Southernseas

NAOMI CAMPBELL & DIAMONDS

2010-08-05T06:28:00.000-07:00

British supermodel Naomi Campbell, testifying at the war crimes trial of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, said on Thursday she had been given a pouch containing small, rough diamonds while in South Africa but did not know who they were from.

Complaining that having to appear in court was a "terrible inconvenience," Campbell said two unidentified men came to her bedroom after she attended a charity dinner with Taylor and then South African President Nelson Mandela in 1997.

"I was sleeping and had a knock at the door that woke me up. Two men were there and they gave me a pouch and said: 'A gift for you'," she told the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague.

"I went back to bed. I looked into the pouch the next morning," the model said. "I saw a few stones, they were very small, dirty looking stones."

"I'm used to seeing diamonds in a box ... If someone had not said they were diamonds, I would not have known they were diamonds," she said.

Prosecutors summoned Campbell to support their allegations that Taylor received so-called "blood diamonds" from rebels in Sierra Leone and used them to buy weapons during his 1997 trip to South Africa. Taylor has denied the allegations as "nonsense."

He is charged with 11 counts of instigating murder, rape, mutilation, sexual slavery and conscription of child soldiers during wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone in which more than 250,000 people were killed. He denies all the charges.

"NOT ABNORMAL"

Under defense questioning, Campbell stressed she did not know personally whether the stones came from Taylor. She said she had handed them to the manager of the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund on boarding a luxury train the following day and asked him "to do something good with them."

The supermodel said she recounted the incident at breakfast to actress Mia Farrow and modeling agent Carole White.

Surprised?... not me. Typical behaviour for these so called super models. Money and diamonds... that's what counts,... all the rest is landscape, or if prefer entourage.

TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT

2010-08-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

London's transports of delight

A KEEN cyclist, Gulliver has been rather over-excited by the prospect of London’s new bike-hire scheme, which was launched today. So, having signed up for a year’s access (at a cost of £48, including a pass-key), I decided to test it out, hiring a bike for the trip from Waterloo station, a big London terminus, to office in the West End—a journey of slightly more than a mile.

The scheme seems to have piqued the interest of Londoners and, as if to emphasise the fact, within seconds of climbing into the saddle, I was accosted by a man demanding to know what I thought about it all. He turned out to be the transport correspondent of The Times. The bike is somewhat clunky, I told him. Heavy, with the turning circle of an articulated lorry. But then they weren’t designed for the hill stages of the Tour de France. Rather they have to cope with London’s bumpy streets, novice cyclists and the attempts at vandalism that will follow closing time in the city's pubs.

Getting people onto bikes for short journeys has to be a good idea in a city where the alternatives are breathtakingly expensive taxis, sweaty and overcrowded underground trains and buses that often crawl along congested streets. And the scheme has laudable ambitions. As Boris Johnson, London’s affable mayor, puts it: “In 1904, 20% of journeys were made by bicycle in London. I want to see that kind of figure again.” (Adding: “If you can’t turn the clock back to 1904, ladies and gentlemen, what is the point of being a Conservative?”)

Central London is not ideal for cyclists but neither is it imperfect. There are plenty of cycle lanes (albeit often used as convenient parking spaces by van drivers) and the terrain is pretty flat. Apparently one problem with cycle-hire schemes in less horizontal cities is that bikes accumulate at the bottom of hills, as nobody has the energy to ride them back up.

The first stage of London's scheme will see 6,000 bikes spread around 400 docking stations. On top of an access fee, which in these early days must be paid in advance online or over the phone, there is an hourly hire charge which increases incrementally the longer you have the bike. This has caused some comment. The mayor says he wants the bikes to be used for short journeys, so the first 30 minutes are free. However, if you keep a bike for a whole day you'll pay £50, for longer than 24 hours £150, and if you don't return it at all £300.

There were a few downsides to my journey. The huge docking station at Waterloo station was almost bereft of bicycles. A friend also told me he’d bagged the penultimate bike at Vauxhall, another busy overground station. The mayor accepts that it will take time to calibrate the system and get the bikes where they are most needed, but I suspect the large train stations will need more.

Conversely, the closest bay in Pall Mall, was full of bikes, leaving nowhere to deposit mine. In such circumstances, you are supposed to be able to push a button, learn where the nearest bay is, and then have an extra 15 minutes, toll free, to get there. But in this case the system wasn’t working, and I had to dash around the corner to St James’s Square where I nabbed the very last space.

All this dashing, coupled with a muggy London morning, meant that when I did get to the office I was, shall we say, glowing (“Glowing the office out,” commented one colleague, somewhat harshly). This would have to be a consideration were I about to rush into an important meeting, and it might limit the programme's appeal to business travellers. Nevertheless, I fully intend to make use of the scheme whenever possible. And judging by my 15-minute cycle, the competition seems worried. I inadvertently cut up a taxi on the Strand, and then saw the driver wind down his window and bellow "you could get someone to drive you for that price!" Sadly he sped off before I had a chance to ask him the last time he drove someone for free.

COSTS OF WAR ....

2010-08-03T07:06:00.000-07:00

US$ 1,024,366,950,540 One trillion, twenty four billion, three hundred sixty six million, nine hundred fifty thousand, five hundred and fourty dollars and counting....!!!!!*
Uff, even writting the number that's a hard job. What is that for ?
This is the number representing the estimated cost of war Against Terror started in 2001 till today, ( ie Irak and Afganisthan ). Do you remember it ?
For what, shall we ask ? Do you know ? Under a simple statistics analysis as a trade off, we could say, all this money would pay in US:

161,677,766 People Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year OR

15,851,218 Police or Sheriff's Patrol Officers for One Year OR

18,317,348 Firefighters for One Year OR

132,716,897 Scholarships for University Students for One Year OR

188,536,667 Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550 OR

395,755,864 Children Receiving Low-Income Healthcare for One Year

OR under a global perpsective, far bigger that the yearly GDP of countries** such as;

Australia or South Korea or Netherlands or if you prefer Switzerland, Austria and Sweden together ! Impresive... What could we say if this money was applied to fight poverty and health or even science ?

Who benefits from this? In thesis, all the Bush's, Cheney's & pals of this life. But it was really so, I doubt it. What I'm sure is all americans lost and as a domino everybody else across globe.
Irak is nowadays far worse ( in every perpsective ), than it was under Saddam Hussein's govnerment. Afganisthan, no comments needed ....

