Category Archives: Brazil

Coronavirus live: UK ‘considering all measures’ including quarantine hotels; Sydney struggles to quash cluster

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Dominic Raab says UK needs to respond to variants from Brazil and South Africa; New South Wales records six new cases

Reaction has been coming today from Russian sources after Brazil’s health regulator said it was seeking further data on Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine before considering its approval for emergency use.

Documents supporting drugmaker Uniao Quimica’s application for emergency use of the vaccine have been returned to the company because they did not meet its minimum criteria, the watchdog said on Saturday.

While people over 75 living at home will be able to get vaccinated from Monday in France, there are concerns in the field that there are not enough doctors, Le Monde reports today.

Jacques Battistoni, president of MG France, a trade union for general practitioners, said: “We expect tensions and a difficult start to the week.”

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Brazil rushes to save premature babies as Covid-19 swamps Manaus hospitals

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  • State hopes to transfer at least 60 babies from neonatal units
  • Air force evacuates coronavirus patients from Amazon city

Authorities in the Brazilian Amazon are reportedly racing to save dozens of premature babies after a surge in coronavirus cases caused a catastrophic breakdown in the oxygen supply to hospitals and clinics.

On Friday, CNN Brasil reported that the northern state of Amazonas was seeking to transfer at least 60 babies from neonatal units in its capital, Manaus, to hospitals elsewhere in the country.

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Brazil’s president casts doubts on Covid vaccine as second wave hits – video

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Jair Bolsonaro, who has said he will personally refuse any Covid-19 vaccine, has cast doubt on the effectiveness and safety of a vaccination that will be rolled out in Brazil as the country's death toll passed 200,000 this week.

Manaus, the capital of Brazil's largest state, Amazonas, has been put under a daily 11-hour curfew as it faces a health system breakdown with oxygen shortages and thousands of deaths

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Global immunisation: low-income countries rush to access Covid vaccine supply

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Despite efforts to procure Covid vaccine, some nations will only vaccinate 20% of population

There are triumphant scenes as lorries leave a vaccine plant in Pune, India, loaded with boxes that will prevent thousands of deaths. Adar Poonawalla, the owner and chief executive of the Serum Institute of India, poses on the tailgate of a truck, making the most of his company’s “proud and historic” moment as the potential saviour of the nation – and even a large chunk of the world.

Poonawalla’s factory, the largest vaccine manufacturing complex in the world, is the best hope for immunisation for people in Africa and some low-income countries elsewhere – which could save them from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. The Serum Institute has been contracted to supply the UN-backed Covax initiative, which subsidises low-income countries, with 200m doses of Covid-19 vaccines with an option on 900m more.

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Covid eruption in Brazil’s largest state leaves health workers begging for help

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Governor of Amazonas says situation critical as alarming details emerge about breakdown of health system in state capital Manaus

Health workers in Brazil’s largest state are begging for help and oxygen supplies after an explosion of Covid deaths and infections that one official compared to a tsunami and said could be linked to a new variant.

Related: Coronavirus live news: curfew in Brazil's largest state after surge in fatalities; record deaths in Sweden

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Brazilian waxwork figures go viral after old video report is unearthed on social media – video

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The human form has inspired artists for centuries for both its beauty and challenges. Now a Brazilian septuagenarian sculptor has won a surprise newfound notoriety for his celebrity waxworks. Six years after it was filmed, a local TV story on an exhibit by Arlindo Armacollo has gone viral for the distorted depictions and the gushing reporter's commentary. Armacollo's work is the latest in an increasingly long list of celebrity sculptures that have gained fame for not quite nailing the brief

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Covid sleuth shames Brazil’s party people as deaths pass 200,000

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Anonymous activist says he’s no ‘moral watchdog’ but vows to continue effort in hope of persuading revellers to stay home

Fuelled by black coffee, yellow-tipped cigarettes and white, incandescent rage, the faceless sleuth lurks on social media poised to unmask his next target.

