Like the United States, Brazil has a long way to go with its response to global warming.
Brazil’s Green-Washed World Cup
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Brazil
Soccer Is Democratic. The World Cup Is Oligarchy.
Thousands of poor Brazilians were evicted from their homes to build multimillion-dollar World Cup stadiums that may never be used again. Now Brazilians are fighting back.
China Trades Up in Latin America
China is taking advantage of its growing trade surplus in Latin America to rally support for its positions at the United Nations.
Brazil’s World Cup Evictions: An Insult to Soccer
Forced evictions are happening throughout Brazil in advance of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, exacerbating the country’s growing inequality.
At the UN, a Latin American Rebellion
Without a doubt, the 68th UN General Assembly will be remembered as a watershed. Nations reached an agreement on control of chemical weapons that could avoid a global war in Syria. The volatile stalemate on the Iran nuclear program came a step closer to diplomacy....
NSA Spying Leaves Washington Lonelier than Ever
As President Barack Obama arrived in Berlin last month to deliver a speech at the Brandenburg gate, many Germans were already expressing concern about revelations of NSA spying. Little did they know that they were viewing the tip of the iceberg and that tensions in...
The Roots of Social Rebellion? Social Movements.
The lesson from the streets of Brazil, Turkey, and the Arab world is to avoid underestimating half-baked social movements still in their infancy. With technological advancements and opportune conjunctures, the underdogs of yesterday can quickly turn into the makers of tomorrow. Not every nascent movement cascades into a full-blown revolution, but the pathfinders whose thoughts and actions carry forward to make history must get their due recognition.
Brazilians’ Demands: From Lower Bus Fares to a Fair Society
With a million people demonstrating in the streets of cities throughout Brazil, everyone’s scrambling to understand how a 20-cent bus fare hike turned into a social revolt.
Triumph of Green Capital at Rio+20
The mood inside the Windsor Barra hotel seemed more buoyant than in many of the over 3,000 other side-meetings taking place parallel to the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). Here, at a suburb far from the favelas shadowing Copacabana or Ipanema, CEOs and other top officials from some of the world’s largest corporations patted each other’s back and exhorted each other to be even more ambitious. Speaker after speaker spoke of how indispensable business is to building the ‘green economy’ – the new economic model that UN officials and developed-country governments were aggressively promoting in this conference.
The Failure of the Summit of the Americas VI
Dilma Rousseff interrupted the speech of Barack Obama. The President of the United States was speaking about the advances of various countries in Latin America, commenting that now there exists “a prosperous middle class” that represents a business opportunity for companies from his country. “Suddenly, they are interested in buying iPads, interested in buying planes from Boeing.” “Or Embraer,” interjected Dilma, yielding applause.