Brazil sets up infrastructure
to avoid spying for foreigners


Can any government escape the prying eyes of the U.S. National Security Agency? Brazil is going to try.
 
Angered by recent revelations that the United States spied on its emails and phone calls and even its president, Brazil's government is speeding up efforts to improve the security of its communications and hopefully keep more of its secrets under wraps.
 
By purchasing a new satellite, pushing bureaucrats in Brasilia to use secure email platforms and even building its own fiber-optic cable to communicate with governments in neighboring countries, Brazil hopes to at least reduce the amount of information available to foreign spies.
 
The growing emphasis on secure communications has been a somewhat tough sell in a famously relaxed country that has no history of international terrorism and hasn't gone to war with any of its neighbors in more than a century.
 
Brazilian officials also admit they face the same problems as many other countries upset by the recent NSA disclosures. That is, building new technology is expensive and difficult, and even then there is no guarantee of fully dodging the sophisticated dragnet employed by the U.S. government.
 
Nonetheless, Brazil is particularly motivated to act.
 
More than most other countries, it has been embarrassed by documents leaked by fugitive former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. A report by Globo TV on Sunday displayed a document with a diagram showing communications between President Dilma Rousseff and her top aides, which it said was part of an NSA case study on its own powers of espionage.
 
Ms. Rousseff was so angered by the news that she may cancel a planned state visit to the White House next month.
 
That followed a report in July that the NSA had used secret surveillance programs to spy on emails and collect data on telephone calls in Brazil and other Latin American countries. In response, the U.S. government has said it monitors the patterns of communications in order to detect potential threats to security, but it does not snoop on ordinary people.
 
Bureaucrats working in Brasilia's modernistic government buildings have had encrypted email services, including a local platform known as Expresso, available to them for years.
 
But it wasn't until the recent disclosures that many officials realized their value, said Marcos Melo, a manager at Serpro, the state-run communications company that created Expresso and provides the government with secure databases.
 
“Now people understand the risk you run of not protecting your communications,” said Melo. “When we started investing in Expresso six years ago, they said: 'Why bother developing a new tool if Gmail exists and is free?'.”
 
The first wave of spying disclosures in July included documents showing the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency jointly ran satellite monitoring stations in 64 countries, including one based in a residential neighborhood of Brazil's capital, Brasilia.
 
Coincidence or not, Brazil has made key decisions in recent weeks to gain more independence in the skies above.
 
Within weeks, it picked Thales Alenia Space, a consortium led by Europe's largest defense electronics company, France's Thales, to build a satellite that will be shared by Brazil's government and armed forces.
 
Much of the Brazilian government's communications, including those of the military, rely on a satellite owned by a company controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim. Brazil cannot control its angle let alone the security of its channels.
 
The new satellite provided by Thales will be launched from neighboring French Guiana in 2016. The total cost, including the satellite, launch and insurance, will be $600 million to $650 million.
 

President Rousseff's trip
to visit Obama is called off


Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has halted advance preparations for a state visit to Washington next month.
 
A statement from President Rousseff's office gave no reason for the cancellation. However, the announcement followed official demands for an explanation of allegations this week that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted President Rousseff's communications.
 
The immediate effect of Thursday's action canceled a planned trip to Washington by an advance team of Brazilian officials preparing for the scheduled Oct. 23 visit.
 
Separately, President Barack Obama and President Rousseff met Thursday in Russia, on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in St. Petersburg.
 
No details of their conversation were immediately available, but Obama's adviser Ben Rhodes said the U.S. is working to resolve the dispute through diplomatic and intelligence channels.
            
Rhodes told reporters at the summit: "We understand how important this is to the Brazilians. We understand their strength of feeling on the issue."
 
The disclosure of U.S. intercepts of Brazilian state communications came from documents copied illegally by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor.
 
An American-born journalist who lives in Brazil and is a confidant of Snowden's said this week that the NSA had access to the entire communications network of President Rousseff and her staff, including all telephone, Internet and social-network exchanges.
 
Without commenting on classified U.S. activities, White House adviser Rhodes said, "What we're focused on is making sure the Brazilians understand exactly what the nature of our intelligence effort is.''


Three candidate cities await
vote on 2020 Olympic games


The International Olympic Committee is meeting in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this week and will vote Saturday on the host city for the 2020 Summer Olympics. The three bidding cities are Tokyo, Istanbul and Madrid.
 
While Japan's capital is considered the favorite, the country has had to deflect concerns over a radioactive water leak from the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant.
 
Tokyo bid committee president Tsunekazu Takeda says enthusiasm for the city’s bid has been growing steadily.
 
"People are excited to imagine Tokyo transformed to a city center party as never before," he said. "And we Japanese people have always loved sports, and our TV ratings of the Olympic and Paralympic Games are among the highest in the world."
 
Istanbul's candidacy is uncertain because of the current political situation, but the city's bid chief, Hassan Arat, said bidding for the games has left a lasting sporting legacy for Turkey and the world regardless of who wins the 2020 hosting rights.
 
"The bid has really inspired people," he said. "The last IOC public poll supported Istanbul — 83 percent, the highest among these three cities."
 
Madrid has tried to deflect questions about its 27-percent unemployment rate and national economic struggles. Alejandro Blanco Bravo, Madrid’s bid committee chairman, said bringing the games to Spain's capital would transform the society.
 
