Isolated Brazilian president accused of ‘utterly reckless’ plan to meet Vladimir Putin in Moscow
Jair Bolsonaro has sparked disbelief and outrage by insisting he will go ahead with a trip to meet Vladimir Putin in Russia despite the escalating military crisis along the Ukrainian border.
Foreign policy experts and rivals questioned the Brazilian presidents’s planned visit after he told supporters he would fly to Moscow in late February to improve trade ties.
Continue reading...Rightwing radical was a towering figure in Brazil who was adored and abhorred in equal measure by millions of followers and foes
Olavo de Carvalho, the coronavirus-denying mentor of Jair Bolsonaro and Brazil’s radical right, has died in the United States, with one of his children citing Covid-19 as the cause.
“The family … asks for prayers for the professor’s soul,” relatives said on Twitter after announcing the death of the 74-year-old polemicist – a towering figure in contemporary Brazilian politics who was adored and abhorred in equal measure by millions of followers and foes.
Continue reading...In the city’s favelas, a new generation of ‘narco-pentecostals’ are embracing Christian symbols
“Pastor, do you think we could hold a service at my house next Thursday?” the peroxide-haired gangster wondered, cradling an AK-47 in his lap as he took a seat beside the man of God.
A few months earlier, the 23-year-old had bought his first home with the fruits of his illegal work as a footsoldier for one of Rio de Janeiro’s drug factions. Now, he wanted to give thanks for the blessings he believed he had received from above.
Continue reading...State governor says surprise operation against drug gangs and mafia groups is start of ‘transformational’ occupation
Hundreds of heavily armed police have stormed one of Rio’s largest favelas at the start of what authorities claimed was a “transformational” attempt to wrest back control from the drug gangs and paramilitary mafias which dominate huge swaths of the Brazilian city.
The operation began at daybreak on Wednesday as security forces in camouflage gear and armoured personnel carriers swept into Jacarezinho, a bustling redbrick community that has been a stronghold of the Red Command drug faction since the 1980s.
Continue reading...Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Paraguay are reeling from a historic heatwave with temperatures as high as 113F
Cities and towns across southern South America have been setting record high temperatures as the region swelters during a historic heatwave.
“Practically all of Argentina and also neighboring countries such as Uruguay, southern Brazil and Paraguay are experiencing the hottest days in history,” said Cindy Fernández, meteorologist at the official National Meteorological Service.
Continue reading...Cargill, which had pledged to clean up its supply chain, sells feed for many of the billion chickens killed annually in UK
A major supplier of animal feed is still buying soya and corn from a farm linked to deforestation in the Amazon, despite having pledged to clean up its global supply chains.
Cargill, a giant agricultural multinational that sells feed to British chicken farms, buys crops from a farm growing soybeans on deforested land in the Brazilian Amazon.
Continue reading...Activists mourn deaths in Amazon state of Pará as bodies of José Gomes, Márcia Nunes Lisboa and their daughter found by son
Police in the Brazilian Amazon state of Pará are investigating the killing of three members of the same family who were shot dead at the riverside home where they bred turtles.
The deaths happened on the island of Cachoeira da Mucura, on the banks of the Xingu River, in São Félix do Xingu and regional media named the victims as José Gomes, his wife Márcia Nunes Lisboa and her teenage daughter, Joane Nunes Lisboa.
Continue reading...Signs of an incipient return to normality have been dashed as case numbers soar but high vaccination rates offer reason for hope
As the pandemic’s second, gruelling year drew to a close and Covid rates in Rio de Janeiro plunged to levels unseen since it began, the Brazilian city’s health secretary, Daniel Soranz, celebrated a desperately needed respite.
“We’ve been through such painful, difficult months … this is now a moment of hope,” the 42-year-old doctor said last November as carioca life regained some semblance of normality, hospitals emptied and the city’s effervescent cultural scene was reborn.
Continue reading...Some people could still be missing after the accident on Furnas Lake in Minas Gerais state, police said
A towering slab of rock broke from a cliff and toppled on to pleasure boaters drifting near a waterfall on a Brazilian lake on Saturday, leaving 10 people dead.
Police said that there was a possibility that some people were still missing on Sunday following the accident in Minas Gerais state. At least 32 people were injured, though most were released from hospitals by Saturday evening.
Continue reading...Germany also cuts isolation period for boosted people after a Covid contact; Karl Nehammer tests positive after contact with member of security team
Argentina reported a record number of Covid-19 cases on Thursday for a third day in a row at nearly 110,000, Reuters reports, as the highly infectious Omicron variant drives a third pandemic wave in the South American nation.
The record tally of 109,608 in the middle of the southern hemisphere summer holiday season with tourist centres full of travellers, has not translated into a similar exponential rise in Covid-related deaths, which totalled 40, the government said.
