Encouraging news from Brazil
Lula wants to open the reinsurance business to the private sector. The country's also developing ethanol production from sugar cane.

Not so encouraging, is this headline, Brazil poses growing threat to U.S. farmers. The threat supposedly comes from soybean production. To me, farm subsidies are much more of a threat than any farming done by other countries. Farm subsidies are inefficient, are a burden to us taxpayers, and deny foreign countries the opportunity to freely compete. Abolishing farm subsidies would be a great thing.

You need not fear much about the rain forest, though. Scott accurately calculates that, at current rates of deforestation, the rain forest has at least 156.90776884806735553004209720628 years left.