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Brazil's São Paulo state top prison official Nagashi Furukawa resigned Friday two weeks after a wave of violence ordered by jailed gang leaders killed at least 150 people including 42 police and prison guards.
Apparently Mr. Furukawa, São Paulo state Director of Prisons, clashed with state officials over the handling of the situation, and police has been accused of the killing of 110 people in a spree of revenge following the first wave of attacks on police stations. An independent commission made up of officials from the Attorney General's Office, lawyers and human rights activists is scheduled to investigate claims of summary shootings by the police of innocent São Paulo residents. Police officers have provided prosecutors with names and autopsy reports of the dead but have not furnished details of the circumstances of the deaths Investigators are to focus specifically on the death of as many as 34 people in the São Paulo suburb of Guarulhos, one of the battlefields in the week-long war between police and the First Command of the Capital, PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital), whose leaders were angry at planned transfers to high security jails and the confiscation of cellular phones. "Authorities deny abuses and police insist that their forces acted in legitimate defense and in compliance with their duty. But we understand that things did not exactly happen that way," said attorney Francisco Lúcio França. Human rights groups claim that after the PCC launched attacks on police stations in São Paulo, security forces retaliated with a wave of vengeance killings in poor neighborhoods on the city's outskirts. França said it has been impossible to establish exactly how many people were summarily executed by police, and he blamed authorities for failing to release the complete list of victims and autopsies. "We didn't have access to the complete list and to autopsy findings," the lawyer said. "The commission will probably request the findings and police bulletins that were not turned over to prosecutors." If the panel determines that police engaged in summary executions, it will likely sue the state of Sao Paulo to obtain compensation for victims' families. 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.
I say free these boys up to do their jobs and clear out the riff-raff from the streets via ANY MEANS POSSIBLE and leave the lefty hug-a-thug organizations to writher and sputter in the wind. There is only ONE WAY to make the streets of Brazil safer, and that is to ELIMINATE the element on those streets posing the threats. And we´re not talking about throwing an extra 50 cents a month their way or building more basket ball hoops and community centres. It´s NOT rocket science boys and girls.