DEMOCRACY IS BEING UPHELD AGAIN TODAY

By VINCENT BEVINS - he writes for and edits “From Brazil”, an experimental English-language blog aimed at highlighting news, analysis, culture and commentary for the global community for the Folha de São Paulo newspaper.

Brazilians go to the polls today to elect their municipal representatives. These posts are quite important, as mayors have a great deal of power here. For those of us that live in Brazil, these campaigns can often drag on forever, but have turned out to be quite interesting this year. For those living abroad, here’s a quick guide to what’s at stake and who’s in the running in Rio and São Paulo.

Sunday is the first round of voting. In cases where there is no majority, the top two candidates go to a second round of voting a month later.

São Paulo – the rise of Evangelical Christian politics

The mayorship of South America’s largest city is extremely important, likened credibly to running a mid-sized country. And as anyone who has visited SP knows, this place is in dire need of good leadership.

We’ve had a big surprise here. The country’s two major parties, the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Worker’s Party, of Dilma and Lula fame), and the PSDB (the center-right party of the also much-revered Fernando Henrique Cardoso), have been shocked to find themselves trailing far behind Celso Russomano, the TV personality and candidate from the relatively new PRD, a party backed by  Brazil’s increasingly powerful evangelical Christian churches.

This has terrified the traditional power structures and you have seen everyone coming together (other than the actual supporters of the man) to try to stop him. This includes the right-wing media, left-wing unions and parties as well as bien pensant middle-class liberal urban types. Most of Russomano’s supporters are the conservative poor, and some call his campaign a genuinely populist movement representing those who have long been neglected, and others call it the dangerous mixing of religion and politics.

But he is almost certainly going to the second round, so the question now is who is going with him. On the right we have José Serra, who was already mayor of São Paulo, but quit to run for president, against Dilma, and lost badly. That has not helped his image with the common man, and pollsters routinely find a large number of voters reject him.

Nevertheless, he’s ahead of Fernando Haddad, a relative newcomer for the PT, who has been pulling out all the stops (these stops are named Lula and Dilma) to get into the second round and give the city a left-of-center option. It could be close.

Rio – Riding a wave of success vs. the gadfly critic
Incumbent Eduardo Paes (from catch-all centrist party PMDB) is overseeing a city which is booming, regaining much of its importance for the country, and which will host the Olympics in 2016. He should win easily and probably will. But the one person who may stop him from getting 50% of the vote today is Marcelo Freixo, the human rights advocate who famously inspired a character in blockbuster movie Tropa de Elite 2 (If you haven’t seen these two movies, but you are somehow reading this blog, you must).
Freixo is an extremely exciting figure for Rio’s middle-class lefties as well as many people in the favelas. This is an impressive spread, to say the least, and he’s a powerful critic of the way Rio is developing.
Source: Blogfolha

WOMEN RULE!

President of Brazil Dilma Vana Rousseff. AFP

Published on September 26, 2012

The popularity of Brazil's first woman president continues to rise and public trust in her administration far exceeds that of her two male predecessors, despite a slowing economy, a CNI/Ibope poll showed on Wednesday.

The approval rating of President Dilma Rousseff's government rose to 62 percent, 3 percentage points higher than in the previous CNI/Ibope poll three months ago.

 

Rousseff has been battling to jump-start a sluggish economy with a flurry of stimulus measures that include tax breaks on manufacturers and consumers, and recently took steps to lower some of the world's highest energy costs.

 

The world's No. 6 economy is expected to grow just 1.5 percent this year, a far cry from the red-hot 7.5 percent expansion seen two years ago.

 

An ongoing corruption scandal involving Rousseff's ruling Workers Party over vote buying a decade ago and a bruising four-month strike by public sector employees have not dented her popularity after nearly two years in office, the poll showed.

 

Her personal approval rating as president remains at 77 percent, the same as in March and June of this year.

 

Trust in Rousseff's stewardship of Latin America's largest nation is riding at between 72 percent and 73 percent, compared 53 percent for former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and 54 percent for Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the widely popular union leader turned president who chose her to succeed him.

 

The left-leaning Rousseff harshly criticized the economic policies of rich nations at the United Nations on Tuesday, saying they were failing to end the global crisis and harming emerging markets such as hers.

 

The quarterly poll of 2,000 people by Ibope and CNI, the country's largest industry lobby, was conducted between Sept. 17 and 21 and has a margin of error of 2 percentage point.

Source: http://www.ntn24.com/news/news/brasils-rousseff-riding-high-p-17936

COME AGAIN? A FLYING RIVER?

Yes, you read it right. A group of Brazilian scientists has been studying over 30 years the air masses which drift from the Amazon region and carry humidity to other regions of Brazil.  The vapour volume conveyed by these flying rivers can be bigger than the discharge of all Brazilian mid-western rivers altogether reaching astonishing 200,000 cu m/s. In other words an amount of water equivalent to the Amazon river discharge may pass over our heads in one second. Still, according to researches a single large tree alone can  transpire 12,000 gallons of water a day. The Amazon rain forest works as a water pump drawing to the continent all humidity evaporated from the Atlantic ocean. This humidity becomes rain and falls over the rainforest itself. 

To show how these flying rivers bring rain to Brazil and South America, British-born pilot Gerard Moss flies aboard his single-engine Embraer 721 aircraft above the Amazon rainforest  "Climate change is taking its toll. The United States is going through its worst drought in half a century, Russia is also reeling from drought and in India monsoon rains have for years been irregular," he said. "Brazil is less affected because we have the world's biggest tropical forest, which helps regulate the climate."

