Watch Brazil government gives go-ahead for huge Amazon dam

Brazil government gives go-ahead for huge Amazon dam


The proposal to build a dam on the Xingu river has long been a source of controversy

Brazil's government has given the formal go-ahead for the building on a tributary of the Amazon of the world's third biggest hydroelectric dam.

After several failed legal challenges, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed the contract for the Belo Monte dam with the Norte Energia consortium.

Critics say the project will damage the local ecosystem and make homeless 50,000 mainly indigenous people.

But the government says it is crucial for development and will create jobs.

Bidding for the project had to be halted three times before a final court appeal by the government allowed Norte Energia, led by the state-owned Companhia Hidro Eletrica do Sao Francisco, to be awarded the contract.

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We will persuade them that we took seriously into account the environmental and social issues”

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
Brazilian president
'Death warrant'
At the contract signing ceremony in Brasilia on Thursday, President Lula said he himself had criticised the dam before he learnt more about it.

"You cannot imagine how many times I spoke against Belo Monte without even knowing what it was about, and it is precisely during my government that Belo Monte is being unveiled," he said.

"I think this is a victory for Brazil's energy sector.

"We will persuade them that we took seriously into account the environmental and social issues," he added.

The proposal to build a hydro-electric dam on the Xingu river, a tributary of the Amazon in the northern state of Para, has long been a source of controversy.

The initial project was abandoned in the 1990s amid widespread protests both in Brazil and around the world.
Coppied by http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11101842

music industry makes Brazil: how to make a profit by giving music away

watches Brazil: how to make a profit by giving music away
BELEM, Brazil — On the poor outskirts of Belem, the club Mansao de Forro was starting to fill up by midnight on a swelteringly humid Thursday night. Girls in tight jeans and heels sipped drinks from plastic cups while boys in long shorts circled around them.

As the hit "Amor Virtual" — Virtual Love — began to play, a dark-haired boy in blue flowery shorts spun around a tall, elegant blonde girl while her friends watched, shaking their hips. The sound of "tecno-brega," Belem’s indigenous computer pop, never fails to get the dance-floor moving. “I like it because you can dance to it,” said Jessica dos Santos, 18, a waitress. “All my friends like it.”

"Tecno-brega," literally cheesy techno, is a brash mixture of tinny electronic beats and shrill, sugary vocals. Produced locally, it has developed a unique business model. In tecno-brega, music is given away for free.

All over the remote Amazonian state of Para, from speakers strung from lamp posts in tiny villages to booming Belem car stereos, you will hear little else. “This is our sound, our rhythm,” said Jose Roberto, a computer programmer for the Brazilian Air Force who runs Belem’s bregapop website — tecno-brega’s biggest portal. “It is its own universe. That’s why I wanted to spread

Tecno-brega artists distribute their music for free via DJs, street vendors and the internet, hoping to build a reputation and gain lucrative live shows. In Brazil, pirated Hollywood DVDs and CDs by major artists are openly sold on the streets. In tecno-brega, there are no official releases — groups make and produce their own CDs. “If you don’t have an official CD,” observed Roberto, “then what is piracy?”

The model of free music distribution, which started with tecno-brega in Belem, has now spread to other "ghetto" music forms like Rio Funk.

The sound began around 2000, evolving out of an earlier local music style called "brega," or cheesy. Prompted by cheap computer technology, producers began mixing romantic Brazilian brega pop with electronic music and rhythms like reggaeton and reggae from the nearby Caribbean. Its pioneers were the group Calypso — judged the most listened-to band in Brazil in a 2007 survey —who pull in crowd of 30,000-plus for live shows.

“The crisis in the music industry is widely talked about,” said Ronaldo Lemos, from the respected Brazilian research institute Fundacao Getulio Vargas — one of the authors of an extensive 2008 study on tecno-brega’s unique industry and business model. In Brazil alone, CD sales fell from 94 million in 2000 to 52.9 million in 2005. “Tecno-brega is an industry that makes millions, but it is a completely different model of business,” said Lemos. “It doesn’t see technology as an enemy but as an opportunity.”
coppied by http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/brazil/100729/music-piracy-techno