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.

By Mary Hennock

China's parliament is frequently dismissed as a rubber stamp body whose delegates agree with every government measure and avoid controversy. This year's session has seen a new trend at work. The two-week gathering of the National People's Congress has seen protesters lobbying hard against a key government policy. No, not Tibet independence activists, angry farmers, or unemployed workers, but company bosses. Many delegates are entrepreneurs, and they're objecting to China's new labor contract law, introduced just over two months ago. "The law is overly-protective of workers' rights," delegate Zong Qinghou told Reuters, adding, "It isn't reasonable." Zong is the chairman of Wahaha Group, China's biggest private soft drinks company.

Beijing isn't alone in its "edifice complex," the massive urban makeover that has transformed the Chinese capital in the run-up to the Summer Olympics. In Shanghai the remodeling of the city's famous Bund waterfront has led to some raised eyebrows. My colleague Duncan Hewitt writes from Shanghai:

When Shanghai does something, it doesn't do it by halves. For years, local urban planners have admitted that the city made a mistake in the 1990s, when it routed one of its major highways right along the famous Bund waterfront. Since then conservationists have dreamt of the day when the traffic would be rerouted, or even put underground in a tunnel, to spare the historic structures from pollution and improve the view of the famous old stretch of colonial-era buildings.

In Brazil these days, armor is the new normal. From bullet-proof luxury rides to the caveirão, a police assault wagon built like a tank, Brazilians have fortified themselves against the hazards of modern living. In Rio, one evangelical Christian church in a crime-ridden favela is raising a steel-plated, 30-meter containing wall to keep the flock from harm's way when the shooting starts. So fashionable is the concept these days that Brazilians have even come to believe that their charmed economy is innured to world economic downturn.

No doubt there is some ground for optimism. Inflation is under control. Hard currency reserves are topping $160 billion, a continental record. Foreign debt is history. And while the largest economy on earth skates on the edge of recession, Brazilian officials confidently project growth of 5 percent or more this year, or, if the international markets tank, "maybe a little less," shrugs Finance Minister Guido Mantega. Give us your best shot, the bulls in Brazil seem to be saying, for Latin America's drowsy  giant has not only stirred but "decoupled" - or broken free - from the vagaries of the globe's overlord economy. 

The War on Terror has burned through America’s human and financial resources and empowered radical Islam. But for China, it’s been a lucrative reprieve.

However weakened are Sino-US ties – and they’ve taken a beating this year – the most important trans-Pacific relationship would be a lot worse if not for the Bush administration’s pre-occupation with the Middle East. His predecessor will likely declare a victory of sorts in Iraq and Afghanistan and slowly draw down the US military presence there. The White House will focus on domestic concerns like health care, immigration, and trade. Media interest in the terrorist threat will wane. (If there is a clash of civilizations and no one around to videotape it, does it get posted on YouTube?)

Stock markets in the developing world are not for sissies. Who can forget the scenes of late last decade, when financial contagion swept bourses from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, bringing traders to their knees? It was no different in Brazil, where in 1999 the overvalued real collapsed practically overnight, taking the São Paulo Stock Exchange (Bovespa) with it. It wasn't long before the sages started dissing Latin America's biggest economy, calling for financial rainmakers to take the B out of BRICs, the acronym for the world's trendiest emerging markets - Brazil, Russia, India and China.

What a difference a decade makes. On October 26, the traders will be frantic again, this time clawing each other for a chance to get a piece of one of the world's hottest properties. Yes, Bovespa is going public. And if the market buzz is to be believed, by the closing bell on Friday, Brazil will have shepherded one of the largest IPOs of the year.

For the last two years running, bankers in London, New York and Tokyo have reaped record-breaking bonuses, sending bountiful ripples through their local economies in the form of everything from gasp-worthy bar bills to astronomical property prices. Many movers and shakers, buoyed by a record $3,300 billion worth of mergers and acquisitions activity globally in the first half of this year, were hoping that the coming bonus season would prove three’s the charm.

That was, of course, until America’s subprime mortgage crisis sent the global economy into a penny-pinching credit crunch.

Cutting edge greenhouse technology in the Netherlands could mean trouble for Kenya's flower industry.  Kenyans have long considered themselves to have an environmental advantage over Europe. Although they rely heavily on air transport—which leaves a hefty carbon footprint—Kenya's climate allows it to grow its plants outside as opposed to indoors, where temperature and light must be controlled artificially. But a new study from the Hague-based Agricultural Economics Research Institute (LEI) shows that difference in carbon dioxide emitted in the production of Kenyan and Dutch roses is smaller than previously thought. And the gap is quickly closing as the Netherlands switches to new, non-polluting methods to heat its greenhouses.

The Netherlands horticultural sector aims to become climate neutral by 2020. Its new heating technology, currently under trial, involves capturing energy with solar panels during summer and storing it in water inside permeable rock materials 120 meters under ground.  The warmed water then gets pumped up to the greenhouse during the winter months while cold water is circulated in the summer. The first greenhouse to use this system opened in Holland last year and further trials are going on in the country right now. At a time when the world is increasingly conscious of the carbon footprint left by shipping commercial goods around the globe--most often calculated as "food miles"--such development could make a big difference to buyers.

If flower consumers do start favoring Dutch suppliers, it would deal a huge blow to Kenya, which sees the 700 million it earns in exports of flowers, vegetables and fruit annually as critical to the health of its economy. Kenya is currently the leading flower exporter to the European Union, supplying 38 percent of all imported flowers sold there. LEI claims that previous reports that emissions from Kenyan flowers, including airfreight, were nearly six times lower than Dutch flowers are just wrong—partially because they neglected to take into account variations in flower weight between Kenyan and Dutch varieties. No doubt Kenyan officials will dispute this new study, which has yet to be published in full, and continue to resist the introduction of carbon labeling on all imported flowers.  But everyone will have to agree that what matters most these days is not what you call a rose. It's the carbon it costs to get there.

There are many misdemeanors a Russian oligarch can commit with impunity, from fraud to murder, and many of them have done so. There's only one really unforgivable crime in the unwritten code of Russian laws known as 'ponatiye', or understandings, and that is defiance of the Kremlin's will.

Mikhail Gutseriyev, former chief executive of Russian oil group Russneft, committed exactly that crime last month.