“It’s outrageous, bizarre, it’s horrifying – a collective genocide,” fumed the twentysomething activist who burns the midnight oil scouring the internet for footage of parties being thrown despite a rapidly deteriorating Covid crisis that has killed more than 200,000 Brazilians.

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¡Populista! review: Chávez, Castro and Latin America’s ‘pink wave’ leaders

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BBC reporter Will Grant has produced an excellent look at the group of strongmen who came from left field

If there was ever a surreal start to a trip to Cuba, it was the one that coincided with the news Fidel Castro had died. That was what I woke up to on 26 November 2016, hours before my husband and I were due to fly to Havana. A day later, we found ourselves in what seemed like an endless queue under a blazing autumn sun, waiting to enter Castro’s memorial at the Jose Martí monument in the Plaza de la Revolución.

Related: Sisters in Hate review: tough but vital read on the rise of racist America

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Brazilian beef farms ‘used workers kept in conditions similar to slavery’

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Workers on farms supplying world’s biggest meat firms allegedly paid £8 a day and housed in shacks with no toilets or running water

Brazilian companies and slaughterhouses including the world’s largest meat producer, JBS, sourced cattle from supplier farms that made use of workers kept in slavery-like conditions, according to a new report.

Workers on cattle farms supplying slaughterhouses earned as little as £8 a day and lived in improvised shacks with no bathrooms, toilets, running water or kitchens, according to a report from Brazilian investigative agency Repórter Brasil.

Since 1995, the report said, 55,000 Brazilian workers have been rescued by government inspectors from “situations similar to slavery”. While the number of investigations has fallen in recent years – 118 workers were freed in 2018, compared with 1,045 a decade earlier – that does not mean the situation has improved, just that inspections have been reduced, it noted.

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The vagina dialogues: 33-metre artwork draws far right’s ire in Brazil

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Juliana Notari’s hillside sculpture sparks clash between Bolsonaro-supporting right and leftwing cultural community

A 33-metre reinforced concrete vagina has sparked a Bolsonarian backlash in Brazil, with supporters of the country’s far-right president clashing with leftwing art admirers over the installation.

The handmade sculpture, entitled Diva, was unveiled by visual artist Juliana Notari on Saturday at a rural art park on the grounds of a former sugar mill in Pernambuco, one of Brazil’s most culturally vibrant states.

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The world in 2021 – how global politics will change this year

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Donald Trump’s departure will alter the face of geopolitics. The climate crisis and Covid response will affect all nations – while others face very particular challenges. Observer correspondents examine the 12 months ahead

A potent mix of hope and fear accompanies the start of 2021 in most of the world. Scientists have created several vaccines for a disease that didn’t even have a name this time last year. But many countries, including the UK and the US, are still stumbling through the deadliest period of the pandemic.

The shadow of Covid will not begin to lift, even in richer countries, for months. Britain was the first to approve a vaccine and has secured extensive supplies, yet Boris Johnson’s suggestion that life might be returning to normal by Easter is widely seen as optimistic. Other countries, particularly in the south, face a long wait to get vaccines, and help paying for them. The rebuilding of economies shattered by Covid everywhere will be slow; even countries that managed to contain it have taken a hit, from Vietnam to New Zealand.

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‘I’m fascinated by power, force and bravery’: the woman who surfed the biggest recorded wave of 2020

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Seven years ago, she was nearly killed in pursuit of the sport she loves, but she defied expert’s predictions and made a stunning comeback

In the photographs of her record-breaking ride, the Brazilian surfer Maya Gabeira is a tiny blade on the water, cutting a line of white spume down the deep ridge of the vast grey wave that climbs behind her. The wave in question measured 22.4 metres (73.5ft), the highest ever surfed by a woman, the first to be measured and verified by Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and a couple of feet greater than the one surfed by her nearest rival. It is also the biggest wave measured this year, surfed by man or woman.

Gabeira, who broke her own previous Guinness world record of 68ft, attributes her achievement to what she calls “taking a critical line”. In short, she takes her board to the fiercest and tallest part of the wave, “where the most powerful energy is, where it is actually breaking”. This, she says, is how “you put value into your wave”.