Under a managerial perpective, all these actions were and still are, a total disaster and complete faillure!

As a balance, US managed to concentrate the hatred and comtempt of the large majority of countries worlwide, and a debt that is taking US ( steadly ) to the Bankrupcy. If it wasn't the "creative accounting" during recent years, they certainly would be under Chapter 11 protection since sometime ago.
What can Obama do? Not much. Probably create a special programm for americans migration towards South. Who know's? Might be Mexicans accept you, as a trade off.

* Data from Costofwar.com
** Data from IMF 2009 figures.

MESS WITH MASSA & FERRARI GOES ON !

2010-07-30T13:24:00.000-07:00

FILIPE MASSA SWORE THAT HE'LL NOT RUN IF HE TURN'S THE 2nd. TEAM PILOT!

After his unacceptable behaviour during last Grand Prix, Filipe Massa in Hungary - where he had a severe accident in 2009 -, promised not to accept new orders of Ferrari. He said "I'll Stop o running when I know I became the second pilot of the team ".

There are people who do not see it. He´s one of them.

After the lack of character demonstrated at the end of last week, this Brasilian chap want's to convince us of something that is contrary to what we all know.

His position at Ferrari is obviously of the 2nd pilot of the team. He'll only find it out when he'll became just a test pilot...

Then what he'll tell us ? He was too good for the team ? Ridiculous ! Another ridiculous story, from a ridiculous guy....

BRIC - Reasons to believe in Brazil

2010-07-27T15:30:00.000-07:00

WHEN, in 2001, Goldman Sachs dreamt up the acronym BRICs for the largest emerging economies, the country that most people said did not belong in the group was Brazil. Today, the leading candidate for exclusion is Russia. But some prominent observers are still sceptical about Brazil’s prospects. A notable example is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, who recently (and very reasonably) pointed out that Brazil’s share of world output has actually fallen over the past 15 years, from 3.1% in 1995 to 2.9% in 2009 at purchasing-power parity. “Brazil cannot become as big a player in the world as the two Asian giants”, China and India, Mr Wolf concludes.

At a recent meeting with a group of investors in Hong Kong, Rubens Ricupero offered an intriguing counterargument. A long-serving and respected Brazilian diplomat, Mr Ricupero was the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development from 1995 to 2004. Although he has links to the opposition to Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party—he previously served as finance minister in the government of a rival party—his analysis is not party-political. “For the first time in its history,” he argues, Brazil is enjoying “propitious conditions in four areas that used to pose serious limitations to growth.” They are:

Commodities. Commodity production used to be regarded as either a curse or, at best, something countries ought to diversify away from as quickly as possible (which Brazil itself did in the 1970s). But over the next fifty years, Mr Ricupero notes, half the expected increase in the world population will come from eight countries, of which only one—America—is not sucking in commodities at an exponential rate of increase. The others are China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Congo. China alone will account for 40% of the additional demand for meat worldwide, he points out. This demand will remain strong partly because of rising population and partly because of urbanisation, which increases demand for industrial commodities (like iron ore to make steel) and meat (because urbanisation changes eating habits). Brazil is already a large iron-ore producer, and has transformed itself into an agricultural powerhouse over the past 10 years, becoming the first tropical country to join the ranks of the dominant temperate-climate food exporters such as America and the European Union. It is well-placed to benefit from the emerging markets’ commodity boom.

Petroleum. Mr Ricupero argues that the success of the Brazilian state oil company, Petrobras, in offshore oil exploration has transformed Brazilian energy. “Although no precise and final estimates can be made yet of the [so-called] pre-salt oil reserves potential of the Santos Basin,” he says, “all serious indications point to the high likelihood that Brazil is poised to become at least a medium-sized net oil-exporting country.” New oil and gas deposits far away from the volatile Middle East should increase Brazil’s strategic importance, as well as improving its balance-of-payments position.

Demography. Brazil is reaping a big demographic dividend. In 1964, its fertility rate (the average number of children a woman can expect to have during her lifetime) was 6.2. It fell to 2.5 in 1996, and is now below replacement level, at 1.8, one of the sharpest drops in the world. The result has been a collapse in the dependency ratio—the number of children and old people dependent on each working-age adult. As recently as the 1990s, that ratio was 90 to 100 (ie, there were 90 dependents, mostly children, for each for every 100 Brazilians of working age). It is now 48 to 100. Thanks to this, Brazil no longer has to build schools, hospitals, universities and other social institutions helter-skelter to keep pace with population growth. Eventually, the ratio will creep back up as today’s workforce enters retirement, but such problems remain decades ahead. In the meantime, Brazil can pay more attention to the quality rather than the quantity of its social spending, which should, in theory, improve the population’s education, health, and work skills.

Urbanisation. Urbanisation both encourages economic growth and accompanies it. But it also causes problems. “Many of the worst contemporary problems in Brazil,” Mr Ricupero says, such as “lack of educational and health facilities, poor public transportation, marginalisation and criminality, stem from [an] inability to cope with internal migrations in an orderly and planned way.” That is now changing, he argues. The waves of migrants out of the countryside and into the cities have more or less finished. Brazil is now largely an urban country: about four-fifths of the population lives in cities. “For Brazil,” he concludes, “the period of frantic and chaotic growth of big cities that is now taking place in Asia and Africa is already a thing of the past.”

Mr Ricupero is relatively cautious about the conclusion. “The four sets of conditions outlined above,” he says “are by no means sure guarantees of automatic success.” He admits Brazil has fallen behind in infrastructure, for example, and says that, if it had the sort of infrastructure you see in Costa Rica and Chile (the two best examples in Latin America), economic growth would be about two percentage points higher per year. On the other hand, Brazil also has some other advantages: unlike China, Russia and India, it is at peace with its neighbours (all 10 of them). Whether you think all this really amounts to a rejoinder to Mr Wolf is a matter of doubt. Brazil might still remain a relatively small player in the world. Still Mr Ricupero’s points are, at least, actually happening (not things expected in future), can be measured in concrete terms and are long-term (they should continue for decades). Who knows? Perhaps they might even be right.

BRAZIL ELECTIONS - WITH MELON'S, WATERMELONS & TATI QEBRA-BARRACO

2010-07-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE,... READ IT!

