WP: Brazil’s new president is already deeply unpopular

[NoCalMike]

I have read a couple different things about those fires, but I don't feel confident that I know anything 100% verified as fact yet.  Something I did see that was pretty crazy are videos from San Paulo where the smoke from the fires has turn day time into pitch blackness from the smoke and that city is I think a couple hours from the fires. 

[China]

RAINFOREST ON FIRE  On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe

 

THE RIVER BASIN at the center of Latin America called the Amazon is roughly the size of Australia. Created at the beginning of the world by a smashing of tectonic plates, it was the cradle of inland seas and continental lakes. For the last several million years, it has been blanketed by a teeming tropical biome of 400 billion trees and vegetation so dense and heavy with water, it exhales a fifth of Earth’s oxygen, stores centuries of carbon, and deflects and consumes an unknown but significant amount of solar heat. Twenty percent of the world’s fresh water cycles through its rivers, plants, soils, and air. This moisture fuels and regulates multiple planet-scale systems, including the production of “rivers in the air” by evapotranspiration, a ceaseless churning flux in which the forest breathes its water into great hemispheric conveyer belts that carry it as far as the breadbaskets of Argentina and the American Midwest, where it is released as rain.

 

In the last half-century, about one-fifth of this forest, or some 300,000 square miles, has been cut and burned in Brazil, whose borders contain almost two-thirds of the Amazon basin. This is an area larger than Texas, the U.S. state that Brazil’s denuded lands most resemble, with their post-forest landscapes of silent sunbaked pasture, bean fields, and evangelical churches. This epochal deforestation — matched by harder to quantify but similar levels of forest degradation and fragmentation — has caused measurable disruptions to regional climates and rainfall. It has set loose so much stored carbon that it has negated the forest’s benefit as a carbon sink, the world’s largest after the oceans. Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky.

 

The catastrophic loss of another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest could happen within one generation. It’s happened before. It’s happening now.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[visionary]

 

[No Excuses]

We are pretty much at the point that the most important conversation for climate change is no longer "let's curb emissions" but start building defenses and infrastructure to withstand what's coming this century.

[Bozo the kKklown]

Where are the wealthy people who donated to the Cathedral of Norte Dame?

[visionary]

 

[Bozo the kKklown]

 

[Bozo the kKklown]

 

[visionary]

 

[China]

The Brazilian Amazon is still burning. Who is responsible?

 

“I am under the impression it could have been set by the NGOs because they had asked for money. What was their intention? To bring about problems for Brazil.”

— Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, in a news conference, on Aug. 21, 2019

 

“Dry weather, wind and heat caused the fires to increase greatly throughout the country. ICMBIO and IBAMA brigade members, equipment and aircraft are fully available to the States and already in use.”

— Brazilian Environmental Minister Ricardo Salles, in a tweet, on Aug. 20, 2019

 

“In reality, [the Amazon wildfires are] directly related to trade. The fact that U.S. farmers can’t sell soybeans to China has created an opportunity for Brazil to sell soybeans to China. As a result, farmers are tearing down the Amazon to grow soybeans.”

— Former congressman John Delaney (D-Md.), in an interview, on Aug. 27, 2019

 

As smoke poured into Sao Paulo, Brazil, the fires raging across the Amazon sparked international outrage. Some in the international community were quick to blame Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for the flames. But Bolsonaro pointed to a dozen possible reasons for why the fires intensified, including blaming nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). His environment minister, Ricardo Salles, claimed the weather intensified the blaze. Environmental activists pointed to large agribusinesses. And former congressman John Delaney (Md.), a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, said it was President Trump’s trade war with China that started it all.

 

All of those explanations cannot possibly be accurate simultaneously because some of them seem to contradict each other. So what’s going on here? Let’s dig in.

 

The Facts

Fires in the rainforest don’t start themselves, but that doesn’t mean they are unusual. Every year in the dry season, roughly between August and October, deforestation fires are set by people who clear land for a variety of reasons — farming, ranching, mining, illicit activities, infrastructure.

 

Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which tracks fires in the Amazon, reports that the number of fires detected through September 2019 is up nearly 50 percent from the same period in 2018. (The number updates daily.) That said, the first nine months of 2019 have also seen roughly 10 percent fewer fires than the same period in 2017. Nevertheless, 2019 has seen just over 10,000 more fires than the Brazilian Amazon has seen on average over the past decade.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Bozo the kKklown]

 

 

 

 

[mcsluggo]

this thread title should be changed......  Bolsonaro isn't nearly as unpopular as Dilma Rousseff  was when this thread was started.......... nor is he anywhere near as unpopular as he SHOULD be.... 

[visionary]

3 hours ago, mcsluggo said:

this thread title should be changed......  Bolsonaro isn't nearly as unpopular as Dilma Rousseff  was when this thread was started.......... nor is he anywhere near as unpopular as he SHOULD be.... 

