Last Saturday night Silva entered the cage in Las Vegas with the intention to show everybody he can handle even fighters heavier than him. On the other hand Irvin has to prove to his weigh class that he would let a 185lb step on him like he does in his category.

“I didn’t come up to the 205-pound division to disrespect any fighters, but if you stand up and exchange Muay Thai, this is what happens.” said Anderson Silva.

James Irvin prepared for everything but the most powerful hit: the punch. When Irvin throw a mid kick against Silva he never imagined that Silva would grab him and punch him badly right in the middle of the face. That punch cost Irvin the right to prove how good he was.

The best thing I like in Mixed Martial Arts is the improvisation during the fight and Anderson Silva is very good at it. You never know what is going to be his next move, maybe a superman punch or a Moay Thai.

“This was my first time coming up here and it was a good experience,” said Silva. “But my responsibility is to defend the 185-pound title”, said Silva.

Even though Silva knows he can handle bigger fighters he intend to stay in 185lb category to defend his title. However Dan White is begging him not to go back to middle-weight division knowing that he’d be more valuable in light heavy-weight division.

“There is no reason I can’t knocking him out or caching him or something. This guy is much smaller than me. I’m gonna beat me him up a lot of things that people don’t realize that he’s beaten smaller guys up”, said James Irvin.

When James Irvin said this words he had no idea that Anderson Silva can’t be consider a smaller guy. If he had realized that he’d have avoid some of the Silva’s biggest asset: Punches.

Anderson Silva talks about his win at light heavyweight against James Irvin

The survey also showed that 85% of respondents believe the world needs a mechanism that serve as a world guide however only 15% believe that G8 is performing this task.

The G8 is a group that brings together the seven most industrialized economies in the world, plus Russia. The group has its annual meeting in the island of Hokkaido in Japan, and Brazil participates as a guest country.

In the survey, were heard 76 government officials and experts from 16 countries from developed and emerging economies, including Brazil, United States, Germany, Britain, France, Argentina, Russia and China.

G8 Perception

According to the survey, only 10% believe that the G8 is seen by the world public opinion as an effective mechanism for international cooperation and only 8% believes that the composition of the G8 is seen by the world public opinion as legitimate.

The survey also showed that, among the Americans heard, 67% believe that the next president of the United States should express support for the idea that the next meeting of the G8 in 2009 in Italy, should expand version of the body including the G5 to the group.

The survey says that by 2050, 8 billion between 9 billion people on the planet will come from non-Western countries and only 1 billion will come from industrialized nations of the West.

”The G8 meetings are intended to deal with global challenges, but the overall majority is not present, currently, says the study.

Analysis

The survey was conducted by Colin Bradford, researcher-member of the Brookings Institution, and analysis of data contained in research in the study “The United States and reform of international forums in an Era of Transformation”, also signed by Bradford.

According to him, the structure of the G8 meeting is obsolete, an aberration of the century 20,  posing in a full century 21 as a group able to exercise global leadership in a world in which the G8 countries are clear minority in terms of population, culture, religion and sizes of their economies.

Brazil Consulate General in New York, United States

1185 Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue), 21. Fl.
New York, New York, United States, 10036
Phone:
+1-917-777-7777
Fax:
+1-212-827-0225
Email:
consulado@brazilny.org
Website URL:
www.brazilny.org

Brazil Consulate General in San Francisco, California, United States

300 Montgomery Street, suite 900
San Francisco, California, United States, 94104
Phone:
+1-415-981-8170
Fax:
+1-415-981-3628
Email:
brazilsf@brazilsf.org
Website URL:
www.brazilsf.org

Brazil Consulate in Atlanta, United States

1201 W. Peachtree St.
Atlanta, Georgia, United States, 30309
Phone:
+1-404-881-7987

Brazil Consulate in Alabama, United States

1901 6th. Avenue, N., Suite 2900
Birmingham, Alabama, United States, 35203
Phone:
+1-205-214-7321

Brazil Consulate General in Massachusetts, United States

The Stattler Building, 20 Park Plaza, suite 810
Boston, Massachusetts, United States, 02116
Phone:
+1-617-542-4000
Fax:
+1-617-542-4318
Email:
cgbos@consulatebrazil.org
Website URL:
www.consulatebrazil.org

Brazil Consulate General in Illinois, United States

401 North Michigan Avenue, Suite 3050
Chicago, Illinois, United States, 60611
Phone:
+1-312-464-0244
+1-312-464-0245
Fax:
+1-312-464-0299
Email:
central@brazilconsulatechicago.org

