MESS WITH MASSA & FERRARI GOES ON !

FILIPE MASSA SWORE THAT HE'LL NOT RUN IF HE TURN'S THE 2nd. TEAM PILOT!

After his unacceptable behaviour during last Grand Prix, Filipe Massa in Hungary - where he had a severe accident in 2009 -, promised not to accept new orders of Ferrari. He said  "I'll Stop o running when I know I became the second pilot of the team ".

There are people who do not see it. He´s one of them.

After the lack of character demonstrated at the end of last week, this Brasilian chap want's to  convince us of something that is contrary to what we all know.

His position at Ferrari is obviously of the 2nd pilot of the team. He'll only find it out when he'll became just a test pilot... 

Then what he'll tell us ? He was too good for the team ? Ridiculous ! Another ridiculous story, from a ridiculous guy....

BRIC - Reasons to believe in Brazil

WHEN, in 2001, Goldman Sachs dreamt up the acronym BRICs for the largest emerging economies, the country that most people said did not belong in the group was Brazil. Today, the leading candidate for exclusion is Russia. But some prominent observers are still sceptical about Brazil’s prospects. A notable example is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, who recently (and very reasonably) pointed out that Brazil’s share of world output has actually fallen over the past 15 years, from 3.1% in 1995 to 2.9% in 2009 at purchasing-power parity. “Brazil cannot become as big a player in the world as the two Asian giants”, China and India, Mr Wolf concludes.

At a recent meeting with a group of investors in Hong Kong, Rubens Ricupero offered an intriguing counterargument. A long-serving and respected Brazilian diplomat, Mr Ricupero was the secretary-general of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development from 1995 to 2004. Although he has links to the opposition to Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party—he previously served as finance minister in the government of a rival party—his analysis is not party-political. “For the first time in its history,” he argues, Brazil is enjoying “propitious conditions in four areas that used to pose serious limitations to growth.” They are:

Commodities. Commodity production used to be regarded as either a curse or, at best, something countries ought to diversify away from as quickly as possible (which Brazil itself did in the 1970s). But over the next fifty years, Mr Ricupero notes, half the expected increase in the world population will come from eight countries, of which only one—America—is not sucking in commodities at an exponential rate of increase. The others are China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Congo. China alone will account for 40% of the additional demand for meat worldwide, he points out. This demand will remain strong partly because of rising population and partly because of urbanisation, which increases demand for industrial commodities (like iron ore to make steel) and meat (because urbanisation changes eating habits). Brazil is already a large iron-ore producer, and has transformed itself into an agricultural powerhouse over the past 10 years, becoming the first tropical country to join the ranks of the dominant temperate-climate food exporters such as America and the European Union. It is well-placed to benefit from the emerging markets’ commodity boom.

Petroleum. Mr Ricupero argues that the success of the Brazilian state oil company, Petrobras, in offshore oil exploration has transformed Brazilian energy. “Although no precise and final estimates can be made yet of the [so-called] pre-salt oil reserves potential of the Santos Basin,” he says, “all serious indications point to the high likelihood that Brazil is poised to become at least a medium-sized net oil-exporting country.” New oil and gas deposits far away from the volatile Middle East should increase Brazil’s strategic importance, as well as improving its balance-of-payments position.

Demography. Brazil is reaping a big demographic dividend. In 1964, its fertility rate (the average number of children a woman can expect to have during her lifetime) was 6.2. It fell to 2.5 in 1996, and is now below replacement level, at 1.8, one of the sharpest drops in the world. The result has been a collapse in the dependency ratio—the number of children and old people dependent on each working-age adult. As recently as the 1990s, that ratio was 90 to 100 (ie, there were 90 dependents, mostly children, for each for every 100 Brazilians of working age). It is now 48 to 100. Thanks to this, Brazil no longer has to build schools, hospitals, universities and other social institutions helter-skelter to keep pace with population growth. Eventually, the ratio will creep back up as today’s workforce enters retirement, but such problems remain decades ahead. In the meantime, Brazil can pay more attention to the quality rather than the quantity of its social spending, which should, in theory, improve the population’s education, health, and work skills.

Urbanisation. Urbanisation both encourages economic growth and accompanies it. But it also causes problems. “Many of the worst contemporary problems in Brazil,” Mr Ricupero says, such as “lack of educational and health facilities, poor public transportation, marginalisation and criminality,  stem from [an] inability to cope with internal migrations in an orderly and planned way.” That is now changing, he argues. The waves of migrants out of the countryside and into the cities have more or less finished. Brazil is now largely an urban country: about four-fifths of the population lives in cities. “For Brazil,” he concludes, “the period of frantic and chaotic growth of big cities that is now taking place in Asia and Africa is already a thing of the past.”

