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 Brazil's Planning Minister Paulo Bernardo da Silva revealed that the United States is prepared to provide up to US$ 10 billion in loans to finance the development of massive hydrocarbon reserves off Brazil's coast.
President Barack Obama's national security adviser, General James Jones, discussed the matter with officials this week during a visit to Brazil. He said the US Export-Import Bank already has signed a letter of intent in that regard with Brazilian state oil company Petrobras.
The loan is equal in value to a similar credit line agreed to with the China Development Bank, also for exploiting Brazil's "pre-salt" area, so-named because the estimated 80 billion barrels of high-quality crude in that new oil frontier lie far beneath the ocean floor under layers of rock and an unstable salt formation.
Under the agreement with the Chinese state bank, finalized during Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's visit to Beijing in May, Brazil can repay the loan facility with oil as opposed to cash.
According to the government's projections, the pre-salt reserves - located at a depth of up to seven kilometers below the ocean surface in an 800-kilometer by 200-kilometer area - could eventually lead to a nearly six-fold increase in Brazil's current proven reserves of 14 billion barrels and transform that nation into one of the world's 10 largest oil producers and a major crude exporter.
Petrobras plans to invest close to US$ 29 billion through 2013 to develop the pre-salt deposits in which the company already holds concession rights. Petrobras is projecting that some 1.3 million barrels per day can be extracted by 2013 from the pre-salt fields and 1.8 million bpd by 2020.
The Tupi field, which is believed to contain between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels of oil and was the first to be exploited in the pre-salt region, is considered to be the largest hydrocarbon discovery in the Americas in the past 30 years. Other large oil and natural gas fields were later found nearby, also under a thick bed of salt.
But Brazil has been forced to seek external financing because the fields pose an enormous technical and financial challenge due to the depth and thickness of the salt and the drastic changes in temperature as the oil is brought to the surface.
Acknowledging that Petrobras alone is not capable of developing the massive pre-salt reserves, Brazil announced in May that it will invite international oil companies to bid for concessions in that region beginning next year.
The country had previously halted the sale of concessions after the massive finds were made. Petrobras, an integrated energy company and the global leader in deepwater oil exploration and production, operates in 27 countries in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Europe.
Shares of Petrobras, Brazil's largest corporation, trade on the Sao Paulo, New York, Madrid and Buenos Aires stock exchanges, but the Brazilian government retains control through a golden share.
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. 
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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. 
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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'm confused.