By Barrett Sheridan and Fred Guterl 

The most common reaction across the world to Barack Obama’s Tuesday night victory was a simple one: “Thank you.” It was a sentiment directed not at the president-elect himself, but at the American people. Having felt abandoned by the United States for so long, and especially after the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush, people across the world saw Obama’s victory as an affirmation that yes, America still does represent something special. Nelson Mandela, in a congratulatory letter to Obama, perhaps summed it up best: “Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.” It was also a good excuse to celebrate. Kenya, the home of Obama’s father, declared a national holiday, and Brazilians proclaimed a new era of "esperanza". The few disappointed by the final tally—a dour-looking Tory in London, some security-conscious Israelis—did little to dampen the global celebration.

Parisians reacted with enthusiasm and relief to the news, some of them turning on a dime to become Amero-philes. And the French newspapers, after 8 years of George W. Bush, might perhaps be forgiven for getting a little tipsy on Obama.

Our team of foreign correspondents has cavassed the globe for the morning-after reaction to this historic election. The event was cause for celebration and contemplation in London, Paris, Jerusalem, Seoul, Durban, Lahore, Tokyo and Rio.

Sarah Palin may not have much experience with the rest of the world—she didn’t even hold a passport until well after her 40th birthday—but the rest of the world has had enough experience with her to know exactly what it thinks. Those thoughts range from mild bemusement to borderline horror. Much of the world, especially in Europe, has spent the last four years counting down the days until President Bush’s final hours in office, and for them, Palin’s folksy ways carry too many echoes of the sitting president. That sentiment doesn't rule out the possibility of a little satirical fun at Palin's expense, of course.

The sober-minded Brits find a perverse appeal in her plain-spoken ways. "She could never exist in the British political system," says London Times columnist and former political satirist Alice Miles. "Or we don't think she could. We're all men in suits saying very, very safe things." Her exoticism has obsessed many, including tennis coach Jack Garvey, who admits to staying up until two a.m. to catch the vice-presidential debate last week. "I found myself shouting at the screen, imploring someone to push her on a few issues," he says. "But everyone was too polite to challenge her. The idea of her facing off against Putin or being in any way near power is just frightening." Even her fashion choices offend the Isles; the Guardian dedicated an entire column to her Alaska-shaped earrings, which, "with terrifying literal-mindedness...express everything we need to know about her pride in her roots and her people."

Across the Atlantic, optimistic Republicans might have hoped for a bit of favorable coverage in Brazil, where evangelical Christians are the fastest-growing religious group. No luck. Palin's been lampooned in cartoons there, and Sergio Augusto, a columnist for the daily newspaper, O Estado de Sao Paulo, joked that "judging by appearances alone, [Palin] could have swapped politics for synchronized swimming or been singing covers of 'Pink Shoelaces.'" Win or lose, Palin should exercise sound judgment in determining how best to make use of her new passport.

With reporting from Barbie Nadeau in Italy, Tracy McNicoll in Paris, Sophie Grove in London and Mac Margolis in Brazil

By Andrew Bast

This weekend witnessed a worrying twist of fate in Bolivia. Voters went to the polls in a national referendum on the country’s leadership, and President Evo Morales won in a landslide. He took more than sixty percent of the vote, higher even than the fifty-three percent he won in the 2005 presidential election. His enthusiasm was unguarded. "I dedicate this victory to all the revolutionaries in the world," he proclaimed in a nighttime victory speech from the balcony of his presidential palace in the capital of La Paz. He had reason to celebrate. The vote cemented his leadership and gave momentum to what could likely be his landmark accomplishment in office, rewriting the country’s constitution.

The twist is that voters not only cast ballots on the president, but on their local leaders as well, and a coterie of opposition governors in the country’s wealthy eastern provinces--Morales’ chief adversaries--also won in the referendum. For months they have been organizing against Morales. The departments of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni have all voted to become more autonomous from the central government, challenging Morales’ centralization of power in La Paz, his land reform initiative and his reengineering of the constitution. “The outcome of the vote in Bolivia is likely to only deepen the wounds between two fiercely antagonistic political projects,” says Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue. “Each side will be tempted to dig in even further.” How Morales plays his so-called revolutionary hand will very much determine Bolivia’s future. Morales would be wise to watch his autocratic ally, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, for what not to do; better to err on the side of democracy and demonstrate real skill as a politician.

Bolivia’s provinces, especially Tarija, are rich in natural gas, making the situation all the more volatile. After taking office, Morales nationalized the industry, straining tensions to the breaking point. Recently, autonomy protests in the provinces have turned violent, and the memories of the 2003 protests over the country’s natural gas reserves, which left eighty people dead, ousted President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and helped bring Morales to power, are still fresh. The issue is as raw as any in the country and could give rise to conflict once again.