Mr Ricupero is relatively cautious about the conclusion. “The four sets of conditions outlined above,” he says “are by no means sure guarantees of automatic success.” He admits Brazil has fallen behind in infrastructure, for example, and says that, if it had the sort of infrastructure you see in Costa Rica and Chile (the two best examples in Latin America), economic growth would be about two percentage points higher per year. On the other hand, Brazil also has some other advantages: unlike China, Russia and India, it is at peace with its neighbours (all 10 of them). Whether you think all this really amounts to a rejoinder to Mr Wolf is a matter of doubt. Brazil might still remain a relatively small player in the world. Still Mr Ricupero’s points are, at least, actually happening (not things expected in future), can be measured in concrete terms and are long-term (they should continue for decades). Who knows? Perhaps they might even be right.

BRAZIL ELECTIONS - WITH MELON'S, WATERMELONS & TATI QEBRA-BARRACO

IF YOU DON'T BELIEVE,... READ IT!

MELON WOMEN IN PHOTOS FOR CAMPAIGN OUTDOORS

She only needs to put her feet on the  Uruguaiana street, Rio’s city center, for be addressed by a crowd mainly formed by men. They all want appreciate, embrace or kiss  Renata Frisson, 23 years, the Melon Woman. With a leap of 12 cm in height and a neckline generous, the famous hoofer not saves sympathy with the fans. It only makes a request: get their vote  in the elections of 3 October.

Melon needs Sun

As well as the Muse that will try to become Rio de Janeiro State Congress member, by party PHS , other celebs also want out a “casquinha” – take advantage - of fame to attract voters. This list still regard with celestial bodies as the singer Elymar Santos, the ex-BBB Jean Wyllys, the ex-pagodeiro Waguinho, the ex-soccer player Romário, actress Lady Francis and funkeira Tati Quebra-Barraco “broken-Shack”. The promises are more varied. I visited many communities and theirs  missing, for example, health posts. If elected, I shall fight to improvements in those places .

Born in the Complexo do Alemão – a Rio’s Favela - Elymar Santos, a candidate to federal deputy by the PP, has not forgotten their origins and either battle by resources for the inhabitants of their neibourhood. The singer, however, does not have a specific project for a possible mandate in Brasilia.” I will work as machine gun turntable and fight for most varied causes. Education, for the disadvantaged, the rights of artists”, says.

The political scientist Ricardo Ishmael, da PUC, believes that the fame aid a candidate, but is not enough. The famous may be elected, but needs aplomb policy to remain in office. And this is not as easy as it seems , says.

TATI QUEBRA-BARRACO

The journalist Jean Wyllys from Bahia, which was celebrated in 2005 to overcome the Big Brother, seem to know and is not only the fame to offer. 


Affiliated to PSOL, he tries becoming deputy federal. It is clear that the fame will help me, but before entering the BBB I was already involved, in some way, with the political and social movements.
After the BBB, I left the media and I devoted to work academic. In Congress, I will defend human rights and freedoms , plans.

Humble Origins in the strategy…and a special care for older people

To become a success also in the polls, many stars remember their humble origins  Son of a charlady and a dustman, Waguinho PTdoB, candidate to  the Senate, speaks of childhood in Vila Cruzeiro, where he struggles for votes.

                                                                                                                                                                                                  Jean Wyllys recalls his early years  on the periphery of Alagoinhas, Bahia.

Romário, which seeks to be federal Deputy,by PSB, has not forgotten childhood in Jacarezinho, another Rio’s Favela.

ROMARIO EX-SOCCER PLAYER

Melon Woman admits that it was not by difficulties when child, but says that there are no resources for its campaign. She reminds that various opponents have more money to invest, but not feel intimated with unequal struggle.It is as in the history of David and Goliath , when a giant is defeated .says. “ I’ll pay a special attention to older people,…” she said. 

Are we facing a potential substitute of Anne Nicole Smith ???

With a huge support of Rio’s taxi drivers and most certainly of “older” people, she’ll not lack support or funds. Reason is quite simple, both groups are afraid that “fruit” goes over validity date and gets rot!

