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 American president Barack Obama might visit Brazil before the end of the year once the US Senate approves the nomination of Thomas Shannon as ambassador before the Brazilian government, announced the head of the Brazilian diplomatic legation in Washington Antonio Patriota.
"President Obama could visit Brazil at the end of this year or beginning of the following," said Patriota in an interview with influential daily O Estado de S. Paulo.
"The confirmation of Shannon as ambassador in Brasília is the first step" for Obama to visit Brazil following the invitation extended earlier this year by Brazilian president Lula, added Patriota.
The Brazilian president met with Obama last April in Washington and again last July in Italy during the summit of the G8.
Last week when President Obama was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize, Lula repeated that his election as US president was in effect "an extraordinary event" and stated that the Nobel was in good hands.
The confirmations of Thomas Shannon as US ambassador and of Arturo Valenzuela as Under Secretary for Hemispheric Affairs have been frozen in the US Senate following objections from Republican Senator Jim de Mint, probably the most conservative lawmaker in the US Congress.
De Mint has questioned the Obama administration foreign policy, particularly concerning Honduras where he, de Mint, is a staunch supporter of de facto president Roberto Micheletti.
According to ambassador Patriota, president Obama would like to tour South America, particularly Brazil and Chile, to meet President Michelle Bachelet before she ends her mandate on March 11.
O Estado reveals that as soon as Shannon is confirmed by the US congress, Bill Burns from the State Department will be flying to Brasília to prepare the trip of State Secretary Hillary Clinton, who will lay the ground for the big meeting.
Lula and Obama have established a close relationship and the US president has gone as far as calling his peer "the most famous politician in the world."
Mercopress
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There again, you have to understand that that newspaper has a large circulation among just the "Paulistas" and they do have a fierce competitor in that state called "Folha". Most of the other states have their own newspapers that are controlled by just one or two groups and they didn't give much coverage about the "censorship". You must understand that in order to survive, the newspapers depend upon the advertisements from powerful entities like the Federal, State and Municipal governments as well as large corporations. 
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.
that Obama was relieved after hearing that affirmation!