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‘Miners out, Covid out’: threats to indigenous reserve in Brazil grow

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Illegal goldminers supported by Bolsonaro bring environmental destruction and coronavirus to Yanomami communities

A petition with 439,000 signatures demanding “miners out, Covid out” of the Yanomami reserve in Roraima state was handed to Brazil’s congress this month as shamanic images were projected on to the building’s exterior. With Covid-19 ravaging the Yanomami population since the first death from the disease was reported in April, the existence of the “garimpeiros”, or goldminers, has brought even greater threats to the reserve.

The estimated 20,000 miners were already blamed for bringing alcohol and prostitution into the Yanomami reserve, where they have worked illegally for decades, clearing forests and polluting rivers with mercury used in separating out the gold. The destruction wreaked by their work has increased since far-right president Jair Bolsonaro took office – and they have kept working during the pandemic.

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Rio de Janeiro mayor arrested in corruption investigation

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Marcelo Crivella arrested days before leaving office, in blow to Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro

Police have arrested Rio de Janeiro’s outgoing mayor Marcelo Crivella, an ally of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, in an investigation into alleged corruption at city hall.

Four carloads of police and prosecutors arrived at the mayor’s house in the affluent Barra da Tijuca neighbourhood before 6am, the website of O Globo newspaper said.

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Rio de Janeiro mayor charged with corruption

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Bolsonaro ally Marcelo Crivella accused of leading ‘well-structured and complex criminal organisation’

Rio de Janeiro’s outgoing mayor Marcelo Crivella, an ally of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been arrested and charged with corruption.

Four carloads of police and prosecutors arrived at the mayor’s house in the affluent Barra da Tijuca neighbourhood before 6am.

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Brazilian woman forced into domestic slavery and marriage freed after 40 years

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Professor and family face up to eight years in prison for their treatment of woman given to them as a child

A Brazilian woman enslaved as a maid from the age of eight for almost four decades and forced into marriage has been rescued in a rare crackdown on domestic slavery.

The 46-year-old was found living in a small room in an apartment in Patos de Minas, in the south eastern state of Minas Gerais. She had worked for the family for most of her life without pay or any time off, according to labour inspectors.

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‘Like nothing seen in nature before’: strange dinosaur has scientists enthralled

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The highly unusual Ubirajara jubatus boasted a mane of ‘hair-like structions’ and two ‘ribbon-like features’, researchers say

About 110 million years ago along the shores of an ancient lagoon in what is now north-eastern Brazil, a two-legged, chicken-sized Cretaceous period dinosaur made a living hunting insects and perhaps small vertebrates like frogs and lizards.

On the inside, it was ordinary, with a skeleton similar to many small dinosaurs from the preceding Jurassic Period, scientists said on Tuesday. On the outside, it was anything but.

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‘I speak Italian with a Croydon accent’: reporters on their language skills

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Our foreign correspondents reflect on the practical and cultural importance of fluency in a country’s native tongue

During the worst of the coronavirus outbreak in China, people described to us deeply personal and traumatic experiences – losing their parents, suffering the death of a child, being harassed and intimidated for trying to speak out. Having these conversations in Mandarin was important not just for capturing nuance and detail but for a sense of empathy.

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Bolsonaro branded ‘homicidally negligent’ over Brazil’s vaccine planning

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President accused of ignoring China-produced Covid vaccine because of political expediency

Jair Bolsonaro is facing a furious backlash over what critics are calling his “homicidally negligent” failure to prepare a coherent coronavirus vaccination programme as Brazil’s death toll again soars.

More than 181,000 Brazilians have died from the disease the president calls “a little flu”, with Latin America’s biggest economy now careering into a painful second wave.

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Boeing 737 Max back in the skies after fatal crashes that killed 346

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Brazilian airline Gol has resumed commercial flights using the plane grounded globally since March 2019

Commercial passenger flights have resumed on Boeing’s 737 Max aircraft for the first time in 20 months, after Brazilian airline Gol resumed operations using the plane.

The aircraft was grounded globally in March 2019 after two fatal plane crashes in the space of six months, which killed a total of 346 people.

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