Rio is Americas’ Most Expensive City
By Jaylan Boyle, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – Rio now takes the title of most expensive city in the Americas for foreigners to live, according to a recent survey undertaken by British consultancy Employment Conditions Abroad (ECA). The study comes with a caveat: it was undertaken and compiled before this year’s dramatic fall [...]
Fire Engulfs Rio Hillside
By Doug Gray, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – At around 10PM on Saturday night a wildfire spread across Morro dos Cabritos in the Copacabana corner of the Lagoa neighborhood, its size and speed assisted by strong winds. The fire department responded before houses were seriously at risk and no injuries were reported, but [...]
Lula Protects Amazon From Foreigners
By Doug Gray, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – As overseas investors continue to speculate on the thriving Rio de Janeiro property market, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came out against the untethered purchasing of land by foreigners last week, saying that he intends to protect the country from the proliferation of [...]
Anti-Corruption Law in Effect This Year
By Jaylan Boyle, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – For the 1.6 million Brazilians who put their names to the “Ficha Limpa” (Clean Record) petition, the news last week was just what they had been waiting for: the Federal Election Board (“Tribunal Superior Eleitoral” – TSE) finally ruled that the newly passed law to [...]
Prison Overcrowding Continues
By Jaylan Boyle, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – The Brazilian government is currently considering a range of options aimed at the slowing rapid growth in the country’s prison population, including the use of electronic surveillance as a means of freeing up space in dangerously overcrowded cells. According to many observers, the federal government [...]
Airports Face ‘Operational Collapse’
By Jaylan Boyle, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – Eight of Brazil’s major metropolitan airports have been described in a recent report as facing an imminent inability to cope with increased traffic that could lead to a complete “logistical blackout.” Undertaken by São Paulo’s Applied Economics Research Institute (IPEA), the report focuses on those [...]
Borel Next to Receive UPP Pacification
By Mira Olson, Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – The Morro do Borel favela is scheduled to receive a permanent Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (Police Pacification Unit, or UPP) on Monday, June 7th. This will be the eighth UPP inaugurated since the policy was launched in January of 2009. Borel and the five neighboring favelas [...]
Dengue Cases on the Rise in Brazil
By Sibel Tinar, Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – The Brazilian Ministry of Health has released a statement reporting an eighty percent increase in confirmed cases of the dengue virus in 2010 according to official figures registered in the first three months of the year, and next summer could see a new increase in the [...]
Report Shows 1 in 5 Have Abortion
By Jaylan Boyle, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – A recent study conducted by the University of Brasilia has revealed that one in five Brazilian women (22 percent) under forty years of age have undergone at least one illegal abortion. This compares about one-third of U.S. women that will have had an abortion if [...]
British School Hosts Model UN
By Jaylan Boyle, Senior Contributing Reporter RIO DE JANEIRO – Starting Friday May 14th, The British School, Rio de Janeiro (Escola Britânica) hosted a Model United Nations (MUN) conference, with 300 students participating over the two days. For some of the participants, this event served as training for a conference to be held at Harvard [...]