A resolution seems distant. Morales has said publicly that he is prepared to talk with the governors, though no one knows what, if any, concessions he would be willing to make. From the outside, the U.S. State Department has said it "stands ready to assist" the discussions, despite its tormented relationship with Morales’ government. Spain, Bolivia’s once-colonial administrator, has also offered to help nudge talks along. The most promising pledge came this week from the Organization of American States, which is headed by the Chilean José Miguel Insulza and had a major success earlier this year when it passed a resolution in March to resolve the standoff between Hugo Chávez and Colombia. In Bolivia, negotiations are the next logical step, but with both sides boosted by big wins at the polls, when, where or on what terms are all big question marks rather than agenda items.

In addition to touting his success as another victory for the revolution, Morales has said that his presidency “starts a new Bolivian history.” Indeed, he is the first indigenous president to be elected in Latin America, and his proposed constitutional reforms would lend political representation to the long-disenfranchised indigenous majorities in the country. But his presidency is not a revolution. It is the result of votes and process and democracy, and with that recognition comes the undeniable fact that he cannot write off the past, no matter how much he may want to.

After a stinging defeat of his Venezuelan constitutional reforms in December, Morales’ staunch ally Hugo Chávez last week decided to instead issue his reforms by decree, subverting the democratic process. Morales would be wise to learn from his mentor, namely that such autocratic strategies make for bad so-called revolutions. Changing Bolivian history could mean bringing the country together, not fanning the flames of autonomy by strong-arming the opposition. Since they have popular support in their provinces, the governors’ grievances deserve a fair hearing, and if Morales has the political skill to bring them into the fold, 21st-century socialism in Bolivia could establish a sound democratic foundation. Considering the way that Chávez’s project is being left behind by less bellicose leaders like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Morales’ aim may be morally admirable, but his method will have to be more independently minded.

Brazil today boasts 1,100 privately owned helicopters (half of them in São Paulo), the world's third largest fleet and growing at the clip of 15 percent a year. For those below, condemned to battling one of the worst rush hours on the planet (on a bad day, traffic pileups can run to 160 kilometers or more), the view isn't so inspiring. But like the crowded skies, the clotted streets are emblems of the remarkable new moment in a nation that has hoisted itself from the ranks of chronic underachiever to emerging market upstart. (Read this week's magazine story, Weathering the Storm.)

The new bullishness has taken many by surprise. For half a century Brazil has been flirting with greatness, aiming for the clouds and then flaming out. At its loftiest the country has charmed a host of believers, but their convictions have wavered. Fleeing Europe to Brazil ahead of World War II, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig famously declared his adoptive country “the land of the future” but then lost hope in the world and downed a lethal dose of vironal in 1942, in the middle of carnival, at that. The future would have to wait.  Charles DeGaulle looked down his spacious nose at much of the world, but the Brazilians always took personally his generic snub that  "Brazil is not a serious country."

It's poetic justice of sorts that the Brazilians are looking down on much of the serious world today. In the quarter century or so I've been keeping an eye on this country, this is the first time I can recall that the dark talk of "crisis" refers not to some domestic debacle but to the mess beyond national borders. "Hey, Bush, we've been waiting 20 years to grow," scolded president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in an impromptu speech the other day, referring to the global spillover from the U.S. subprime credit crunch. "Get your act together."

Except for on the football pitch or the catwalks, such hubris is new for this chronically underperforming country. Maybe it's the currency. When I first arrived in Rio, in the early 80s, with inflation topping three digits, the greenback was almighty. Converted into wads of pink and green cruzeiros or cruzados or new cruzeiros (pick your perishable banknote), a hundred U.S. dollars could buy you a week on the town. Now and then the officials in Brasília tried to do something about it, lopping three zeros off the currency and decreeing drastic price freezes, so bringing only a flicker of stability. It wasn't as bad as Bolivia, where I once saw them weighing money instead of counting it in the Chapare district, but it left the continent's biggest country dysfunctional, all the same.

I keep a box in my drawer stuffed with inflation memorabilia from those days. Lost in the rubble of half a dozen versions of soiled bank notes and a kilo or so of useless coins, there's a small paper chit with the number 2147 stamped on it. It's the waitlist number I drew for the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro air shuttle, which thanks to the price freeze during the so called Cruzado Plan, of 1986, cost $38, about half the current bus fare. When prices are kept steady, goods tend to disappear, and the Cruzado Plan was no different; Brazil's airports became flop houses as stranded passengers waited hours for an available seat.

It's not always easy to pinpoint a nation's turning point, but 1994 has to be a modern Brazilian watershed. That was the year of the Plano Real, a radical new stabilization plan named for the eponymous currency, backed this time by fiscal discipline, not a price freeze or any of the other "heterodox" hocus pocus of former plans. Brazilians were skeptical and who could blame them, after a quarter century of band-aid reforms and Monopoly money?