Brazil Consulate in Hawaii, United States

345 Queen Street, suite 400
Honolulu, Hawaii, United States, 96813
Phone:
+1-808-235-0571
Fax:
+1-808-923-0851
Email:
honolulu@brazilian-consulate.org

Brazil Consulate General in Texas, United States

Park Tower North, 1233 West Loop South, Suite 1150
Houston, Texas, United States, 77027
Phone:
+1-713-961-3063
+1-713-961-3064
Fax:
+1-713-961-3070
Email:
consbras@brazilhouston.org
Website URL:
www.brazilhouston.org

Brazil Consulate General in California, United States

8484 Wilshire Blvd., suites 711/730
Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, United States, 90211
Phone:
+1-323-651-2664
Fax:
+1-323-651-1274
Email:
info@brazilian-consulate.org
Website URL:
www.brazilian-consulate.org

Brazil Consulate in Tennessee, United States

1256 N. McLean Blvd.
Memphis, Tennessee, United States, 38108
Phone:
+1-901-272-6505

Brazil Consulate General in Florida, United States

80 SW 8th St. – Suite 2600
Miami, Florida, United States, 33130
Phone:
+1-305-285-6200
Fax:
+1-305-285-6229
Email:
consbras@brazilmiami.org
Website URL:
www.brazilmiami.org

Brazil Consulate in Louisiana, United States

365 Canal Street, Suite 1600
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, 70130
Phone:
+1-504-561-6206

Brazil Consulate in Virginia, United States

625 Chesopeian Trail
Virginia Beach, Virginia, United States, 23452
Phone:
+1-901-272-6505

Brazil Consulate in Arizona, United States

9721 E Desert Cove Ave
Scottsdale, Arizona, United States, 85260
Phone:
+1-602-252-6056
+1-480-767-7639
Fax:
+1-602-340-0550
Email:
phoenix@brazilian-consulate.org

Brazil Consulate in Utah, United States

30 E. 100th. S., Suite 950, 180 South 300 West, Suite 130
Salt Lake City, Utah, United States, 84111
Phone:
+1-801-363-4936
Email:
saltlake@brazilian-consulate.org

Brazil Consulate in California, United States

2380 Caminito Agrado
San Diego, California, United States, 92107
Phone:
+1-619-224-1145
Email:
sandiego@brazilian-consulate.org

Brazil Consulate in Georgia, United States

107 Prosperity Drive
Savannah, Georgia, United States, 31408
Phone:
+1-912-964-0711
Fax:
+1-912-964-0771

The Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (PCI) of Pedophilia, installed in the Senate, approved today unanimously the confidentiality breach of 3,261 profiles of Orkut’s users, one of Google services, including data and albums of photos that have child pornography. Google has until the day on April 23rd to provide this data.

According to the Prosecutor’s office of the Republic in the State of Sao Paulo, Orkut is responsible for about 90% of disseminating child pornography on the network, and the other 10% are disseminated through instantaneous communication tools(instant messenger), and chats rooms.

The prosecutor of the Republic in the State of Sao Paulo, Sergio Suiama said today in testimony to the CPI, that Google is creating difficulty for the verification of crimes on Orkut. One of them would be the practice of “delete” pages with content of child pornography when taking knowledge of the problem, disabling, thus, the knowledge of the facts by the authorities and maintenance of evidence against users who practice this type of crime.

The President of Google in Brazil, Alexandre Hohagen, undertook today with the Brazilian authorities to cooperate for the identification, punishment and prevention of sexual crimes against children on the site of relationships Orkut. Hohagen attended a public hearing in the CPI.

The Group of Combat of Crimes in the Cyberspace of the Federal Prosecutor in Sao Paulo (MPF-SP) gave 48 hours to the company Google Brazil informs which of the 3,261 photo albums of Orkut with content blocked by users reported by the NGO Safernet contains pictures of child pornography. The notification was sent to Hohagen and the deadline was closed on April 9th.

General thinking is that the term was first prominently used in a thesis of the Goldman Sachs investment bank. The main point of this 2003 paper was to argue that the economies of the BRICs are rapidly developing and by the year 2050 will eclipse most of the current richest countries of the world.

