RIO DE JANEIRO — The search for the black boxes from an Air France airliner crash off Brazil six months ago will resume in early February, the head of the French office investigating the accident said here Saturday.

The new underwater sweeps, approximately 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) off Brazil’s northeast coast, will last a maximum three months and involve sonar and robot submarines, said Jean-Paul Troadec, director of the Investigation and Analysis Bureau. Read the full story

NEW YORK – Brazil has recently generated positive headlines with its 2016 Olympic bid victory, as well as its increased economic and political visibility.

Based on current economic trends, it could be one of the world’s five biggest economies — along with China, the United States, India and Japan — by the middle of this century, according to The Economist.

Yet, the evidence of progress has been marred by the nation’s troubling crime statistics — and reports of unlawful methods employed by the security forces. Read the full story

RIO DE JANEIRO — A huge power failure involving the world’s largest operating hydroelectric plant this week was the worst in its 25 years of use, Brazilian officials said Wednesday, causing widespread blackouts that exposed the vulnerability of Brazil’s electricity infrastructure.

Officials in Brazil and Paraguay were still searching for answers late Wednesday to explain the failure at the Itaipú plant, which straddles the border between the countries along the Paraná River and is a critical source of power for both nations.

For more than two hours late Tuesday, the failure of three transmission lines that deliver power from the plant created a domino effect, cutting off electricity to 18 of 26 states in Brazil, including the country’s two largest cities, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Tens of millions of people were affected. Airports in several cities were briefly shut down and passengers had to be pulled from subway cars in São Paulo when the system lost power.

Much of Paraguay, which suffered several brief power failures in the past week, was also blacked out Tuesday night for about 20 minutes.

Electricity system operators said that there was no evidence of sabotage and that the most likely cause was an unexplained atmospheric disturbance, like heavy rains or winds in the area. “The system is not fragile, it is one of the strongest and most secure in the world,” said Edison Lobão, Brazil’s energy minister.

Still, energy experts in both countries said the widespread blackout showed the potential weaknesses in Brazil’s transmission system and the need for better management of the interconnected electrical grids.

“This was a management failure,” said Ildo Sauer, a professor of energy at the University of São Paulo. “There is not a lack of generation capacity, there is not a lack of transmission capacity, there has not been a lack of investments” in the sector, he said. “What is lacking is management, command and control of the operations.”

But Professor Sauer also said that the blackouts showed that reforms of the electrical grid made in 2003 and 2004, after a series of blackouts, “were not sufficient.”

The system failure was reminiscent of the blackout of 2003 in the American Northeast and Midwest, the country’s widest electrical blackout in history, affecting 10 million people in Ontario, Canada, and 45 million people in eight American states.

For Brazilians, Tuesday’s blackout brought back painful memories of energy shortages in 2001, which led the country to intensify its push for more supplies of natural gas and hydroelectric power. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then the president, instituted nine months of energy rationing, and the country’s energy shortcomings were blamed for a considerable decline in Mr. Cardoso’s popularity as he ended his second term in office.

Tuesday’s failure was not related to a shortage of energy, officials insisted, but a disruption in transmitting it. Since 2001 Brazil has diversified its energy supply and has avoided widespread shortages.

The failure occurred at 10:13 p.m. local time. It affected the southeast of Brazil most severely, leaving São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo completely without electricity. But blackouts also swept through parts of other states like Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Bahia and Pernambuco, energy officials said.

By 12:30 a.m. power had been restored to most areas.

Itaipú’s problems also affected parts of Argentina that share interconnections through Brazil and Paraguay. The plant supplies about 20 percent of Brazil’s power and 90 percent of the energy consumed by Paraguay.

http://www.nytimes.com/

Though journalists, international affairs professionals, travel lovers, and international businessmen are already well aware that Brazil is the country to watch, there are still many gringos who aren’t tuned in to Brazil’s ascent or don’t quite understand the country’s importance. This list is for those gringos.

10. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s cultural capital (but not the national capital – that’s Brasília) is an excellent urban case study when learning about the developing world. It shares certain characteristics with other developing cities that provides many important lessons and a useful perspective on urban conflicts, like inequality, violent crime, and drug trafficking, as well as positive changes like a growing middle class, increased purchasing power of the average consumer and social movements. Read the full story

SAO PAULO, Brazil — A massive 2007 electrical blackout in Brazil has been newly blamed on computer hackers, but was actually the result of a utility company’s negligent maintenance of high voltage insulators on two transmission lines. That’s according to reports from government regulators and others who investigated the incident for more than a year.

In a broadcast Sunday night, the CBS newsmagazine “60 minutes” cited unnamed sources in making the extraordinary claim that a two-day outage in the Atlantic state of Espirito Santo was triggered by hackers targeting a utility company’s control systems. The blackout affected 3 million people. Hackers also caused another, smaller blackout north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005, the network claimed.

Brazilian government officials disputed the report over the weekend, and Raphael Mandarino Jr., director of the Homeland Security Information and Communication Directorate, told the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo that he’s investigated the claims and found no evidence of hacker attacks, adding that Brazil’s electric control systems are not directly connected to the internet. Read the full story

SAO PAULO– Several major Brazilian cities including the two largest, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, were plunged into darkness Tuesday, witnesses said, in a blackout initially attributed to problems at a hydroelectric dam.

The power outage hit at 10:15 p.m. (0015 GMT Wednesday) and spread to the states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, including both their capitals, the states of Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo, in the southeast, Mato Grosso do Sul, in the southwest, parts of the central state of Goias, as well as the federal district of Brasilia.

The blackout reportedly affected large swaths of Brazil’s major cities in those states as well.

Globo television said National Electric System officials blamed the blackout on a domino effect in the country’s power grid from a power failure at the Itaipu hydroelectric plant that Brazil shares with Paraguay.

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net

Brazil’s 2 largest cities hit by blackouts

RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s two largest cities have been hit by a massive blackout that has also affected other parts of Latin America’s largest nation.

Media reports say problems at a huge hydroelectric dam are to blame for the electrial outages affecting large parts of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and other cities in several states.

The G1 Web site of Globo TV says Brazil lost 17,000 megawatts of power after an unspecified problem happened at the Itaipu dam that straddles the border of Brazil and Paraguay.

Officials did not immediately comment on Tuesday’s outages. The blackouts came three days after CBS’s “60 Minutes” news program reported several past Brazilian power outages were caused by hackers. Brazilian officials played down the report.

http://www.google.com/

There are 50 murders a day in South Africa, the host country of the 2010 football World Cup. And Brazil, host of both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, also suffers from extreme violence. With a view to the high-profile events, the two countries are now attempting to crack down on rampant crime — and are using ruthless tactics to do so.

An orchid, a laptop and a Bible adorn the desk of Pricilla de Oliveira Azevedo. She is wearing the blue uniform of the military police, but there is no weapon visible in her small office. Her territory is the Favela Santa Marta, a hillside slum in the heart of the southern tourist zone of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. From the top of the hill, there is a magnificent view of Sugar Loaf Mountain, the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Copacabana beach. Read the full story

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Suspected drug traffickers shot down a police helicopter and set fire to five buses and a school in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday, killing two policemen, police and media said.

It is one of the worst recent outbreaks of violence in Rio and comes two weeks after the city was awarded the 2016 Olympic Games, despite worries over its high levels of violence and poor security. Read the full story

Olympic ‘nopes’ beat out hope in Chicago
By Jessica Ravitz
CNN

(CNN) — The announcement that Chicago, Illinois, will not host the 2016 Olympic Games took the hopeful wind out of many in the Windy City.

Read the full story

The Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 games are sure to be a great time for everyone involved. When the Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 games were announced, there was celebration all over the streets of this Brazilian city.

The Rio de Janeiro Olympics 2016 games come as a surprise to many that assumed that President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama and Oprah would be able to sway the IOC (International Olympic Committee) to select Chicago as the 2016 Olympic Games venue. Read the full story

Watch Live:

http://news.bnonews.com/xh2m

Chicago has been eliminated in the first round of voting for the 2016 Olympics.

Hoping to persuade the IOC to award Chicago the 2016 Olympics, Obama and his wife led a heartfelt and, at times, very personal plea Friday. Instead of stodgy technical details, discussions of finances or computer-generated graphics, Chicago took members inside the city to show why it should win the games.

