The Pantanal wetland – home to the hyacinth macaw – is suffering its worst blazes in decades, most probably started by humans
The world’s biggest refuge for endangered hyacinth macaws has been devastated by a historic fire in the Brazilian Pantanal.
The Pantanal, a vast tropical wetland straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia and Paraguay, is currently suffering its worst fires in more than two decades, with nearly 12% of its vegetation reportedly already lost.
Continue reading...Spain sees more than 3,700 new cases as Italy records 642 new infections; Iran death toll exceeds 20,000; strict restrictions imposed on Greek island
The 25th edition of France’s Colmar Jazz Festival, scheduled for September, has been postponed until next year due to the coronavirus epidemic, the city said in a statement on Wednesday.
“Current progress in the health crisis does not allow us today, realistically, to consider staging concerts in September,” the statement says, adding that this edition of the festival will now take place in 2021.
American Indians and Alaska Natives have been hit harder by Covid-19 than the white US population and have been more likely to become infected by coronavirus at a younger age, a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report showed on Wednesday.
The incidence of laboratory-confirmed Covid-19 cases among people identified as American Indians or Alaska Natives was 3.5 times that of non-Hispanic whites, making them one of the racial and ethnic minority groups at highest risk, according to the study based on data from 23 US states from 22 January to 3 July.
Continue reading...Luiz Henrique Mandetta accuses president of playing a ‘pivotal’ role in steering economy towards catastrophe
Historians will savage Jair Bolsonaro for leading Brazilians into a deadly “canyon” with his shambling, self-interested and anti-scientific response to Covid-19, according to his former health minister.
In an interview with the Guardian, Luiz Henrique Mandetta accused the Brazilian president of playing a “pivotal” role in steering Latin America’s largest economy towards a catastrophe. Bolsonaro played politics with citizens’ lives at a time of global crisis, he said, as Brazil’s death toll rose to more than 105,000. Only the US has suffered more deaths.
Continue reading...Over 10,000 blazes seen so far in August, with response of President Bolsonaro condemned as ineffective
The Amazon has seen the worst start to the fire season in a decade, with 10,136 fires spotted in the first 10 days of August, a 17% rise on last year.
Analysis of Brazilian government figures by Greenpeace showed fires increasing by 81% in federal reserves compared with the same period last year. Coming a year after soaring Amazon fires caused an international crisis, the new figures raised fears this year’s fire season could be even worse than last year’s.
Continue reading...Informed by baile funk, metal and more, Linn da Quebrada and Jup do Bairro – with producer Badsista – are dodging racism, transphobia and music industry resistance to tell their own stories
Jup do Bairro and Linn da Quebrada first met at a festival in São Paulo through mutual friends. It didn’t go well, Jup says while we wait for Linn to join our Zoom call. “I looked at her and joked: Is it Linn for linda?”, meaning beautiful in Portuguese. “I remember she rolled her eyes and I thought: Yikes, game over!”
But the two musicians kept running into each other. “Linn often performed at the same parties I was invited to and since we both lived far from the city centre, we’d always wait for the bus together,” Jup says. In the end, they became close friends and eventually musical partners.
Continue reading...US considers blocking infected citizens returning; Australian outbreak trends down; Singapore economy plunges 43%
Nearly five months to the day since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, Covid-19 infections have passed 20 million cases. In acknowledging the milestone, the health body’s chief warned against despair, saying if the virus could be suppressed effectively, “we can safely open up societies”.
Global cases reached one million at the start of April. By 22 May, there were 5 million cases. That figure had doubled to 10 million cases by the end of June, and, seven weeks later, it had doubled again to 20 million infections.
Continue reading...Indigenous leader Célia Xakriabá and Vagina Monologues author V discuss Brazil’s biodiversity crisis and why this is the century of the indigenous woman
Célia Xakriabá is the voice of a new generation of female indigenous leaders who are leading the fight against the destruction of Brazil’s forests both in the Amazon and the lesser known Cerrado, a savannah that covers a fifth of the country. V, formerly Eve Ensler, is the award-winning author of the Vagina Monologues, an activist and founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against all women and girls and the Earth. The two recently held a conversation in which V asked Xakriabá about what is happening to Brazil’s biodiversity and indigenous peoples, and why women are the key to change.
V: Many people, especially in the west, don’t really understand what’s happening to the Cerrado in Brazil. Can you tell us what’s happening to the forests?
