Sydney Possuelo, the activist whose jungle expedition Wallace joins at the request of a National Geographic editor, is a character in more than one sense of the word. When Wallace meets Possuelo on the Amazon, the expedition leader is head of the Brazilian National Indian Foundation (FUNAI)'s Department of Isolated Indians, a unit dedicated to the protection of the most primitive Amazonian tribesmen. If FUNAI officials do their job, these people will remain blissfully ignorant that they are being "protected" at all.

Possuelo leads his men past oddly-named towns ("Contraband"), around dangerous tribes (e.g. the "Head-Bashers") and through virgin jungle land, deep into a reservation -- Brazil's Javari Valley -- that is off-limits to all but the indigenous people for whom it has been set aside. His goal? To locate a previously uncontacted tribe known simply as the "Arrow People" -- but not to bother, disturb or even come face-to-face with any of its members.

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2. Actual nudity of the day: The Gloss' Jamie Peck walked around topless in Central Park to prove that it's legal for women to go shirt- and braless in public under N.Y. state law.

3. Secret wedding of the day: No-longer-"Ugly" star America Ferrera married longtime boyfriend Ryan Piers Williams in an intimate ceremony last night.

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From Rio's glamorous beaches to a notorious slum to an elegant theater, Obama glimpsed the city's cultural extremes and offered the kind of personal engagement that can pay political dividends for years. Less than one day after announcing U.S. military strikes against Libya's government, Obama made time to kick a soccer ball around with kids in a shantytown.

The competing stories of Obama's itinerary -- a war front in Africa, an economic commitment to South America -- divided his time in incongruous ways. By morning, he spoke with his security team about the international assault against Moammar Gadhafi's defenses; by night, he was to stand atop a mountain and admire Rio's world famous statue of Jesus.

Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes pounded faraway Libya.

It was all summed up by one image: Obama, adeptly juggling a soccer ball, as his aides helped him juggle his agenda.

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After an early morning arrival in Brazil's capital, Obama held meetings with newly elected President Dilma Rousseff, then addressed a joint meeting of U.S. and Brazilian business leaders. He praised Brazil's economic ascent, and said American workers stood to benefit from increased ties with the world's seventh-largest economy

"As the United States looks to Brazil, we see the chance to sell more goods and services to a rapidly-growing market of around 200 million consumers," Obama said. "For us, this is a jobs strategy."

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And there was controversy. In the 1998 World Cup final against host France, Ronaldo looked slow and disoriented and played poorly as Brazil lost. It later came out that Ronaldo had suffered a seizure the night before and should never have been on the field.

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Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva also said it was time for affluent countries to begin paying attention to nations like Senegal, ranked as one of the world's poorest.

"For too long, rich countries saw us as peripheral, problematic, even dangerous," said Silva, who stepped down last year with one of the highest approval ratings in his country's history, "Today we are an essential, undeniable part of the solution to the biggest crisis of the last decade -- a crisis that was not created by us, but that emerged from the great centers of world capitalism."

His speech marked the second day of the six-day World Social Forum, an annual counterpunch to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

While the latter draws CEOs who sleep in four-star hotels and take turns on the Swiss slopes, the participants in the World Social Forum are happy to camp on the sides of roads or sleep with locals in order to take part in the yearly anti-capitalist gathering.

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Next to it, people waved and jumped, desperate for help after being stranded for six days by mudslides that obliterated entire communities in the jagged mountains outside Rio de Janeiro, killing at least 677 people as of Tuesday and leaving nearly 14,000 homeless.

"Do we have enough space to land?" the pilot, Col. Orlando Artur da Costa, head of the air rescue sent by Parana state police, asked his crew mates.

Minutes earlier, an attempt to touch down in another isolated area with nearly 330 pounds (150 kilograms) of food, water and medical supplies had been aborted after what at first seemed to be flat dirt turned out to be nearly liquid mud that could have swamped the six-person helicopter.

Three men digging at the edge of the mud flat, their legs protected by trash bags tied around their thighs, were left behind for another mission.

This time Costa got the go-ahead: The space was tight, with sheer drops on three sides, but it was enough. He touched down on the grass and more a dozen women and children crowded around, barely waiting for the rotors to stop.

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Witnesses reported that 29-year-old Rogerio Damascena, a sales manager in Camaragibe, outside the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, did not give any previous indication that anything was wrong at his wedding reception, police investigator Joao Brito said.

Brito would not speculate on a possible motive, saying family members were in shock and he had not interviewed them yet.

Brito did say the killings are believed to be premeditated because of the groom's announcement and because he had hidden a gun in his father's pickup truck.

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The ruling issued Tuesday by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights held the Brazilian government responsible for the forced disappearance of 62 alleged members of the Araguaia guerrilla movement-- a small armed band of communists crushed by military operations between 1972 and 1975.

Only about 20 members of the group survived. One of them is Jose Genoino, who later headed the ruling Workers' Party of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and President-elect Dilma Rousseff, herself a survivor of torture in the dictatorship's prisons.

Brazil's amnesty law, passed in 1979, barred prosecution of both government agents and leftist militants who committed politically related crimes during the 1964-1985 military regime. The law was recently upheld by Brazil's supreme court.

The Costa Rica-based court found the law incompatible with Brazil's commitments under the American Convention on Human Rights.

The head of the government's National Human Rights Secretariat, Paulo Vannuchi, said in a press conference Wednesday that authorities understand the ruling must be obeyed.

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Francisco Silva won more votes than any other candidate for Brazil's lower house and now he has been cleared to take his seat. A judge says he can read and write well enough to act as a congressman.

