Group items tagged

Fresh evidence emerged this week that the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and his father and predecessor Kim Jong-il, obtained fraudulent Brazilian passports in the 1990s.

These copies may not constitute conclusive proof, but it's not the first time Brazilian passports have been linked to the Kim family.In 2011, Japanese media quoted officials as saying Kim Jong-un and his brother Jong-chul had entered the country to visit Tokyo Disneyland on Brazilian documents as far back as 1991.Jong-un's older half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, is said to have fallen out of favour with their father in 2001 after he was caught trying to sneak into Japan using a false Dominican passport - apparently also on his way to Disneyland.

In the post-Cold War world of diplomacy, North Korea's friends were dwindling in number, making its passport of limited use. Its secretive first family would also probably have preferred to remain under the radar.

In the mid-1800s, the most prolific slaver in Brazil was a man named José Bernardino de Sá. The transatlantic slave trade was banned in Brazil and abroad, but Bernardino nonetheless financed the trafficking of nearly 20,000 Africans to Brazil — and became one of the country’s wealthiest people.

He used that wealth to buy farms, build roads — and, historians say, fund the Banco do Brasil. It’s just one of several links that ties this country’s oldest and most prominent bank to the slave trade. Not only was its initial capital drawn from slavery, historians say; its original vice president and director were also notorious slavers.

That history, and what should be done about it, is now at the center of a remarkable legal filing by government attorneys in Rio de Janeiro — an action that’s asking some of the most fundamental questions about Brazil, its history and the long shadow the transatlantic slave trade casts over it.

Dilma Rousseff: Brazilian congress votes to impeach president

In a rowdy session of the lower house presided over by the president’s nemesis, house speaker Eduardo Cunha, voting ended late on Sunday evening with 367 of the 513 deputies backing impeachment – comfortably beyond the two-thirds majority of 342 needed to advance the case to the upper house.

“The fight is now in the courts, the street and the senate,”

The problem is that soccer dominance is an important part of Brazil's sports identity, and this loss cut to the core of it. As Eric Simons, author of The Secret Lives of Sports Fans, explained in an email, "If you're Brazilian, your identity is based on self-concept that you're always the best soccer team in the world, and you know that everyone else knows it, so you're proud." So the pain of losing isn't, in this case, that of an underdog happy to be there, and for the Brazilians to lose in this manner is to collide violently against all sorts of national expectations and self-conceptions.

"What happens when your pride, self-concept, and identity are suddenly obliterated in front of the entire world?" said Simons. "I don't know. I don't know if anyone does; this is, in sports, something of an unprecedented self-esteem catastrophe. Has anyone that good, with that much expectation, every lost that badly before, with so many people watching?" The answer to that question may be no, which would mean we're in somewhat uncharted sports-trauma territory.

Brazilians have been tricked by the media over a "little flu," according to president Jair Bolsonaro. Families should still go out to eat despite coronavirus fears, says Mexico's president Andres Manuél Lopez Obrador. And Nicaragua's leader Daniel Ortega has all but disappeared, while political marches and rallies continue.As global leaders race to contain the brutal threat of a growing pandemic, a triumvirate of denial has emerged in Latin America, with the leaders of Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua downplaying the danger of a looming outbreak.

As confirmed cases have surged in recent days, AMLO, as the president is often called, has shown more concern, encouraging people to stay home. He said his cabinet will be working on ways to help vulnerable populations, providing relief to small businesses and banning gatherings of 100 people or more. But as recently as Sunday, he posted a video encouraging people to continue to go out to eat, urging Mexicans to limit any damage to the economy. "We do nothing good and we don't help if we're paralyzed, if we act in an exaggerated way," he said in the video. "Let's continue living life normally."

In the absence of a large federal response, the fight against the virus has largely fallen to Mexico's states, municipalities, and even private businesses. On Monday, Mexico City forced all bars, nightclubs, and movie theaters to close and banned gatherings of 50 people or more (though CNN witnessed lots of people still out on city streets Monday).

Although she's not a household name in the United States, billionaire Luiza Trajano, the richest woman in Brazil, might very well become one soon if her radical new model to confront structural racism takes hold.

