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 Brazil's aircraft maker Embraer confirmed on Friday, June 6, that it had sold a propeller-driven fighter plane to a unit of Blackwater Worldwide, the world's largest private defense services company, and said the war plane would not be used for operations in Iraq.
The sale of the Super Tucano, first reported last Sunday, was cleared by both the Brazilian and US governments, Fernando Ikedo, Embraer's vice-president of market intelligence for defense and government markets, told a press briefing in Paris.
"We sold a Super Tucano to (Blackwater subsidiary) EP Aviation but for use as training in the US only," he said. He added "there is no link to Iraq".
Blackwater formed in 1997 by former US Navy special forces guards US government personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. It is under investigation by the FBI over the killing of several Iraqi civilians in a crowded Baghdad square in September 2007.
It had been announced earlier in the week that Embraer was in preliminary negotiations to sell the US government eight 314-B1 Super Tucano light attack and training planes for use in Iraq.
The plane maker is offering Washington the Super Tucano in a tender process opened by the US government, according to an Embraer spokesman who declined to be named in keeping with company policy.
Embraer, or Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica SA, has sold 99 of the planes to the Brazilian military and 25 to neighboring Colombia's Air Force - mostly to fight drug trafficking along the countries' Amazon border, the spokesman said.
A light fighter like the Super Tucano, which the Brazilian military outfits with .50 caliber machine guns under each wing, could be used to patrol Iraq's borders with Iran and Syria, where the US military says militants and weapons are routinely smuggled.
The US has provided small planes before to the nascent Iraqi air force, which has about 1,500 personnel and 50 aircraft - mostly small propeller planes and helicopters.
Brazilian law prohibits a private company from selling arms for use in existing conflicts. If the US government decides to buy the Tucano from Embraer and requests that they be outfitted with weapons, at that point the Brazilian government would have to step in and negotiate the sale, the Embraer spokesman said.
Mercopress
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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.
truth is the first casaulty..especially in this war