MELON WOMEN IN PHOTOS FOR CAMPAIGN OUTDOORS

She only needs to put her feet on the Uruguaiana street, Rio’s city center, for be addressed by a crowd mainly formed by men. They all want appreciate, embrace or kiss Renata Frisson, 23 years, the Melon Woman. With a leap of 12 cm in height and a neckline generous, the famous hoofer not saves sympathy with the fans. It only makes a request: get their vote in the elections of 3 October.

Melon needs Sun

As well as the Muse that will try to become Rio de Janeiro State Congress member, by party PHS , other celebs also want out a “casquinha” – take advantage - of fame to attract voters. This list still regard with celestial bodies as the singer Elymar Santos, the ex-BBB Jean Wyllys, the ex-pagodeiro Waguinho, the ex-soccer player Romário, actress Lady Francis and funkeira Tati Quebra-Barraco “broken-Shack”. The promises are more varied. I visited many communities and theirs missing, for example, health posts. If elected, I shall fight to improvements in those places .

Born in the Complexo do Alemão – a Rio’s Favela - Elymar Santos, a candidate to federal deputy by the PP, has not forgotten their origins and either battle by resources for the inhabitants of their neibourhood. The singer, however, does not have a specific project for a possible mandate in Brasilia.” I will work as machine gun turntable and fight for most varied causes. Education, for the disadvantaged, the rights of artists”, says.

The political scientist Ricardo Ishmael, da PUC, believes that the fame aid a candidate, but is not enough. The famous may be elected, but needs aplomb policy to remain in office. And this is not as easy as it seems , says.

TATI QUEBRA-BARRACO

The journalist Jean Wyllys from Bahia, which was celebrated in 2005 to overcome the Big Brother, seem to know and is not only the fame to offer.

Affiliated to PSOL, he tries becoming deputy federal. It is clear that the fame will help me, but before entering the BBB I was already involved, in some way, with the political and social movements.
After the BBB, I left the media and I devoted to work academic. In Congress, I will defend human rights and freedoms , plans.

Humble Origins in the strategy…and a special care for older people

To become a success also in the polls, many stars remember their humble origins Son of a charlady and a dustman, Waguinho PTdoB, candidate to the Senate, speaks of childhood in Vila Cruzeiro, where he struggles for votes.

Jean Wyllys recalls his early years on the periphery of Alagoinhas, Bahia.

Romário, which seeks to be federal Deputy,by PSB, has not forgotten childhood in Jacarezinho, another Rio’s Favela.

ROMARIO EX-SOCCER PLAYER

Melon Woman admits that it was not by difficulties when child, but says that there are no resources for its campaign. She reminds that various opponents have more money to invest, but not feel intimated with unequal struggle.It is as in the history of David and Goliath , when a giant is defeated .says. “ I’ll pay a special attention to older people,…” she said.

Are we facing a potential substitute of Anne Nicole Smith ???

With a huge support of Rio’s taxi drivers and most certainly of “older” people, she’ll not lack support or funds. Reason is quite simple, both groups are afraid that “fruit” goes over validity date and gets rot!

Facebook has become the third-largest nation

2010-07-22T16:45:00.000-07:00

Status update

THE world's largest social network announced that it had reached 500m members on Wednesday July 21st. If Facebook were a physical nation, it would now be the third-most populous on earth. And if the service continues to grow as rapidly as in the three months to July, it will reach one billion in about 15 months—almost the size of India. Not least because of its gigantic population, some observers have started to talk of Facebook in terms of a country. “[It] is a device that allows people to get together and control their own destiny, much like our nation-state,” says David Post, a law professor at Temple University, Philadelphia.

Genocide Behind Your Smart Phone

2010-07-22T07:03:00.000-07:00

An unidentified man searches for tin ore at a sub-Saharan mine.

Biggest gadget makers—including HP and Apple—may inadvertently get their raw ingredients from murderous Congolese militias. A new movement wants them to trace rare metals from ‘conflict mines.’

It takes a lot to snap people out of apathy about Africa’s problems. But in the wake of Live Aid and Save Darfur, a new cause stands on the cusp of going mainstream. It’s the push to make major electronics companies (manufacturers of cell phones, laptops, portable music players, and cameras) disclose whether they use “conflict minerals”—the rare metals that finance civil wars and militia atrocities, most notably in Congo.

The issue of ethical sourcing has long galvanized human-rights groups. In Liberia, Angola, and Sierra Leone, the notorious trade in “blood diamonds” helped fund rebel insurgencies. In Guinea, bauxite sustains a repressive military junta. And fair-labor groups have spent decades documenting the foreign sweatshops that sometimes supply American clothing stores. Yet Congo raises especially disturbing issues for famous tech brand names that fancy themselves responsible corporate citizens.

A key mover behind the Congo campaign is the anti-genocide Enough Project: witness its clever spoof of the famous Apple commercial. Major names like Hillary Clinton and Nicole Richie have gotten on board. And the timing is perfect: new rules requiring American-listed companies to improve their supply-chain transparency are folded into the financial-reform bill that passed Congress this week.

Congo is a classic victim of the resource curse. Its bountiful deposits—in everything from copper to diamonds—are brazenly plundered by corrupt governments and regional warlords while the population goes without basic services. Today, most violence—including mass rape, slavery, mutilation, and possibly even forced cannibalism—is concentrated in the war-ravaged eastern Kivu provinces, where the Congolese Army and ethnic militias bludgeon each other over the right to trade in mineral ore. One study estimates 5.4 million people have been killed since 1998; 45,000 fatalities still occur each month. Infant mortality and death from HIV/AIDS are also rampant—Congo ranks 16th and sixth-highest in the world, respectively, on these measures.

Still, minerals like tantalum, tin, and tungsten are essential for our wired lifestyle. Tantalum—of which Congo produces about 20 percent of world’s supply—makes capacitors that store electric charge, allowing our devices to function without batteries. Tin is used to fortify circuit boards. Tungsten helps our iPhones vibrate.

But this dependency has a cost in human rights. The U.N. Group of Experts reported last year that the annual trade in gold, tin, and coltan (or tantalum ore) delivers hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of the FDLR militia, whose myriad factions include Congolese Army renegades and Hutu fighters associated with the 1994 Rwandan genocide. With irregular arms delivery tracked from North Korea and Sudan, there is little doubt that bounty funds butchery.

