Argentine President Cristina Fernández met on Monday with her Uruguayan counterpart José Mujica after the pair inaugurated a new vessel belonging to the ferry company Buquebús, (which joins Montevideo with Buenos Aires), in order to discuss matters related to the controversial UPM pulp plant formerly known as Botnia.
With less than a month for Argentina’s mid term elections the opposition to President Cristina Fernandez in the province of Buenos Aires, the largest and crucial electoral circuit clearly leads in public opinion polls and continues to advance over the primary results of August.
Argentina has confirmed the purchase of 16 second hand Mirage F-1 decommissioned from the Spanish Air force in an operation valued at 170 million Euros. The expenditure is contemplated in the 2014 budget bill approved in the Lower House and which awaits debate in the Senate.
Iran and Argentina have confirmed they will be meeting in November in Geneva to continue discussions on the Memorandum of Understanding to jointly probe the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires 19 years ago. The information was announced following two meetings held on Saturday between Foreign Minister Héctor Timerman and his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif at the UN headquarters in New York.
The US Supreme Court was scheduled to meet behind closed doors on Monday to decide whether to hear a high-profile appeal by Argentina over its battle with hedge funds that refused to take part in two debt restructurings that sprang from the country's 2002 default.
A report from Argentina’s INIDEP (fisheries research institute) presented to the Fisheries Federal Council last week indicates that during 2013 Illex squid catches totalled 434.561 tons of which 156.163 were landed by 66 Argentine jiggers. The report identified as Number 20, refers to the first 35 weeks of this year, (1 to 35) and includes Argentine waters and outside Argentina’s Exclusive Economic Zone, ZEEA.
Spain will not be involved in ‘joint actions’ with Argentina regarding sovereignty claims over Gibraltar and Malvinas, said on Friday Spanish Foreign minister Jose Manuel Garcia Margallo, arguing there had been ‘misinterpretations’ in the Argentine version of the bilateral ministerial meeting and which was first denied by the Moncla Palace.
Uruguay’s president Jose Mujica anticipated that his intention is to authorize the UPM pulp mill to expand production, as the Finnish company had requested, but conditioned to certain additional environmental measures, which will not be made public until talks with Argentine president Cristina Fernandez on Monday.
The Ministry of Defence and the Navy share the dream of having a fluvial outpost at the head of the San Martin bridge” which links Uruguay with Argentina, said Uruguayan Defence minister Eleuterio Fernandez Huidobro following a joint forces exercise denominated ‘Turbulent River’ involving land, naval forces and air support.
Uruguay’s largest pulp mill UPM announced that it will be making final checks of the plant’s equipment in the rest of the week, following on annual maintenance work, but production is not scheduled to resume until the Finnish company receives a reply from President Jose Mujica regarding the output expansion request.