Brazil's Rousseff explains cacellation of US visit

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said Wednesday that she had to cancel a planned state visit to the United States after Washington refused to apologize for spying on her. "I was going to travel. We said there was only one way to solve the problem, and it was an apology for what happened and a promise that it would not happen again," she said in a radio interview. The lack of apology from Washington created an impasse, she said, adding that she did not want to run the risk of having a new spying scandal during her visit, which would be an embarrassment for both sides. She stressed, however, the incident had not affected relations between her country and the United States. She said the U.S. spying was out of economic and strategic interests instead of concerns about terrorism as Washington had claimed, as Brazil's state oil giant Petrobras was also targeted.In the interview, Rousseff also responded to a recent story in the Brazilian Folha de Sao Paulo daily, accusing Brazil's intelligence agency of spying on diplomats from Russia, Iran and Iraq in 2003 and 2004. She said the agency's operations did not involve privacy violations as no phone calls or emails were tapped.