brazil

Hawaiian slack key guitar ensemble Keola Beamer toured Brazil in April with the American Music Abroad program. CPD Blogger Paul Rockower describes what happened next.

“The best possible birthday gift for Brazilian and global web users” is how Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, which turned 25 this month, described Brazil’s “internet bill of rights” in an open letter on March 24th. The next day legislators in the lower house of Congress duly approved it.

In "Rebel Music: Race, Empire, And The New Muslim Youth Culture", Hisham Aidi examines the connection between music and political activism among Muslim youth around the globe. 

His book takes us on a musical tour from hip-hop in Brazilian favelas to Gnawa-reggae in North Africa. Aidi highlights the U.S. State Department’s use of hip-hop as a diplomatic tool, sending hip-hop envoys to Muslim countries around the world. 

Organizers of the Rio 2016 Olympics on Thursday revealed plans to provide language training for more than a million people ahead of the event. Brazil ranks behind many of its counterparts in the language learning stakes, comparative international studies show, and few people speak English outside major cities.

Every year, select students from the USC Master of Public Diplomacy program at USC Annenberg travel abroad to conduct field research, which furthers the study of public diplomacy and international communications. This year, the Class of 2014 selected São Paulo, Brazil for its unique position in world politics.

Revellers in Rio have joined a whirl of festivities as carnival fever took hold, the world's biggest street party putting firmly aside lingering protests over corruption and the cost to Brazil of hosting the World Cup. With the football extravaganza now just three months away, flamboyantly dressed metropolis residents indicated that, for the moment, they had spent enough time demonstrating and wanted to let loose instead.

If there are two Brazils, then one of them is here, in a café by the Praça São Salvador, a few blocks from the beach in Rio de Janeiro. Wearing a gray T-shirt, sunglasses and a ring in the shape of a human skull, Alan Fragoso, 27, takes a sip of his caipirinha. Fragoso used to be a sort of Brazilian Don Draper, an advertising man selling products to the nation's emerging consumer class. Then one day he quit. "What I really want is to work with projects I believe in," he says, "not to invest in consumption."

If Brazil is not for beginners, as the saying goes, then Venezuela isn't, either. But as far as the two countries' recent protest experiences go, they have a few interesting elements in common. At first glance, the countries seem quite different: Venezuela is deeply and bitterly politically polarized, with shortages of basic food staples and goods, rising inflation, spiraling crime rates, and what some say is a breakdown of institutions.

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