Most Recent Posts

MANAUS, Brazil (AP) — Light plays off the Solimoes River, duplicating the verdant canopy of the Amazon rainforest on the water's surface.

The landscape that glides by the Almirante Barbosa is breathtaking, but almost no one aboard the boat pays attention. Nearly all the passengers doze in dozens of hammocks strung from the boat's rafters, lulled to sleep by the rocking motion, the motor's chugging, and the tropical swelter.

Boats like the Almirante Barbosa are the lifeline of Brazil's Amazon region, carrying passengers and staple goods ranging from rice to diapers to remote riverside villages inaccessible any other way.

They're also a great way for World Cup fans in the remote Amazon city of Manaus to make a quick jungle escape between matches.

The lumbering wooden vessels are slow going — the Almirante Barbosa chugs at some 20 kilometers (12 miles) an hour — and trips can stretch out for days or even weeks.

While most tourists opt for speedboats for their jungle journeys, a riverboat day trip can give even World Cup visitors on a tight schedule a taste of authentic Amazonian life.

Carved out of the heart of the world's largest forest where the onyx waters of the Rio Negro and milky tea-hued Solimoes meet to form the immense Amazon, Manaus is host to four matches, including the game between Cameroon and Croatia on Wednesday.

Dozens of boats set sail from Manaus daily for destinations such as Belem, about 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) to the east, or to Sao Gabriel da Cachoiera, 860 kilometers (530 miles) to the west, along the Rio Negro's headwaters near Brazil's border with Colombia.

Around the port, hustlers with loudspeakers announce their vessels' destinations and the various stops they will make along the way. Laborers wearing hats that look like Turkish fezzes jostle up and down the docks with giant loads atop their heads, the hats' flat surfaces helping balance impressive loads — sacks of beans and sugar, giant bunches of bananas, six-packs of beer.

Manacapuru, about 79 kilometers (49 miles) up the Solimoes from Manaus, is among the best destinations for an easy day trip — and a ticket that's just $11. There's not much to see in the town itself, but the six-hour voyage is stunning. Plus, Manacapuru is among a few destinations easily accessible by car, and a $65 cab ride gets day-trippers back to the city in an hour.

Potential travelers would be wise to board well ahead of the scheduled departure and bring a hammock. Stalls in Manaus' Adolpho Lisboa market in front of the port, and a row of shops behind the market, have hammocks for every budget, from $5 to $100-plus.

Travelers without hammocks will have a hard time finding a place to sit on the boat, and competition for on-board real estate can be fierce. On the often-overcrowded vessels, hammocks are hung from the overhead wooden beams and stacked two- or even three-high bunk bed-style, with adults on the lower levels and kids above.

Food is included in the ticket price, but gastronomical variety is not: Every day, there's bread and coffee for breakfast, followed by chicken, rice and white noodles for lunch and dinner. The only other food available is fare like cookies and chips at the boat's snack bar.

As dusk falls, the collective midday stupor lifts and the passengers gather at the railings to watch the sunset play on the water and the floating houses, bars and general stores of the riverside communities slip past. The men sip on cold beers as the women gossip and chase after toddlers. Fussing babies are breast-fed and rocked back to sleep by the gentle back and forth of the ship.

"I've been making this trip every two months for three years, and I have the choice: take a speedboat that gets me to where I'm going in four hours, or spend 18 hours on a riverboat," said Marina Vieira, a 28-year-old biologist conducting field research in a remote community up the Solimoes. "I always, always take the riverboat."

___

Jenny Barchfield on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jennybarchfield

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — President Cristina Fernandez says Argentina can't possibly comply with U.S. court orders to pay $1.5 billion in cash to winners of a decade-long debt dispute, the position her country was left in Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear her government's final appeal.

Delivering a nationally broadcast address Monday night, Fernandez expressed willingness to negotiate, but said there is simply no way that Argentina can pay in cash, in full, starting just two weeks from now, which is what the U.S. courts have ordered.

"What I cannot do as president is submit the country to such extortion," Fernandez said.

Under the U.S. court orders, Argentina must hand over $907 million to the plaintiffs, or lose the ability to use the U.S. financial system to pay an equal amount due June 30 to holders of other Argentine bonds.

Fernandez said the total owed to the plaintiffs is $1.5 billion including interest, and paying it all immediately in cash the way the courts ordered could trigger another $15 billion in other cash payments to the remaining holders of defaulted debt. That "is not only absurd but impossible," since it represents more than half the Central Bank's remaining foreign reserves, she said.

She repeatedly vowed to keep making payments on the vast majority of the country's performing debts, which are held by bondholders who agreed previously to provide debt relief that enabled Argentina to rebound from its economic crisis of 2001. Even if Argentina can't use the U.S. financial system to do so, she said, teams of experts are working on ways to avoid such a default and keep Argentina's promises.