Its coveted trainee program, long considered a major stepping stone into Brazil's corporate world, will now only admit Black Brazilians into its ranks in an effort to upend a system that oftentimes sidelines Brazilians of African heritage from rising up the corporate ladder.

The Magalu announcement quickly reverberated across the Brazilian media landscape. It was a bold move, no doubt, but not one without blowback; there have been calls across social media for a boycott of the company's stores.

Left-leaning Dilma Rousseff has been re-elected president of Brazil, after securing 51.45% of votes in a closely-fought election.

Ms Rousseff, in power since 2010, is popular with poor Brazilians because of her government's welfare polic

Her re-election for a second term extends the rule of Ms Rousseff's Workers Party (PT), which has been in power for 12 years.

Surge of Zika Virus Has Brazilians Re-examining Strict Abortion Laws

RECIFE, Brazil — The surging medical reports of babies being born with unusually small heads during the Zika epidemic in Brazil are igniting a fierce debate over the country’s abortion laws, which make the procedure illegal under most circumstances.

A judge in central Brazil has taken the rare step of publicly proclaiming that he will allow women to have legal abortions in cases of microcephaly, preparing the way for a fight over the issue in parts of the country’s labyrinthine legal system.

Mr. Bolsonaro’s promise of change, any change, was enough to sweep him into office with 55 percent of the vote in October. The language of his inaugural address — “I come before the nation today, a day in which the people have rid themselves of socialism, the inversion of values, statism and political correctness” — was music to the ears of his reactionary base, investors and Mr. Trump, who shares his values and his bluster. The stock market soared to record highs and the Brazilian real strengthened against the dollar.

Mr. Bolsonaro has drawn liberally on the playbook of the likes of Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Viktor Orban of Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. He has also been dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics” for his outrageous remarks and political base of evangelical Christians, moneyed elites, craven politicians and military hawks.

While his economy minister, Paulo Guedes, a University of Chicago-educated neoliberal economist who taught economics in Chile during the Pinochet era, promised to reform Brazil’s unwieldy pension system, Mr. Bolsonaro made unscripted comments suggesting a minimum retirement age well below what his economic team was mulling.

RIO DE JANEIRO — As dozens of fires scorched large swaths of the Amazon, the Brazilian government on Thursday struggled to contain growing global outrage over its environmental policies, which have paved the way for runaway deforestation of the world’s largest rain forest.

The fires, many intentionally set, are spreading as Germany and Norway appear to be on the brink of shutting down a $1.2 billion conservation initiative for the Amazon.

“The ongoing forest fires in Brazil are deeply worrying,” the European Commission said in a statement on Thursday. “Forests are our lungs and life support systems.”

Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has tried to reassure his citizens over the threat of coronavirus by claiming Brazilians can bathe in excrement “and nothing happens”.

Without offering any scientific evidence, Bolsonaro continued: “I think it’s even possible lots of people have already been infected in Brazil, a few weeks or months ago, and have already got the antibodies that help it not to proliferate”.

On Thursday Brazil’s health ministry said that its coronavirus death toll had risen to 77, up from 46 on Tuesday. So far 2,915 cases have been confirmed.

Bolsonaro has continued to downplay the pandemic, despite more than 20 members of a delegation he recently led to the US becoming infected with Covid-19.

“It’s an excessive dose of medicine – and too much medicine becomes poison,” Bolsonaro said, rejecting criticism of his administration’s response. “I’m the manager of the team and the team is playing very well, thank God.”

Much of the fury has focused on Bolsonaro’s decision to pose for triumphant photographs and mingle with supporters outside the presidential palace last Sunday despite receiving medical advice to self-quarantine because of his possible exposure to the virus during a trip to meet Donald Trump in the US.

Nearly every Brazilian state has an ICU occupancy of 80% or higher,

As of Friday, 16 of 26 states were at or above 90%, meaning those health systems have collapsed or are at imminent risk of doing so.

The seven-day averages of both new cases and new deaths are higher than they have ever been.In the last 10 days, about a quarter of all coronavirus deaths worldwide have been recorded in Brazil,

South America's greatest soccer contest may be moved to Brazil in a last-minute maneuver to save the troubled tournament less than two weeks before kick-off, but Brazilian officials say there is more to consider.

