Janet Tappin Coelho

April 13, 2016

Embattled Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has vowed to fight “until the last minute of the second half” to preserve the government’s mandate, as impeachment proceedings against her took a dramatic turn on Wednesday.

April 11, 2016

Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff could soon see impeachment proceedings brought against her, as congress legislators are expected to vote on starting the process today. However, media coverage of the political turmoil is causing alarm among some leading journalists who claim the country’s democratic process is under threat from a “perniciously” partisan press.

April 04, 2016

A Brazilian man has been filmed by a security camera fearlessly dodging five bullets as he beat off a pair of would-be robbers.

The Sao Paulo man, who asked not to be identified for fear of a reprisal attack, survived the horrifying ordeal only because the assailant with the gun was a poor marksman and then ran out of ammunition. The victim was shot in the leg and is recovering from his injury.

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April 04, 2016

Ingenious surgeons have helped save a Brazilian man’s hand from being amputated by putting it inside a 'pocket' in his belly. 

Doctors decided to bury Carlos Mariotti’s left hand inside his abdomen and cover it with a flap of protective skin, after the machine production operator suffered a horrific work accident that ripped off all the skin on his hand.

April 01, 2016

One of Brazil’s most senior security officials has admitted that the country’s widening political crisis could lead to “international distrust” of arrangements for this summer’s Olympic Games.

The remarks by Andrei Rodrigues, secretary for major events at the Justice Ministry, followed the abrupt resignation of the commander of the national security force involved in the preparations for the Games in Rio de Janeiro.

March 15, 2016

For the first time in Brazil’s political history, a former president is expected to become a serving minister in a bid to stop the government of Dilma Rousseff collapsing under a mammoth corruption scandal, and stave off the threat of presidential impeachment.

March 15, 2016

An amateur ballerina in Brazil, whose lower left leg was amputated after a road accident, has spoken of her joy after becoming among the first people to receive a pointe foot prosthesis allowing her to dance classical ballet again.

March 07, 2016

Four years ago, Joao Pereira de Souza, 71, found a South American Magellanic penguin covered in oil and starving on a beach on an island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. A friendship was born. 

Since they met in 2011, the creature, which normally breeds on the Patagonia coasts of Argentina and Chile...

March 05, 2016

A palpable sense of fear pervades Morro da Providencia – the oldest favela in Rio de Janeiro – on the morning after a night of intense gunfire between local criminals and police. 

For three hours, hundreds of bullets ripped through the public square...

March 03, 2016

Once the richest man in Brazil, Eike Batista is claimed to have resorted to one of the oldest superstitious rituals in the world in the hope of rebuilding his billion-pound empire, throwing money into the biggest wishing well he could find – the South Atlantic Ocean.

February 16, 2016

Hundreds of swimmers in Brazil are being warned to stay out of the water following a spate of attacks by shoals of deadly piranha, which has left more than 50 people injured in just over a month.

February 11, 2016

The Catholics are against it, the Anglicans undecided and the Baptists veering toward supporting the right to choose for mothers infected with Zika. 

This week, religious leaders from all Christian denominations in Brazil...

February 07, 2016

Ana Carolina Caceres is on her way out to meet friends. Holding her mobile phone at an angle just above her head, the Brazilian youngster takes a quick picture and checks how she looks in the photo before she dashes out of the house. 

February 03, 2016

This year’s annual street carnivals which begin across Brazil at the weekend could prove to be an “explosive cocktail” for the spread of the Zika virus, the country’s leading virologist has warned.

As hundreds of thousands of people prepare to join week-long festivities on the streets and in samba parade stadiums nationwide, 

January 29, 2016

It should have been a joyful celebration for both Vanessa Oliveira and Thais Battistot. But like thousands of women across the South American continent, the two Brazilian mothers have had to come to terms with one of the most heartbreaking revelations – that their newborn arrivals have microcephaly.

January 28, 2016

With four million cases now predicted across the Americas, one of the first Brazilian medics to make the link between the Zika virus and birth defects has spoken of her frustration at Brazil’s failure to control the outbreak.

May 24, 2015

Residents of Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, have been portrayed as domestic servants, thieves and uneducated nonentities for too long, they say.

Now, fed up with not seeing their real way of life represented on Brazilian television, a group of residents 

May 15, 2014

“We Are One” (Ole Ola) is this year’s official soundtrack of the World Cup that kicks off in Brazil within a month, but the track, sung by Pitbull and Jennifer Lopez, hasn’t generated the results predicted by Fifa’s marketing executives.

May 10, 2014

Hollywood A-listers, pop stars and royalty may make lofty demands of hotels, but some of the 32 national teams taking part in this summer's Fifa World Cup in Brazil list some curious requirements that have surprised even the most grizzled hotelier.

March 30, 2014

It took just 15 minutes for more than 1,000 military police to occupy one of the most violent shanty towns in Rio de Janeiro, as dawn was breaking on Sunday morning.

March 01, 2014

The homes are ramshackle structures made with palm-frond roofs and weather-beaten walls caked in sun-dried mud. It does not take much for a bulldozer to flatten the flimsy buildings, erected in a tree-felled clearing in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest in the north-eastern state of Maranhao. In a few ruthless moments, years of memories and family and farming life existence are destroyed.