Deforestation is, however, an important counterfactor. With logging and agriculture shrinking Brazil's rainforests, there are fewer trees to release the water vapour that creates these flying rivers. Scientists believe nearly 20% of the Amazon has been destroyed and some fear a point of no return if destruction reaches 35% to 40%. Large-scale deforestation has made Brazil one of the world's top greenhouse gas emitters, but the government has vowed to curb it and has made significant strides in the past decade. Brazilian authorities confirmed earlier this year that deforestation fell to a record low of 6 418 km² in 2011, down from a peak of 27 000km² in 2004.

Sources: News24, Mensageiros da água, As boas novas

GERMAN, POMMERSCH OR HUNSRUCKISCH?

Pomerode is a Brazilian city in the state of Santa Catarina, in Southern Brazil. It is located in the valley of the Itajaí-Açu river, not very far from the city of Blumenau, one of the largest cities in the state.

Pomerode is known as the most German city in Brazil, because the vast majority of its inhabitants are of German descent and are bilingual in German and Portuguese.

Pomerode was founded by Pomeranian Germans in 1861 and is considered the "most typically German of all German towns of southern Brazil".

One very remarkable characteristic about Pomerode is the fact that Pommersch is still being preserved by the majority of the local population.

In Pomerode, as in some other localities in southern Brazil (Santa Maria de Jetibá, Espírito Santo, among them), the German language is not a foreign language, but a Brazilian linguistic regionalism.

For a good part of the 20th century, the Brazilian government did not encourage people to speak the German language. As a matter of fact, at times it was actively repressed and prohibited, like during Getúlio Vargas's presidency. Today on the other hand the German language is part of the curriculum in local schools and strongly encouraged by the local governments throughout southern Brazil.

If Pomeranian (i.e. Pommersch, not to be confused with Slavic Kashubian which is in English also called Pomeranian) is spoken by most town inhabitants of Pomerode (alongside Portuguese), most German-Brazilians who are bilingual speak the Riograndenser Hunsrückisch or Hunsrückisch German dialect.

The town government uses "Pomeroy" as the English translation of the town's name on its website, despite being etymologically incorrect.

Candidates for the forthcoming elections to a seat  at the the City Council and Town Hall do better to convince the electorate if they can speak the local dialect.

The local Zoo is also an attraction in itself. 

Source: Wikipedia

THE ZOO

RADIO POMERODE

AND THE LATIN GRAMMY GOES TO...

This video is one of the nominees to the 2012 Latin Grammy to be held in Las Vegas. It runs for three of the main prize statues: record of the year, album of the year and best musical video.

Other Brazilian nominees in the most important categories are - "Chico" by Chico Buarque (album of the year, the song "Extranjero" by Maria Gadú (best song) and Gaby Amarantos (2012 revelation).

THE CAPITAL AT THE MIDDLE OF THE WORLD

An equinox occurs twice a year (around 20 March and 22 September), when the tilt of the Earth's axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun, the center of the Sun being in the same plane as the Earth's equator. The term equinox can also be used in a broader sense, meaning the date when such a passage happens. The name "equinox" is derived from the Latinaequus (equal) and nox (night), because around the equinox, the night and day have approximately equal length.
The date at which sunset and sunrise become exactly 12 hours apart is known as the equilux. Because times of sunset and sunrise vary with an observer's geographic location (longitude and latitude), the equilux likewise depends on location and does not exist for locations sufficiently close to the Equator. The equinox, however, is a precise moment in time which is common to all observers on Earth.

Sun compass: to the left of the picture,
the  northern hemisphere, to the right - the
southern hemisphere

You are right between two hemispheres

Macapá is the only Brazilian capital crossed by the equator line. That’s why the inhabitants of the city have the privilege – at least twice a year – to watch the Equinox, when the sun rises, moves and sets exactly along the equator line. In this period days and nights on our whole planet are of equal length. And this phenomenon happens only twice a year : in March, known as “Spring Equinox” – and in September, the “Autumn Equinox”.

In Macapá the “Equinox” can be observed from the monument “Marco Zero”. Apart from locals, the phenomenon attracts tourists and scientists. This year it was set for Sep. 22nd at 11:49. Local of observation : City of Macapá.

Source: Wikipedia

VIDEO

MEET THE GREEN MUSEUM OF TOMORROW IN RIO

The Museu do Amanhã, or Museum of Tomorrow, designed by Santiago Calatrava, an internationally renowned architect "will be a living museum and pedagogical tool,”  according to him. “We want it to exemplify ecology for young people who’ve never heard about it. They’ll be able to see how things work with their own eyes.” 
The rectangular, concrete building’s most prominent feature is a series of photovoltaic panels protruding from its steel roof. During the daytime, they will tilt to follow the sun’s course across the sky. “They’re not passive elements,” Calatrava says. “The building changes like a flower or a plant.”
Other pedagogic green features include pools to capture rainwater, for use in the plumbing system, as well as pools that naturally filter water from the bay. Pumps will harvest seawater, moreover, to cool interior rooms and galleries—all features that could earn LEED certification from the Green Building Council Brasil, an affiliate of the USGBC.
Visitors will enter from a ground-level plaza then ascend to an upper level via two long ramps—one geared toward children, the other for adults—that terminate in windows overlooking the bay. From there, they will pass through a vestibule that rotates 180 degrees and deposits them into a high-ceilinged, nave-like gallery running the building’s length.
Not yet open to the public though, (expectations set for the grand opening to be mid-2014) the gardens and a plaza-level auditorium should open by 2012, in time to host Earth Summit events. 
Source: Architectural Record