Monthly Archives: May 2015

Brazil to cut historic R$70bn from 2015 budget

Anadolu Agency

SÃO PAULO — Brazil will cut its 2015 budget by a historic 69.9 billion Brazilian reais ($23 billion) to ensure the government hits its fiscal targets this year, planning minister Nelson Barbosa announced Friday.

The government also said the austerity measures, the biggest spending freeze in the country’s history, would act as a “first step” to returning Brazil to economic growth.

Barbosa said 38 percent (25.7 billion reais) of savings would come from cuts to the government’s Growth Acceleration Program – the ruling government’s flagship program funding new infrastructure projects.

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Brazil, China sign multi-billion-dollar agreements

Press TV

SÃO PAULO — Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang have signed $53 billion of agreements in a range of areas, including infrastructure, agriculture and energy, in what is being hailed as a new era in Sino-Brazilian relations.

The new wave of Chinese investment in Brazil has come at an opportune moment, as the Brazilian economy continues to struggle and a vast corruption scandal at Petrobras bears down on both the political world and the country’s top construction companies.

Despite firearm restrictions, guns kill 5 people every hour in Brazil

VICE News

SÃO PAULO — Firearms are responsible for 116 deaths every day in Brazil, according to a new study — a rate of nearly five people every hour.

The Map of Violence 2015, which UNESCO published this week in partnership with the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences and the Brazilian government, calculated that gun violence ended a staggering 42,416 lives in 2012 alone, the most recent year with comprehensive data.

The national mortality rate of 21.9 gun-related fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants — of which nearly 95 percent are homicides, while the balance includes suicides, accidents, and unexplained cases — is the second highest ever recorded in the annual study’s 35-year history.

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Fighting the bugs: the insecticide sprayer for hard-to-reach communities

BBC World News

RIO DE JANEIRO — A crucial element in the fight against insect-borne diseases like dengue fever or malaria is the use of insecticides to kill the bugs that transmit the illness. However, many communities that are affected by dengue fever are inaccessible to heavy-duty spraying equipment.

Engineers in Brazil have come up with one possible solution. It is called Motofog: a motorbike-mounted mobile insecticide sprayer that can reach those hard-to-get-to areas.

As well as a string of locations across Brazil, Motofog is also now being used in countries in Africa and the Caribbean.

Listen to the BBC World Service radio version of this report:

Remembering Brazil’s forgotten WW2 soldiers

English version of BBC Russian article

SÃO PAULO — Events commemorating the 70th anniversary of VE Day have naturally focused on the Second World War’s key players – Germany, Italy, Britain, the United States, France and the countries of the Former Soviet Union. 

But Brazil – the only South American country to participate militarily in World War II – is not one for military pomp.

President Dilma Rousseff visited Rio de Janeiro on 8 May for a ceremony for the approximately 450 Brazilians soldiers killed in the war, but didn’t travel to Moscow for Victory Day celebrations as had been rumoured.

Brazil, as a whole, was always unlikely to pay much attention to the date.

Few Brazilians know about the 25,000 men who set out from Rio in 1944 to fight alongside the Allied Forces in Italian battlegrounds to break through the Gothic Line. Although the World Wars are taught in schools, Brazil’s role is either a minor detail or overlooked entirely.

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Behind bars in Brazil: Inequality reigns even in jail

Medium & BBC Brasil

CURITIBA, Paraná — Brazil oozes inequality: while some live in abject poverty, others get rich from the country’s commodities. A few, of course, get rich in ways that are less than legal. You might think that life behind bars would level out these huge differences in fortunes.

But in reality, while some rot in mouldy, dank cells without charge and given scant access even to daylight — others are given clean, fluffy pillows, regular medicals and TVs to watch.

Nowhere has this been more clearly exemplified than with the recent jailings of top executives, held over corruption and money laundering charges relating to Brazil’s biggest company.

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