Environmentalists say Huon deal will make it harder to regulate local industry and is ‘truly bleak news’ for the state
Brazilian meat processing giant JBS has been cleared to take over Tasmanian salmon farmer Huon by the Foreign Investment Review Board in a move environmental groups fear will make it harder to regulate the local industry.
Huon Aquaculture received final approval on Monday when the FIRB confirmed it did not object to the $500m takeover bid.
Continue reading...‘Artivist’ Thiago Mundano used ash from Amazon fires to paint a towering monument to Brazil’s firefighters in São Paulo
Continue reading...A roundup of the coverage of the struggle for human rights and freedoms, from Russia to Yemen
Brazilian president savaged for ‘macabre’ and ‘slovenly’ response to pandemic and ‘deliberate neglect’ of indigenous people
Jair Bolsonaro should be charged with crimes against humanity and jailed for his “macabre” reaction to a Covid outbreak that has killed more than 600,000 Brazilians, including a disproportionate number of indigenous citizens, a congressional inquiry has found.
Two of the most dramatic accusations against the Brazilian president – murder and genocide of the country’s indigenous populations – were removed from a previous draft of the report on Tuesday night after talks between opposition senators serving on the inquiry.
Continue reading...Draft text says neglect, incompetence and opposition to science fueled ‘stratospheric’ death toll
The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, should face murder charges for his role in the country’s “stratospheric” coronavirus death toll, a draft report from a senate inquiry into Brazil’s Covid crisis has recommended.
The 1,078-page document, published by Brazilian media on Tuesday afternoon, is not due to be voted on by the commission until next week and could yet be modified by senators.
Continue reading...Lenilda dos Santos left her home in rural Amazonia, part of a South American exodus driven by a coronavirus-era depression
As coronavirus tore through the Valley of Paradise, a farm-flanked backwater in the Brazilian Amazon, Lenilda dos Santos, a nurse technician, stood on the frontline clutching hands most feared to touch.
“She was a warrior during the pandemic,” said Lucineide Oliveira, a friend and colleague at the town’s small, understaffed hospital. “She’d say: ‘If we have to die, we’ll die. But we must fight.’”
Continue reading...Jair Bolsonaro’s comments called ‘stupid and selfish’ in country where 600,000 people have died of Covid
More than 600,000 of his citizens have lost their lives to a Covid-19 outbreak he once pooh-poohed as a “little flu”, but Brazil’s science-denying president, Jair Bolsonaro, has announced he will decline to be vaccinated, saying “it makes no sense” for him to do so.
“With regard to the vaccine, I’ve decided not to have it any more,” the 66-year-old populist told a right-wing radio station on Tuesday. “I’ve been looking at new studies … Why would I get vaccinated?”. He said his antibody levels were already “sky high” because of a past infection. “It would be the same as betting 10 reais (£1.30) on the lottery to win two. It makes no sense.” Bolsonaro said he was not anti-vaccination, but did oppose what he called the vaccine-buying “frenzy”.
Continue reading...India, Egypt and Cuba among first states to develop and make their own vaccines as Covax falls behind
Developing countries are increasingly turning to homegrown Covid vaccinations as the UN-backed Covax programme falls behind.
While western countries roll out booster jabs to their own populations, Covax, which was set up by UN agencies, governments and donors to ensure fair access to Covid-19 vaccines for low- and middle-income countries, has said it will miss its target to distribute 2bn doses globally by the end of this year.
Continue reading...This gorgeous and moving melodrama finds two women in 1950s Rio under suffocating family expectations – and sees what happens when they are defied
‘What do you want from life?” a husband drunkenly yells at his wife in Karim Aïnouz’s gorgeous and very moving melodrama set in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. The man’s wife is Euridice (Julia Stockler) and what she wants is to be a classical pianist. Her husband is angry and hurt: why can’t she just be happy in the kitchen? Adapted from a novel by Martha Batalha, this is the story of Euridice and her sister Guida (Carol Duarte): their inner conflicts and rebellion against the suffocating patriarchy of home.
The film beings a few years earlier: Euridice is 18 and applying to study music in Vienna. Her heart is broken when boy-mad Guida runs away with a no-good sailor to Greece, promising to write when she is married. Predictably, she returns with a baby bump and no wedding ring. There’s an appalling homecoming scene when their dad, a baker, violently shoves Guida out of the house; she’s nine months pregnant at the time (and the film never lets us forget that violence can be done to these women at any time of a man’s choosing). Unforgivably, Guida’s dad says that Euridice has left Rio and is living in Vienna. The truth is she’s up the road, married to an insightless oaf.
Continue reading...Campaigners say president’s veto is ‘absurd and inhumane’ in country where period poverty keeps one in four girls out of school
President Jair Bolsonaro’s decision to block a plan to distribute free sanitary pads and tampons to disadvantaged girls and women has been met with outrage in Brazil, where period poverty is estimated to keep one in four girls out of school.