Finally, because of the popularity of the Goldman Sachs thesis “BRIC” and “BRIMC” (M for Mexico), these terms are also extended to “BRICK” (K for Korea) , “BRICS” (S for South Africa), “BRICA” (GCC Arab countries – Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE) and “BRICET” (including Eastern Europe and Turkey) have become more generic marketing terms to refer to these emerging markets.
The BRIC thesis

Goldman Sachs argues that the economic potential of Brazil, Russia, India, and China is such that they may become among the four most dominant economies by the year 2050. The thesis was proposed by Jim O’Neill, global economist at Goldman Sachs. These countries encompass over twenty-five percent of the world’s land coverage, forty percent of the world’s population and hold a combined GDP of 15.435 trillion dollars. On almost every scale, they would be the largest entity on the global stage. However, it is important to note that it is not the intent of Goldman Sachs to argue that these four countries are a political alliance (such as the European Union) or any formal trading association, like ASEAN. Nevertheless, they have taken steps to increase their political cooperation, mainly as a way of influencing the United States position on major trade accords, or, through the implicit threat of political cooperation, as a way of extracting political concessions from the United States, such as the proposed nuclear cooperation with India.

Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050

The BRIC thesis (defended in the paper Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050) recognizes that Brazil, Russia, India and China have changed their political systems to embrace global capitalism. Goldman Sachs predicts China and India, respectively, to be the dominant global suppliers of manufactured goods and services while Brazil and Russia would become similarly dominant as suppliers of raw materials. Cooperation is thus hypothesized to be a logical next step among the BRICs because Brazil and Russia together form the logical commodity suppliers to India and China. Thus, the BRICs have the potential to form a powerful economic bloc to the exclusion of the modern-day G8 status. Brazil is dominant in soy and iron ore while Russia has enormous supplies of oil and natural gas. Goldman Sachs’ thesis thus documents how commodities, work, technology, and companies have diffused outward from the United States across the world.

Following the end of the Cold War or even before, the governments comprising BRIC all initiated economic or political reforms to allow their countries to enter the world economy. In order to compete, these countries have simultaneously stressed education, foreign investment, domestic consumption, and domestic entrepreneurship. According to the study, India has the potential to grow the fastest among the four BRIC countries over the next 30 to 50 years. A major reason for this is that the decline in working age population will happen later for India and Brazil than for Russia and China. BRIC is the future.

source : wikipedia

eventual B5 mandate—approaching, oilseed growers, producers and project developers are keen on ramping up, but a bit overwhelmed by the government’s aggressive target.

By Elizabeth Johnson

In March 24, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva inaugurated the first large-scale biodiesel plant in Brazil. The plant, located in Cássia, in the state of Minas Gerais, has a capacity to produce 12 million liters (3.17 million gallons) of biodiesel per year and will be the first of many, if the President’s biodiesel program is a success. At the event, President Lula said he believes Brazil has the potential to become one of the world’s largest biodiesel producers. “We have everything necessary to produce biodiesel, and we hope that someday we will be able to supply the world,” said Lula, who had promised earlier that Brazil’s state-controlled oil giant Petrobras will play a key role in the sale and distribution of the renewable fuel.

“Our biodiesel program needs to have a national dimension to become a permanent source of fuel for Brazil. It is our responsibility to guarantee that all Brazilians who want to use biodiesel to fuel their cars will have the right to do so,” he added.

With world oil prices hovering around US$60 per barrel and growing concerns over global warming, countries are allocating more resources to develop technologies for renewable, cleaner burning fuels. Brazil, long the world leader in sugarcane-based ethanol production, launched its Pro-Alcohol Program under a military dictatorship in the late 1970s to reduce its dependence on oil imports. The program strengthened the cane industry by creating an alternative demand for its product aside from sugar.
Now the country’s left-leaning administration is moving ahead with a program that will make a blend of biodiesel—made from vegetable oils and ethanol—mandatory in the national fuel supply by 2008, with the expressed purpose of creating sources of income for many small family farmers in the poor, drought-plagued northeastern region of the otherwise fertile agricultural powerhouse. Officials associated with the massive soy crushing industry in the center-south, however, say the project is doomed without the scale of production that only it can provide to meet future output goals, but so far the government has not come up with the necessary tax breaks to make biodiesel production from soybean oil an attractive investment.

An ambitious national plan
The new law (MP 227), passed by Brazil’s Congress in April, will make B2 use—now voluntary—mandatory nationwide in 2008 and raise the mandatory mix to B5 in 2012, which will help reduce the country’s diesel imports, currently at almost 4 billion liters (1.1 billion gallons) annually. Yearly diesel demand is about 40 billion liters (10.57 billion gallons), or 60 percent of the country’s overall fuel consumption.

