World View Hot Topics in Pivotal Markets

(Corrects blog post published July 6 to correct spelling of name in paragraph seven and remove erroneous information in original paragraph six.)

It was a dizzying height from which to drop. Eike Batista is the quintessential high-achieving, alpha male entrepreneur. He's the richest man in Brazil, with a group of companies active in everything from mining and shipping to oil and real estate.

China’s retirees may not have the world’s richest pensions, but they have long enjoyed some of its earliest.

By Chinese law, men can retire at 60; women in government and state-owned companies can leave at 55; and women in the private sector can start collecting pensions at 50.

India's finance minister, the veteran politician Pranab Mukherjee, 76, tendered his resignation last week after three years in office. This was his second term in that post -- he first served from 1982 to 1984 -- an extraordinary feat of political endurance, as well as a study in contrasts between the challenges of running the economy in pre- and post-liberalization India.

There was no whiff of controversy or taint of scandal about Mukherjee's sudden departure. Nor could it be said, though, that he left on a high. India's economy has been on a rocky road recently.

If you are an opposition politician in Russia and someone hacks into your e-mail, the police will not be interested in the hacker, even though his name is no secret. Parliament deputies will, however, demand that you, the victim, be placed under investigation based on the content of your private mailbox.

Welcome to the surreal world of Alexei Navalny, the lawyer and anti-corruption blogger whom many consider to be one of the leaders of recent “white ribbon” protests against President Vladimir Putin's authoritarian rule.

The demise of Brazil's military dictatorship in 1985, after 21 dark years, was supposed to have ended government intrusiveness in people's lives.

But searching through government documents, the newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo has found evidence to the contrary. Papers show that Brazil’s secret service spied on both Dilma Rousseff, now the president, and her mentor and predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, from the time democracy was restored until the early 1990s.

At 6 a.m. last Wednesday, residents rushed out of a Shanghai housing compound and discovered the bloody aftermath of the latest episode in what may be China’s most ancient and intractable conflict: the war between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

In this case, the carnage was particularly ferocious. Two women, a 60-year-old mother-in-law, and her five-month pregnant daughter-in-law, left a trail of blood from the building to their respective ambulances. The supposed cause of the bloodshed became an immediate Internet sensation:

Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh became the first Indian head of state in 25 years to make a visit to Myanmar (formerly Burma), the eastern neighbor that has for 50 years been ruled by a repressive military junta. The visit was both a welcome gesture of reconnection and a reminder of a wasted half-century in relations between two newly independent states (Burma was decolonized in 1948, a year after India) that share a border of more 1,500 kilometers (900 miles).

The meeting of top representatives of the world's largest democracy and an authoritarian but liberalizing regime was also a reminder of how the ideology of the nation-state -- appearing in this region in response to colonization, straining against local traditions of feudalism, despotism and dynastic rule to fashion a secure transition to democracy, and eventually spawning a fresh jostle for power and influence in an often arbitrarily broken-up subcontinent -- has served to disrupt age-old civilizational links in South Asia, probably for good. Realists would also say that the rapprochement was geopolitically inevitable, given Burma's vast reserves of natural resources (including natural gas) and China's growing influence over its economy, a reward for a no-questions-asked engagement with the junta. A team of prominent Indian businessmen accompanied Singh on his visit, seeking new markets in areas such as telecommunications and manufacturing.

A bizarre sight greeted selected guests at this year's St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Russia's version of Davos: four little girls in silver face paint and metallic headdresses, confined from their necks down in the walls of a chrome-plated bath, blowing at paper boats under a hot sun.

The "Four Winds" art installation, featured at a lavish reception hosted by St. Petersburg Governor Grigory Poltavchenko, added to an overarching impression of feast amid the plague. With a second wave of the global economic crisis looming, the Russian government sought to display its imperial greatness at its premier international showcase event. As usual, the president made a major speech, and state-owned companies put off the signings of big contracts so they could take place during the forum.

Sao Paulo isn't just the biggest city in Brazil. With 19 million inhabitants, it's the biggest in South America.

Its rivalry with the prettier, more glamorous Rio de Janeiro is intense but, deep down, Brazilians know that Sao Paulo, the center of finance, business, advertising and banking, is where the big decisions are made.