C: It’s very tough at this moment. Every minute one person dies of Covid-19, but also every minute one tree is cut. And whenever a tree is cut, a part of us is cut, a part of us also dies, because the territory dies and with no territory there is no air, no good air for everyone in the world. People can’t breathe. So all this Covid contamination, it gets to the territory through the miners, the gold miners, the loggers and the rangers. And now that we are getting to August, we get even more worried about the fires, all the fires that burned the Amazon last year. It’s going to come back.
Cases in Britain rise over 1,000 a day for first time since June; one in every 65 Americans has tested positive; US health secretary praises Taiwan
Five months since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus crisis a global pandemic, the number of Covid cases globally is nearing 20m, with almost 730,000 known deaths.
The current number of confirmed infections stands at 19,792,519, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, with total new cases daily averaging more than 250,000.
Continue reading...Born in Rio’s favelas, Anitta became Brazil’s biggest pop star. Then a political awakening made her even more influential. She talks Bolsonaro, Black Lives Matter and bisexuality
Anitta had imagined that this summer would be a break: a period in which she could record new music. It would have followed 10 years in which she became Brazil’s biggest pop star, including stadium tours, a Netflix docuseries about her life, and hits with Madonna, Snoop Dogg and Rita Ora – all of which skyrocketed her from a Rio favela to fame. Instead, she’s been quarantining at home with her five dogs, infiltrating her country’s politics and being touted as a future Brazilian president.
I speak to her in early June, just as the coronavirus pandemic is tightening its grip in Brazil. (The country’s death toll is now the second-highest in the world.) Demonstrators have gathered to denounce the president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has urged governors to open states while dismissing Covid-19 as “a little flu” and reminding Brazilians that “we’re all going to die one day”. Some of the protests have expanded to include the issues of systemic racism and police brutality that plague Brazil’s population, which is 50.7% black or mixed race, according to a 2010 census. The country is hot with unrest.
Continue reading...Luiz Henrique Mandetta says the Brazilian president’s ‘misguided’ handling of the crisis has failed to comfort families
Jair Bolsonaro’s former health minister has accused the Brazilian president of failing to offer “a single word of comfort” to the families of the 100,000 Brazilians who have lost their lives to Covid-19.
In an interview marking Brazil’s latest Covid-19 milepost, Luiz Henrique Mandetta – who was sacked in April after challenging the president’s internationally condemned coronavirus response – expressed consternation that Brazil’s leaders had failed to recognise so much pain.
Continue reading...Responding to Greenpeace campaign to cut links to Brazilian meat giant JBS, supermarket calls on government to ensure all UK food is deforestation-free
Tesco has called on the UK government to order food companies to ensure all food sold in the UK is deforestation-free. The move comes in response to a new Greenpeace campaign calling on the supermarket to cut links to JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, over its alleged links to farms involved in Amazon deforestation.
The supermarket says the UK should introduce due diligence across supply chains to monitor for deforestation. Germany is also weighing up a due diligence law on supply chains, reportedly supported by Angela Merkel. And more than half of Britons would consider rejecting meat products linked to deforestation, a YouGov poll for Greenpeace has found.
Continue reading...Global Witness campaigners warn of risk of further killings during Covid-19 lockdowns
A record number of people were killed last year for defending their land and environment, according to research that highlights the routine murder of activists who oppose extractive industries driving the climate crisis and the destruction of nature.
More than four defenders were killed every week in 2019, according to an annual death toll compiled by the independent watchdog Global Witness, amid growing evidence of opportunistic killings during the Covid-19 lockdown in which activists were left as “sitting ducks” in their own homes.
Continue reading...Top investment house delists world biggest meat producer over lack of commitment to sustainability issues
The investment arm of northern Europe’s largest financial services group has dropped JBS, the world’s biggest meat processer, from its portfolio. The Brazilian company is now excluded from assets sold by Nordea Asset Management, which controls a €230bn (£210bn) fund, according to Eric Pedersen, its head of responsible investments.
The decision was taken about a month ago, over the meat giant’s links to farms involved in Amazon deforestation, its response to the Covid-19 outbreak, past corruption scandals, and frustrations over engagement with the company on such issues. “The exclusion of JBS is quite dramatic for us because it is from all of our funds, not just the ones labelled ESG,” Pedersen said.
