Brazilian prosecutors have brought new charges against former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, adding another accusation to a series of corruption charges.

The Brazilian mother-in-law of Formula One supremo Bernie Ecclestone has reportedly been kidnapped in São Paulo and is being held for a ransom of $36.5m (€32m).

Hours after Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, was suspended by a vote to put her on trial for breaking budget laws, the man who took her place unveiled his cabinet: An all-male line-up of 23 ministers.

Brazil’s impeachment of its president will serve little on its own, but must be the catalyst to drive changes in a country languishing, writes Luiz Felipe d’Avila

A committee of Brazil’s lower house of Congress has voted 38-27 to recommend the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, who faces charges of breaking budget laws to support her re-election in 2014.

Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was detained for questioning in a federal investigation of a bribery and money laundering scheme that police said had financed campaigns and expenses of the ruling Workers Party.

A UN report shows Brazil is winning, and exporting, its anti-austerity policies, writes Hans Zomer

Delegates at the World Economic Forum on Africa will be isolated from reality on the ground, says Pascal Fletcher.

About 150,000 anti-government demonstrators have again taken to the streets in several Brazilian cities and engaged police in some isolated but intense conflicts.

Brazil’s president has broken her silence after more than a week of massive, violent protests rocked the country.

From Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Cuba’s Raul Castro, about 30 heads of state joined the funeral of Hugo Chávez in a last goodbye to the charismatic but divisive Venezuelan leader who changed the face of politics in South America.

Opposition politician Leopoldo Lopez bowed out of Venezuela’s presidential race, saying he will support his leading rival as the opposition seeks to field a single candidate to challenge President Hugo Chavez.

Brazil’s former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will undergo chemotherapy for a cancerous tumour in his larynx.

THE massive Belo Monte hydroelectric dam in the heart of the Amazon rain forest won approval from Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, yesterday, clearing the way for construction of a project fiercely opposed by environmentalists, indigenous activists and celebrities.

Dilma Rousseff was sworn in as Brazil’s first female president today, capping a rapid political trajectory for the career technocrat and former Marxist rebel who was imprisoned and tortured during the nation’s long military dictatorship.

BRAZILIAN President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva turned down an extradition demand for an Italian ex-militant, Cesare Battisti, considered a “terrorist” by Rome for murders committed in the 1970s.

Skirmishes raged across cyberspace between WikiLeaks supporters and the companies they accuse of trying to stifle the group, with websites on both sides of the battle line taken out of service or choked off by attacks.

BRIAN COWEN has been called a lot of things since becoming Taoiseach, and not all of them nice.

Iran will not send a woman who had faced death by stoning on an adultery conviction to Brazil, which has offered her asylum, the president said.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva offered to provide refuge to a woman who was sentenced to death in Iran following her conviction for committing adultery.

THE United States was yesterday to push Europe to focus on encouraging economic growth rather than slashing budgets as world leaders gathered for G8 and G20 summit talks.

Iran submitted a plan to swap some of its enriched uranium for reactor fuel in a bid to to evade new United Nations sanctions and said the onus was on world powers to defuse tensions by accepting the deal.

Iran has agreed to ship much of its enriched uranium to Turkey in a nuclear fuel swap deal reached with the help of mediation from Brazil and Turkey.

A YOUNG Frenchacademic flew home from Iran yesterday, 10 months after she was arrested and accused of spying, as France denied striking a secret deal with Tehran.

Fidel Castro is “exceptionally well” and appears recovered from a health crisis that has kept him out of the public eye for more than three and a half years, Brazil’s president said, according to reports by his country’s news media.

STUNNED rescuers wrenched a survivor from the rubble after 12 days entombed in Haiti’s quake-ravaged capital, where desperate crowds clamoured yesterday for more and quicker relief.

Brazil’s president said “gringos” should pay Amazon nations to prevent deforestation.

POPE Benedict XVI decried the worsening plight of the world’s one billion hungry yesterday as a United Nations food summit rallied around a strategy of more help to farmers in poor nations but rebuffed a UN appeal to commit billions to the plan.

BRAZILIAN officials are insisting security won’t be a problem for the 2016 Olympics, despite drug-gang violence that plunged Rio de Janeiro into a day of chaos just two weeks after it was picked to host the games.

US President Barack Obama will travel to Copenhagen to support the bid by the city of Chicago to host the 2016 Olympic Games.

Hugo Chavez made diplomatic inroads in Africa at a summit of South American and African leaders where he offered Venezuela’s help in oil projects, mining and financial assistance.

Hungry Hondurans scrambled through looted shops and lined up for food during a break in a long curfew called to halt violence that erupted with the return of the country’s deposed leftist president.

Honduras was sealed off from the world today after its deposed president made a dramatic return that sparked off street riots.

BRAZIL’S navy recovered the tail fin from the Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic a week ago, and was transporting 16 bodies to shore for identification.

Brazil’s president has made an impassioned defence of biofuels, denying that their production contributes to food scarcity and rising world prices.

More than 5,000 teary-eyed Brazilians marched to the site of a plane crash that killed 199 people, blaming the government for the nation’s deadliest aviation disaster.

Pope Benedict XVI has today stressed church opposition to abortion minutes after arriving in Brazil today.

US President George Bush sees a new agreement with Brazil on ethanol as a way to boost alternative fuels production in the Americas and get more cars running on something other than petrol.

A meeting of the world’s top commercial powers yielded only a vague pledge of commitment to global trade liberalisation efforts today – a disappointment after business and political leaders called for progress in the World Trade Organisation talks.

Brazilians are poised to re-elect their first working-class president tomorrow, a poor farmer’s son who became a radical union leader and has governed as a centrist, stunning the world by stabilising a notoriously unpredictable economy and bringing millions out of poverty without raising taxes.

Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez rallied thousands of leftist sympathisers after a South American trade summit at Cordoba, in Argentina, railing against the US-backed free market policies they blame for many of Latin America’s woes.

BRAZIL coach Carlos Alberto Parreira appeared exasperated yesterday as he faced a barrage of questions over why his first team had lost to the reserves in a 40-minute practice match ahead of the World Cup.