“The situation that we have experienced in Spain, in Europe, and in the world, indicates that there is a significant lack of values," he said. "Sport can provide us with them, and the Olympic Games are the greatest expression of these values."
 
Madrid has failed in three prior attempts to become Olympic host. It was runner-up to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which is staging the 2016 Summer Games.


Venezuelans reel after outage
that hit two-thirds of nation


One of the worst power outages in Venezuelan history has given a jolt to President Nicolas Maduro's government and revived opposition accusations that its socialist policies and incompetence are wrecking the country.

Even though Venezuela's 29 million people have endured sporadic blackouts since 2009, there was widespread shock at the extent of this week's outage across two-thirds of the nation.

In the capital, Caracas, which the government strenuously shields from rationing, the power went off throughout Tuesday afternoon, causing chaos on the streets.

“This isn't the Third World, it's the Fifth World!” griped student Marilyn Morales, 26, recounting how first she was trapped in underground transport, then had to lend a doctor her iPhone to use as a flashlight during an appointment in a dark clinic.

Some Venezuelans in the provinces said it was about time the privileged residents of the capital, known as “caraquenos,” saw what they endured regularly.

Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver who narrowly won a presidential election this year after the death of his mentor and former leader Hugo Chávez, accused the opposition of deliberately sabotaging the grid to discredit him.

“Everything seems to indicate that the extreme right wing has revived its plan for an electricity coup,' he said, announcing a new Chávez-style initiative, Mission Electricity, to guard and improve the grid. “I urge the electricity workers and people to help in the fight to protect the system from sabotage.”

Maduro has not yet provided concrete evidence of sabotage, and troops have been guarding important installations since similar accusations in the past.

Though Venezuela's well-funded opposition movement certainly has its radicals, and plenty of machinations plagued Chavez' 14-year rule, Maduro's daily accusations of assassination and coup plots are straining credulity for many Venezuelans.

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who still contests Maduro's election victory in April and hopes to make gains against the ruling party in December local elections, led lampooning of the sabotage claims.

“The power cut shows once again the terrible incompetence of this government,” said Capriles. He was in the middle of a webcast with journalists where electricity shortages were under discussion when the lights went off on him.

“They'll make up any old story to distract Venezuelans,” added Capriles, 41, who governs Miranda state.

Opposition politicians accuse officials of stealing money and failing to invest properly in state-run power company Corpoelec after Chávez nationalized the sector in 2007 during a  sweeping state takeover of much of the economy.

The electricity sector is just one in a bulging in-tray of  problems Maduro faces as he seeks to govern in the name of Chávez while also fixing some of his predecessor's failings.

Inflation, a decades-old problem predating Chavez, remains the highest in the Americas, at an annualized 43 percent, and is causing huge pain on the streets despite government subsidies that offer some protection to the poor.

Currency controls are creating myriad distortions and scams: the dollar is selling on the black market at six times the official price of 6.3 bolivars.

That has brought a resurgence of practices like “currency tourism” where Venezuelans travel abroad simply to take advantage of dollar allowances at the official rate.

In some cases, they buy a ticket to show as a requisite for the allowance, but then do not get on the plane. Or they fly to the cheapest possible destination, where someone will be waiting to buy their credit card allowance straight off them.

Restricted access to dollars for private businesses has also been a factor in persistent shortages of basics from toilet paper to flour that continue to irritate Venezuelans.

Maduro's standing has not been helped, either, by some spectacular verbal gaffes.

In the latest, when alluding to the biblical story of Jesus miraculously providing loaves and fishes for a crowd of followers, he spoke of a multiplication of penises instead of fishes, muddling the Spanish words penes and peces.

Also last month, he raised eyebrows describing how he sometimes sleeps in the mausoleum where Chavez's body lies.


Video games seems to help
older adults remain sharp


Scientists have developed a video game for older adults that appears to improve their short-term memory and long-term focus.  Seniors who play the so-called multi-tasking game develop neurological improvements rivaling those of 20-year-olds.

Peoples’ short and long-term cognitive abilities decline with each passing decade.  But there is growing scientific evidence that the human brain, with the right stimulation, can be reprogrammed to counteract the effects of age.

The latest research comes out of the University of California San Francisco, where researchers developed a video game for seniors called NeuroRacer. 

The game study involved more than a dozen 60 to 80-year-old participants, who were asked to maneuver a video-screen car at the same time that signs flashed in front of them on a screen.  The signs were either relevant or irrelevant to the game play.  The participants followed signs they deemed relevant and disregarded those they thought were unimportant.

Researchers began their investigation by measuring how well participants performed on one task and compared it to how well they did when a second task was added. 

Compared with young people who played the game once, study lead author Adam Gazzaley said in a telebriefing with reporters there was a striking improvement in multi-tasking after seniors practiced at home for one month.

“Before training, they had a 65 percent drop in performance when they do the two tasks versus one task.  After training, they only had a 16 percent drop in performance. And that’s better than the 20-year-olds that had a performance drop in the 27 percent range," said Gazzaley.

Most striking to Gazzaley was that improvements in the seniors' brain power carried over for six months into other mental areas and without any additional game play.

Although he’s reluctant to endorse commercially available video games, Gazzaley says some shooter games that focus players’ attention on a particular target could have a similar benefit.

Gazzeley says his lab is in the process of developing other video games for people with attention deficit disorder and depression.