Today, with foreign investors tripping over themselves to pour money into Brazil, the real has outgunned the world's top 16 currencies, from Euro to Yen, gaining 13 percent against the dollar this year alone, and nearly 60 percent since 2004. To my knowledge Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen never actually turned down work for U.S. dollars, but when the rumor that she had went viral in Brazil I knew the earth had shifted in this part of the hemisphere. Now it's outbound Brazilians changing their reals into wads of greenbacks and having the time of their lives in Paris or Disney World.

You don't have to go that far to watch them frolic. The boom that has seen Brazil's economy soar has also deepened pockets. The country now boasts 20 billionaires on the Forbes list (up from just four in 2003) and 140 millionaires, a 19 percent rise year to year, against a 6 percent rise for the rest of the world. Boutique banks and private asset managers have decorated the skylines with their logos and heli-pads.

The bonanza is not just for those commuting in choppers. Climbing wages (overall payroll is up 16 percent year to year), a flood of consumer credit (growing by 30 percent yearly) and plenty of new jobs (1 million this year, 7.3 million since 2004), have hoisted countless poor into the consuming classes. Much is made of how China's surging economy has lifted tens of millions out of poverty. In fact, Dragonomics has increased the wealth gap, while Brazil has managed to reduce inequality at the same it booms. Brazil's poorest ten percent have seen their wages grow by 57 percent in real terms between 2002 and 2006, against a nine percent rise for the richest tenth, says economist and poverty scholar Marcelo Neri of the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a business school.

And while the middle class in the developed world moans about slipping downmarket, Brazil's just keeps on rising. Some 20 million Brazilians have moved up to the middle class in the last decade, and are now putting 800 new cars a day on the road in São Paulo alone. Sound exaggerated? Check out rush hour.

A competing jumble of climate change negotiations have turned the forum itself into a debate topic as polarizing as the carbon markets and global targets being proposed. Not one, but two extra groups have joined the G8 at Hokkaido, each with the potential to reach its own set of conclusions. The G8 + 5 group brings major developing emitters like China and India into the fold, and the Major Economies Meeting (MEM), George  W. Bush’s brainchild, adds three other big carbon emitters—Indonesia, Australia and South Korea—into the mix. Together, the groups account for 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Washington would prefer to settle the major points at the MEM before tackling the unwieldy 200-country United Nations gatherings, which are coming up against their deadline for a post-Kyoto treaty to be approved in Copenhagen in December of 2009. Coming out of Hokkaido empty-handed will make pre-Copenhagen talks this fall just that much messier.

Still, while none of the three groupings at Hokkaido will likely produce a major consensus on emissions caps, they are producing a lively diplomatic chess match. E.U. members, who want the group to commit to steep cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, are butting heads with Bush over his unwillingness to commit to numerical targets. Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is trying to broker a compromise. With a more green-friendly Obama or McCain administration only months away, Fukuda apparently believes that a tussle with Bush is counterproductive. Instead, he’s pushing for agreements on less-polarizing issues, such as encouraging carbon capture and storage technology for coal power plants, promoting nuclear energy and lowering tariffs on clean technology.

Rolando Andrade/AFP-Getty Images
Protesting Prices: Farmers and their supporters demonstrate against the Government for raising export tariffs on soybean products in Rosario, Santa Fe province

By Brian Byrnes

In Argentina, history tends to repeat itself. Every decade or so, the country implodes in crisis: coup d’etats, dictatorships, hyperinflation, devaluation, crime--all trademarks of Argentina’s self-fulfilling prophecy of repeated and gross governmental failure.
 
The wounds of the 2001 economic collapse--popularly blamed on outside forces like the International Monetary Fund and Wall Street--have just barely healed, but Argentina once again looks to be on track for a meltdown, and this time it could be sparked by a showdown on the Pampas.
 
A conflict between the fledgling government of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and Argentina’s influential farming sector over export taxes on commodities has dragged on since mid-March, and decimated the presidenta’s popularity. According to a poll released on May 22 by Poliarquia Consultores, Kirchner’s approval rating sank to 26 percent this month, down from 56 percent in January. This sharp decline was precipitated by the government’s inability to resolve the export-tax stalemate, but it has been deepened by the openly hostile stance that Cristina has taken with the farmers, and just about everyone else.

By Brian Byrnes

The Queen’s honeymoon was over before it even began. Less than 72 hours after she donned the azure-and-white sash as Argentina’s first elected female president, her highness had already gone to battle.
 
Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s reputation as strong-willed, outspoken and sometimes flippant had earned her the faux-royal title, and it was proven in spades on December 13,  when she took the podium at the Pink House in downtown Buenos Aires to blast U.S. allegations that  Venezuela's Hugo Chavez had tried to fund her presidential campaign with clandestine petrodollars.
 
With pointing fingers and a steely glare, “garbage” was how she described a U.S. prosecutor’s charges that a suitcase from Venezuela stuffed with $800,000 in cash had been destined for her campaign coffers before it was detained at a Buenos Aires airport in August. Fully aware of the moment, Cristina played the gender card, vowing not to be “pressured” because she was a woman and -- in a not-so-subtle dig at the Bush administration -- promising to strengthen relations with “friendly” countries, like Venezuela.
 
Not exactly a winning start for a president who was expected to improve ties with the U.S. following a frosty four-and-a-half years under her predecessor (and husband) Nestor Kirchner, who routinely blamed the IMF and Wall Street for Argentina’s catastrophic economic collapse in 2001. Cristina--with her penchant for globetrotting, high fashion and political discourse--would surely be able to patch up foreign relations, or so everyone thought.

Politicians on both sides of the partisan divide in the U.S. rarely miss a chance to beat the drums over the perils of the immigrant tide and the imperative to "secure our borders." That might be a good idea. With the world's largest economy on a slide, the dream of making America is looking less lustrous every day, and now the U.S. risks seeing one of its most dynamic and creative sources of human capital blow away with the prairie dust. 

There are already troubling signs. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank reports that the flow of dollars Latin American and Caribbean immigrants send back home is slackening. In 2007, Latins living in the U.S. remitted $66 billion to their native countries. That's not half bad (a record amount, in fact) but what drew the Bank's attention was the modest 7 percent increase over the previous year. Until then the flow of dollars back home had been expanding at double digit rates every year. Last year the nominal sum of incoming migrant dollars actually fell in Brazil, from $7.4 billion to $7.1 billion.

Call It the cough heard round the world. The World Health Organization's Feb. 26 report on how super strains of tuberculosis are on the loose has shaken physicians and policy makers everywhere to the marrow. And rightly so. The study, based on a massive survey of 90,000 patients worldwide, is eloquent testimony to the ravages of a modern killer: multi drug resistant tuberculosis, known as MDR TB in the chilly shorthand of public health, and its even deadlier next of kin, extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, or XTR-TB, which is practically untreatable.  

It's no surprise that poor countries, rife with malnutrition, claustrophobic slums, and especially AIDS are super TB's closest ally. Precisely because HIV strafes the human immune system, patients are sitting ducks for infection. That's why almost everywhere that AIDS is prevalent,  tuberculosis is soaring. Worst hit are the fragments of the old Soviet Union (led by Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, where one in four new tb patients have the super variety) and Africa, with the highest rate of TB in the world and the worst public health statistics (only six nations on the continent managed to report to Geneva).  At this rate the Economic Forum at Davos might have to be scrapped in favor of the sanatorium that once crowned that Magic Mountain.

There is one bright spot in the developing world's deathlock with TB: Brazil. That may sound odd. Nearly a quarter of the 185 million Brazilians live below the poverty line, where contagions rage, and some 620,000 have AIDS, a third of all cases in Latin America. But unlike almost every other developing nation, Brazil has not seen the overall TB infection rate spike - much less a runaway outbreak of MDR-TB - among the most vulnerable population. The reason is as simple as it is controversial: free meds for HIV and AIDS patients. In 1996, the Brazilian congress passed a law requiring the government to hand out antiretrovirals to anyone with HIV free of charge. Drug companies were disgruntled, not least because Brazil browbeat them into slashing prices for the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals, the state of the art medicine used to combat the virus. The same policy encouraged nearly two dozen other developing countries to take on the biggest pharmaceutical corporations as well.

No one ever claimed Brazil was a health spa, of course. After a brief lull, mosquito-borne dengue fever has come raging back, including the killer hemorrhagic variety. An outbreak of micobacteriosis, which causes a nasty hospital infection, leaves lasting surgery scars and can withstand all but the most drastic disinfectants, is on the loose. And while in theory anyone may be treated at the country's public hospitals, chronic underfunding has apparently forced brain surgeons in Rio de Janeiro to resort to common power tools, like home drills, in the operating rooms.

Still, it's hard to argue with success. A team of international scientists recently crunched the numbers and found that Brazilians living with AIDS who reguarly took the three-way cocktail of antiretrovirals had 80 percent lower TB infection rates than did patients who were not treated. (The study reviewed data from 1995 to 2001, but researchers say that the trend holds to this day.) The bottom line is that systematic use of  cutting edge HIV/AIDS medicine may be one of the best ways to keep this millennial scourge at bay. That may not be the best news for Big Pharma's shareholders. But it ought to give public health authorites a shot in the arm.