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 French President Nicolas Sarkozy in a visit to Brazil and his Brazilian counterpart Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva agreed on Monday to take a common EU-Brazil position to the next G20 summit dealing with the global financial crisis.
"We decided with President Lula that things must change and change profoundly," Sarkozy, the current president of the European Union, said in a speech at a two-day EU-Brazil summit in Rio de Janeiro.
"We decided to narrow our positions and arrive in London with a common vision, on the future role of the IMF, the system of management of financial institutions," he said. "We cannot allow a single financial institution to be uncontrolled or unsupervised."
Sarkozy and Lula da Silva gave no details on proposals they would take to the London summit on April 2 and they did not take questions from reporters after their meeting, which was also attended by European Commission President José Manuel Barroso.
Sarkozy also openly backed Brazil's claim to a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, saying the country had a vital role to play in global decision-making during the financial crisis.
"I am sincere when I say that we need Brazil in the world's governance," Sarkozy said. "President Lula knows that this view is not shared by all European countries, so I am speaking not as President of the European Council, but as the President of France. We need Brazil to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council and also to help safeguard the planet's environmental balance."
Lula has made obtaining a permanent council seat for Brazil one his major foreign policy goals.
The Brazilian leader hailed last month's G20 summit of leading economies in Washington as a decisive step toward increasing the clout of developing countries. Among other steps, the summit opened the door for more countries to have seats at the IMF and the World Bank.
Lula joined Sarkozy in calling for governments to take a greater role in regulating financial markets and in creating jobs, including the United States, which he said bore the brunt of blame for the crisis.
"President Obama has a responsibility on his back that few presidents in the world have," Lula said in a speech, referring to US President-elect Barack Obama.
"He will take office with a crisis that the United States has more than 60% of the responsibility for."
Mercopress
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The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.
I spit my coffee all over the keyboard on that one. Safeguard the planet's environmental balance huh? So we're going to be depending upon brazil to enforce laws and take on dangerous drug cartels as well as land owners in the lawless region of the Amazon huh? For exactly how many years now has the brazilian gov't. shown through deed that they simply don't give a rats ass? Not saying there should be international intervention. Just saying that the place will turn into whatever the FARC and the landowners with cash want it to be.
Sarkozy is a puppet. And at the end of the day he'll do what he's told.