Continue reading...Photographs by employee appear to show company trucks being used to transport cattle from allegedly prohibited cattle farm
New evidence appears to connect JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, to cattle supplied from a farm in the Brazilian Amazon which is under sanction for illegal deforestation.
This is the fifth time in a year that allegations have surfaced connecting the company to Amazon farmers linked with illegal deforestation.
Continue reading...More than 160,000 people have died but from Mexico to Brazil, social networks are awash with quack cures and conspiracies
For months Gustavo Andrade has been battling to convince his parishioners to take Covid-19 seriously.
Related: Desperate Bolivians seek out toxic bleach falsely touted as Covid-19 cure
Continue reading...An intergalactic refugee travels through time to modern-day Brazil in an eerie tale that has real-life corruption at its heart
Brazilian director Adirley Queirós here cobbles together something comparable, though far more lo-fi, to Wong Kar-wai’s 2046: a haunted, backwards-looking sci-fi assembled from textures of the past, which encourages you to pick through the wreckage of political ideology it strews in its wake. Wellington Abreu plays WA4, a Mad Max-style refugee from outer space who, as punishment for an illegal land occupation on his own planet, is sent to Earth to assassinate the real-life former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek on the inauguration day of the capital city, Brasília, in 1961. But his ship crash-lands in the present day, in the satellite city of Ceilândia, an overflow enclave for the dispossessed that represents how the country’s utopia has been thwarted.
Continue reading...Alcoholism and depression ‘part and parcel’ for those who bury the bodies of Covid-19 victims – more than 80,000 so far
Miguel Braga has done many things in life: sold lollipops, hawked cleaning products, guarded cars. This year, as Covid-19 shook Brazil, he turned his hand to burying bodies.
“Someone has to do it,” said the 30-year-old father-of-two, who earns £200 ($250) a month carving 2m x 1m resting places into the caramel coloured soils of Latin America’s largest cemetery.
Continue reading...Some central American nations seeing highest weekly increase in cases; official UK death toll now stands at 45,422
The Nobel Foundation, which manages the Nobel Prizes, on Tuesday cancelled its traditional December banquet because of the coronavirus pandemic and said the award ceremonies would be held in “new forms”, AFP reports.
This is the first time since 1956 that the lavish banquet has been cancelled, according to the foundation. The event traditionally marks the end of the so-called Nobel Week, when the year’s prize-winners are invited to Swedish capital Stockholm for talks and the award ceremony.
Joe Biden, in a scathing speech in his campaign to become the next US president, said Donald Trump had ‘quit’ on US citizens and did not care about America.
In a speech on his plan for the economy, in which he promised to expand access to preschool for working families, directly linking the need for affordable childcare to America’s economic recovery, Biden said Trump was not taking the public health crisis seriously:
Continue reading...€750bn EU Covid-19 recovery plan agreed in early morning talks; Trump to resume daily briefings, backs face masks as ‘patriotic’; two Brazil ministers test positive. Follow latest updates
Passengers of China-bound flights must provide negative Covid-19 test results before boarding, China’s aviation authority has said.
The Chinese government has sought to reduce the risk of imported coronavirus cases as international travel resumes.
The €750bn deal is the “most important economic decision since the introduction of the euro,” according to the EU’s economy commissioner Paolo Gentiloni, who said the most difficult challenge for the commission starts now.
Il vertice infinito è finito con un’intesa. #NextGenerationEU è la più importante decisione economica dall’introduzione dell’euro. Per la Commissione, che ha proposto il piano, comincia la sfida più difficile. #21luglio L’Europa è più forte delle proprie divisioni.
Continue reading...São Paulo is transformed into a spooky fairytale landscape in this elegant, unsettling tale of a pregnant woman and her prospective employee
There’s an enjoyably inscrutable performance at the heart of this Brazilian fairytale for grownups. Clara (Isabél Zuaa), an unsmiling mystery women, arrives at the luxurious São Paulo apartment of pregnant Ana (Marjorie Estiano), to be interviewed for the position of nanny. But is that really the role on offer? And is Clara an entirely honest applicant?
The first third of this two-hour-plus film keeps us wondering. It’s clear that something is off between the women, but impossible to determine where the balance of power lies. Is this a Rosemary’s Baby-style horror about satanic foetus worship? A Parasite-like study of the subversive intimacy between domestic servant and employer? Or some unholy combination of the two? Then, with all the sprightly mischief of one of Ana’s country-music workout videos, the plot dances off again, in an entirely different direction.
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