Brazil

Smithfield Foods Inc. said it was selling its beef operations to JBS of Sao Paulo, Brazil, for $565 million. It was the second deal in two days for JBS, which is becoming the largest meat processor in the U.S. The deal comes a day after National Beef Packing Co. of Kansas City, Mo., the nation's fourth-largest beef processor, said it was being acquired by JBS in a cash and stock deal worth $560 million. Smithfield Foods, based in Smithfield, Va., is the fifth-largest U.S. beef producer.

A significant turning point for Maya Gabeira -- one of many in her turbulent life -- occurred Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 5., 2006. She'd moved from Brazil to Hawaii and had become passionately addicted to surfing large waves. "Waimea was the first huge wave I ever saw, and I just felt that was what I wanted to do for my life," she says.

Auto sales may be slumping in the U.S., but in Brazil these days, everyone seems to have a new set of otimo -- cool -- wheels. Bank employee Rafael Hanzava bought not one but two new cars in recent months: a Peugeot and a Fiat. He loved the styling and gas mileage of both of them, but what really sealed the deals, he said, were the five-year loan on the Peugeot and a six-year loan on the Fiat that dealers offered.

Brazil received an investment-grade credit rating for the first time from Standard & Poor's, sending the country's benchmark stock market index to a record high and yields on dollar bonds to an all-time low Wednesday. Brazil, whose economy grew last year at the fastest pace since 2004, should be able to maintain annual growth of as much as 4.5%, S&P said as it raised the country's long-term foreign-currency debt rating to BBB-minus from BB-plus. Brazilian exports have tripled since President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office in January 2003 on rising world demand for soybeans, iron ore, beef and cars.

A South American union was born as leaders of 12 nations set out to create a continental parliament. Some see the Union of South American Nations, or Unasur, as a regional version of the European Union. Summit host Brazil wants it to help coordinate defense affairs across South America. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez calls it a counterweight to the United States. But divisions remained. The organization's first secretary-general resigned before the organization formally met, saying some leaders had balked at his vision of putting other regional trade blocs under Unasur.

The United States lost its final appeal Monday in a billion-dollar trade dispute with Brazil over subsidies to U.S. cotton growers. A World Trade Organization appeals panel reversed parts of a ruling made in December, but found that on the whole the U.S. payments breached global commerce agreements. Brazil can now ask the WTO to authorize retaliatory trade sanctions on the U.S. that could run into the billions of dollars until Washington scraps the payments. U.S. lawmakers voted last month to overturn a veto by President Bush and force through a farm bill worth $290 billion that would largely maintain the cotton payments for the next five years.

I WANTED to thank Reed Johnson for his piece on Lucio Flavio Pinto ["On the Beat in the Amazon," May 18]. It was very informative on a subject near to my heart: the conflicts of native peoples against money and politics in the wilderness areas of Brazil. It's a subject as far-reaching as Brazil's geography, and Johnson summed Pinto's view of the challenge well as "Enabling humans to learn 'how to use' the Amazon 'without destroying it.' " James Traynor Oxnard

For as far as the eye can see, stalks of sugar cane march across the hillsides here like giant praying mantises. This is ground zero for ethanol production in Brazil -- "the Saudi Arabia of biofuels," as some have already labeled this vast South American country.

Police have arrested a suspect in the heist of two Pablo Picasso prints from a museum in Sao Paulo and recovered one of the works, police and a museum official said Saturday. Inspector Cesar Carlos Dias said information obtained through wiretaps of gang members suspected in unrelated robberies led police to Ueslei Barros, the suspect in the July robbery.

ThyssenKrupp's towering steel factory going up near Rio de Janeiro resembles a medieval cathedral -- and stands as a latter-day shrine to the belief that Brazil's economy will withstand U.S. financial turmoil. Brazil's stocks and currency whipsawed wildly last week along with U.S. markets, recalling the gyrations that preceded financial crises in the 1990s when meltdowns in Mexico, Russia and Thailand sucked this country's economy down with them. But as the U.S.