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The United States Congress approved this week scrapping subsidies to the cotton industry and ending export and import subsidies which should help to normalize world cotton prices.
Last year the Bush administration agreed to implement a World Trade Organization (WTO) ruling against the subsidies brought forward by Brazil, arguing that US help to American cotton farmers distorted the global market. The House of Representatives passed the bill on Wednesday, following approval by the Senate late last year. The congressional vote, which came with protests from the agricultural lobby, means that U.S. exporters and manufacturers will no longer receive an incentive for buying their cotton from domestic farmers. The bill will now go to President Bush who is expected to sign it into law. The Bush administration has already scrapped two credit programs for the farmers, to comply with the WTO decision. US cotton subsidies have been at the center of a global trade battle for years, with successive administrations paying billions of dollars annually to farmers in the American South, who have a powerful lobby in Washington. The Bush administration said repeal of the program would help to address top U.S. trade priorities by eliminating both export subsidies and import substitution subsidies deemed illegal by the World Trade Organization and help in stabilizing world cotton prices. "It implements findings in the WTO dispute brought by Brazil, and it fulfills commitments made at the recent Hong Kong ministerial to eliminate export subsidies for cotton by 2006" said Rob Portman, U.S. Trade Representative, in a statement. "These are important objectives, and I commend the Congress for working with the administration to address these critical issues." In a landmark ruling in 2004 the WTO decided that much of the assistance given to American farmers broke its rules. In Brazil, the resolution was hailed as a victory and will be seen as vindication of the government's strategy of tough diplomacy at the WTO, in coordination with other developing nations. Mercopress - www.mercopress.com
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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.
The policies of the Bush administration are so short-sighted and self-destructive that the USA will be reduced a large, very poor theocratic dictatorship. There will be no incentive, economic or social to import anything but oil. Nor any money, either.