Brazil's Truth Commission May Find Inconvenient Answers

Unlike countries such as Argentina and Uruguay, Brazil has never prosecuted anyone for human-rights offenses carried out during its military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985.

This is due to a 1979 amnesty law, which let sleeping dogs lie. And perhaps also because while Brazil’s military rulers were responsible for the torture and execution of dissidents, it was on a relatively small scale: Some 400 disappeared or killed is the widely used figure, compared with tens of thousands in Argentina.

India's Parliament turned 60 last week. This landmark in the life of the legislative body of the world's largest democracy was marked by special sessions in both houses of Parliament.

Newspapers provided a wealth of fascinating black-and-white footage and other archival and anecdotal material about the inaugural session on May 13, 1952, almost five years after India won its independence. After the country's founding fathers decided that the new Indian state would be a secular democracy, a Constituent Assembly spent those years painstakingly working out the specific forms of the state and the checks and balances it would require. Then, elections to Parliament were held and Parliament convened.

In the wake of Vladimir Putin's surreal inauguration as president of Russia, both protesters and police are struggling to figure out what their new rules of engagement should be.

The violent clashes of May 6 have given way to a more peaceful form of protest: the demonstrative stroll. Last week, anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny took a few hundred supporters on a “walk” along Moscow's downtown boulevards. Since the walk was not officially sanctioned, participants refrained from carrying signs or shouting slogans. They simply wore white ribbons to symbolize their anti-Putin views.

Before the U.S.-led overthrow of Iraq's Saddam Hussein, a main argument against invasion was that it would be hard to keep the factionalized country together without his iron-fisted methods.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's solution, according to his critics, is to adopt them. Wrote columnist Ahmad al-Muhanna in the Iraqi daily Al-Mada:

Nothing animates Brazilian opinion quite so much as cash -- and the current battle over interest rates between the government and the banks is no exception.

Add to this Brazil's tradition of sky-high interest rates, and bad memories of hyperinflation in the 1980s, and the result is a lot of emotion and rhetoric.

On May 7, a black motorcade carried Vladimir Putin to his inauguration as Russia's president through a capital city that looked like a ghost town. Police had cleared the streets of all traffic and pedestrians after a violent resurgence of protests the day before. It was an inauspicious start of a third term for Putin, who is still bent on acting as if his opponents do not exist.

Nobody expected the demonstration of May 6, called the "March of Millions," to be a big event. The opposition had planned it, and the authorities had sanctioned it, soon after Putin won the presidential election in March. Poor turnout at demonstrations in the interim had lowered expectations.

Americans, it would seem, can never read Ernest Hemingway's fiction without a picture of Hemingway the man in mind; the writer's mythology threatens to supplant the force of his work. If there is a comparable figure in Indian literature, it is Sadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955), whose centenary is May 11. Manto, who wrote in Urdu, was both the enfant terrible of his literary milieu and the sharpest and most disillusioned observer of the extraordinarily fascinating political currents of his age.

These currents had their origins in the Hindu-Muslim tension that prominently marks (alongside a parallel history of coexistence and communion) the history of the Indian subcontinent. They culminated in Manto's lifetime in the creation of the nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947, based on the "two-nation theory," and in the terrifying bloodbath and religious rancor of Partition, an event that might be seen as the subcontinent's equivalent of the Holocaust. In the six decades since, it has been most unusual for India and Pakistan to agree on anything. But all this year, the literary cultures of both countries have been united in marking the memory of Manto, whose life story -- the first 35 years spent in a colonial India, one year in independent India, and the final seven in the new country of Pakistan -- so vividly mirrors the dreams and fractures of his age. Among the events celebrating Manto's life and work this week will be one in New York.

It's been a tough campaign for contenders in Algeria's parliamentary election. Politicians of almost all stripes have been hounded, heckled and, in some cases, literally run out of town.

While the past year has brought the spirit of change to other parts of the Arab world, Algerians don't seem to believe in it much. Wrote columnist Hadda Hazzam in the Algerian daily El-Fadjr:

On Wednesday evening, Exercise Book, a user of the Sina Weibo microblog, posted a message for his 2.5 million followers: “I’ve finally figured out where the safest place in China is…”

The message was anything but cryptic. Only hours earlier, state-run Chinese media began reporting what much of the world had known for almost a week: Legal activist Chen Guangcheng, who is also blind, had escaped from house arrest in Shandong Province and was granted refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Cachoeira -- a businessman known in the international press as "Charlie Waterfall" -- has been in prison since March, accused of running illegal gambling operations and other offenses. (He denies the charges.)

But police say phone conversations recorded during the gambling investigation revealed suspicious links between Cachoeira and members of Congress from numerous political parties, high-ranking officials, state governors and the construction company Delta Construcoes S/A, which since 2007 has won more government contracts than any other.