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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...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.
Continue reading...Shooting of cousins aged just four and seven, allegedly by police, heightens calls for national reckoning over ‘genocide’
The shooting of two young black girls – who had between them enjoyed fewer than 11 years of life – has sparked outrage in Brazil and intensified the debate over police violence and structural racism in a country still grappling with the legacy of slavery.
Emily Victoria Moreira dos Santos and Rebeca Beatriz Rodrigues Santos, cousins aged four and seven, were killed on Friday night as they played outside their grandmother’s home in Barro Vermelho, a redbrick favela on Rio’s rundown northern fringe.
Continue reading...Analysis: Amid rising trade tensions, Chinese interests are keen to develop a high-quality deposit in Guinea. Analysts warn any restrictions on Australian sales to China would ‘send shockwaves through the market’
Across China and around the clock, furnaces fuelled by Australian iron ore pump out the steel the country needs to build its way out of the coronavirus downturn.
But as China’s trade war with Australia has become louder, working its way from unofficial stoppages to swingeing tariffs on barley and wine, so too have rumblings that the country may slow or end its use of Australian ore.
Continue reading...Bank robbers armed with military-grade weapons have laid siege to a city in southern Brazil, torching vehicles, kidnapping government workers, blowing up a bank and engaging in a two-hour gun battle as the mayor begged residents to stay indoors.
Mobile phone footage taken by terrified residents showed gunmen patrolling the streets of Criciúma as gunfire echoed across the city. After the ordeal, which lasted over two hours, the group made off, leaving hundreds of thousands of reais in banknotes littering the streets.
Continue reading...An area seven times larger than Greater London has been lost in what one activist called a ‘humiliating and shameful’ destruction
A vast expanse of Amazon rainforest seven times larger than Greater London was destroyed over the last year as deforestation surged to a 12-year high under Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.
Figures released by the Brazilian space institute, Inpe, on Monday showed at least 11,088 sq km of rainforest was razed between August 2019 and July this year – the highest figure since 2008.
Continue reading...Bolsonaro ally Marcelo Crivella lost in all of Brazilian city’s 49 constituencies
Rio de Janeiro is rejoicing after voters inflicted a humiliating electoral defeat on a widely loathed neo-Pentecostal bishop considered by some to be the worst mayor in the city’s history.
Marcelo Crivella, a gospel-singing preacher who has branded homosexuality a “terrible evil” and had shunned Rio’s annual carnival, lost in every one of the city’s 49 constituencies in Sunday’s run-off vote.
Continue reading...A landslide in Sunday’s election is predicted to sweep away the city’s ‘disastrous’ conservative leader
Tarcísio Motta is one of Rio’s best-known lefties – but when the city elects its new leader on Sunday, he’ll be voting for the right.
“We’ve got a mayor who’s an enemy of the city, and this can’t go on. It’s ludicrous,” complained the socialist councillor, one of millions of exasperated locals desperate to evict the neo-Pentecostal bishop Marcelo Crivella from city hall after what is widely regarded as a dismal four-year reign.
Continue reading...Tesco, Lidl, Asda, McDonald’s and Nando’s all source chicken fed on soya from Cerrado tropical biome region
Supermarkets and fast food outlets are selling chicken fed on imported soya linked to thousands of forest fires and at least 300 sq miles (800 sq km) of tree clearance in the Brazilian Cerrado, a joint cross-border investigation has revealed.
Tesco, Lidl, Asda, McDonald’s, Nando’s and other high street retailers all source chicken fed on soya supplied by trading behemoth Cargill, the US’s second largest private company. The combination of minimal protection for the Cerrado – a globally important carbon sink and wildlife habitat – with an opaque supply chain and confusing labelling systems, means that shoppers may be inadvertently contributing to its destruction.
Continue reading...Days of protests erupted after video showed Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas, who later died, being attacked by white security guard
The UN has said that the deadly beating of a black man by white guards in Brazil exemplified “structural racism”, and called for an independent investigation and urgent reforms in the country.
