During the Civil Rights movement it was tough for African-Americans to sit down in a bus station and enjoy a cup of coffee. Today anybody can walk into a Starbucks but they can't buy a cup of the world's top espresso roast. Not even here in Brazil, the world's coffee...

Stonewalled by Madonna's posse, local media outlets are taking a closer look at the Material Girl's charity work ostensibly directed at helping kids in Brazil's favelas.

The story from blogger Monica Bergamo at Folha Online connects readers to the Brazilian office of the globalist Kabbalah Centre, the same Kaballah...

Poolside at the Copacabana Palace and the buzz is that the Material Girl has become the Girl from Ipanema, moving uptown to the chic Fasano Hotel not far from the Kaballah Centre and joining Rio governor Sergio Cabral for carnaval festivities. But tall and tan and young and lovely is...

Business and political leaders just gathered on the Magic Mountain hoping to beam up depressed financial markets. But the velocity of information is moving faster than the velocity of money and the fault may lie not in their stars, but in themselves.

Class warfare between capitalism and communism played...

With a presidential vote on the horizon, Brazil's national conscience is getting a strong dose of melancholia generated by non-stop coverage of dead and wounded soldiers coming home from UN peacekeeping operations in Haiti.

Suddenly, the tremblement de terre in Haiti evokes the words of African-American writer Langston Hughes...

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn has proposed a "Marshall Plan" that might help Haiti put in place a new foundation for nation building. But the Marshall Plan was designed to contain the spread of communism and if this one is to succeed it will need to contain the...

Rio

I'm poolside at the Copacabana Palace, watching light play against the water as a devil moon slides across the southern sky. Last time Madonna was here she met the richest man in Brazil and walked away with $7 million for her favela charity work. And now she is focusing...

With NBA commissioner David Stern suspending Gilbert Arenas, the media has forgotten that this party got started thanks to Twitter. Gil's Arena, the great charity website that took Arenas from zero to hero can't mask the fact that the Wizards $111 million man is a Twitter addict and...

In an effort to strengthen to the French national identity president Nicholas Sarkozy has named writer Albert Camus to the Pantheon, the final resting place for social and intellectual heroes of the Republic.

Had a socialist president made the call the media would be heralding a cultural event of planetary...

Christmas season marks the 50th anniversary of Brasilia, the futuristic capital city designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer, and magazines and online media are celebrating the event. Moving the seat of government inland was the beginning of the Bossa Nova (new wave) of president Juscelino Kubitscheck that started Brazil's transformation...

American football is becoming popular on Copacabana Beach. You can drink caipirinhas and watch the game as it was played a century ago when Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais perfected the forward pass on the sand at Cedar Point, Ohio, half way between Notre Dame's Golden Dome and Cleveland Browns...

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has pronounced an economic Dark Ages. Rupert Murdoch gives print media twenty years. Crossing the rubicon to the flat earth of government by feelings leaders are judged by popularity instead of effectiveness. Those who can afford to participate in the new digital economy are caught in...

Sao Paulo

While sharing his vision of a more peaceful world with the UN and demanding big Pentagon cuts, US president Barack Obama has also been lobbying Brazil to buy warplanes from shrinking defense giant Boeing. This latest chapter in the underreported arms race between Brazil and Venezuela is a...

Leading Argentina to the 1986 World Cup, football legend Diego Maradona scored a goal with his arm he attributed to the "the hand of God." As it often does, karma from that controversial score against England has caught up with the ex-superstar and with Argentina's football fortunes as well.

Having adding "widowed" as a status to Facebook's aging demographic profile Mark Zuckerberg brought his road show to Brazil recently to drum up young members. With security and PR support befitting the leader of a 200 million strong online nation the shy, 23-year old billionaire spoke with future entrepreneurs at...

Presidents Lula of Brazil and Bachelet of Chile have voiced concern that Washington's push for more bases in Colombia will drive armed conflict deeper into the rain forest. But global demand makes the drug trade too big to fail, credit markets are drained and narcodollars are the last mountain of...

The dramatic call for "insurrection" by deposed Honduran president Mel Zelaya and the 72 hour ultimatum issued by the Organization of American States (OAS) are reminders of how just much the stakes have escalated since negotiator Oscar Arias won the Nobel Prize trying to bring peace to his region a...

Fifty million Brazilian students will have Christmas in July when software Santa slips down the chimney to give them a free ticket on the information highway.

With Microsoft software licenses costing up to 1000 percent more in Brazil than in the US, the ProInfo program launched by the government of...

China has made a $10 billion investment in energy giant Petrobras strengthening Brazil's efforts toward sustainability and putting sugar based ethanol in the center of the geopolitical arena.

Using its own technology and just 1% of its arable land, Brazil efficiently produced 6.57 billion gallons of sugar ethanol last...

Rio de Janeiro

The International Olympic Selection Committee just completed a week long visit here and if the buzz at the Copacabana Palace Hotel is any indication, prospects seem good that the Olympics will come to South America for the first time.

Chicago, Tokyo and Madrid are competing...