Unjabbed supporters of President Bolsonaro are banned from some pubs – but elsewhere fans can buy pizza named after him
Jana Santos has an unambiguous message for Jair Bolsonaro-supporting anti-vaxxers who want to sup a Moscow Mule or Caipirinha at her bar in south Brazil.
“Don’t come. We don’t want you here,” said the mixologist and bar owner who recently placed a placard at its entrance instructing unvaccinated Bolsonaristas to steer clear.
Continue reading...Bolsonaro said he was discharged on Wednesday, two days after being admitted with intestinal obstruction
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been discharged from hospital, two days after being admitted with an intestinal obstruction, his latest health complication from a 2018 stabbing.
“Being discharged now. Thank you all,” Bolsonaro posted on Twitter on Wednesday morning alongside a religious message and a photo of himself and his doctors giving a thumbs up.
Continue reading...Forced from their homes by missionaries, the Ayoreo cling on in the Chaco. Now the Bioceanic Corridor cuts through the fastest-vanishing forest on Earth, refuge of some of the Americas’ last hunter-gatherers
In 1972, Catholic missionaries entered the Chaco forest of northern Paraguay and forced Oscar Pisoraja’s family, and their nomadic Ayoreo people, to leave with them. Many perished from thirst on the long march south. Settled near the village of Carmelo Peralta on the Paraguay River, dozens more died from illnesses. Still, the survivors kept up some traditions – hunting for armadillos; weaving satchels from the spiky caraguatá plant. “We felt part of this place,” says Pisoraja, now 51.
Today, his community – and other indigenous peoples across the Chaco, a tapestry of swamp, savanna and thorny forest across four countries that is South America’s largest ecosystem after the Amazon – are confronting a dramatic new change.
Mario Abdo Benítez, Paraguay’s president, and Reinaldo Azambuja Silva, governor of Mato Grosso do Sul state in Brazil, at the site of a new bridge across the Paraguay River, due to be completed in 2024
Continue reading...France reports 335,000 new Covid cases as Italy, Portugal, Netherlands and Turkey all see record cases
India is reporting 58,097 new Covid cases, twice the number seen only four days ago, according to health ministry data.
Wednesday’s figure takes the cumulative total to more than 35 million.
Continue reading...Júlio Lancellotti is an outspoken champion of homeless people – a cause that makes him unpopular with Brazil’s authorities
In 2017, most Brazilians were still unfamiliar with the name Jair Bolsonaro. But for Júlio Lancellotti, there was already cause for concern in the reactionary rhetoric of the man who would be elected president two years later under the slogan: “Brazil above everything, God above everyone.”
“I am astonished that a homophobic person like Bolsonaro appears on the presidential ballot,” said the priest during mass on 7 March of that year at St Michael the Archangel parish in São Paulo’s East Zone. The sermon, in which he also preached against rape culture and sexism, was typical of the man who has devoted his life to fighting injustice, often finding himself targeted by conservative politicians as a result.
Continue reading...Leader admitted with intestinal blockage but is in stable condition, hospital says
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been taken to hospital with an intestinal blockage but is in a stable condition, according to the hospital.
Bolsonaro said in a Twitter post that his doctors were evaluating potential surgery on his intestine, adding that he was using a nasogastric tube.
Continue reading...Healthcare workers around the world have been on the frontline of the coronavirus pandemic for almost two years, which put them through the darkest days of their careers. Five doctors who have worked in hospitals in Uganda, New Zealand, the US, India, the UK and Brazil told the Guardian about how the pandemic had tested them personally and professionally, but how they continue to find hope and resolve to keep working.
Thanks to Dr Peter Kavuma, Dr Dalilah Restrepo, Dr Yogesh Kalkonde, Dr Anne Menezes and Dr Megan Smith, who is also a spokesperson at the campaigning organisation EveryDoctor
Brazilian president plans to reveal identities despite health officers receiving death threats
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has asked for the names of health officials who approved Covid vaccines for children, saying he planned to make their identities public despite previous death threats.
In late October, Brazil’s health regulator, Anvisa, released a statement saying five of its directors had received death threats over the possible approval of vaccinations for children of five-11. The agency granted such approval for the Pfizer shot on Thursday.
Continue reading...From a Jacobean traveller’s travails in Sindh to the tangled roots of Nigeria, our pick of new nonfiction books that shine a light on Asia, Africa and South America
• Share your top recommendations for books on the developing world in the comments below
You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Works 2011-2021
By Alaa Abd El-Fattah
Members of Red Command drug faction accused of crime that caused outcry across Brazil
Nearly a year after three young boys vanished near their homes in Rio de Janeiro’s rundown northern sprawl, police have accused members of the city’s largest drug faction of murdering the children in reprisal for stealing an ornamental bird.
The boys – aged nine, 11 and 12 – disappeared on the afternoon of 27 December 2020 after leaving their homes in the Morro do Castelar favela to play. They were last seen in eerie security footage showing them walking towards a local street market.
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