Conflict-free sources of the “three T” minerals do exist. Yet Congo has a huge competitive advantage over resource-rich rivals like Australia, Canada, and Brazil. Ore extraction is both cheap and lucrative for the militias that control the mines. For one, they can coerce miners to work for a pittance (an average of $1 to $5 per day). For another, they can enforce protection rackets on legitimate operators or simply steal minerals after they’ve been mined. Then the militias extract bribes and impose taxes along the transport route.

Yet supply-chain audits are far from rigorous because the minerals change hands so many times on the way to the market. After transiting across Africa, the ore is eventually shipped from ports in Kenya and Tanzania to multinational smelting and processing companies located mainly in Asia; from there, component manufacturers purchase the metals and convert them into capacitors and circuit boards; finally, these are sold to electronics manufacturers. Hewlett-Packard, for example, says, “[T]hese issues are far removed from HP, typically five or more tiers from our direct suppliers.” Nonetheless, it “expects” suppliers to operate in a manner that does not directly support armed conflict. The company also claims to possess repeated assurances from capacitor suppliers that they do not use Congo-sourced tantalum (although it remains unsure where the tantalum comes from).

Replying personally on his iPhone to a concerned customer last month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made similar points: “We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict-[free] materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.” And Microsoft has said that a “conflict mineral free supply chain is a priority.”

The minerals trade already suffers from a lack of international enforcement. A U.N.-approved certification scheme known as the Kimberley Process currently operates to prevent blood diamonds from entering mainstream markets (one requirement is that diamonds be shipped in tamperproof containers). But there is no equivalent for other minerals often mined in war zones. Germany wants certified trading chains—linking international purchasers with conflict-free mining sites. (It is piloting a program to “fingerprint” legitimate tantalum sources in Congo and Rwanda.) But the logistics are daunting and there has been little international support since the 2007 G8 summit, when the concept was first advanced.

In the meantime, local transparency requirements may partly fill the breach. The financial-reform bill passed this week requires American-listed companies to disclose whether they source minerals from Congo. (Although importantly, the provision does not make such trade illegal—out of a fear of damaging the livelihoods of Congolese who rely on legitimate mines.) Companies must provide independently audited reports showing what they’ve done to avoid financing armed conflict—such as citing documentation between the African source country and the Asian processor. Failure to cooperate or the filing of a false report could result in court sanctions.

TIMBER - SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE ECOLOGICAL DISASTER?

2010-07-22T05:55:00.000-07:00

THE past weeks have brought rare good news for the world’s forests. On July 15th a new study found that worldwide harvests of illegal timber dropped by 22% over the past decade, with declines reaching as high as 50-75% in the major timber-producing countries of Brazil, Indonesia and Cameroon. In a victory for greens and governments alike, the preserved trees represent between 1.2 billion and 14.6 billion tonnes of cheaply averted carbon emissions, or $6.5 billion in potential government revenues if they were logged legally.

The study, issued by the London think-tank Chatham House, suggests that international efforts to improve forest monitoring and enforcement drove the declines. But below the marquee findings, the report’s optimism is more qualified.

The authors point out that inconsistent policies and weak legal systems defang timber laws in producer countries, threatening hard-won successes. In Brazil, for example, timber prosecutions languish in gridlocked courts for years, even decades. And though the value of fines levied against violators has risen more than eightfold since 2003, some states collect as little as 2.5% of these penalties.

The sheer scale of illegal logging also tempers the report’s rosy message. However encouraging, recent improvements accrue from a truly dreadful baseline: in the early years of the study, nearly half the tropical logs, sawn timber, and plywood traded worldwide was illegal. (In Indonesia, one of the world’s largest timber producers, more than 80% of logs were cut illegally in 2001.) Even after a decade-long decline, 100m cubic metres of illicit timber are still stripped from forests each year.

Unfortunately, future improvements will be more difficult. Unlike the industrial-scale skulduggery targeted thus far, remaining forms of illegal logging are hard to detect. Regulators struggle to catch companies that overharvest within the boundaries of legally granted lands or deliberately misidentify prohibited tree species as legal ones. Smaller-scale cutting for domestic markets is often overlooked. And government corruption is a perennial bugbear, with murky licensing procedures often masking illegal timber concessions. (Indeed, the report acknowledges that current estimates almost certainly undercount such violations.)

Better oversight may help rein in abuses. Cameroon won plaudits for its donor-financed monitoring scheme, which established an independent regulator to tackle illegal logging in the face of widespread corruption. And Brazil is replacing a rickety, paper-based timber permit program with online certifications, allowing regulators to track timber flows electronically through harvest, processing and export. The technology is not infallible—in 2008, authorities caught logging companies hacking into the system to launder 1.7 million cubic metres of illegal timber. But despite its “teething problems”, this integrated, (generally) tamper-resistant approach may yet improve accountability in the country’s logging operations.

Such accountability is growing more important as consumer countries clamp down on illegal timber. In another victory for forest advocates, the European Parliament voted on July 7th to prohibit imports of illegally harvested wood products starting in 2012, echoing a similar US ban passed in 2008. The new rules demand that importers verify the legality of their supply chains or face sanctions (though penalties will be left up to individual member countries). Regulators hope that such demand-side regulation will make it harder to profit from ill-gotten timber.

It’s a good start. But changing patterns of timber trade will challenge the laws’ effectiveness. In 2002, 85% of illegal wood products came straight from the country of harvest to consumer countries; six years later, only about half did, as illegal timber increasingly detoured through third-party processing nations like China before arriving in the form of finished products. With their opaque supply chains and lax import regulations, such middlemen provide an easy entry point for contraband logs. Regulators have earned the right to celebrate their accomplishments, but a daunting flood of illegal timber remains.

WHY ARE PENGUINS DYING IN BRASIL ?

2010-07-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

No one quite knows why, but around 500 dead penguins have washed ashore on Brazilian beaches in the past week and a half. (via the Associated Press)
Mostly Magellan penguins--believed to have been migrating north--have been found in Brazil's Sao Paulo state. Biologists who've conducted autopsies on the birds have found that many of them had completely empty stomachs, leading experts to believe the penguins starved to death.
This is the typical time of year for penguins to migrate north and while it's normal for several to succumb to the hazards of the journey, scientists are worried about the huge number of dead penguins that have been found in only 10 days. They are now investigating what could be causing such a huge spike in deaths.
So far, possibilities include colder-than-normal temperatures--which could affect the food supply--or humans over-fishing in the area.