He added that if it goes ahead, teams and their staff will have to follow health guidelines, including being vaccinated. Ramos also said that the competition, which is being called the Cornavirus Cup by critics, would be held in empty stadiums without spectators.

The confusion on Monday is just the latest chapter in the chaos leading up to the tournament as much of South America, including Brazil, is in the grips of the global pandemic with some of the world's worst infection and death rates.

“Brazilians will only be free when the last Bolsonaro is strangled with the entrails of the last pastor from the Universal Church,” Mr. Cuenca wrote on Twitter, riffing on an oft-cited 18th century quote about the fates that should befall kings and priests.

Leticia Kleim, a legal expert at the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists, said, “We’re seeing the justice system become a means to censure and impede the work of journalists.”

Mr. Cuenca said he didn’t deem his tweet particularly offensive given the state of political discourse in Brazil.After all, the country is governed by a president who supports torture, once told a female lawmaker she was too ugly to rape, said he would rather his son die in an accident than be gay, and in 2018 was criminally charged with inciting hatred against Black people, women and Indigenous people.

Dilma Rousseff Is Impeached by Brazil’s Lower House of Congress

Brazilian legislators voted on Sunday night to approve impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, the nation’s first female president, whose tenure has been buffeted by a dizzying corruption scandal, a shrinking economy and spreading disillusionment.

Its 81 members will vote by a simple majority on whether to hold a trial on charges that the president illegally used money from state-owned banks to conceal a yawning budget deficit in an effort to bolster her re-election prospects.

Researchers here say they have unearthed stone tools proving that humans reached what is now northeast Brazil as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery adds to the growing body of research upending a prevailing belief of 20th-century archaeology in the United States known as the Clovis model, which holds that people first arrived in the Americas from Asia about 13,000 years ago.

Paleontologists in Uruguay published findings in November suggesting that humans hunted giant sloths there about 30,000 years ago. All the way in southern Chile, Tom D. Dillehay, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University, has shown that humans lived at a coastal site called Monte Verde as early as 14,800 years ago.

Dr. Guidon, the Brazilian archaeologist who pioneered the excavations, asserted more than two decades ago that her team had found evidence in the form of charcoal from hearth fires that humans had lived here about 48,000 years ago.

There are very few things as enjoyable as hating another soccer team and everything it stands for. Because it ends up being (mostly) harmless yet poignant, hate derived from soccer—be it from a legendary rivalry, a personal grudge or any other reason—is the best kind of hate. It might actually be the only acceptable kind of hate.

What I resent are teams who believe winning is their exclusive privilege before the referee (chinga tu madre!) has even started the game.Enter Brazil, kings of entitlement.

The elegant talent of Zico and Eder has been replaced by the robotic muteness of Hulk or the overestimated antics of Neymar, a sort of puffed up Woody-Woodpecker. Even Brazilian extravagance has lost its class: Where before roamed Romario—beautifully defined by Jorge Valdano as a “footballer straight out of an animated cartoon”—now one can find Fred, who has the charisma of a chloroform soaked rag. And there’s more. This Brazil can become violent in an instant. The rough game (the antifutbol) was never part of the Brazilian repertoire. It is now and it has been for a while (ask Tab Ramos if he remembers Leonardo’s elbow). In the 2014 squad, even Neymar carries an axe. This is far from a joyful team.

PALMAS, Brazil — The first World Indigenous Games closed Saturday night with a pumping ceremony that brought together nearly 2,000 participants from more than two dozen countries for a monumental extravaganza.

Palmas, a sunbaked outpost in the geographical heart of Brazil, and the 5,000-seat arena was packed well beyond capacity for the spectacle.

With delegations from as far afield as Ethiopia and New Zealand and two dozen indigenous peoples from across Brazil, the games produced nine frenetic days of compet

Police in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro say they have shot dead a 67-year-old Spanish tourist.

The woman, María Esperanza Jiménez Ruiz, was on a tour of the Rocinha favela when the car she was travelling in broke through a police blockade, officials said.

Brazilian security forces have been accused of using excessive force by human rights groups.