Panama’s president warned on Thursday he would visit Europe to force a consortium to drop a threat to suspend expansion work on the Panama Canal, as a row over a US$1.6 billion cost overrun escalated.
A Spanish-led construction group has threatened to halt the massive project within three weeks if the Panama Canal Authority fails to pay the extra costs, but Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli said he expected the Grupo Unidos por el Canal (GUPC) consortium to finish the work “without any setbacks, because these cost overruns are irresponsible.”
“I will go to Spain and Italy to demand these governments take moral responsibility for what happened, because it is not possible that a company put huge extra charges on expansion work,” he said.
Martinelli did not put a date on his trip.
Panama Canal Authority administrator Jorge Quijano insisted the waterway is working as usual, despite the threat.
“The important thing now for the international maritime community is that the canal continues to operate efficiently and effectively,” Quijano said.
In a letter to canal authorities on Monday, Spanish builder Sacyr, the consortium’s leader, gave a 21-day deadline before suspending its US$3.2 billion contract to expand the capacity of the canal, notably by installing a third set of locks.
The project aims to make the 80km waterway big enough to handle new cargo ships that carry 12,000 containers.
The overall cost of the project has been estimated at US$5.2 billion.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS