Green Machines | Braskem’s Sugar Cane Gains

The Estadão reports: Tigre will introduce a new line of drainage grills using polyethylene produced by Braskem from sugarcane. Known as the Tigre Eco-Grill, the product line marks the entry of «green» plastic into the construction market, the company says, without revealing further details of the deal. “Our investment in this new line shows that we are [...]

Marina and the Greens | Plus, Big Sousaphone Solo

Newsvine | A Fair and Balanced Interview with Marina Silva by Globo. Mirabile Dictu.. That is me doing a quick bit of translation about the collision between politics and environmental policy in Brazil. Brazil has only had a forest service for 10 years, to our 110. The obscenely well-organized agribusiness lobby is more interested in [...]

Thoughtoid

An open letter to various persons around the world. I have been scheduled for an extensive biographical interview tomorrow afternoon — doctor’s orders, knowing my wife’s talent as a journalist and searching for insight into my human condition as an incomprehensible gringo with an improbable life story. There is some possibility I will be receiving [...]

Brazilian Capital Market Machine | Writing the Meltdown Manual

The great Sambodian smoking hole, above: Collapse of excavations at the future Pinheiros Station of the São Paulo Metrõ system. After all these years, and thank you for your concern, Brazil seems to have adequate control over its nuclear reactors — even if the location Angra dos Reis along the south-cenral coast, teeming with life, [...]

New From the Nose for Newsaphone

Learn how to fool search engines and optimize your sites and blogs Gilpérez set to lead Telefónica Latam: buzz Just horsing around with the headlines this morning, as usual. The Latin American digital convergence market is just about the most interesting game on the planet, if you squint at it correctly — a version of [...]

What I Want To Be Able To Do

What I would really like to be able to do is what Placeography does — use an extension to SemanticMediaWiki to provide data entry forms informed by systems of concepts that over time evolve into a pretty good database. Above, the data entery form for contributors to the project’s folksy contributors, who add information on interesting [...]

The Landless Gringos Movement | New Ban on Land Sales to Non-Brazilians

Cane fields, São Paulo. Critics question the wisdom of betting so heavily on monoculture. One hears that these vast stretches make great hiding places for pot cultivation. It came out it in the Estadao BRASÍLIA – The government has resolved to ban new sales and mergers, to or with foreigners, of Brazilian firms with landholdings in [...]

Massacre at the Estadão | Shanghai-Sambodian Data Pipeline

Comunique-se reports: local metro daily O Estado de S. Paulo lays off 22 journalists. Already, most of Brazil’s estimated 12,000 “journalists”– the term also applies to publicists — are working in corporate communications. My wife just landed such a job. Pbulic service journalism is palpably shrinking. I once calculated on the bakof a bar napkin [...]

BATS Brasil | “Catalyst of Consolidation”?

You stop paying attention to a subject for a couple of years and suddenly you have know idea what is happening any longer. To the announcement that the BATS exchange — third-largest in the U.S. — would enter Brazil, and will seek to kick off a process of consolidation of exchanges through M&A, for example, [...]

Your Morning Mingau | Deloitte Is Semi-Andersoned Over Panamericano

The BCB, Brasília. Out-Death Stars even the sinister FIESP tower on the Av.Paulista. Here are the headlines at this Sambodian hour. The Estadao reports that sources inside the Brazilian Central Bank consider Deloitte Touche to have suffered an Enron-scale attention deficit disorder in the case of the Banco Panamericano and the phantom R$4.5 billion it carried [...]