Judge Aloisio Silveira ruled Wednesday that Silva did not lie when he signed a document swearing that he is literate.

Silva became famous as the clown Tiririca, which means "Grumpy" in Portuguese. He received about 1.3 million votes in elections last October. But allegations that he was illiterate emerged after discrepancies between the handwriting on Silva's application to run for Congress and that on the document in which he swears he can read and write.

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The Sao Paulo Electoral Court held a closed-door exam for the clown turned congressman-elect on Thursday to determine if he meets a constitutional mandate that federal lawmakers be literate.

Details of the test were not immediately available from the court's press office.

Francisco Silva became famous as Tiririca -- "Grumpy" in Portuguese -- and received about 1.3 million votes, nearly twice as many as the next-highest vote-getter in last month's congressional elections.

His campaign videos drew millions of viewers on the Internet, with slogans such as "It can't get any worse" and "What does a federal deputy do? Truly, I don't know. But vote for me and you'll find out."

But a less humorous element emerged during the campaign: Allegations that Silva, like 10 percent of Brazilians, is illiterate. Judge Aloisio Silveira ruled that there were discrepancies between the handwriting on Silva's application to run for Congress and that on the document in which he swears he can read and write and in autographs he gave to fans.

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Dilma Rousseff's win follows major global steps toward presidential parity: In 2006, Michelle Bachelet was elected as Chile's first female president, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner became Argentina's first female president in 2007. You might also have noticed that the 2008 U.S. election brought about many historic moments for women (so many, in fact, that some smart people have written whole books on that very subject). In the context of women's advancement, her victory is certainly something to celebrate, as are her leftist, democratic aims -- but Rousseff is also a more complex character than that narrative allows. As the Washington Post reports, she has quite the fabled past:

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Brazil, China, and India. I name-checked those three countries in my post yesterday on Malthus and the Discovery Channel gunman as likely sources of the human capital that might help us innovate our way through the challenges of the 21st century. But while skimming the headlines today, I realized that even I, ostensibly a writer about globalization, had not been paying enough attention to what's been going on in the "emerging" world.

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If confirmed, the deaths would raise the toll sharply from the 153 people already known to have perished in slides this week triggered by record rains.

Pedro Machado, subsecretary of Rio state's Civil Defense department, told Globo TV that as many as 60 houses and 200 people were buried in the Morro Bumba slum in Niteroi, neighboring Rio.

"In our experience, it's an instant death" for those caught in their homes at the time, Machado said.

Machado said the shantytown was built on a mountain of trash that accumulated for decades, making the ground there unstable and vulnerable to giving way.

"When I climbed atop the hill, the smell was very strange, bad," Machado said.

A fire department spokesman said six bodies had been found so far in the Morro Bumba and 28 were rescued after the mudslide hit late Wednesday.

Alves Souza, commander of the firefighters in the Niteroi rescue operations, said the wet, steep terrain posed a continued threat to anyone trapped in the wreckage and emergency crews alike.

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President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in an interview with The Associated Press that sanctions could isolate Iran so much that tensions would spiral out of control. And that, he suggested, might lead to war.

"We don't want to repeat in Iran what happened in Iraq," Silva said, a week after rebuffing U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton's appeal for Brazilian support for a new round of tough sanctions.

Iran has accelerated its disputed nuclear program in the face of previous U.N. penalties, but the United States and other supporters say a renewed demonstration of world resolve could finally push Iran to the bargaining table.

Silva said that Brazil won't support the sanctions and that he will try during to convince Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during a visit in Tehran in May to restart negotiations to ease concerns about the nation's nuclear program.

"I have already told them (Iranian officials) that a war must be avoided at all costs," Silva said. "In whose interest is a war?"

He made the comments before heading to the Middle East this week for visits to Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian-governed West Bank.

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Brazil's Secretariat for Women's Affairs said in a statement that "it devalues women -- in particular blond women" and called for it to be yanked from the air. A spokesman for a private ad regulation firm, which actually has tremendous pull in the country, explained the seeming contradiction between Brazil's sizzling image and the recent outrage: "The problem with the ad isn't a lack of clothing, but its sensual nature. A woman in a bikini on a beach isn't necessarily sensual; it depends on the context." According to the Washington Post, the company has "opened three separate investigations into the campaign." Three. Separate. Investigations.

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Gilliam was in town to promote yet another of his troubled projects with a tortuous production history. As he put it in our conversation, every film he makes becomes a film about the making of a film. The one-time Monty Python member has had collapses, aborted projects and problem-plagued productions before, from his underappreciated box-office bomb "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" to his failed efforts to adapt Alan Moore's "Watchmen" to an unproduced "Time Bandits 2" script to "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," which was shut down after a week of filming in 1999. (Gilliam and Johnny Depp still hope to make that film.)

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Negotiators said Zelaya's camp has promised that if he returns to power, he will drop his efforts to change the Honduran constitution, an initiative that led to his June 28 ouster.

Juan Barahona, a Zelaya supporter who has led street protests against the coup, walked out of the talks Tuesday in protest of the agreement on the constitution. He vowed to continue fighting for a new constitution on his own even if Zelaya is restored to office.

Critics say Zelaya was seeking to extend his time in office by removing a constitutional ban on presidential re-election, as his ally Hugo Chavez has done in Venezuela. Zelaya denied that was his intention, but soldiers flew him into exile at gunpoint after he ignored court orders to drop a referendum to ask Hondurans if they wanted an assembly to rewrite the constitution.

Zelaya sneaked back into Honduras on Sept. 21 and is holed up at the Brazilian Embassy. The United States and other countries have suspended aid to the Central American country to pressure the interim government to restore Zelaya.

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