Brazil

Reporting from Bogota, Colombia, and Sao Paulo, Brazil -- The power outage in Brazil that left as many as 60 million people in darkness was the inevitable result of the country's failure to invest in infrastructure to keep pace with its economic and population growth, experts said Wednesday. Government officials said Tuesday night's blackout resulted from a powerful storm that caused a disruption at the giant Itaipu hydroelectric complex on the Paraguayan border, which generates 28,000 megawatts of power, or 20% of Brazil's total.

The Justice Department said it had opened an antitrust investigation of the compressor industry, part of a global probe of possible price fixing and other anti-competitive practices at companies that supply the cooling parts for appliances such as refrigerators and air conditioners. In the United States, home appliance maker Whirlpool Corp. said it had received a grand jury subpoena this week and that investigators had visited company facilities in Brazil and Italy.

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) has asked the Obama administration to grant asylum to a gay man who was forced to return to Brazil after he married a U.S. citizen in Massachusetts. Genesio "Junior" Oliveira has been separated from his husband, Tim Coco, since 2007, when he left the country after his request for asylum and an appeal were denied. Oliveira asked for asylum in 2002, saying he was raped and attacked by a physician as a teenager in Brazil and feared persecution because of his sexuality.

Brazilians huddled in cow pens converted into emergency shelters as swollen rivers continued to rise and northern Brazil's worst floods in decades boosted the number of homeless to nearly 300,000. The death toll rose to 39, and heavy rains washed away earth from one cemetery, dislodging coffins into a river. In Bacabal, a city of 95,000 surrounded by small farms and jungle, more than 1,000 displaced people were crammed into a sprawling complex of stables and wooden shacks that is home to an annual cattle fair.

Stolen paintings by Pablo Picasso and Candido Portinari were returned to the Sao Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil on Wednesday while police tried to find out who masterminded the Dec. 20 robbery. The paintings, worth millions of dollars, were recovered Tuesday when a suspect led police to a house on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, said chief police inspector Mauricio Lemos Freire. A helicopter and more than a dozen police vehicles escorted the small truck carrying "Portrait of Suzanne Bloch" by Picasso and "O Lavrador de Cafe" by Portinari, an influential Brazilian artist, back to the museum.

An $8-million painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat has been located in a Manhattan warehouse after apparently being smuggled out of Brazil, federal prosecutors said. Prosecutors filed papers Wednesday seeking to seize the 1982 painting, called "Hannibal," in an effort to help Brazilian authorities claim it. U.S. authorities said they found the painting in an Upper East Side warehouse in November. It wasn't clear who brought it into the U.S., but prosecutors said it arrived via John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Brazil, the world's largest emerging-market debtor for decades, became a net foreign creditor for the first time in January. International reserves, swelled by investment inflows and record exports of agricultural commodities and oil, probably exceeded gross foreign liabilities last month by about $4 billion, Banco Central do Brasil said Thursday.

Sugar rose, gaining 2.7% for the week, after Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke urged the U.S. to reduce tariffs on imports of cane-based ethanol from Brazil, the world's largest producer. Brazil used more than half of its sugar-cane crop to make ethanol instead of sweetener as crude oil prices climbed to a record high. The U.S. imposes a tax of 54 cents a gallon on ethanol from Brazil. The tariff, set to expire at the end of this year, may be renewed by Congress. Ethanol, a gasoline additive, is made from corn in the U.S.