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Everaldo Dias Pereira — known to his flock as Pastor Everaldo — shakes the hands of potential voters at a shopping mall in a suburb of Sao Paulo in Brazil.

As he wishes them the peace of the Lord, a group of supporters shout out: "Enough of corruption, enough of people who don't know the word of God. We want Pastor Everaldo."

The pastor is running for president, and even though it is unlikely he will win — polls show he only has 3 percent of the vote — his socially conservative message resonates among many of the evangelical faithful.

"Our proposal is clear," he says. "We defend life of the human being since its conception. We defend the Brazilian family. We defend this clearly: marriage is between a man and woman."

Campaigning is in full swing in advance of Brazilian elections in October. Polls show President Dilma Rousseff will have a tough re-election battle on her hands amid grim news on the economy.

Among those competing for the public's vote are evangelical Christians — a group with growing political clout. And to garner support they're using a strategy familiar to American voters — focusing on passion-inspiring social issues like abortion, homosexuality and religion in schools.

Religious Leaders, Political Kingmakers

There are dozens of other evangelicals running for national office in this election. Some are affiliated with one of the two main evangelical parties, one of which Pastor Everaldo heads; others are members of other groups.

Evangelicals currently make up 14 percent of deputies and 5 percent of senators in Brazil's National Congress. Evangelicals say they hope their numbers in government will jump some 30 percent after the upcoming elections.

Parallels

Brazil's Evangelicals A Growing Force In Prayer, Politics

"From a very small percentage of the population ... we get out these general laws of migration that were defined in the late 19th century," Schich says.

One law was unexpected: People don't like to move too far from home, even in the 21st century. Despite the invention of trains, planes and cars, artists nowadays don't venture much farther from their birthplaces then they did in the 14th century. The average distance between birthplace and where a person dies hasn't even doubled in 400 years, the team found. (It's gone from 133 miles to 237 miles.)

Schich and his team also showed that deviations from these overall trends could be linked to historical events. For example, a lot of politicians and architects died in France between 1785 and 1805, right around the time of the French Revolution. But the violence had a much smaller effect on people in the fine arts.

The models are the latest application of a rapidly growing field, called network science — which uses visualizations to find the underlying patterns and trends in complex data sets.

Krulwich Wonders...

A 'Whom Do You Hang With?' Map Of America

Last month, the only hospital in the sleepy town of Belhaven in eastern North Carolina closed its doors, prompting Belhaven Mayor Adam O'Neal to step out of party lines and call for an expansion of Medicaid in North Carolina. And then he took a lot more steps.

The Republican mayor and self-proclaimed conservative spent the last two weeks walking the 237 miles from eastern North Carolina to Washington, D.C., to raise awareness of the need to save his and other rural hospitals around the nation.

O'Neal did it with the support of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. O'Neal, Belhaven residents and NAACP members met on the front steps of a U.S. Senate building on Monday. They demanded the reopening of the hospital and hoped to draw attention to what they call a rural health care crisis.

The protesters fear that the 20,000 residents of Beaufort and Hyde counties will have to travel as far as 75 miles for emergency department facilities. O'Neal asserts that people will die as a result of the hospital's closure and that one woman, 48-year-old Portia Gibbs, was the first victim of Vidant Health's "shameless and immoral" decision to close the hospital.

Barry Gibbs, husband of Portia Gibbs, joined O'Neal at the rally in D.C. He says his wife died as a result of delayed care, waiting for a helicopter to airlift her to Norfolk, Va., because the hospital in Belhaven had closed. There aren't any doctor practices or hospitals in Hyde County.

Shots - Health News

Medicaid Expansion Boosted Emergency Room Visits In Oregon

The coal industry made its presence known in Pittsburgh this week for public hearings on President Obama's controversial plan to address climate change. A key element is rules the Environmental Protection Agency proposed in June. They would cut greenhouse gas emissions — chiefly carbon dioxide — from existing power plants. The national goal is 30 percent by 2030, based on 2005 levels.

Coal has much to lose under the rules. The EPA says power plants make up about a third of the greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S, and coal is used to generate nearly 40 percent of electricity today. States have a variety of options for meeting their reduction targets, but in coal country the industry and its workers are worried about the future.

At an industry rally Wednesday, Joel Watts with the West Virginia Coal Forum opened the event with a prayer. Referring to "God-given coal fields" his prayer took aim at the White House and EPA. "Give us the strength to stand strong against those who lie to us and hide behind their laws," prayed Watts. After "amen" there was applause.

Few here mention climate change. They focus instead on jobs and the economy. "If you shut coal down you lose miners. Miners lose money and they can't get out and shop. So it affects other businesses — it affects your community," says Kathy Adkins, a nurse in Madison, West Virginia who's married to a retired coal miner.

This theme continued at EPA's public hearing at the federal building in downtown Pittsburgh. West Virginia's Democratic Secretary of State Natalie Tennant called for more federal investment in technologies to capture carbon from burning coal and then store it before it escapes into the atmosphere. "There is no reason to pit clean air against good-paying jobs," testified Tennant, "West Virginia can lead the country in developing coal technology that supports both."

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