Brazil's Supreme Court convicted three top aides of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's of graft related to a vote-buying scheme in Congress.

Lula's ex-chief of staff Jose Dirceu was found guilty by six of the 10 judges in connection with the scheme that ran from 2002 to 2005 during the popular president's first term, a court spokesman said.

Brazil's upcoming municipal elections are being overshadowed by the Miss Bum Bum pageant, a nationwide online contest to find the cutest female behind.

Young ladies representing the country's 26 states and the federal district Brasilia are vying to qualify for the grand finale scheduled to take place in Sao Paulo on November 30.

In just five decades, Brazil has lost 80 percent of the coral reef once found along 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) of its northeastern coast, according to a study cited by local media Sunday.

Brazil's reef ecosystems -- with 18 species of coral, algae and at least three types of fish -- lie not far out to sea, near major Brazilian cities like Fortaleza, Recife and Natal.

President Dilma Rousseff on Friday, moving to raise awareness of Brazil's unacceptably high traffic deaths, launched a campaign to halve the number of road accidents by 2020.

A day after official statistics showed that 53 percent of the country's 194-million-strong population was now middle class, she said reducing traffic deaths was essential to ensure that Brazil becomes "not just a great middle class country, but also a great civilized country".

President Dilma Rousseff has approved new tax incentives to boost innovation in the information technology and telecommunications sectors, the official Agencia Brasil reported Tuesday.

The measures, published in the Official Gazette, are part of the government's Brasil Maior ("Bigger Brazil") plan unveiled in August 2011 to strengthen the productivity and competitiveness of Brazilian industries.

Firecrackers and sporadic gunfire greeted the police-escorted social workers as they drove into northern Rio's Jacarezinho shantytown, home to a large population of crack cocaine addicts.

With one million users, Brazil is the world's largest market for crack, a highly addictive cocaine derivative which is wreaking havoc in impoverished slums, according to a study by the Federal University of Sao Paulo (UNIFESP).

The largest flower and ornamental plant show in Latin America is held in a quaint small town founded by Dutch immigrants that is the heart of Brazil's flower industry.

Welcome to Expoflora, complete with an incongruous Dutch windmill greeting visitors at the entrance of the giant flower exhibition center, a two hours' drive from Sao Paulo.

One of the world's most body-conscious countries, Brazil is now threatened by growing obesity rates, with half of the population already overweight.

As a result of an unbalanced diet and a rise in more sedentary lifestyles, Brazil, which moved 30 million people out of poverty and into the middle class over the past decade, is paying a heavy price for its frenetic growth.

A Sao Paulo court allowed a woman to abort a four-month-old malformed fetus despite Brazil law only granting abortions in cases of rape or when the mother's life is in danger, local media said Sunday.

In this case, the fetus was diagnosed with Edwards syndrome, a genetic disorder that is the second most common autosomal trisomy after Down syndrome, the daily Folha de Sao Paulo reported.

Brazil hopes to capitalize on the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics to advance its goal of becoming the world's third largest information technology and communications (ITC) market, a top industry official says.

"We are today the fifth largest ITC market in the world, (worth) $210 billion dollars," Antonio Gil, president of the Brazilian Association of Information Technology and Communication Companies (Brasscom), told Agence France Presse in an interview Monday.