Stiletto Fan Ladies - A fashion "weapon" with two blades

2010-07-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

High heels leave permanent marks on legs and not just blisters!

Most women tend that high heels are perfectly comfy—once you get used to them . What inveterate wearers sometimes gripe about is niggling pain felt when forced to walk with their feet flat. Tills observation prompted Marco Narici of Manchester Metropolitan University in Britain and his team find out once and for all what, if anything, happens to legs persistently subjected 10 high heeled treatment.

By pushing heels up, such shoes in effect shorten the calf muscles. Since other research has shown that holding a muscle in a shortened position for a long time can lead to permanent contraction, high heels could have a durable effect on aficionados anatomy. As Dr Narici and his colleagues report in the Journal of Experimental Biology, this ts in fact what happens.

The team's first slefxas It | were, was to find a suitable leg sample, to do this they placed an ad in a local newspaper inviting anyone who had regu Larly worn stilettos with heels of 5cm (2 inches) or more at least five times a week for a minimum of two years. 80 of the volunteers who came forth Dr Narici picked : who complained of discomfort when walking flat-footed. He also recruited 9 heel averse women as a control.

Dr Narici began by comparing the volume of calf muscles using magnetic-resonance imaging, since forcing calves into a shortened position also reduces the load on them, he expected the heel-wearers' muscles to be proportional ly smaller. To his surprise, they weren't. However ultrasound revealed that the muscle fibres that make up the calves were indeed 13% shorter, on average, for the heel fans.

In principle.muscles wilh shorter fibres ought to exert less downward force, making those who have them less firm on their feet. Bui when Dr Narici strapped his heel wearers'ankles into a dynamometer, which can measure a foot'sturning force, the readings were indistinguishable from the control group's. This indicated some compensatory mechanism must be in play. The researchers'attention then turned to the Achilles tendon, which connects the calf to the heel. They discovered that it was significantly thicker and stiffer for the heel wearers. This rigidity makes up for the force lost due to shorter calves and also may explains the mysterious - discomfort

So. what are ailing Manolo lovers to do? Dr Narici recommends stretching exercises. The alternative is not to take the shoes off at all. Many Blahnik buffs could probably live with that.

JAPANESE POLITICS : UP-AND-COMING FORCE

2010-07-20T16:34:00.000-07:00

At last, a new political party to be reckoned with in Japan!

There is something forgivably yuppie like about YOUR PARTY, the 11 month old outfit that In the upper house elections on July 11th burst out as a new force in Japanese politics. It may be the pineapple-like quiff on the head of Yoshimi Watanabe, its 58 year old leader. Or it may be the way that young japanese businessmen discuss it with the reverence usually reserved for MBA courses.

Its success on Sunday is owed chiefly to two factors. First, disenchantment with the Democratic Party ol Japan. Keltchiro Asao, one of Your Party's founding MP's, says that of the 5Mio new voters it picked up since the general election last August, about three-quarters were defectors from the ruling party. Second was its campaign message of small government, strong economic growth and backing for Japan's strategic alliance with America.

Such policies attract the support of business-which in turn brings plenty of funding.

With a tally of 11 out of 142 seats in the upper house and five out of 480 in the lower house, it is hardly a direct threat to the two main parties. But it has the clout to propose important legislation: Mr Watanabe says he wants to change the law governing the Bank of Japan if it does not adopt an inflation target to pull Japan out of deflation.

Its rivals hope it will be a one-hit wonder, and think its business leanings will, in time,alienate the public. But if the new party keeps its focus on growth, Japan's disenchanted and underemployed youth may yet take a greater interest. The two main panics, run by men in then sixties, rarely spare young sters a thought! So, they must be careful with young, free and single, "new kids on the block...."

DOES THAT SUIT FITS YOU?

2010-07-19T16:21:00.000-07:00

FITHING HUNGER IS A TEAM EFFORT!

2010-07-19T16:11:00.000-07:00

HELP TO BUILD THE NEXT GENERATION

BRASIL'S FOREIGN AID PROGRAM - A NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

2010-07-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

In search of soft power, Brazil is turning itself into one of the world's biggest aid donors. But is it going too far, too fast?

One of the most successful post-earthquake initiatives in Haiti is the expansion of LEI Agogo (Lots of Milk, in Creole), a dairy co-operative, into a project encouraging mothers to take their children to school in exchange for free meals. It is based on Bolsa Família, a Brazilian welfare scheme, and financed with Brazilian government money. In Mali cotton yields are soaring at an experimental farm run by Embrapa, a Brazilian research outfit. Odebrecht, a Brazilian construction firm, is building much of Angola's water supply and is one of the biggest contractors in Africa.

Without attracting much attention, Brazil is fast becoming one of the world's biggest providers of help to poor countries. Official figures do not reflect this. The Brazilian Co-operation Agency (abc), which runs "technical assistance" (advisory and scientific projects), has a budget of just 52m reais ($3om) this year. But studies by Britain's Overseas Development Institute and Canada's International Development Research Centre estimate that other Brazilian institutions spend 15 times more than abc's budget on their own technical-assistance programmes. The country's contribution to the United Nations Development Programme (undp) is $2om-25m a year, but the true value of the goods and services it provides, thinks the undp's head in Brazil, is $ioom. Add the $30001 Brazil gives in kind to the World Food Programme; a $35om commitment to Haiti; bits and bobs for Gaza; and the $3.3 billion in commercial loans that Brazilian firms have got in poor countries since 2008 from the state development bank (bndes, akin to China's state-backed loans), and the value of all Brazilian development aid broadly defined could reach $4 billion a year (see table on next page). That is less than China, but similar to generous donors such as Sweden and Canada-and, unlike theirs, Brazil's contributions are soaring, abc's spending has trebled since 2008.

This aid effort-though it is not called that by the government-has wide implications. Lavishing assistance on Africa helps Brazil compete with China and India for soft-power influence in the developing world. It also garners support for the country's lonely quest for a permanent seat on the un Security Council. Since rising powers like Brazil will one day run the world, argues Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães Neto, the foreign ministry's secretary-general, they can save trouble later by reducing poverty in developing countries now.

