A former Petrobras executive told a congressional hearing in Brazil on Tuesday that the ruling political party received up to 200 million dollars skimmed from contracts with the state-run oil company, reiterating claims made in plea bargain testimony.
The Falkland Islands Museum & National Trust is very proud to announce that the Historic Dockyard Museum has been shortlisted in the International category of the Museums + Heritage Awards for Excellence 2015.
British architects Foster & Partners has been appointed to design Qatar’s Lusail Stadium, venue for the Qatar 2022 World Cup opening match and final. The London-based firm won the international tender competition for the project, Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy announced on Monday.
Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo has renewed his bid to have Gibraltar excluded from the European Union aviation measures. According to Spanish wire reports he raised the issue in Riga during a conference of foreign ministers which was intended to focus on the crisis with Russia and Ukraine.
United States President Obama on Monday issued a new Executive Order (E.O.) declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.
Brazil’s congressional heads denied involvement in the country’s largest graft scandal after being named among dozens of politicians for investigation. Renan Calheiros and Eduardo Cunha, the heads of the Senate and Lower House respectively, and Rio de Janeiro Senator Lindbergh Farias all rejected allegations of graft in the Petrobras kickback scheme dubbed “Carwash.”
Brazil and Mexico announced the renewal of vehicle quotas for four years, delaying the implementation of a free-trade agreement between the two countries. Under the new agreement, Brazil and Mexico will permit $1.56 billion of duty-free vehicle imports for the first year of the agreement. That amount will rise 3% each year until the agreement expires, in 2019, when they’ll return to a free-trade regime.
Poverty affected 28% of Latin America’s population in 2014, revealing that its decline has stalled at around that level since 2012, while indigence rose to 12.0% from 11.3% during the same two-year period in an overall context of economic deceleration, according to the projections from a study released by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile.
Following the death of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, an Argentine-Israeli journalist who first reported the death has sued two state-owned companies that publicized his private data.
Saudi Arabia has replaced India as the largest importer of defense equipment worldwide and took the top spot as the number one trading partner for the US in 2014, according to IHS’ annual Global Defense Trade Report.