Facebook has become the third-largest nation

Status update

THE world's largest social network announced that it had reached 500m members on Wednesday July 21st. If Facebook were a physical nation, it would now be the third-most populous on earth. And if the service continues to grow as rapidly as in the three months to July, it will reach one billion in about 15 months—almost the size of India. Not least because of its gigantic population, some observers have started to talk of Facebook in terms of a country. “[It] is a device that allows people to get together and control their own destiny, much like our nation-state,” says David Post, a law professor at Temple University, Philadelphia.

Genocide Behind Your Smart Phone

An unidentified man searches for tin ore at a sub-Saharan mine.

Biggest gadget makers—including HP and Apple—may inadvertently get their raw ingredients from murderous Congolese militias. A new movement wants them to trace rare metals from ‘conflict mines.’

It takes a lot to snap people out of apathy about Africa’s problems. But in the wake of Live Aid and Save Darfur, a new cause stands on the cusp of going mainstream. It’s the push to make major electronics companies (manufacturers of cell phones, laptops, portable music players, and cameras) disclose whether they use “conflict minerals”—the rare metals that finance civil wars and militia atrocities, most notably in Congo.

The issue of ethical sourcing has long galvanized human-rights groups. In Liberia, Angola, and Sierra Leone, the notorious trade in “blood diamonds” helped fund rebel insurgencies. In Guinea, bauxite sustains a repressive military junta. And fair-labor groups have spent decades documenting the foreign sweatshops that sometimes supply American clothing stores. Yet Congo raises especially disturbing issues for famous tech brand names that fancy themselves responsible corporate citizens.

A key mover behind the Congo campaign is the anti-genocide Enough Project: witness its clever spoof of the famous Apple commercial. Major names like Hillary Clinton and Nicole Richie have gotten on board. And the timing is perfect: new rules requiring American-listed companies to improve their supply-chain transparency are folded into the financial-reform bill that passed Congress this week.

Congo is a classic victim of the resource curse. Its bountiful deposits—in everything from copper to diamonds—are brazenly plundered by corrupt governments and regional warlords while the population goes without basic services. Today, most violence—including mass rape, slavery, mutilation, and possibly even forced cannibalism—is concentrated in the war-ravaged eastern Kivu provinces, where the Congolese Army and ethnic militias bludgeon each other over the right to trade in mineral ore. One study estimates 5.4 million people have been killed since 1998; 45,000 fatalities still occur each month. Infant mortality and death from HIV/AIDS are also rampant—Congo ranks 16th and sixth-highest in the world, respectively, on these measures.

Still, minerals like tantalum, tin, and tungsten are essential for our wired lifestyle. Tantalum—of which Congo produces about 20 percent of world’s supply—makes capacitors that store electric charge, allowing our devices to function without batteries. Tin is used to fortify circuit boards. Tungsten helps our iPhones vibrate.

But this dependency has a cost in human rights. The U.N. Group of Experts reported last year that the annual trade in gold, tin, and coltan (or tantalum ore) delivers hundreds of millions of dollars into the coffers of the FDLR militia, whose myriad factions include Congolese Army renegades and Hutu fighters associated with the 1994 Rwandan genocide. With irregular arms delivery tracked from North Korea and Sudan, there is little doubt that bounty funds butchery.

Conflict-free sources of the “three T” minerals do exist. Yet Congo has a huge competitive advantage over resource-rich rivals like Australia, Canada, and Brazil. Ore extraction is both cheap and lucrative for the militias that control the mines. For one, they can coerce miners to work for a pittance (an average of $1 to $5 per day). For another, they can enforce protection rackets on legitimate operators or simply steal minerals after they’ve been mined. Then the militias extract bribes and impose taxes along the transport route.

Yet supply-chain audits are far from rigorous because the minerals change hands so many times on the way to the market. After transiting across Africa, the ore is eventually shipped from ports in Kenya and Tanzania to multinational smelting and processing companies located mainly in Asia; from there, component manufacturers purchase the metals and convert them into capacitors and circuit boards; finally, these are sold to electronics manufacturers. Hewlett-Packard, for example, says, “[T]hese issues are far removed from HP, typically five or more tiers from our direct suppliers.” Nonetheless, it “expects” suppliers to operate in a manner that does not directly support armed conflict. The company also claims to possess repeated assurances from capacitor suppliers that they do not use Congo-sourced tantalum (although it remains unsure where the tantalum comes from).

Replying personally on his iPhone to a concerned customer last month, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made similar points: “We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict-[free] materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.” And Microsoft has said that a “conflict mineral free supply chain is a priority.”