The B2 mandate, due to come into force in two and a half years, will require 840 million liters (222 million gallons) of biodiesel annually and create jobs for more than 150,000 small farmers, according to Brazil’s Science and Technology Ministry. According to government estimates, B2 will reduce the nation’s total fuel imports by 33 percent and will save the country $450 million reals (US$195 million). By 2013, the B5 mandate will require 2.4 billion liters (634 million gallons) of biodiesel per year, according to estimates from Brazil’s main vegetable oils industry association. In an effort to meet this growing demand, several large-scale plants are finally beginning to appear, like the one inaugurated by President Lula in March.

SoyMinas was the first company to begin producing in Brazil with a capacity of 12 million liters (3.2 million gallons) per year. In April, Brazil’s Agropalma opened a $2 million reals (US$ 851,000) factory in Belem, northern Brazil, with capacity to produce 24 million liters (6.4 million gallons) per year of biodiesel from palm oil.

New plants being developed
According to the recently formed Brazilian Biodiesel Industries Association, ABiodiesel, eight new projects are currently in development: Ecologica Mato Grosso Industria and Comercio Ltda. (Ecomat); Ceralit; Adequim; Biolix, AgroDiesel; Fusermann Biodiesel; Petroquimica Capital (Petrocap); and Brasil Ecodiesel. Petrocap, the largest of this group is scheduled to inaugurate a plant in the coming weeks with a capacity to produce 300 million liters (79.3 million gallons) per year. These eight projects, combined with Agropalma and SoyMinas plants now in production, are expected to put out more than 450 million liters (118.9 million gallons) of biodiesel annually by 2008.

ABiodiesel’s forecast does not include projects under study by Brazil’s state energy company Petrobras, which expects to start two biodiesel pilot projects at Guamare in Rio Grande do Norte state using castor bean oil. The company’s renewable fuels manager José Carlos Miragaya said that Petrobras is also looking for sites to construct a 45 million-liter- (11.9 million-gallon) per-year biodiesel factory—using various vegetable oil feedstocks—and that it should begin development this year.

Since the beginning of this year, 2% of biodiesel has to be blended into regular diesel in Brazil. The government had originally planned to demand a binding 5% blend in 2013.

The government could make a 3% biodiesel blend binding in July of this year and may require a 4% blend next year.

With a 3% blend, Brazil would consume 1,260 billion liters of biodiesel a year, up from 840 million now, Lobao is quoted as saying.

The minister rejected concerns that there could be biodiesel supply problems in Brazil. The country currently already has a 2.5-billion-liter biodiesel production capacity, he said.

Much of Brazil’s biodiesel output capacity lies idle, however, due to high prices of raw materials, such as soy oil.

The country produces almost 7 million metric tons of beef each year from a total population of 165 million head.
One “missing picture” in the Brazilian cattle industry though, is that of a North American-style feedlot. Only 4% of the cattle killed each year are “fattened” in feedlots. With Europe being Brazil’s main beef export market, the majority is grown to finish under a hormone-free regime on grass pastures. At times during th

e dry season, small amounts of corn or soybean meal may be used to supplement grass gains.

Most cattle are sold directly by farmers to small, inefficient slaughterhouses — seldom with intermediate traders. Only breeding stock is sold through live auction markets.

Brazil has tripled its beef exports in the past three years to about 550,000 tons. Through export-certified entities like Bertin Group Ltd., the Brazilian government hopes to increase exports to 1.15 million tons by 2003. Brazilian beef is exported to Chile, Egypt, Germany, Iran, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, the European Union and the U.S.

All members of the executive and legislative branches are elected by direct suffrage.^[32][33][34] Judges and other judicial authorities are appointed after passing entry exams.^[32] Voting is compulsory for those aged 18 or older.^[3] Four political parties stand out among several small ones: Workers’ Party (PT), Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), and Democrats (formerly Liberal Front Party – PFL). Practically all governmental and administrative functions are exercised by authorities and agencies affiliated with the Executive. The form of government is Republican and democratic,^[3] and the system of government is Presidential.^[3] The President is Head of State and Head of Government of the Union and is elected for a four-year term,^[3] with the possibility of re-election for a second successive term. Currently the President of Brazil is Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. He was elected on October 27, 2002,^[35] and re-elected on October 29, 2006.^[36] The President appoints the Ministers of State, who assist in governing.^[3] Legislative houses in each political entity are the main source of laws in Brazil. The National Congress is the Federation’s bicameral legislature, consisting of the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate. Judiciary authorities exercise jurisdictional duties almost exclusively.