
Two more Iranian bulk carriers that came to Brazil carrying urea and were expected to return home with corn could be left without enough fuel, as Brazil's Petrobras refuses to provide them with bunker fuel due to U.S. sanctions.

Prime Minister Theresa May will hold a meeting of Britain's emergencies committee on Monday to discuss Iran's seizure of a UK-flagged oil tanker in the Gulf. In one of her final important acts as prime minister before resigning on Wednesday, May will chair a meeting of Britain's COBR emergencies committee at around 10.30am (0930 GMT), her Downing Street office said.

The Council of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has condemned recent attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz and Sea of Oman at its meeting in London held from 15-19 July.

Chile, the world's largest producer of copper, reduced on Thursday its price projection for the precious metal for 2019 from US$3.05 to US$2.89 per pound due to a drop in demand from the planet's largest consumer, China.

Two Iranian vessels have been stranded for weeks at Brazilian ports, unable to head back to Iran due to lack of fuel, which state-run oil firm Petrobras refuses to sell them due to sanctions imposed by the United States.

The Cuban government Wednesday explained the repeated blackouts in the country but are due to breakdowns in the electricity-producing machinery and not because of a shortage of oil that can be attributed to sanctions by the United States.

As the Uruguayan state has vowed to take over the administration of departing Montevideo cooking gas suppliers Montevideo Gas and Conecta and jobs have been secured, the UOEGAS workers' union has agreed to end the strike, starting this Friday.

Premier Oil on Wednesday reduced its forecast for its 2019 operating costs to US$12 per barrel of oil equivalent (boe) from US$ 13 and expects debt reduction to reach the upper end of its US$ 250-350 million target by year-end.

Uruguay's President Tabaré Vázquez and Petrobras CEO Roberto Castello Branco met Tuesday in Santa Fe, Argentina, to discuss a possible solution to the crisis affecting Montevideo's two gas suppliers, which are both subsidiaries of the Brazilian consortium.

Less than a month after a similar episode although at a larger scale happened in almost the entire southern cone, a power cut hit New York for about four hours Saturday, affecting some 72,000 customers, in the city's western area and landmarks such as Times Square, causing havoc and unrest when metro lines and theatres came to a standstill.