Obama spoke of finally finding a home in Chicago after a nomadic childhood. Michelle Obama recounted how, growing up on the city’s South Side, her disabled father taught her how to throw a ball and a “mean right hook.” Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley invoked the memory of Jesse Owens.

“Like so many young people, I was inspired” by the Olympics, the first lady said. “I found myself dreaming that maybe, just maybe, if I worked hard enough, I, too, could achieve something great. But I never dreamed the Olympic flame might light up lives in my neighborhood.

“But today I can.”

Chicago, competing with Madrid, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo for the 2016 Games, was the first of the finalists to make its presentation. Some of its speakers looked nervous and parts of the presentation came off as stilted. It also was surprisingly low-key, with a video featuring blues legend Buddy Guy and slick snapshots of the city the splashiest part of the presentation.

But that’s how it was designed, Daley said.

“It’s not about the words,” he said. “It’s about the heart and the soul.”

Though Chicago is the third-largest city in the United States, it is largely unknown overseas. Or, if people are familiar with it, they see it as the home of Michael Jordan and Al Capone — and not necessarily in that order.

So Chicago showed videos of its picturesque lakefront, where most of the venues will be clustered, and artsy Millennium Park, which will be a gathering place for fans during the games. Schoolchildren read letters to the IOC in another video, and a teacher spoke of a troubled student who turned his life around after joining the wrestling team.

Highlighting the city’s diversity — “It’s a place where our unity is on colorful display,” Obama said — the videos featured people of different colors and nationalities, including a group of veiled women playing basketball.

Bid chairman Patrick Ryan, who made his considerable fortune in insurance, spoke of the many companies that are based in the Midwest, making it “fertile territory” for new Olympic sponsors. He also mentioned the universities in and around Chicago, how they would be a source for research.

In planning the games, Chicago has made the athletes its focus, decathlon gold medalist Bryan Clay and Paralympic champion Linda Mastandrea said. The compact plan puts 90 percent of athletes within 15 minutes of their venues — a not insignificant detail, Clay said, describing a day that begins at 5 a.m. and doesn’t end until midnight.

Athletes would also feel at home in Chicago, Clay said. Pick pretty much any country in the world, and it likely has its own neighborhood in Chicago — the Walgreens in Greektown has English and Greek lettering on the building. Not only does that mean “local” cheering sections for all athletes, but there will be a homestay program for their families.

Chicago will use mostly existing and temporary facilities. While that means there won’t be any grand building, like the Bird’s Nest in Beijing, operations chief Doug Arnot said Chicago will leave a far more lasting — and important — legacy.

“We know that concrete and steel do not build sport, people build sport,” Arnot said.

The U.S. Olympic Committee has had a testy relationship with the IOC, including recent flare-ups over revenue sharing and a USOC TV network. Chicago leaders addressed that head on, repeatedly talking about wanting to be partners with the IOC. Stealing a page right out of Obama’s “Yes, we can” campaign theme, one video even featured residents repeating “Together we can.”

“I see a future in which the Olympic movement and the United States will move shoulder to shoulder toward the horizon, with a shared mission, together as true partners, thanks to an Olympic Games in Chicago in 2016,” said Bob Ctvrtlik, a former IOC member and the USOC’s vice chair of international relations.

Read More:

http://www.greenvilleonline.com/

In 1808, the Portuguese court, fleeing from Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal during the Peninsular War in a large fleet escorted by the British, moved the government to Brazil ending a 308 year of colonial rule. Rio de Janeiro became the Empire Capital and the Portuguese king ruled his huge empire for 13 years from the Passo Imperial Palace, an old colonial building ocean front in Rio de Janeiro downtown, and there he would have remained for the rest of his life if it were not for the turmoil aroused in Portugal due, among other reasons, to his long stay in Brazil after the end of Napoleon’s reign. Read the full story

At least 35 people were hurt this morning when Continental Airlines Flight 128 bound for Houston from Rio de Janeiro encountered severe turbulence, forcing it to be diverted to Miami.

Mary Clark, a spokewoman for the Houston-based carrier, said 28 people were treated at the scene and seven were hospitalized in the Miami area. The airline initially said nine were hospitalized but later reduced the number.  Read the full story