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 The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has called on developed countries to donate money to a new fund designed to protect the Amazon rainforest. Brazil will seek donations abroad and aims to raise US$ 21 billion by 2021.
The fund will promote alternatives to forest-clearing for people living in the Amazon and support conservation and sustainable development. But a government minister said Brazil would not accept foreign interference in its Amazon policy.
The environmental group Greenpeace said it was the first time Brazil had accepted a link between global warming and preserving the rainforest.
Speaking at the launch in Rio de Janeiro, Lula said Brazil was aware of how much the Amazon meant to the wider world.
"It's better for the country's image to do things right, so we can walk in international forums with our heads high," he added.
But the Brazilian leader also insisted that the Amazon's preservation was Brazil's responsibility.
"We... want the sovereignty that we hold over Amazonian territory and the decisions that are made in this region to be respected," he said.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, minister for strategic affairs, put the point more forcefully:
"The fund is a vehicle by which foreign governments can help support our initiatives without exerting any influence over our national policy. We are not going to trade sovereignty for money."
Greenpeace in Brazil said that the country was accepting the link between global warming and preserving the forest for the first time.
"For a long time, Brazil was violently opposed to this, insisting fossil fuel was to blame," said Sergio Leitão, director of public policies for Greenpeace Brasil. "That's true, historically speaking, but today forests play an important role," Leitão said.
Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc called for a radical change in environmental attitudes: "We are committed to reducing the destruction of the rainforest, to eliminating illegal burning and to guaranteeing a better quality of life for all.
"Our war is not won by simply reducing illegal burning in one month, it will be won once this environmental model that is destroying our communities and biodiversity is history."
The Amazon rainforest is the largest continuous tropical forest, shared by nine countries, 65% of which is Brazilian territory.
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.
Those of us who have actually lived in the Amazon for a few decades know that those who are cutting down the forest are Brazilians working for Brazilian interests. Most of the lumber is for internal consumption. The minerals belong to the government, unlike U.S. law. Most of the agricultural products are for use in Brazil. What´s exported is done with the complicity and approval of the government, who profits thereby.
The Brazilian portion of the Amazon belongs to Brazil alone, we are reminded. Your contribution does not mean you will get a say in what is determined to be policy.
And the Amazon is not as big a contributor to the world´s O2 supply as we were led to believe.
So why would people in other countries contribute to this fund? Are they nuts, given the above?
No. But Barnum Was Right. And left wing greenies are sincere, well-meaning people, but they tend to be schmucks. Suckers, better word.
Never underestimate the lengths to which the left will go nor programs that they will come up with to separate you from your money. For to them, of course, it´s not really yours.