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The gang violence that rocked Brazil's prisons and its largest city for a week, killing 170 people, appeared to subside Friday, May 19, with police reporting no deadly overnight clashes with gang members.
But the fear that gripped São Paulo during the unprecedented crime spree remained and will likely be a major issue in this year's presidential campaign. Police said that for the first night in a week they had no confrontations with members of the ruthless First Capital Command gang, or PCC, that launched the strikes, enraged at last week's transfer of gang leaders to a remote lockup. After spiraling upward following daily gun battles between police and suspected criminals, the death toll didn't rise and remained Friday at 170 people: 107 suspected criminals, 41 police and prison guards, 18 inmates and four civilians, police said. But Brazilians were outraged, and made plans for demonstrations in large cities across the country Sunday to vent their rage at the failure of politicians to crack down on organized crime. Critics said President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has not delivered on promises to improve the lives of the poor, who have long been ruled more by heavily armed crime groups than by the government but are often subject to brutal police repression. Silva's main opponent in October elections, former São Paulo state Governor Geraldo Alckmin, is also taking heat for failing in his five years in office to stamp out the PCC, which launched the attacks across Brazil's most populous state. Both sides face political repercussions from stark television images of buses torched by gang members, police cruisers riddled with bullets and funerals of police officers and innocents caught in the crossfire. Across São Paulo's urban sprawl, police frisked motorists at checkpoints in an unprecedented clampdown in the city of 18 million, South America's largest. "This will have a nationwide impact," predicted David Fleischer, a political scientist at the University of Brasília . Some blame the problems on racism and the profound divide between rich and poor in Latin America's largest economy, home to 182 million. Brazil will only change when its wealthier white minority lets its riches trickle down to tens of millions of poor Brazilians with darker skin, said Claudio Lembo, who took over for Alckmin as São Paulo state governor less than two months ago.
São Paulo's elite must "recognize its responsibility and open its wallet," Lembo told the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo. But rather than trying to root out the causes of crime, he said, the city's fortunate "head out to the best five-star restaurant." Dozens of poor families who hadn't seen their relatives in days showed up Thursday at a morgue to see photos of 40 unidentified young men killed by police. Some also hoped to identify the bodies of slain bystanders. Hamilton Guadino, a 64-year-old real estate agent, dropped off his neighbor, whose daughter had been killed in a carjacking. "They just came up, smashed the window and shot her," he said. "It doesn't make sense." Guadino blamed the violence on a decades-old culture of corruption, exemplified by the recent scandal that forced the resignations of Silva's chief of staff and finance minister. Nicknamed the "mensalão," or "big monthly allowance," it involved lawmakers who allegedly took bribes to support Silva's Workers Party in Congress. "They don't have money for social programs or prison security, but they have money for the mensalão," Guadino said. The rampage began May 12 after the PCC unleashed its fury on officers following the transfer of its leaders to a remote prison Police struck back, killing some 107 suspected criminals in the following days, including 14 overnight Wednesday and Thursday. Human Rights Watch said some of the killings by police may have been summary executions, and urged authorities to launch an independent probe. "A thorough investigation of all the deaths is crucial to establish the truth and maintain confidence in the police," said Paulo Mesquita, a spokesman for the group. Pravda - www.pravda.ru
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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 US government is datamining the point to point call data to learn about social networks involving terrorists, which is a benefit for their citizens - there are positive implications for organized crime fighting as well.
The tech evolved out of commercial and academic (sociological) applications and is probably inevitable.
The privacy issues, though real, are often presented idiotically - no government has the resources to listen in on their citizens'/subjects' ordinary conversations - the beauty of the datamining scheme is that even if a court won't allow listening, it still provides useful info without anti-terror or law enforcement having to monitor actual content. "
Yes - find out who Marcola's amigos are and slaughter them!!!