Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff narrowly won re-election on Sunday after convincing voters of her party’s strong record of reducing poverty over the last 12 years.
Rousseff won 51.6 percent of votes in a runoff against centrist opposition leader Aecio Neves, who won 48.4 percent support.
The campaign was one of the most dramatic in Brazil since direct elections were restored in 1989. One candidate was killed in a plane crash in August, and his replacement then soared into the lead in opinion polls, only to fade in the final days before the first round of voting October 5.
The vote split Latin America’s biggest country almost evenly in two along lines of both social class and geography. Neves prevailed in Brazil’s richer south, southeast and centre-west, while Rousseff took the Amazon north and impoverished north-east.
Voting was peaceful.
The result means another four years in power for the Workers’ Party, which since 2003 has virtually transformed Brazil – lifting 40 million from poverty, reducing unemployment to record lows and making big inroads against hunger in what remains one of the world’s most unequal countries.
With 200 million people and a gross domestic product of $2-trillion, Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy and its most populous country.
Rousseff owed her victory to overwhelming support from the roughly 40 percent of Brazilians who live in households earning less than $700 a month.
They have benefited from the Workers’ Party’s rollout of a programme that pays a small monthly stipend to one in four Brazilian families, as well as federal housing programs, government-sponsored vocational schools and an expansion of credit to the working class.
Rousseff, 66, is unlikely to enjoy much, if any, of a honeymoon when her second term starts on New Year’s Day.
Marco Aurelio Garcia, a top Rousseff adviser on foreign affairs, sounded a defiant note shortly after the results were published. Asked what the government’s message to financial markets was, he replied: “Take tranquillisers.”
During the runoff, senior leaders from both parties compared their rivals to Nazis.
Rousseff, who was jailed and tortured in the early 1970s for opposing that era’s military dictatorship, is the country’s first woman president. The daughter of a Bulgarian aristocrat who emigrated to Brazil during World War 2, she was a relatively obscure government technocrat until her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hand-picked her as his successor.
Many in the Workers’ Party are already thinking ahead to the next election in 2018, when Lula, who governed from 2003 to 2010, has said he may run again. Brazil’s constitution doesn’t allow presidents to seek a third consecutive term.
Rousseff repeatedly thanked Lula for his support on Sunday night, and gave him a big hug onstage.
Neves’ PSDB, meanwhile, faces an uncertain future after falling short in three straight presidential contests due in part to its image as the party of Brazil’s wealthy minority.
International student enrollment is on the rise at U.S. colleges.
In total, 764,495 international students were enrolled at colleges and universities across the United States during the 2011-2012 school year, up 5.7 percent from the previous year, according to a November 2012 report from the Institute of International Education.
The U.S. News Best Colleges rankings can help prospective American and international students refine their list of target schools in the United States, but some of the world’s best universities can be found outside the U.S. as well.
China, Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and France all attract more than 100,000 international students each year, according to IIE data.
Latin America, the Middle East and other parts of Asia have also seen an uptick in international student enrollment over the past decade, according to a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
One explanation for the trend toward international education: an “exploding demand for higher education worldwide,” the OECD notes.
Studying in a foreign country – whether for a semester, a year or for an entire degree – also helps prepare students to enter a high-tech and highly global economy, says Allan Goodman, president of IIE.
Executives at multinational corporations might work in nine or 10 different countries throughout their career. Those who stay closer to home will likely still work with people from other cultures on a regular basis, says Goodman, who co-authored “A Student Guide to Study Abroad.”
“If you’re the top student, but you’ve never sat next to a Chinese or Brazilian, or had an argument with an Indian or a discussion with a Frenchman, you’re not going to be prepared to be a worker in the global marketplace,” he says.
Sorting out where to study and why can be a multipronged equation.
For some, language is a primary factor. Students either want to learn in their native language or become fluent in another. Others want to gain business expertise abroad in order to get a leg up in an increasingly competitive workforce.
Many international students also choose where to study based on where they hope to start their careers, says Daniel Obst, IIE’s deputy vice president of international partnerships in higher education.
“There’s a great opportunity in another country to do academic work, but also then connect it to your first job,” he says.
Obst has personal experience as an international student. Born and raised in Germany, Obst earned his bachelor’s degree in the United States and his master’s in England. His academic interests motivated him to study outside of Germany, he says.
“I wanted to do international relations, and back then they didn’t have that as a degree program in Germany. They had political science,” he says.
Whatever the motive to study overseas, each major region has something to offer students bent on studying overseas.
Europe
International students accounted for 18.6 percent of total higher ed enrollment in the U.K. in 2010-2011, according to IIE.
Students can venture outside of the U.K. and still get a great education in Europe.
Schools such as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Ecole Normale Superieure de Paris, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg in Germany also have strong global reputations.
Asia
Students from China, India and South Korea account for 52 percent of the 4.1 million international students worldwide, according to the OECD. But the region has also emerged as a top destination for foreign students.
Why do Americans often seem so clueless about the world outside their borders? The answer lies with what the three major U.S. television networks offered their viewers in the way of news during 2013.
