Everything started when some of the most vicious criminals(drug dealers) from Rio de Janeiro were transfered to a maximum security prison in the São Paulo. It is known that those in prison are the people in control. They had said that if they were transfered to the maximum security, the “followers” should raise hell to the city of Rio de Janeiro.

In fact, they listened very well to the order and they are destroying and burning anything they can. They are burning cars, buses, vans and motorcycles.
They are terrorizing everyone by shooting at people, invading their homes and closing streets by burning tires.

To stop the attacks, the police asked for help to the navy and the army. The navy supplied armored vehicles that are being used to move special forces inside the “favelas”.

Since the criminals have a sophisticated arsenal, the army was called in order to help fight these people. In the past 3 days, a great number of soldiers were sent to help.

Today (27), the Chief Police Office announced that they are created a plan in order to avoid confrontation during the negotiation with the criminal. They told the criminal to surrender in peace. They should go to a designated place without the guns or holding them above their heads.

If the criminals decide not to surrender, they will have to go inside the Alemão complex to capture them. The worst case scenario would be the necessary of an invasion. In a situation like that many people will die, specially people that have nothing to do with that.

Here are some of the pictures of the situation:

According to the president, some think that Brazilians are ” idiots” and do not know how to make the necessary improvements for the tournament.

“The African Cup has just ended and they have already started asking ‘where are the Brazilian airports?’, where are the Brazilian bus lanes?,” the president said, not elaborating on who “they” are.

“As if we were a bunch of idiots who do not know how to make things, how to define our priorities.”

The pressure for Brazil to make the necessary projects to host the next World Cup has increased in the past month, due to the proximity of the tournament, the fact that many reforms necessary to the Cup have yet to start, and to the problems with airports seen in South Africa.

President Lula also commented on the Rio-Sao Paulo bullet train project. According to the president, the train will be ready by 2016 when Rio will host the Olympic Games. He stressed the importance of the project and the difficulties to make the bullet train possible.

“I think Brazil needs it (the train) and I think that Rio and Sao Paulo need it because they are the most important cities in Brazil,” he said

The public bidding process for the bullet train’s construction will take place in mid-December.

Source: Xinhua

Besides Barack Obama and John McCain, there’s a new candidate with a potential to win this election shown in this video. It began as a joke and turn to a strong threat against republican and democratic to the presidential office.

Note: The video was created by a third party and has been freely distributed online, so the producers of this site cannot be responsible for its content or usability. The producers of the site cannot assume responsibilty for the site’s compatibility with any user’s computer system, or for any consquences of user’s use or misuse of the software or content.

Fifteen of the 26 state capitals defined the new mayor in the first round of municipal elections. Of the 15 mayors elected, 13 managed to be re-elected in the election this Sunday (5). Other 11 capitals will have second round, held on 26 October.

Among  the capitals that will have the second round, only Belem has not established yet the two candidates. With 98.71% of the votes counted by 6:14 a.m. this Monday, Priante (PMDB) and Mario (PT) will compete against Duciomar Costa (PTB), current mayor.

Of the 20 mayors of the capital who sought re-election, 13 were re-elect in the first round and the other seven are guaranteed in the second round. The current mayor don’t competes for reelection in Belo Horizonte, Macapá, Natal, Recife, Rio de Janeiro and São Luís

Reelected

The first being elected in the capital was Beto Richa (PSDB), which received 77.27% of valid votes in Curitiba (PR). The performance of Richa was only exceeded by Cicero Almeida (PP), who was reelected in Maceió with 81.49% of valid votes.

In Aracaju, Edvaldo Nogueira (PC do B) was reelected with 51.72% of valid votes (140,962). In Boa Vista, Iradilson Sampaio (PSB) received 54.35% of the valid votes. In Campo Grande, Nelson Trad Filho (PMDB) obtained 71.41%.

Five of the 13 are from capital of the northeastern region. Apart from Aracaju and Maceio, the mayors were re-elected Ricardo Coutinho (PSB) in João Pessoa; Luizianne Lins (PT), in Fortaleza, and Silvio Mendes (PSDB) in Teresina.

It was also re-elect Raul Filho (PT) in Palmas; John Coser (PT) in Vitoria, Iris Rezende (PMDB), in Goiania, Roberto Sobrinho (PT) in Porto Velho, and Raimundo Angelim (PT) in Rio Branco.

• If you are not an American or Canadian citizen, check if you need a VISA to enter Brazil for tourism purposes.
• Identify your consular jurisdiction, determined by your place of residence, and always check with your consulate for specific information about hours of operation, processing time, and payment methods.
• APPLICATIONS BY MAIL WILL BE ACCEPTED ONLY FOR RESIDENTS WITHIN the appropriate CONSULAR JURISDICTION.
• The consulates in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, DO NOT ACCEPT APPLICATIONS BY MAIL.
• APPLICATIONS from outside of your jurisdiction area will only be accepted if submitted in person.

GENERAL TOURIST VISA INFORMATION

YOU MUST CONTACT THE CONSULATE OF YOUR JURISICTION

Requirements for TOURIST visas:

• A passport valid for at least six months beyond the applicant’s intended period of stay in Brazil.
• One passport-sized photograph (2″ x 2″)
• A photocopy of the round trip ticket or itinerary
• A duly filled out and signed visa application form. Download a Visa Application form at http://www.brasilemb.org/consulado/consular_forms.shtml
• For American citizens the fee is U$130.00. For citizens of Canada the fee is U$65.00. For citizens of other countries, please check at http://www.brasilemb.org/consulado/consular_table_fee.shtml
• A non-refundable handling fee of US$10.00 per visa applies to visa applications submitted by mail or by any individual other than the applicant or an immediate member of his or her family (NOTE: New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco do not accept applications by mail).

If your consulate does not accept applications by mail (New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), applicants unable to apply in person MUST use a visa service agency. Please visit the website for the consulate in your jurisdiction for a list of visa service agencies.

Visa processing times for applications vary. Processing time may take one to ten business days for applications received in person. The consulates that accept applications by mail usually require 7 to 10 business days (NOT including transit times) to process visas. Check with the consulate where you will be applying for their current processing times.

If you are applying by mail do not forget to include a prepaid, self-addressed/ stamped return envelope with the application so that the consulate can mail it back to you (ONLY USPS ENVELOPES WILL BE ACCEPTED). The Brazilian Tourism Office recommends the use of USPS registered or certified mail or the use of USPS priority or express mail. Do not forget to keep the tracking or registration number for your records in case you need to locate the envelope.

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.

But aside from the images permeating TV and computer screens this time of year, how about the investment climate in Brazil?For someone not already invested in Brazil, there doesn’t currently seem to be any compelling need to immediately get into the marketWorldwide, current markets generally present above-average risks to any stock investor, and extreme caution is needed to navigate through these uncharted waters. The depth and duration of any impending U.S. or worldwide economic downturn is still largely unknown. Hence, a prudent investor is most likely to remain on the sidelines at least until the end of the first quarter of 2008 and let the market go through its gyrations.

There is not yet an overwhelming mass of evidence that a significant economic and market correction has already occurred in Brazil.

The Brazilian market’s Bovespa index, like most of the world’s stock market gauges, fell victim to selling in January. It skidded to a closing low of 53709.11 on Jan. 21 from its all-time high of 65790.81 set on Dec. 6 of last year. But within a week, it had recovered to near the 59000 level. The brief setback could hardly be described as a bear market, especially in emerging-market terms.Even at the trough of its January downward spike, the Bovespa held at levels no lower than four months earlier.So when considering that nation’s current economy, the logical conclusion is that failure to invest in Brazil at current levels doesn’t necessarily mean missing a great buying opportunity. There will very likely be plenty of time for investors to find bargains in mid- to late 2008 and beyond. Brazil’s economy has undergone some much-needed changes that could set the stage for more sustained growth and less volatility than in the past. Changes such as paying down its debt levels and keeping a lid on spending are exactly what emerging markets should be doing in times of prosperity. If the global expansion slows, it will affect Brazil’s economy in no uncertain terms, as commodity demand accounts for 50% of all of the nation’s exports.However, with a cleaner national balance sheet and policies that have attracted foreign investment, Brazil is in the best position it has ever been in to tackle the challenges of a global downturn.Brazil’s economic growth in 2007, as can be seen in the accompanying table, came in at 5.3%, more than double its most recent 10-year average of 2.5%. This has resulted in an uptick in inflation and has strained infrastructure resources such as roads, ports and electricity. So a global slowdown may be just the tonic to get Brazil’s growth rate back to more sustainable levels.Additional investment in infrastructure is needed for Brazil’s future economic expansion and international competitiveness. The prospect of a healthier national balance sheet will attract additional foreign investment to funds, likely boosting the nation’s securities markets. A glance at the high-double-digit returns in the accompanying table of funds with portfolio exposure of 20% or more in Brazil is likely to give pause to anyone tempted to jump in at current levels. The returns through the end of December seem to be discounting a lot of growth without providing much latitude for economic disappointment.

Commitments to funds with significant exposure to Brazil are more likely to turn profitable if made during periods of market weakness. The table was created by searching TheStreet.com Ratings fund database for open-end mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and closed-end funds with at least 20% of portfolio value in Brazilian-domiciled investments.

Most recently available portfolio data indicates that 806 U.S. open-end funds hold positions in 187 Brazilian investments worth an aggregate $76.9 billion. Twenty-three ETFs hold a combined $15.7 billion in 74 Brazilian companies, and 44 closed-end funds have positions in 50 Brazilian firms with a cumulative value of $831 million.A nearby table lists the 10 favorite investments of U.S. funds, sorted by combined value of holdings of open-end, closed-end and exchange-traded funds.

The standard time-test principles of investing should be worth careful consideration when looking at Brazilian investments at current levels, namely: Capital preservation should overrule all else. Capital preserved in safe money market funds and the like are tantamount to bullets in a gun — cash, the bullets, allows you to go hunting when the time is right.Investment in emerging markets such as Latin America is an opportunity to keep in mind. An emerging-market component to any well-diversified and conservative portfolio of funds can prove a “kicker” for returns. The risks are higher. However, if the core of a fund portfolio consists of large-cap multinational funds as well as international holdings in mature economies, then an emerging market such as Brazil balances out the portfolio nicely.