Moreover, aid makes commercial sense. For example, Brazil is the world's most efficient ethanol producer, and wants to create a global market in the green fuel. But it cannot do so if it is the world's only real provider. Spreading ethanol technology to poor countries creates new suppliers, boosts the chances of a global market and generates business for Brazilian firms.

The effort matters to the world's aid industry, too-and not only because it helps offset the slowdown in aid from traditional donors. Like China, Brazil does not impose Western-style conditions on recipients. But, on the whole, western donors worry less about Brazilian aid than they do over China's, which they think fosters corrupt government and bad policy. Brazilian aid is focused more on social programmes and agriculture, whereas Chinese aid finances roads, railways and docks in exchange for access to raw materials (though Brazilian firms are busy snapping up commodities in third-world nations, too).

Marco Farani, the head of abc, argues there is a specifically Brazilian way of doing aid, based on the social programmes that have accompanied its recent economic success. Brazil has a comparative advantage, he says, in providing hiv/aids treatment to the poor and in conditional cash-transfer schemes like Bolsa Família. Its tropical-agriculture research is among the world's best. But Brazil also still receives aid so, for good or ill, its aid programme is eroding the distinction between donors and recipients, thus undermining the old system of donor-dictated, top-down aid.

And all this has consequences for the West. Some rich-country governments cautiously welcome what Brazilians call "the diplomacy of generosity", just as they do the soft-power ambitions of which aid is part. After all, if (as seems likely) emerging markets are to become more influential, Brazil-stable, democratic, at peace with its neighbours-looks more attractive and tractable than, say, China or Russia.

But if aid is any guide, a lot will have to change before Brazil occupies the place in the world that its president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, aspires to. Brazil seems almost ambivalent about its aid programme. The country still has large pockets of third-world poverty, and sending money abroad could be controversial. Brazilian law forbids giving public money to other governments, so legal contortions are inevitable. The abc aid agency is tucked away in the foreign ministry, where its officials are looked down on as "Elizabeth Arden" diplomats (London-New York-Paris), not the "Indiana Jones" adventurers required. At least some aid, for example to Venezuela, seems to have been inspired by Lula's soft spot for leftist strongmen. And the exponential increase in aid-the value of humanitarian contributions has risen by 20 times in just three years-means that both people and institutions are being overwhelmed. Stories abound of broken promises, incompetence and corruption.

Slowly, though, things are changing. Dilma Rousseff, the presidential candidate from Lula's party, is thought to be mulling over the idea of a new development agency to raise aid's profile, if elected. As Mr Farani says, Brazil needs more aid officials, with more operational independence and a greater emphasis on policy aims, not just piecemeal projects. Until it gets those, Brazil's aid programme is likely to remain a global model in waiting-a symbol, perhaps, of the country as a whole.

New kid on the block
Brazil's foreign-aid commitments, 2010, $m
Brazilian Co-operation Agency	30
Other technical co-operation	440
Humanitarian aid	30
To UNDP	25
To World Food Programme	300
To Gaza	10
To Haiti	350
Total direct aid	1,200
BNDES loans in developing countries	3,300
2008-Q12010
of which new loans, Ql 2010	1,500
Source: The Economist

Pre-salt Oil - Faith in God and everybody on the run towards the “pile” of money

2010-07-16T12:19:00.000-07:00

During inauguration of the beginning of the commercial exploitation of the first offshore pit to explore the layer of pre-salt in Brazilian coast, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva returned to comment in Vitoria (ES) the oil leakage oil in the United States. In his speech during the event, held at the Vitoria Airport, Lula blamed BP by tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico.
"What happened was not an accident, was a disaster. (Guilherme) Estrella (director of exploration and production of Petrobras) told me that the company was looking do more cheaply and use less safety equipment of that needed ", said Lula. "We have technology and God will not allow this to happen here."

Lula was upset with the newsflash released today by local newspaper O Globo, which says that Brazil is on the opposite direction of the oil industry to allow in deep drillings Lula mentioned "Perhaps behind the idea to say that Brazil: ''shall not draw its oil of pre-salt leaving it there waiting for others do it later'' He also underlined that the production of oil at EU is decadent.
Lula visited the platform , which started yesterday to produce oil of pre-seat by means of pit Baleia Franca I, the 1400 meters blade of water, almost the same depth of pit Macondo, operated by BP, that exploded almost three months ago in the Gulf of Mexico.
We shall congratulate Brazil by achieving the implementation a project of enormous technical complexity. However we cannot forget that this project already “swallow” enormous financial resources of Petrobrás state oil company. The financial effort required to give continuity to this project , will oblige a continues increase of capital, so huge that Petrobrás plans to perform this year the largest operation of capitalization, ever made ! Just in 2010 they will need R$ 88Bio ( US$ 40Bio ), but till 2014this amount will increase up to R$224 Bio (US$ 110Bio )! Fabulous amounts which has already led some experts to question the economic viability of this project.
However and due to the technical difficulties of great depth exploitation, questions how reliable is the technology in place to avoid possible leaks. Is the environment duly protected ?. Who grants that, Lula or God? Engineers certainly not!
Is also foreseen a “enormous internal guerrilla”, between the various States of the Union for the “profits” generated by pre-salt. The law ,recently approved , was the start-up of this “silent war ” between producer States ( Rio, Espirito Santo) and all the other States of the Union , generating already some ruptures among main political parties. Tacitly, Lula who was responsible for approving or vetoed the law, decided to leave the decision for president to be elected in October. As a local senator said “we shall have faith…”.

@ Ernesto Melo Vieira
Consultant MEng,MSc, MBA
15Jul2010

The most expensive coffee ( cafezinho ) in the world ?

2010-07-15T08:31:00.000-07:00

Waiters “hard live” at Brazilian Senate…

Due recent publication of the income received by holders of public posts in Brazil, some other news caught my attention.

The approval last week by local parlment of wages increase – average 25% -, for the staff of the Senate. After brief research I found out that local Senate is “managed” by 181 directors. But now Senate is facing another surprising figures: at least 20.4% of 3,500 servers in the institution are waiters or porters.