November 01, 2013

Eike Batista once boasted he would become the richest person on the planet. But now Brazil’s most flamboyant billionaire, formerly listed as the eighth wealthiest individual in the world with more than $30 billion in his personal coffers, has seen 99 percent of his fortune drain away. In one of the most spectacular corporate defaults in global history, Batista’s  flagship oil and gas company, OGX, has sought protection from bankruptcy with debts of 11.2 bn reais (£3.2 bn).

October 29, 2013

World Cup fans heading for Brazil next year could find they are booking into sex motels as government tourism bosses look for ways to tackle the expected shortage in hotel accommodation.

October 29, 2013

A thick river of treacle is threatening to swamp a town in Sao Paulo state in southern Brazil, after a fire in a warehouse melted more than 30,000 tons of sugar. The blaze comes just days after a large fire in the port of Santos, also in the state, destroyed six warehouses leased by Copersucar, the largest exporter of sugar and ethanol in Brazil.

October 18, 2013

As work on the Russian Olympic Stadium for the 2014 Winter Games in the Black Sea resort of Sochi draws to a close, Sebastian Coe has added his voice to the growing controversy over the exploitation of the migrant workers who have helped to build the stadium and associated buildings.

October 10, 2014

A prison rebellion in São Luis, in the north-eastern state of Maranhão, Brazil, has left 13 dead and more than 30 injured.

Rioting between rival gangs held in the 600-inmate jail, Complexo Penitenciario de Pedrinhas, broke out on Wednesday evening after prisoners refused to allow an inspection of their cells by wardens, starting a confrontation with officers, 

October 04, 2013

Brazil’s Olympic scouts are hoping to discover a potential archery gold medallist from Amazonian tribes at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.

Marcia Lot, an archery scout from the Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS) has been hunting through eight indigenous communities in the rainforest since February this year,

October 01, 2013

Not forgetting to feed the cats has taken on a completely new level of importance for one Brazilian family, which is sharing its home with nine fully grown tigers.

The Borges live side by side with the 35-stone predators on their property in Maringá, Parana, and show no fear, calling their big cats their pets.

September 08, 2013

A Brazilian man recovering from a stroke has turned into a philanthropist after damage to parts of his brain changed his personality in a way previously unheard of by doctors.

The 49-year-old senior manager of a large corporation found that he could not stop giving away money and spending cash liberally on sweets, food and drinks for children he met in the street.

September 02, 2013

Globo, the biggest media organisation in South America, has publicly apologised in an editorial for acting as the propaganda arm of Brazil’s military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985.

After nearly 50 years of denying that it had any involvement with the military regime, the Marinho family, the long-standing owners of the company, 

September 01, 2013

Brazil’s prison authorities have discovered that they have been holding a man – who was arrested in 1960 – for 23 years after he was supposed to have been released.

The unnamed man, who has not been named and is aged 80, should have been freed in 1989 but has been locked up in the psychiatric unit of the Governor Stenio Gomes prison in Itaitinga, Ceara, north-east Brazil.

September 01, 2013

A confidential report by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) obtained by the newspaper O Estado de S Paulo reveals alarming delays have already put the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro at risk.

Details from the classified document published at  the weekend point out that  Rio is unprepared

August 22, 2013

The body of Brazil’s former president João Goulart is to be exhumed to discover if he was the victim of an assassination plot mounted by the military dictatorship that ousted him in 1964.

A team of experts arrived on Wednesday to inspect the tomb in Sao Borja, Rio Grande do Sul...

August 09, 2013

It was supposed to be the prime means of transport for the residents of Rio de Janeiro’s Alemao favela, enabling them to access all parts of the huge complex they call home; instead the newly installed cable-car system has become a massive tourist attraction.

With 152 gondolas covering just over two miles, the service climbs to the top of Alemao in 16 minutes,

July 22, 2013

12: Pope Francis lands in Rio on Monday night after a 12-hour flight from Rome, where the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff welcomed him with a ceremony at the Guanabara Palace. He will rest today before travelling by helicopter to the Aparecida shrine in São Paulo to celebrate mass and have lunch with theological students. He will also visit the San Francisco de Assisi hospital, where patients with Aids-related illnesses are treated.

July 13, 2013

When Daniel Pellegrine decided not to wear his usual bullet-proof vest to the concert he was performing at in Campinas, Sao Paulo, last Saturday night, it proved to be a fatal mistake. The 20-year-old Brazilian funk singer, whose stage name was MC Daleste, was shot in the stomach in front of a 4,000-strong crowd that night and died in the early hours of Sunday morning in hospital.

June 14, 2013

On the River Javari, coursing deep inside Brazil’s Amazonian jungle, the only sound disturbing the silence in the pitch black darkness of the night is the putter of a river boat’s motor.

This 400-metre wide tributary flows into the Amazon River and forms a natural frontier between Brazil on one side and Peru on the other. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a spotlight pierces the moonless night and the scream of a siren is accompanied by the roar of powerful engines, 

April 26, 2007

A new TV series shows what happened when three comprehensive pupils swapped places with their peers in an independent school. The experience prved a lesson for them all.

October 16, 2006

"If your husband boils this plant and drinks it in this herbal mixture, within a matter of minutes, he'll have no problem getting an erection." This matter-of-fact medicinal advice is delivered in softly spoken Swahili by Alfonse Bifumbo, a medicine man of some repute here in Bwindi, south-west Uganda.

"But my husband doesn't need it," I blurt out a little too defensively (I can just see my hot-blooded, Brazilian-born spouse taking umbrage at me for bringing back this duty-free love potion).