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 Brazil, Nigeria, Lebanon, Gabon and Bosnia were elected Thursday to non-permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. They will serve two-year terms starting January 1st and will participate in decisions ranging from deploying U.N. peacekeepers to imposing sanctions.
This year's vote lacked the suspense of some previous elections, because all five candidates were unopposed and succeeded in getting the two-thirds majority required in the first round of secret ballots.
Brazil received the support from 182 out of 190 UN country members with seven abstentions and one vote for Venezuela.
Brazil joins the council for the 10th time. It is a founding member of the United Nations and was part of the first group elected to the Security Council in 1946. It last held the bench in 2004/05.
The fact that there was no competition for the Latin America seat following Mexico's unopposed nomination last year seems to signal that the region wants to avoid sour disputes as happened in 2006 with Guatemala and Venezuela.
UN members had to vote 48 times to try and achieve the necessary two thirds and the dispute was finally agreed with the nomination of Panama as a consensus candidate.
Brazil is also lobbying strongly for a UN reform that would expand the permanent members of the Security Council incorporating regional representatives, which obviously would include Brazil and probably Mexico.
Ten of the council's 15-seats are filled by regional representatives for two-year terms. The other five seats are permanent ones held by veto-wielding members Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States.
British Ambassador John Sawers said the additions to the council will make it even stronger.
"We have two large countries in Brazil and Nigeria who carry the weight of being a regional power," he said. "We have two countries in Lebanon and Bosnia who have been through conflict and can bring their own national experiences to the Security Council."
Lebanon and Bosnia and Herzegovina are in the unusual position of also being on the council's agenda.
Bosnia is a multiethnic country still recovering from the war that accompanied the break-up of Yugoslavia. It has experienced internal divisions and rising tensions in the past year, as major political parties struggle to agree on a basic political structure.
Bosnian Foreign Minister Sven Alkalaj said the current political crisis would not adversely impact its role on the council or prevent it from taking common positions.
"The situation in Bosnia is going to be stable, it is now stable. What is happening now is some political crisis that also happens elsewhere in world," he said.
Lebanon has one of the largest UN peacekeeping forces in the south of its country. It is also the subject of a UN-backed tribunal which is considering indictments in the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Internal divisions have prevented the formation of a new government following June elections.
One council diplomat said Lebanon could prove to be something of a wild card on Middle East issues - particularly Iran's nuclear ambitions. He noted that if the Iranian dossier comes back to the council for possible sanctions, Lebanon, which will likely have members of Iranian-backed Hezbollah's political wing in its next government, could have a conflict of interest and choose to abstain from voting.
Nigeria has served three times before. Foreign Minister Ojo Maduekwe said his country would work to prevent crises and conflicts, deal with human rights issues and generally promote international solidarity.
"We intend that working with all the other members of the U.N. Security Council," he said. "Our preventive diplomacy will be central to our approach to a lot of issues."
Nominations for non-permanent seats are not required and countries simply announce their intention to run. Consideration is given to an equitable geographical distribution and a candidate's contribution to the maintenance of international peace and security.
The five new members are replacing outgoing council members Burkina Faso, Costa Rica, Croatia, Libya and Vietnam. In addition to the five permanent council members, they will join Austria, Mexico, Japan, Turkey and Uganda on the 15-member council.
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.
and remove Ghana from play also as they beat brazil
as he does not like what they did to his commie friend .
and he will use his new seat to demand something to be done to hounduras .
his next move will be to not let them in the o games in brazil