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Leaders of the five BRICS nations fueling global economic growth plan the creation of a development bank in a direct challenge to the World Bank that they accuse of Western bias.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) announced today that eight NBA teams will take part in a comprehensive global games schedule that will include a total of eight games in six countries this October. The games will include the first-ever NBA preseason games to be held in Brazil and the Philippines, and in the cities of Bilbao, Spain and Manchester, England.

Two rats — one in North Carolina, the other in Brazil — worked together on a task by communicating telepathically, thanks to implants in their brain. Electrical signals from a "leader" rat’s brain were collected, encoded and then zapped into the "follower" rat’s cortex in the form of an electrical signal. The follower rat then pressed one of two levers based on a light visible only to the leader rat. The Duke University experiment is the first time two animals have collaborated through such an artificial link, and shows that the mammal brain can be trained to act on electrical signals from another animal.

More than 150 nightclubs, restaurants and bars in Brazil are declared unsafe and closed by authorities, following a fire that killed 236 people.

SANTA MARIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Relatives of the 231 people who died in a Brazilian nightclub fire demanded answers on Monday as to how it could have killed so many people, while police questioned the club's owner and members of the band whose pyrotechnics show allegedly caused the tragedy.

A fire leaves more than 200 people dead in Santa Maria, Brazil. Rafael Romo reports.

Rio de Janeiro, which will host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, faces criticism for not doing enough to curb the deadly problem.

A Brazilian judge has ordered bookstores to ensure that the erotic trilogy "Fifty Shades of Grey" is out of the reach of minors.

Brazil has had a tough two years. This last one in particular has been rough. A crime wave swept Sao Paulo, the nation’s largest city, towards the end of the year. But more importantly, a country that wants to be the country of the future, with all the amenities and a stable economy, has seen its confidence dwindle a bit. This is not the Lula years, in reference to popular president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The nation that will hold the FIFA World Cup in just two short years and later the Summer Olympics in 2016 is scratching its collective heads. How did Brazil go from one of the biggest economies in Latin America, to be usurped by Mexico now as measured by investor appetite and losing the No. 6 global economy position to the U.K. in less than a 12 months.

What to expect when expecting over 60. A Brazilian woman, Antonia Leticia Rovati Asti, gave birth for the first time on Tuesday — a week after turning 61. The late-life pregnancy was possible in part because of Dr. Orlando de Castro Neto, an assisted reproduction specialist.