Mr. Gu, an unmarried pharmacist in north China’s Jilin province, never aspired to be a champion for privacy, much less porn. Yet, sometime this spring -- probably in March -- Mr. Gu, possessor of 95 downloaded pornographic films on his hard drive, uploaded the wrong photo to a popular Chinese bulletin board.

It was not titillating.

When I left my house in Delhi on the last night of April, summer had just arrived in the north of India. The next evening, I found myself in a radio station in Copenhagen, discussing ideas of love in the 21st century with the Danish poet Mette Moestrup and two very opinionated musicians.

From Copenhagen, I voyaged to New York, where I had two weeks to myself in a flat on the Upper West Side with a marvelously idiosyncratic cat as my companion. I spent my mornings drinking iced coffee and writing in that grotto of sweet pleasures, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and my evenings browsing in the city's magnificent used bookstores and drinking and dining in Chinatown and Greenwich Village.

What if the director of the FBI threatened to decapitate a journalist and the threat became public? The result would be scandal, resignation and possibly criminal proceedings.

Not so in Russia. When Alexander Bastrykin, who runs the FBI's local equivalent, the SKR, made such a threat to an investigative reporter, he got off with an apology. Many journalists, including the recipient of the threat and his editor-in-chief, considered the apology sufficient. Case closed.

Two decades into their country's post-liberalization new economy, many Indians, especially the sizeable middle-class, have substantially revised ideas about government spending that were accepted without question in the old days of socialism.

But the drift rightward is a slow one. If pressed for a "yes" or "no"' answer, most Indians today might still be sympathetic to the current government's adherence to welfarism and subsidies in the sectors of agriculture, education, food and labor.

The facts of the case are clear, the killer having confessed. Elize Matsunaga, a former prostitute, murdered her rich, cheating husband Marcos, chopped his body into pieces and left them on a dirt road.

Still, the interpretation of those events and the behavior of Elize, 30, and Marcos, 42, have all of Brazil talking.

Ksenia Sobchak, a TV personality often portrayed as Russia's Paris Hilton, had a rocky start as a leader of the country's opposition movement. At one point, demonstrators tried to boo her off a stage.

Now, President Vladimir Putin's ham-handed effort to punish protesters is making her a star.

Monday morning June 11, 9:45 a.m., a microblogging account devoted to news about China’s Hubei Province tweeted three photos depicting downtown buildings wrapped in gray-orange haze.

According to the text, they had just been taken in downtown Wuhan, Hubei's provincial capital, population 10 million : “It’s suddenly enveloped by smog and the air is thick with a combustible smoky smell! Is it like this where you are?”

The worst kept secret in contemporary China is the role that corruption plays in the function and disfunction of public life. Take, for example, Zhang Shuguang, the former deputy chief of engineering for China’s Railway Ministry.

In 2011, at the time of his arrest, state media briefly reported that he had $2.8 billion stashed away in foreign bank accounts . The scale of Zhang’s avarice was grand, but it differed only in scale from the documented acts committed by thousands of other Chinese public officials every year. A few months after Zhang’s arrest, the People’s Bank of China (China’s Central Bank) posted a report –- subsequently deleted -– claiming that 16,000 to 18,000 public officials had fled China since the mid-1990s, taking with them $120 billion .

Brazilian alternative rock band Legiao Urbana had its heyday in the 1990s, but that hasn't stopped its trademark song "What Country is This?" from living on.

With a verse that warns "Brazil will get rich/We will earn a million/When we sell all the souls/Of our Indians in an auction," the tune found its way onto the pages of the leading business daily, Valor, this week. Journalist Daniela Chiaretti invoked it to attack the government’s environmental policy or rather, as she saw it, its lack of one. The song's sentiment "plays well for the Brazil of 2012,” wrote Chiaretti.

We learned last week that India's economic growth in the quarter from January to March was 5.3 percent, the slowest in 36 quarters, though not bad by world standards.

The news may signal the end of growth rates between 6 percent and 9 percent that have radically refashioned the consumer landscape of the country in the two decades since the liberalization of the economy in 1991 and have lifted a few hundred million people out of poverty. Growth was never this slow, even during the world financial crisis of 2008.

What's the difference between today's global finance system and a Ponzi scheme? This is the question that a 56-year-old veteran Russian financial scammer has been asking his victims.

Chillingly, he almost has a point.