Bolsonaro vetoed part of a bill that would have given sanitary products at no charge to groups including homeless people, prisoners and teenage girls at state schools. It was expected to benefit 5.6 million women and was part of a bigger package of laws to promote menstrual health, which has been approved by legislators.
Continue reading...A sandstorm made by powerful winds whipping up dust from the ground has engulfed Barretos and surrounding towns north of the city of São Paulo. The storms were triggered by the worst drought to hit Brazil in nine decades, which depleted hydroelectric reservoirs, forcing the grid operator to fire up more expensive thermoelectric plants and the government to implement a 'water scarcity' power rate.
Continue reading...Bolsonaro’s government plans to build a 1,00km railway to export soya beans despite warnings of a ‘catastrophe’ for indigenous people and the environment
The Final Countdown blared from speakers and the crowd broke into applause as one of Jair Bolsonaro’s top lieutenants strode into the Amazon auditorium with glad tidings of a railroad to the future.
“The ‘Grain Train’ is going to happen,” Brazil’s infrastructure minister, Tarcísio de Freitas, told the hundreds of mostly male spectators who had flocked there in a caravan of high-end SUVs.
Continue reading...Official figures suggest 1.7% of the population have long-Covid symptoms, Finnish decision comes after similar moves in Sweden and Denmark
A quick snap from Reuters reports that Uzbekistan has started producing the Russian-developed Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine domestically in a joint project with Russia. The nation already manufactures the Chinese-developed ZF-UZ-VAC2001 vaccine on its territory.
Just a little more from the UK’s education secretary and former vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi here. As part of his media round this morning he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain “My pledge to your viewers and the country, as the prime minister pledged, is children will catch up by the end of this Parliament. By next month, I’ll have the first cut of the evaluation of the tutoring programme, but it already looks good.”
Continue reading...Pictures of destitute Brazilians searching scraps for food lay bare scale of economic and social crisis
Heart-wrenching photographs of destitute Brazilians scavenging through a heap of animal carcasses for food have laid bare the hunger crisis blighting Latin America’s most populous nation, where millions have been plunged into deprivation by the coronavirus pandemic and soaring inflation.
The images, taken in Rio last week by the prize-winning photojournalist Domingos Peixoto, show the group rummaging for scraps in the back of a lorry that had been transporting the discarded offal and bones to a factory that makes pet food and soap.
Continue reading...Crowds parade through cities as polling shows president’s ratings sinking to new depths
Tens of thousands of protesters have returned to the streets of Brazil’s biggest cities to demand Jair Bolsonaro’s impeachment, as a poll showed the Brazilian president’s ratings had plumbed new depths.
Huge crowds paraded through downtown Rio on Saturday to voice their outrage at Bolsonaro’s response to a Covid outbreak that has killed nearly 600,000 people and dealt a heavy blow to the South American country’s economy.
Continue reading...Group of whistleblowing doctors gave 10,000-page dossier to investigators last month with allegations against Prevent Senior
One of Brazil’s biggest healthcare providers has been accused of covering up coronavirus deaths, pressuring doctors to prescribe ineffective treatments, and testing unproven drugs on elderly patients as part of ideologically charged efforts to help the Brazilian government resist a Covid lockdown.
Related: Trump may be gone, but Covid has not seen off populism
Continue reading...Rally to demand government action on climate crisis is first worldwide since start of pandemic
Hundreds of thousands of people in 99 countries have taken part in a coordinated global climate strike demanding urgent action to tackle the ecological crisis.
The strike on Friday, the first worldwide climate action since the coronavirus pandemic hit, is taking place weeks before the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow, UK.
Continue reading...Refusal to recognise vaccines given across Latin America, Africa and south Asia has been denounced as ‘discriminatory’
England’s Covid travel rules and refusal to recognise vaccines administered across huge swaths of the world have sparked outrage and bewilderment across Latin America, Africa and south Asia, with critics denouncing what they called an illogical and discriminatory policy.
The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, described England’s rules, unveiled last Friday, as “a new simplified system for international travel”. “The purpose is to make it easier for people to travel,” Shapps said.
Continue reading...Marcelo Queiroga sat close to Boris Johnson and Liz Truss at New York meeting
Brazil’s health minister, Marcelo Queiroga, has tested positive for Covid and gone into isolation, 24 hours after meeting a maskless Boris Johnson and other British officials in New York.
Queiroga, who sat close to Johnson and the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, on Monday during their meeting with Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, announced his positive test on Twitter on Tuesday night.
Continue reading...Pelé has said he is “recovering very well” following reports he had re-entered an intensive care unit at São Paulo’s Albert Einstein Hospital in an apparent deterioration of the three-time World Cup winner’s health, after he left the unit earlier this week.
ESPN Brasil reported on Friday that Pelé was readmitted to the ICU due to acid reflux. The 80-year-old had a colon tumour removed this month and stayed in the hospital for further monitoring.
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