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Latin American stocks were mixed to higher, with Brazilian shares gaining, as sluggish U.S. jobs data boosted hopes that the U.S. Federal Reserve will pause its monetary tightening cycle.
Brazil's Bovespa Index jumped 441.49 points, or 1.08%. Mexico's benchmark Bolsa Index dipped 56.21 points, or 0.26%, while Argentina's Merval Index surged 46.28 points, or 2.50%. Brazilian shares advanced, as weaker-than-expected U.S. jobs data helped to ease worries about a continued rise in U.S. interest rates. U.S. nonfarm payrolls rose by 138,000 in April, less than the 199,000 expected by economists. The data boosted hopes that the U.S. Federal Reserve will take a more dovish stance on monetary policy. Higher U.S. interest rates tend to divert investment flows away from emerging markets like Brazil. In local economic news, Brazilian industrial output fell 0.3% in March from February but jumped 5.2% from a year earlier. The IBGE said the month-on-month decline was due to seasonal factors including a retooling of industrial facilities. On the corporate front, Brazilian airline TAM SA reported a first-quarter net profit of 111.2 million reais, up sharply from 53.5 million reais a year earlier, on an expansion of routes and rising overall demand. Net revenue was up 24% to 1.59 billion reais. Meanwhile, a major investment bank downgraded Vivo Participações to "underweight" from "neutral." "We see first-quarter results as a significant downward inflection point, as Vivo service revenues declined for the first time in nominal terms. "Going forward, we do not expect this negative trend to reverse significantly, given Vivo's apparent inability to thrive in a very competitive environment," the bank said. Elsewhere, Mexican shares ended lower after erasing earlier gains on an improved outlook for U.S. interest rates. In corporate news, airport operator Asur said April traffic at its airports was down 2.3% from April 2005, due partly to the slow recovery of tourist travel to Cancun and Cozumel following Hurricane Wilma. Argentine issues followed regional equities higher, in a quiet news day for the local market. Argentine natural gas pipeline operator Transportadora de Gas del Sur SA posted a quarterly net profit of 90.4 million Argentine pesos, down from 93.2 million pesos a year ago. Thomson Financial - www.thomsonfinancial.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.