It is a shame that, after 23 years of direct elections of the rector and after the election of five rectors (one of them reelected) by the university community, the University of Brasília (UnB) must once again undergo a period with a rector pro tempore appointed by the Minister of Education.

Since it was enacted in October 1988, the Brazilian Constitution has developed judicial independence and offered to the population a broader access to the courts. Over these last two decades, however, the level of distrust in the Brazilian judiciary has paradoxically increased, and judges have been constantly involved in practices of corruption.

There is a new participant in the international deliberations on global warming and agrofuels: the biotechnology industry. The corporate giants of the genetics industry propose new technologies, including genetically modified trees, second generation cellulosic ethanol, and synthetic biology, to wean society off fossil fuels and fight climate change.

With food riots across the globe in the news, the immediate cause of food shortages is simply this: grain prices have doubled over the last year and poor people can no longer afford to buy enough food. There is no one single cause for the price rise; it is a combination of supply and demand.

In these weeks leading up to the 120th anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery in Brazil, I have spent some time reading the Chamber of Deputies' and the Federal Senate's records from the sessions in which the Congress was debating and approving the Lei Áurea, the law that banned slavery.

There has probably never been a better time for a worker to find a good job in Brazil than at the moment. The economy is growing, shrugging off most of the fallout from the crisis in the United States, consumers are buying as if every week was Christmas, real pay is rising and millions have been moving up the social ladder into higher classes.

Oil has seldom been far from the headlines in Brazil since the state-owned petroleum giant, Petrobras, announced at the end of last year that it had discovered large new offshore reserves of oil and gas. Should these reserves be recoverable then Brazil is set to become not only an oil exporter but one of the world's biggest producers.

Around the middle of October 1960, on a Friday afternoon, Celso Furtado decides to hear Sartre's conference to be held in Recife, Brazil. Driving in his jeep, free of his chauffeur, he arrived into a packed house: The usual seductive figure was talking on many issues, but at the end of the session a "small" detail was left out, there was no translator so that Sartre could receive questions.

Cool, swaying, seductive and sophisticated, a new sound emerged fifty years ago at the crossroads of samba and jazz in Rio de Janeiro. Known as bossa nova ("new flair"), it blended - like Brazil itself - elements from Africa, Europe and the Americas.