Meanwhile, she suggested that she has a moral obligation not to make the court-ordered payments to NML Capital Ltd. and other investors she calls "vulture funds."

"It's our obligation to take responsibility for paying our creditors, but not to become the victims of extortion by speculators," Fernandez said.

The president said her government has repeatedly shown its willingness and ability to negotiate debt accords, and called on her countrymen to "remain tranquil" despite the Supreme Court loss. "It was known that this would happen," she said.

Earlier Monday, the markets reacted in fear that Fernandez would take just such a stance. Argentine stocks plunged as economists, analysts and opposition politicians practically begged her to comply.

The justices not only rejected Argentina's appeal without comment — they also ruled 7-1 that bondholders could force Argentina to reveal where it owns property around the world. That could make it easier to collect on other debts that have gone unpaid since Argentina's economy collapsed.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that U.S. federal law offers no shield to Argentina's assets. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg worried that this could expose even its embassies and military ships to seizure if the government doesn't pay.

"This is the end of the line for Argentina in the judicial appeal process. It has nowhere else to turn," said Richard Samp, a lawyer for the Washington Legal Foundation who lobbies for plaintiffs that included NML Capital Ltd., the hedge fund owned by New York billionaire Paul Singer.

Argentina could win a delay of a few weeks by asking for a rehearing, but they are almost never granted.

Bowing to the U.S. courts would force Fernandez to betray a pillar of the government that she and her late husband and predecessor, Nestor Kirchner, have led since he won the presidency in 2003: That Argentina must maintain its sovereignty and economic independence at any cost.

In addition, Fernandez said, there's near certainty that the 92 percent of creditors who accepted new bonds at steep discounts years ago — debt now totaling at $24 billion — "will find a judge who will tell them that they, too, have the same rights," leading to "the more than certain possibility that the economy will crash."

Refusing to comply could win applause from her core supporters, because paying the plaintiffs 100 percent plus interest in cash would mean sacrificing the subsidies and populist programs that enabled her to win re-election by a landslide.

But while she and NML Capital's owner, New York billionaire Paul Singer, jockey for any remaining advantage ahead of the inevitable negotiations, Argentina's immediate economic outlook seems grim, analysts say.

Argentina's Merval stock index dropped 11 percent after the court decision, its largest one-day loss in more than six months. Share prices for the state-run YPF energy company fell nearly 13 percent, while the Edenor electricity utility plummeted 20 percent. The cost of insuring Argentine bonds against default soared, and the value of Argentina's currency plunged to 12 pesos to the dollar on the black market, implying a 33 percent loss to anyone needing to buy foreign currency legally.

Refusing to comply was "the best option" among a series of grim alternatives that Cleary, Gottlieb, U.S. law firm representing Argentina in Washington, presented to Fernandez ahead of the Supreme Court decision.

Fernandez will pay a steep political price by paying off the winners, but doing so will lower Argentina's country risk, restore foreign reserves and prevent the recession from worsening, said Miguel Kiguel, a former deputy finance minister and World Bank economist in the 1990s who now runs the Econviews consulting firm.

Defiance "would be very damaging to the Argentine economy in the near future," he said.

___

Associated Press writers Mark Sherman in Washington, Luis Andres Henao in Santiago and Almudena Calatrava in Buenos Aires contributed to this report

The Israeli military is searching the West Bank for three Israeli teens who were kidnapped last week.

MADRID (AP) — Eight people have been arrested in Spain and a further three in Germany for suspected links with jihadi groups, especially in Iraq and Syria, authorities said Monday.

A Spanish Interior Ministry statement said police detained the eight in Madrid early Monday on suspicion of recruiting jihadi militants for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.

It said the cell was led by a person who lives in Spain but had previously been jailed in Guantanamo Bay after being arrested in Afghanistan in 2001.

Spain gave no immediate details on the nationalities of the arrested.

In Berlin, prosecutors' spokesman Martin Steltner said police on Saturday arrested a 30-year-old Frenchman suspected of "supporting a terrorist organization" by fighting in Syria for the group.

Steltner said the suspect, who wasn't named because of German privacy laws, was wounded in fighting. He has also allegedly appeared in ISIL propaganda videos.

A court will decide on his extradition to France in the coming weeks.

The French Interior Ministry said in a statement that the detainee had been identified by French intelligence agency DGSI as "dangerous and susceptible of acting on French soil." The statement said he was arrested upon arrival from Istanbul.

German police also arrested a 27-year-old German woman at Frankfurt Airport on Thursday, and a 17-year-old German in Stuttgart on Friday. Both are being linked to Islamist extremist groups.

European authorities have stepped up their cross-border co-operation since four people were killed in Brussels by a suspected French Islamic extremist returned from Syria.

The suspect in that shooting passed through Frankfurt Airport earlier this year, triggering an alert from German authorities to their French colleagues, but they didn't ask for his arrest.

____

Angela Charlton in Paris and Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.