In the whole they represent 717 staff members, 204 waiters and 513 porters. The average salary of such servers is R$3,000 / month ( US$ 1.700 ), but there are some waiters earning more than R$8,000 month ( US$ 4.520 )!!!. More curious in average they just work 3 up 4 hours per shift, 4 shifts per week. In theory, there are in the Senate more than seven waiters to serve each of the 81 senators !!!.

But, if we consider that 81 senators drink on average 4 cafézinhos a day, times 5 days per week, we come to the simple conclusion that only in personnel costs each cafezinho will cost to Brasilian tax payers the amount of R$ 95.00 each ( US$ 54 ). Cheap isn’t it????!!!!
If we look further we notice : Local Senate includes on their payroll 6,630 servers ( 2,030 retired ). Senate project will have an impact of R$ 217.7 million this year alone and almost half billion next year: R$ 464 million ( US$ 262 Mio ).

In a few minutes, the members included the project and the agreed tariff. Proof that after all, when they like, they are fast in the decision…

Was you who asked for a cafézinho? If you are in Brasilia, bear in mind, check your wallet first...

On Lula Footsteps

2010-07-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

Dilma Rousseff is cruising towards victory on the coat-tails of apopular president. But there is more at stake in October's election than meets the eye

On July 6th the campaign for October's general election formally kicked off. It will be the first presidential election since democracy was restored in the 1980s in which the name of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva does not appear on the ballot. But Lula, Brazil's president since 2003, is nevertheless the dominant figure in the campaign.

For the past 18 months he has put all his efforts into trying to get Dilma Rousseff, his former chief of staff, elected as his successor. She is not an obvious presidential candidate: an efficient though notoriously bad-tempered administrator, she only joined Lula's Workers' Party (pt) in 2001. She has never before stood for elected office. But several more senior figures in the pt were forced out of politics by a corruption scandal during Lula's first term, and others have proved electoral flops. Barely known to the public at the outset, Ms Rousseff spent half of the past year recovering from lymphatic cancer. Despite all these handicaps, she has risen inexorably in the opinion polls. This month she overhauled the opposition's standard-bearer, José Serra, formerly the governor of São Paulo state, for the first time (see chart 1). The only other plausible candidate is Marina Silva, a long-time member of the pt who is standing for the small Green Party. Like Lula, she was born in poverty, but she fell out with him over what she sees as his government's failure to defend the environment.

The election has now become Ms Rous-seff's to lose. Her rise in the polls shows that Lula has been able to transfer his own extraordinary popularity to her. A former trade-union leader, Lula has a rapport with ordinary Brazilians that no other politician enjoys. But he can also point to solid accomplishments. He has presided over both a steady increase in economic growth which is now-conveniently—reaching new heights, and a sharp reduction in poverty. Even allowing for an expected slowdown, the economy will have grown by around 8% in the year before the vote.

The polls show that roughly 75% of Brazilians approve of the job Lula has done. Alexandre Marinis, a political consultant in São Paulo, notes that recent elections show a close correlation between the president's popularity and his candidate's success.

All this makes Mr Serra's job exceptionally hard. A minister in the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula's predecessor, he trumps Ms Rousseff in political experience and has been an effective governor of São Paulo, the country's second-most-powerful job. His supporters are counting on his opponent to make gaffes. But Ms Rousseff is looking increasingly assured. And he is struggling to make his experience count in an election where most Brazilians-especially in the country's poorer areas—want continuity.

To see why, visit places like Jardim Igua-temi, afave\a (a self-built settlement) straggling over steep hills on the eastern extremity of São Paulo. Bordered by forest, it is an hour and a half's drive from the city centre. Mr Serra's state government built a big new school and a health clinic there. But it is the president who commands the sympathy of many residents. They credit Lula with Bolsa Família, a programme under which 12m of the poorest Brazilian families get a monthly stipend of up to 200 reais ($111), paid to mothers provided they keep their children in school and take them for health checks.

The government has cautiously allowed private investment in roads, railways and ports. But airports are run by an inefficient state body. Such mismanagement is a luxury Brazil can ill affbrd-if only because it will need to handle visitors to the football World Cup, to be held in the country in 2014. and the Olympic games, in Rio de Janeiro two years later.

Meanwhile, the government is spending more and more on pensions. Fabio Giambiagi, an economist at the National Development Bank (bndes), notes that although only 6% of Brazilians are of pensionable age, the country spends 11,3% of its gdp on them; in the United States, by contrast, the 12% of the population who are pensioners receive around 6% of gdp. Spending on pensions for private-sector workers in the formal economy has tripled as a share of Brazil's gdp since 1988. This is partly because the economy grew quite slowly (until recently), but mainly because of the generosity of the pension regime. Many affluent Brazilians retire in their 50s, and many pensions have risen steeply because they are tied to the minimum wage.

The result is that the federal government bails out the national pension system to the tune of 1.5% of gdp. Mr Giambiagi points out that the number of pensioners will grow by about 4% a year for the next ten years. Provided the economy grows at a similar rate and the next government slows the rise in the minimum wage, the pension burden will be just about manageable. But it reinforces Brazil's inequalities. Mr Paes de Barros notes that the government transfers ten times more money to pensioners than to children. He is advising the third candidate, Ms Silva, the only one who talks much about pension reform.

Banking on industrial policy

The government's critics also worry about the implications of a big expansion of the role of state banks (Brazil has three large ones). This came about partly as a result of the world financial crisis, when private banks temporarily cut back their lending. But the bndes, in particular, has become an important agent of industrial policy under Lula. Over the past two years the federal government boosted the bank's capital base with two long-term loans worth 180 billion reais. Its annual lending has reached 4-5% of gdp, and should be double its 2008 level by year's end. Its loans are mainly long-term (for up to 30 years), with priority for infrastructure, investment in industry and services and seed money for innovation. They cost around half of the Central Bank's benchmark interest rate.

The bndes has given big loans to state-owned electricity companies (revived by Lula) and to Petrobras, the government-controlled oil giant. But it has also financed takeovers by big private companies, both at home and abroad, creating national champions in businesses ranging from food to pulp and paper. Eduardo Giannetti, an economist in São Paulo, worries that all this involves big, but opaque, subsidies (of perhaps 8 billion to 12 billion reais a year, he thinks) while extending government influence over business.