Several days of protest erupted in Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, after video footage last week showed 40-year-old welder Joao Alberto Silveira Freitas being punched in the face and head by a supermarket security guard while another guard held him. Freitas later died and the two men who attacked him are currently being investigated for homicide.
Continue reading...João Alberto Silveira Freitas was allegedly attacked by security guards at a Carrefour store in Porto Alegre
A black man who died after being beaten by supermarket security guards in the city of Porto Alegre on the eve of Black Consciousness Day has sparked outrage across Brazil after videos of the incident circulated on social media.
Footage showed João Alberto Silveira Freitas being punched in the face just outside the doors of a Carrefour supermarket, late on Thursday. Other clips showed Freitas’ being kneeled on.
Continue reading...A black man has died after being beaten by supermarket security guards in the city of Porto Alegre on the eve of Black Consciousness Day. Videos of the incident circulated on social media and have sparked outrage and protests across Brazil, with people entering Carrefour supermarkets and demanding justice for Freitas
Continue reading...Objection to virtual meetings threatens next year’s conference in China, say environmental campaigners
Brazil has been accused of obstructing global efforts to protect nature following a row over the use of virtual meeting technology to overcome Covid-19 restrictions.
The dispute threatens a key United Nations conference in Kunming, China, next year, which aims to set new targets to protect the Earth’s natural life support systems.
Continue reading...Removing far-right president is top priority for many Brazilian leftists – but can they build the united front needed to defeat him?
When glad tidings of Donald Trump’s undoing reached Flávio Dino’s 18th-century palace in north-eastern Brazil, he felt delight.
“Trump was such a toxic figure,” said the Communist party governor of Maranhão state, a leading light of the Brazilian left. “Trump’s defeat is a victory for humanity.”
Continue reading...President’s candidates suffer heavy defeats amid resurgence of mainstream parties
Jair Bolsonaro – already smarting from Donald Trump’s defeat – has suffered a further setback after candidates he had championed performed dismally in municipal elections.
Sunday’s vote provided the first electoral opportunity to gauge the health of the Brazilian president’s anti-establishment movement since the populist’s shock election victory in 2018.
Continue reading...Jair Bolsonaro has said Brazil needs to 'stop being a country of sissies' over the Covid pandemic. Speaking at an event where few attendees wore a mask, the Brazilian president claimed he was sorry about coronavirus-related deaths, but "all of us are going to die one day". Taking a swipe at the US president-elect, Joe Biden, who is apparently threatening Brazil with sanctions if fires in the Amazon rainforest are not dealt with, Bolsonaro said that "diplomacy is not enough [...] there must be gunpowder"
US close to 10m cases, with India second on 8.5m cases, followed by Brazil and Russia
The number of coronavirus cases worldwide has passed 50 million, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, which showed that the US, India and Brazil have the highest figures.
A total of 50,052,204 infections had been reported around the world by Sunday evening.
Continue reading...Campaigners say visit was ‘media propaganda’ as officials failed to stop at any devastated rainforest areas
Environmentalists have criticised a three-day tour of the Amazon that the Brazilian government staged for foreign ambassadors as a “sham” and “media propaganda” after it failed to stop at any environmentally devastated areas.
The tour ended on Friday and focused on better-protected areas of the northern Amazon. “The government prepared an itinerary that does not show the reality of the Amazon – the abandonment of indigenous peoples, the land grabbing, the illegal mining and the uncontrolled deforestation. It is a sham,” said Marcio Astrini, executive director of the Climate Observatory, an umbrella group of environmental NGOs.
Continue reading...Flávio Bolsonaro accused of siphoning off employees’ publicly funded wages
Jair Bolsonaro’s eldest son has been formally accused of embezzlement, money laundering, misappropriation of funds and directing a “criminal organisation” as sleaze allegations continue to swirl around the family of Brazil’s far-right president.
Prosecutors in Rio de Janeiro announced late on Tuesday that they had filed the charges against Flávio Bolsonaro, 39, a senator whose affairs have been under the spotlight since the eve of his father’s January 2019 inauguration.
Continue reading...