Syria and celebrities dominated foreign coverage by ABC, NBC, and CBS – whose combined evening news broadcasts are the single most important media source of information about national and international events for most Americans. Vast portions of the globe went almost entirely ignored, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.
Latin America, most of Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia apart from Afghanistan, and virtually all of East Asia – despite growing tensions between China and Washington’s closest regional ally, Japan – were virtually absent from weeknight news programmes of ABC, NBC, and CBS last year, according to the report, which has tracked the three networks’ evening news coverage continuously since 1988.
Out of nearly 15,000 minutes of Monday-through-Friday evening news coverage by the three networks, the Syrian civil war and the debate over possible U.S. intervention claimed 519 minutes, or about 3.5 percent of total air time, according to the report.
That made the Syrian conflict and the U.S. policy response the year’s single-most-covered event. It was followed by coverage of the terrorist bombing by two Chechnya-born brothers that killed three people at the finish line of last April’s Boston Marathon (432 minutes); the debate over the federal budget (405 minutes); and the flawed rollout of the healthcare reform law, or Obamacare (338 minutes).
The next biggest international story was the death in December of former South African President Nelson Mandela (186 minutes); the July ouster of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and its aftermath; the coverage of Pope Francis I (157 minutes, not including an additional 121 minutes devoted to Pope Benedict’s retirement and the Cardinals’ conclave that resulted in Francis’ succession); and the birth of Prince George, the latest addition to the British royal family (131 minutes)
The continued fighting in Afghanistan came in just behind the new prince at 121 minutes for the entire year.
The strong showings by the papal succession, Mandela’s death, and Prince George’s birth all demonstrated the rise of “celebrity journalism” in news coverage, Andrew Tyndall, the report’s publisher, told IPS. He added that “a minor celebrity like Oscar Pistorius (the South African so-called “Bladerunner” track star accused of murdering his girlfriend) attracted more coverage [by the TV networks – 51 minutes] than all the rest of sub-Saharan Africa in the months before Mandela’s death.”
Surveys by the Pew Research Centre for the People & the Press, among other polling and research groups, show that about two-thirds of the general public cite television as their main source for national and international news, more than twice the number of people who rely on newspapers, and about one-third more than the growing number of individuals whose primary source is the internet.
An average of about 21 million U.S. residents watch the network news on any given evening. While the cable news channels – CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC – often get more public attention, their audience is actually many times smaller, according to media-watchers.
“In 2012, more than four times as many people watched the three network newscasts than watched the highest-rated show on the three cable channels during prime time,” Emily Guskin, a research analyst for the Pew Research Centre’s Journalism Project, told IPS.
As in other recent years, news about the weather – especially its extremes and the damage they wrought – received a lot of attention on the network news.
Last year’s tornado season, severe winter weather, drought and wild forest fires in the western states constituted three of the top six stories of the year, according to the report. Along with the aftermath of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, those four topics reaped nearly 900 minutes of coverage on the three networks, or about six percent of the entire year’s coverage.
By comparison, the growing tensions between Japan and China in the East China Sea – which many foreign-policy analysts here rate as one of the most alarming events of the past year if, for no other reason, than the U.S. is committed by treaty to militarily defend Japan’s territory – received a mere eight minutes of coverage.
Two other major U.S. foreign policy challenges received more coverage. North Korea and the volatile tenure of its young leader, Kim Jong-un, received a total of 87 minutes, including 10 minutes to visiting basketball veteran Dennis Rodman, of coverage during 2013.
Events in Iran, including the election of President Hassan Rouhani and negotiations over its nuclear programme, received a total of 104 minutes of coverage between the three networks over the course of the year, nearly as much attention as was given the British royals.
Libya received 64 minutes of coverage, but virtually all of it was devoted to the domestic controversy over responsibility for the September 2012 killings of the U.S. ambassador and three other officials there. The Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria and the civil war and humanitarian disaster in the Central African Republic received no coverage at all.
As for the Israel-Palestinian conflict which Secretary of State John Kerry has made a top priority along with a nuclear deal with Iran, it received only 16 minutes of coverage in 2013. “Palestine has virtually disappeared from the news agenda,” noted Tyndall.
As has Latin America, which received virtually no attention, according to Tyndall who suggested that the lack of coverage may be due to the growth of Spanish-language networks here. “The assumption seems to be that anyone interested in Latin American coverage would likely speak Spanish and find it in that language.”
Altogether, the three networks devoted just under 4,000 minutes, or about 27 percent of total air time, to coverage of overseas stories or U.S. foreign policy. That was somewhat under the average amount of 25-year average. Indeed, the 1,302 minutes’ worth of stories focused on U.S. foreign policy marked a nearly 50-percent reduction from the average.
“In general, foreign policy coverage has risen when the president is bellicose,” according to Tyndall, who noted that such coverage had risen sharply as a result of armed conflicts during the administrations of the two Presidents Bush and fallen under Presidents Clinton and Obama.
But the collection by the National Security Agency (NSA) of “metadata” on U.S. citizens and of private conversations and email of foreign leaders as disclosed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden – a story with both domestic and international repercussions – also placed among the top 10 stories of the year with 210 minutes of coverage. – IPS
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