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 With the goal of promoting awareness of the link between AIDS and tuberculosis and the necessity to address discrimination in Brazil's response to HIV, the head of the United Nations agency charged with coordinating the fight against HIV/AIDS is in Brazil this week .
Brazil is home to some 40% of people (730,000) living with HIV in Latin America, the largest epidemic in the region, while the next most significant HIV-positive population lives in Mexico with 200,000 people.
However, AIDS mortality rates were halved between 1996 and 2002 thanks to the country's commitment to providing access to both HIV prevention and treatment services, which has also helped stabilise the epidemic.
"We have to stop people living with HIV from dying of tuberculosis," Michel Sidibé, Executive Director of the Joint UN Program on HIV/AIDS UNAIDS, said at the launch of a report by the World Health Organization, WHO on global TB control.
"Universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care and support must include TB prevention, diagnosis and treatment. When HIV and TB services are combined, they save lives," stressed Mr. Sidibé.
Underscoring a message of solidarity with those affected by HIV and his opposition to laws blocking AIDS services, Mr. Sidibé will meet in Brasília with government officials, the National Congress Parliamentary group on HIV, as well as civil society actors active in promoting HIV awareness, protecting human rights and ending stigma and discrimination.
One meeting will bring together national level representatives of groups representing people living with HIV, youth, women, and lesbians, gays, bisexuals and trans-genders to discuss these issues within the national and local context.
Mr. Sidibé also plans to visit organizations providing vital services to children and young people in Rio de Janeiro as part of his first official trip to Brazil since becoming Executive Director of UNAIDS.
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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.
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