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from Photographers Blog:
Favela fighter
When I reached the Chapeu Mangueira favela in Leme, a slum that borders on Copacabana, I was expecting to do a story on a martial arts school for poor kids. But there I met “Nativo” (Native), expert in what is today called MMA/NHB, or Mixed Martial Arts/No Holds Barred fighting. Nativo is the nickname of Fabio da Conceicao Ventura, 25, a lifelong resident of the same slum. Nativo told me how he was born in Chapeu Mangueira, and when he was just five he watched his mother set fire to herself to escape her miserable life. Two years later his father kicked him out of the house and he found himself on the streets.
In the streets Nativo learned to steal before joining up with drug traffickers. He told me how he first liked to rob tourists on Copacabana Beach, but then how it was really being part of a drug gang that made him feel most protected. He made it obvious to me that the gang came to be his family. With them he would spend hours consuming drugs and taking care of business inside the slum.
I started to photograph him and accompanied him around the narrow streets of the favela that was “pacified” by police in June, 2008, as part of a government program. Nativo showed me the places where drugs used to be commonly sold, and where he sat with his rifle giving cover to the gang.
In one corner he showed me where 12 of his companions were massacred by a rival gang. Several times while walking around he acted strange, scaring me like someone I always hoped not to come across on a dark street. He said to me, “I’ve done all types of evil, including things that you can’t even imagine.”
from MacroScope:
India’s central bank battles alone in inflation struggle
What more does India's central bank have to do? Last week data showed March inflation rising to almost 9 percent on an annual basis. More importantly, core inflation is above 7 percent for the first time in 3 years meaning demand-side pressures are rising fast. And that's despite the Reserve Bank of India raising interest rates eight times since last March.
The inflation data comes just after a quarterly HSBC report based on purchasing managers indexes showed that inflation in India seemed impervious to monetary policy tightening.
from Photographers Blog:
The most painful story
EDITOR'S NOTE: Last Thursday, April 7, a gunman entered under a false pretext the Tasso da Silveira school in a Rio de Janeiro suburb, carrying two pistols and dozens of rounds of ammunition. An alumnus himself of the same school where he had a history of being bullied and mental illness, he lined children up facing the wall and shot two dozen of them, before turning the gun on himself. Twelve students were dead, and others are still agonizing in the hospital.
This is the most painful type of story for most photographers, when a senseless tragedy involves children. The two Reuters photographers who covered the shooting and subsequent funerals speak here of their experiences, and how they coped professionally and personally.
from Photographers Blog:
Boxing their own worst enemy
On some of my first trips around Sao Paulo after moving here, I caught glimpses of life under the city’s many highway viaducts, whether it was of people storing recyclable waste or even living under the bridges. I refer to my roaming excursions in this city as “trips,” because this massive city of nearly 20 million inhabitants is a world in itself.
One day, as I gradually widened my geographic range and knowledge of my new city, I spotted people practicing sports under one bridge. It was a brief view but long enough to register in my mind. So when I read soon after about a boxing school under a viaduct and went to search it out, I realized immediately it was the same one I had spotted that day.
from Reuters Soccer Blog:
Will God be Brazilian in 2014?
"God is Brazilian" is a favourite phrase for Brazilians when fortune smiles on their country.
Former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva famously uttered it after massive new oil reserves were discovered off the coast in 2007.
from Breakingviews:
Brazil sends bad market signal scalping Vale’s CEO
-- The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --
By Rob Cox
Last week’s ouster of Vale SA’s chief executive sends a terrible signal to the markets about the Brazilian government’s intentions. Roger Agnelli resisted the state’s designs to push the $180 billion mining group into lower-return, if labor intensive, activities. With President Dilma Rousseff’s government forcing his departure, investors must brace for a strategy that favors jobs over profit – think Pemex instead of BHP Billiton.
from Reuters Soccer Blog:
Soccer Break Wednesday
Now the international period is over we can focus on domestic issues again, or can we?
Tuesday's matches provided plenty of drama, from the battles Spain and the Netherlands had to fight to get through tricky Euro 2012 qualifiers, to Ghana's lighting up of London, to Australia's World Cup revenge against Germany in a friendly.
from Environment Forum:
Amazon’s drought, seen from space
How green is the Amazon?
Not as green as it used to be, as shown in an analysis of satellite images made during last year's record-breaking drought.
Because greenness is an indication of health in the Amazon, a decline in this measurement means this vast area is getting less healthy -- bad news for biodiversity and some native peoples in the region.
from Felix Salmon:
Brazil’s love of equity
About the same time that "junk bonds" became "high yield" and shortly after "third world" became "emerging markets," the finance industry quietly engineered another rebranding: "leveraged buyouts" became "private equity."
So as Andrew Ross Sorkin notes today, the idea of a private-equity shop without debt is fundamentally at odds with the genesis of the industry. This is private equity done the old-fashioned way, where "old-fashioned" means "unprecedented." But in Brazil, it makes perfect sense: rates there are simply too high to be able to make LBOs profitable, and meanwhile there are lots of efficiencies to be found turning smallish family-owned companies into much larger professionally-run operations.
from Reuters Investigates:
Will Brazil be ready for kick off?
Everybody knows Brazil is booming these days. But they don’t always see the dark side of that progress: some of the world’s worst traffic jams, blackouts, and trucks that sit in lines for several days at harvest time because seaports are so full.
Hoping to fix those problems, Brazil plans more than $1 trillion in infrastructure improvements in the next decade, and the scope is pretty amazing. The government wants a bullet train between Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo; a huge new hydroelectric dam in the Amazon; and a railroad criss-crossing Brazil’s northeast, a region that is a bit like the American Deep South in that it has historically lagged behind the rest of the country in investment.