Luciano Coutinho, the bndes's president (who is tipped to be finance minister if Ms Rousseff wins), insists that the bank deploys professional techniques of credit analysis and dismisses as a "conservative fiction" the notion that its loans are governed by political criteria. The bank's role is transitional, he says, until private capital markets develop long-term savings and lending instruments.

Ms Rousseff champions industrial policy—indeed her critics see her as more dirigiste than Lula, whose instincts are pragmatic. But Mr Coutinho says that this does not involve a return to the big Brazilian state and the high tariff protection of the 1960s and 1970s, as the critics charge. Brazil's economy is more open today. Mr Coutinho says his inspiration comes from Asian countries such as South Korea and China (though average tariffs are still higher in Brazil than in those countries).

This debate is most intense over how to develop the vast new oil deposits found deep beneath the Atlantic in 2007 Their discovery followed Mr Cardoso's decision to open up the oil industry to competition and subject Petrobras to market discipline (though the company continues to be controlled by the government, a majority of its shares are publicly traded).

Since Lula's administration thinks it clear that there is much more oil to be found, it wants to change the rules governing the industry. Instead of concessions under which oil companies pay royalties and taxes but keep the oil they extract, in any future fields the oil will belong to a new state company and Petrobras will be the sole operator (though it can team up with partners under production-sharing agreements). These changes are embodied in four laws, though only one-allowing the government to vest oil deposits in Petrobras as a way of increasing its capital-has so far been approved by Congress.

The government also hopes to create a national oil-supply industry. It is drawing up requirements that equipment, from tankers to service platforms and drilling rigs, should be mainly locally produced. Already Petrobras is doing much of its procurement locally, and officials point to a revival in Brazil's shipbuilding industry as an early success. Provided such restrictions are temporary, they may pay off for the oil industry. But there are risks. One is a repeat of the mistakes of the 1970s, when a government attempt to develop a computer industry by banning imports cut Brazil off from new technology. Another is placing too much strain on Petrobras, which has also been required by the government to build four new refineries.

This month Petrobras unveiled a huge increase in its five-year investment plan, to $224 billion (up from $187 billion). But the next day it abruptly postponed until September a planned share offering expected to be worth up to $25 billion. The price of the company's bonds has fallen recently because of fears that the accident at a bp rig in the Gulf of Mexico will add to the cost of deep-sea oil operations.

Oil now accounts for 12% of Brazil's gdp, a fourfold increase since 1997- It will climb as high as 20%, reckons Adrian Pires_:an industry regulator under Mr Cardoso. The opposition's nightmare is that Ms Rousseff might use oil revenues to entrench the pt in power and that Brazil might go the way of other oil-rich Latin American states, such as Hugo Chavez's Venezuela or Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party. But officials have other models in mind, such as democratic Norway, which has saved much of its oil revenues. "We want to use the oil wealth in ways such that it doesn't contaminate the rest of the economy," says Márcio Zimmermann, the energy minister.

Brazilians thus face a choice in October. Mr Serra would provide them with a strong but lean state, that would make room for more private investment and initiative and would tax its citizens less. Ms RoussefPs advisers think that Brazil has time to bring down interest rates and taxes gradually, and that the state should promote industrial development and redistribute income. After 16 years of stability and policy continuity under Mr Cardoso and Lula, neither candidate offers a radical change of course. What is at stake is the speed of the country's progress. ■

2010-07-14T10:45:00.001-07:00

Lacks everything for 2014?
Three years after “awarding” Brazil with the organization of 2014 world cup, and one day after the closure of the world cup at South Africa, FIFA has made an alert to the Brazilian authorities.
"Lacks everything" for the country be able to organize the event in four years. FIFA y also advised: we’ll pressure for the works to be accelerated. Even Brasil Court of Auditors of the Union reached the same conclusion and, by way of a report, pointed out that the "works are unacceptably delayed".
The secretary-general of FIFA, Jérome Valcke, was hard and straightforward in its analysis. "We have some problems", said, yesterday, in Johannesburg. The list of the leader, in reality, is long and complex. "need to build stadiums, roads, system of telecommunications, airports and see whether there is sufficient capacity in hotels." In summary, the announcement of the entity is that nothing is up to date”.
There is no definition of where will they run the opening match and semifinals, which infrastructures or airports will be used, even financial guarantees. A Executive Committee Member of Fifa said , “… if Brasil had not competing alone to organize the 2014 world cup, would not have been the organizing country , "so great is the lack of planning". For 2018 and 2022, there are in FIFA who has the feeling that candidates are better prepared that Brazil.
Behind the scenes, the country is being considered by FIFA as problematic or even worse that South Africa. Before the beginning of the World Cup, the FIFA president, Joseph Blatter, reached the point that "Brazil was not a paradise", as a sign of dissatisfaction with the form as leaders and politicians are coping the event. In May, Valcke had already said that the work in Brazil was "unbelievably delayed ". Its assessment is that the delay is about two years.
On thrusday the president of Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF), Ricardo Teixeira, assured that this was not the situation in Brazil and the works were already in progress. But has alerted to the situation at airports. On Friday, was the turn of the President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attack those who doubted of Brazilian capabilities. For him, was a"misplaced" question whether the country would be ready for the Copa, ensuring that investments were made and no airports missing.

But he was quit annoyed with the questioning. "If Brazil has not conditions, I assure you that I’ll return to Africa, swimming ." Valcke, which will have to take decisions on stadiums and on the format of competition in Brazil, accepts that the work will not be small. "We will work in all these matters." But, yesterday, one day after the end of the worldcup, the feeling was that we should not handle the matter in the face of large audience. FIFA was decided not to allow Brazilian journalists to use the press conference and speak of 2014. Blatter admitted that will make a visit to the end of the year to Brazil before the end of the mandate of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. But the relationship between FIFA, CBF and the government today is not the best. Lula abandoned the initial plan to attend cup’s final match, which was considered an act of disregarding towards FIFA.
In response yesterday, during the presentation of the project, High Speed Train , which will link Campinas, S Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Lula da Silva, said "You have seen that South Africa Wordl Cup just finished but there are already some people start saying: Where are the Brazilian airports? Brazilian trains? Brazilian subways?, As if we were a gang of idiots. We clearly know which are the priorities, said Lula yesterday in Brasilia.

Who’s right or wrong ? Will Lula da Silva need go back to Africa, swimming?

To follow…