled an ambassador to a South American nation since the 1870 Triple Alliance war that pitted Brazil and Uruguay against Paraguay.
Quito’s foreign ministry issued a statement deploring Brazil’s decision and its “firm disposition” to maintain good relations with its neighbor, which, it added, the court action against BNDES should not affect in the least.
The diplomatic spat was triggered by Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s announcement on Thursday that he had taken the BNDES loan to the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris for arbitration.
Ecuador contends the US$243 million loan is no longer its responsibility since it was paid to Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, which built the now defective San Francisco power plant.
Odebrecht was expelled from Ecuador after the plant broke down and Correa rescinded US$600 million worth of contracts he had signed with the firm. He also said he would sue Odebrecht for refusing to compensate Ecuador for contract violations.
BNDES issued a statement on Friday saying it had “rigorously complied with all requirements” in the contract on the plant.
It also said it was ready to “give all the technical support needed to legally defend [Brazil’s] national interests.”
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS