s a good place to live", says Mora. Five relatives from three generations live in her house and none of them wish to leave neighbours or live apart. Hers is among 150 families that dispute claims that O Pico's steep location brings geological hazards, as cited in the city's risk assessments that are being used to justify evictions. The assessments are just one controversial area of the upgrading of...
s speech on limited reform of US espionage practices, saying the measures did not go far enough to address concerns over American snooping on its European allies. European Union Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European commission, said Obama's speech was a step in the right direction: "I am encouraged to see that non-US citizens stand to benefit from spying safeguards. In data protection we trust....
s annual gathering in the Swiss ski resort of Davos next week. The WEF said its annual survey of 700 opinion formers had identified the income gap, extreme weather events and unemployment or underemployment as the three threats most likely to cause major cross-border damage in the next 10 years. It added that a fresh fiscal crisis, climate change and water shortages were the three risks that would...
Buses set on fire in Campinas where 12 young men were gunned down in suspected retaliation for shooting of officer ...
The best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week Jim Powell ...
t forget that the progress has been uneven. A report released in October by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development highlighted that Brazilian youths, aged between 15 and 24 years, are more likely to be unemployed than the population average. Of this group of young and unemployed Brazilians, more than half are women and there is a case to be made for the notion that tackling these...
s horizons – but a Brazilian project is literally aiming for the skies, putting isolated communities online using balloons that transmit internet signals. The Conectar (Portuguese for "connect") project, which is being overseen by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), is not the first to launch balloons in an effort to bring internet-transmitting stations to hard-to-reach locations...
s most endangered tribal groups. The Awá population has been decimated along with the eastern Amazonian forests upon which its nomadic people depend. Disease, murder and the loss of habitat are thought to have reduced their numbers to 450. Although the Brazilian government demarcated their territory in Maranhão state more than 10 years ago, the Awá reserve has been increasingly infringed upon by ranchers,...
s training. But she was not in the least daunted. She lives in the hot, unpleasant town of Uruará, on the Transamazônica highway, which cuts through the Amazon basin from east to west. With some 50,000 inhabitants, it is a typical frontier town, with no running water, no sewerage, no internet, no airport (apart from several small, clandestine landing strips, some of which are said to be used for drug...
Photographs from the Guardian Eyewitness series ...
official supporters' club to see whether they have enough loyalty points to qualify for one, this time there should be more than enough to go around. On top of the tickets on general sale, Fifa has confirmed that 8% of the capacity of each stadium will be reserved for fans of the competing teams. In all there are around 3m tickets on sale. Around 1m have been sold already, more than 22,000 of those...
The world celebrates with spectacular firework displays lighting up the sky across the globe James Murray ...
s much bigger than that. The heart of the sporting year is of course the World Cup in Brazil : football tournament, economic powerhouse, and to date a kind of skyscraper-scale tuning fork transmitting the wider notes of sporting hysteria, social unrest, global brand armageddon and – let's face it – pretty much everything else that's going on in the world right now. All World Cups start long before...
m glamorous and rich and my profession is so classy," she raps in her song, All the Models in the House . "Yesterday I was ugly, today I'm the flavour of the month." The São Paulo-based model, 29, wrote the song to promote her book, I Need to Go Around the World – Surreal Adventures of a Real Model, an attempt to demystify what many see as an enchanted life. "There are moments of glamour, but few,"...
s tale or two . Through a long history of doing stupid things, I've accumulated a stock of gripping yarns. But I failed to explain myself. Some people interpreted the tale I told last Christmas as making a political point about Travellers I had no intention of suggesting ; a point that is in fact the opposite of what I believe. So please read what follows as a story and no more: true to the best of...
s impossible to talk about forests in Acre, Brazil, without mentioning the state...
s far western region, tappers walk the forest trails, harvesting liquid latex from the trunks of the bountiful native rubber trees. But while their grandparents collected rubber for military use in World War Two, today it is used for lovemaking, not war – transformed into condoms at a factory in the town of Xapuri in Acre state. The industry provides a sustainable way to profit from the forest, the...
lobby When Chico Mendes was gunned down in the Amazon, the two policemen who were supposed to protect him were playing dominoes at his kitchen table. It was 22 December 1988. The officers had been sent to the union activist's small wooden home in Xapuri after he received death threats from landowners, who were enraged by his campaign to prevent forest clearance. But the police dropped their guard...
s time to say 'stop'," she says emphatically. The Iniciativa de Integracíon Sudamericana (Iirsa), the project to integrate infrastructure in South America, will link Brazil to the Pacific Ocean and branch out through the Amazon to connect Brazilian mines and agricultural companies to trade routes and power supplies. The proposals include more than 500 mega projects, including hydroelectric dams, highways,...
t mean the continent with 35 ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse countries, they mean the United States of America. That might be where the aggressive envy many South Americans have towards the US starts: why do we have to be "South Americans" and people from the US get to be just Americans, no explanatory prefix required? But that's just the beginning of it. Brazil has been overwhelmingly...