They poured into shopping malls en masse to have some fun. But the reaction, a mixture of fear, admiration and heavy-handed repression, brought a new youth movement into being in Brazil: the “rolezinhos.”
Sustainable transport grew in the Latin American cities of Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro in 2013.
The controversy is on: the authorities in Brazil say there are not enough medical professionals, and to resolve the problem, they decided to import this “non-traditional product”. Doctors, on the other hand, are opposed to both the diagnosis and the treatment. But there is one thing everyone agrees on: the areas suffering from a shortage of health professionals are the poor suburbs and impoverished areas in the hinterland and remote border areas. The situation in Brazil as compared to itself and to other countries can be seen in this series of interactive maps and graphs.
Pope Francis' first overseas trip, to Brazil, the country with the largest number of Catholics in the world, was marked with setbacks, disorganisation and lack of infrastructure for an event that brought half a million pilgrims to the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Sexual violence against women is alarmingly under-reported and invisible in Brazil where, for example, there are no accurate, comparable data on rape in the country's 27 states.
Brazil, and especially the city of Rio de Janeiro, is experiencing a boom in bus rapid transit (BRT), a public transport system that now has an internationally-recognised quality standard.
As Brazil prepares to host several sporting mega-events, human rights abuses and authoritarian interventions by the authorities are going on behind the scenes, favouring major urbanisation projects and stadium remodelling, a study says.
Tuchinha was once a drug lord in Rio de Janeiro’s Mangueira favela. But today he is helping youngsters in this Brazilian city turn their lives around and leave behind crime, prison and the likelihood of an early death.