The minerals trade already suffers from a lack of international enforcement. A U.N.-approved certification scheme known as the Kimberley Process currently operates to prevent blood diamonds from entering mainstream markets (one requirement is that diamonds be shipped in tamperproof containers). But there is no equivalent for other minerals often mined in war zones. Germany wants certified trading chains—linking international purchasers with conflict-free mining sites. (It is piloting a program to “fingerprint” legitimate tantalum sources in Congo and Rwanda.) But the logistics are daunting and there has been little international support since the 2007 G8 summit, when the concept was first advanced.

In the meantime, local transparency requirements may partly fill the breach. The financial-reform bill passed this week requires American-listed companies to disclose whether they source minerals from Congo. (Although importantly, the provision does not make such trade illegal—out of a fear of damaging the livelihoods of Congolese who rely on legitimate mines.) Companies must provide independently audited reports showing what they’ve done to avoid financing armed conflict—such as citing documentation between the African source country and the Asian processor. Failure to cooperate or the filing of a false report could result in court sanctions.

TIMBER - SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE ECOLOGICAL DISASTER?

THE past weeks have brought rare good news for the world’s forests. On July 15th a new study found that worldwide harvests of illegal timber dropped by 22% over the past decade, with declines reaching as high as 50-75% in the major timber-producing countries of Brazil, Indonesia and Cameroon. In a victory for greens and governments alike, the preserved trees represent between 1.2 billion and 14.6 billion tonnes of cheaply averted carbon emissions, or $6.5 billion in potential government revenues if they were logged legally.

The study, issued by the London think-tank Chatham House, suggests that international efforts to improve forest monitoring and enforcement drove the declines. But below the marquee findings, the report’s optimism is more qualified.

The authors point out that inconsistent policies and weak legal systems defang timber laws in producer countries, threatening hard-won successes. In Brazil, for example, timber prosecutions languish in gridlocked courts for years, even decades. And though the value of fines levied against violators has risen more than eightfold since 2003, some states collect as little as 2.5% of these penalties.

The sheer scale of illegal logging also tempers the report’s rosy message. However encouraging, recent improvements accrue from a truly dreadful baseline: in the early years of the study, nearly half the tropical logs, sawn timber, and plywood traded worldwide was illegal. (In Indonesia, one of the world’s largest timber producers, more than 80% of logs were cut illegally in 2001.) Even after a decade-long decline, 100m cubic metres of illicit timber are still stripped from forests each year.

Unfortunately, future improvements will be more difficult. Unlike the industrial-scale skulduggery targeted thus far, remaining forms of illegal logging are hard to detect. Regulators struggle to catch companies that overharvest within the boundaries of legally granted lands or deliberately misidentify prohibited tree species as legal ones. Smaller-scale cutting for domestic markets is often overlooked. And government corruption is a perennial bugbear, with murky licensing procedures often masking illegal timber concessions. (Indeed, the report acknowledges that current estimates almost certainly undercount such violations.)

Better oversight may help rein in abuses. Cameroon won plaudits for its donor-financed monitoring scheme, which established an independent regulator to tackle illegal logging in the face of widespread corruption. And Brazil is replacing a rickety, paper-based timber permit program with online certifications, allowing regulators to track timber flows electronically through harvest, processing and export. The technology is not infallible—in 2008, authorities caught logging companies hacking into the system to launder 1.7 million cubic metres of illegal timber. But despite its “teething problems”, this integrated, (generally) tamper-resistant approach may yet improve accountability in the country’s logging operations.

Such accountability is growing more important as consumer countries clamp down on illegal timber. In another victory for forest advocates, the European Parliament voted on July 7th to prohibit imports of illegally harvested wood products starting in 2012, echoing a similar US ban passed in 2008. The new rules demand that importers verify the legality of their supply chains or face sanctions (though penalties will be left up to individual member countries). Regulators hope that such demand-side regulation will make it harder to profit from ill-gotten timber.

It’s a good start. But changing patterns of timber trade will challenge the laws’ effectiveness. In 2002, 85% of illegal wood products came straight from the country of harvest to consumer countries; six years later, only about half did, as illegal timber increasingly detoured through third-party processing nations like China before arriving in the form of finished products. With their opaque supply chains and lax import regulations, such middlemen provide an easy entry point for contraband logs. Regulators have earned the right to celebrate their accomplishments, but a daunting flood of illegal timber remains.