Photo source: Business Insider By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe UpFront 2019 Amazon wildfires, that lit up in August, led to an international concern about the fate of the rainforests, responsible for world’s twenty percent oxygen, often called as the ‘lungs of the world’. Some 1,202 square kilometers (464 square miles) of forest — an area more than twenty times the size of Manhattan — was destroyed from January 2020 to April 2020, according to Brasil's National Space Research Institute. It’s the highest figure for the first four months of the year since 2015. The same agency reported that there were more than eighty thousand fires in 2019, the most that it had ever recorded. It was nearly an eighty percent jump with what the country had experienced in 2018: the sky over Sao Paulo, Brasil’s largest city, went dark with smoke clouds that blocked out the sun. After bowing to pressure, president Jair Bolsonaro announced a 60-day ban on setting fires to clear land. The environmen...

Source: Google By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Up Front B razil has been witnessing upheavals since 2015.  A round 35,000 people have marched the capital and other cities in May 2017. Angry demonstrators have set fire to several ministerial buildings in Brasilia.  Commuter buses have been burned. Communist sickle and hammers have been sprayed on the walls. Graffiti’s called for “ Death to the Bourgeois”. To quell upcoming protests, there has been a heavy police presence on the streets. Rubber bullets have been fired. There also has been an investigation surrounding usage of live ammunition on protestors. At the present moment, people are demanding the resignation of President Temer, fresh elections and economic plans set by the current regime to be withdrawn. Unions of key sectors, political parties and activists stand as one people to bring a change in their country. General strikes have been called. Proposals to bring changes to labour laws and pension syste...

By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront W orld's four emerging economies, Brasil, Russia, India, and China are poised to become the leading global economies in the twenty-first century. China's decade of unprecedented growth has eclipsed Japan as the world's second-largest economy. Brasil has harnessed its resources and has become the largest economy in Latin America. India will soon become the most populated country in the world, with a young and educated workforce. Russia, for a while, has dominated its position as the world's leading energy supplier. Recent economic data on foreign direct investments, both to and from, these countries reflect the appearance of the rise of a new economic bloc on the world stage. FDI outflows from BRIC states accounted for $146 billion in 2011. This is almost 10 percent of the world's GDP output, shared by four developing countries. World Investment Report (2012) ascertains that outward FDI from developing nations by ...