The original article which is what the thread title is from refers to Michel Temer, who replaced Rousseff. 

[China]

Illegal loggers kill Amazon indigenous warrior who guarded forest, wound another

 

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Illegal loggers in the Amazon ambushed an indigenous group that was formed to protect the forest and shot dead a young warrior and wounded another, leaders of the Guajajara tribe in northern Brazil said on Saturday.

 

Paulo Paulino Guajajara, or Lobo (which means ‘wolf’ in Portuguese), was hunting on Friday inside the Arariboia reservation in Maranhao state when he was attacked and shot in the head. Another Guajajara, Laercio, was wounded but escaped, they said.

 

The clash comes amid an increase in invasions of reservations by illegal loggers and miners since right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office this year and vowed to open up protected indigenous lands to economic development.

 

“The Bolsonaro government has indigenous blood on its hands,” Brazil’s pan-indigenous organization APIB, which represents many of the country’s 900,000 native people, said in a statement on Saturday.

 

“The increase in violence in indigenous territories is a direct result of his hateful speeches and steps taken against our people,” APIB said.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Bozo the kKklown]

Lula da Silva is about to be released from

prison. Get in!

 

 

Edited November 8, 2019 by BenningRoadSkin

[China]

Brazil: Netflix told to remove film depicting Jesus as gay

 

A judge in Brazil has ruled that a film depicting Jesus as gay must be removed from the TV streaming service Netflix.

 

The film, The First Temptation of Christ, infuriated fervent Christians in the country.

 

Two million people signed a petition calling for it to be axed, and the production company was attacked with Molotov ****tails last month.

 

In the ruling against Netflix, the judge said: "The right to freedom of expression... is not absolute".

 

However, the ban is only temporary while a final decision is made.

 

Why has the film caused uproar?

The parody film, which was run as a Christmas special, was created by Brazilian YouTube comedy group Porta dos Fundos.

 

Many of the country's conservative Christians were angered by the portrayal of Jesus bringing home a presumed boyfriend to meet his family.

 

On Christmas Eve, a group attacked Porta dos Fundos's office in Rio de Janeiro with fire bombs.

 

A judge in Rio de Janeiro ordered Netflix to take the film down, the BBC's Daniel Gallas reports from São Paulo.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

As coronavirus deaths surge in Brazil, calls for Bolsonaro’s impeachment intensify

 

On Sunday, the day Brazil hit the half-million mark in confirmed COVID-19 cases and inched closer to 30,000 deaths, President Jair Bolsonaro flew in a camouflaged military helicopter over a rally in the capital, Brasilia, waving to protesters who held banners calling for the closure of the country’s congress.

 

He landed and greeted supporters, shaking hands and carrying a young boy on his shoulders. The far-right leader then paraded on horseback, smiling at fans who chanted and waved signs urging the closing of the country’s Supreme Court. Bolsonaro didn’t wear a mask and neither did his fans, even as face coverings are mandatory in Brasilia.

 

As Brazil’s coronavirus crisis deepens, Bolsonaro continues to downplay the pandemic, igniting widespread pro-democracy movements that are fueling a push for his impeachment.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Brazil's Bolsonaro calls surging Amazon fires a 'lie'

 

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday angrily denied the existence of fires in the Amazon rainforest, calling it a “lie,” despite data produced by his own government showing that thousands of fires are surging across the region.

 

Bolsonaro last year similarly denied a spike in fires that provoked a global outcry, with the right-wing populist trading barbs with French President Emmanuel Macron and other world leaders.

The president’s comments on Tuesday come even as Reuters witnesses in the remote Amazon town of Apui observed smoke blanketing the horizon in all directions during the day and large fires setting the sky aglow at night.

 

Fires in Brazil’s Amazon for the month of August hit a nine-year high in 2019 and this month so far looks even worse. More than 10,000 fires have been recorded in the first 10 days of August, up 17% from the same period a year ago, according to data from the country’s national space research agency Inpe.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

As if 2020 wasn't already bad enough:

 

Let’s Check in on the Amazon, and Damn, That’s Not Good

 

Major fires in the Brazilian Amazon are being set at an unprecedented rate. Between May 28 and Aug. 25, 2020, more than 500 major forest fires blazed across roughly 912,000 acres, new satellite data from the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) shows. That’s on par with the inferno that’s consumed California this month.

 

MAAP defines fires’ severity based on their aerosol index, a measure of the presence of levels of particles of smoke and ash in the air. Shockingly, nearly half of these forest fires took place in just the past two weeks. The largest of the documented blazes was one in Northern Brazil on August 17. That single fire alone burned nearly 25,605 acres of land.

 

Unlike the ones currently scorching California, these forest fires weren’t lit by lightning. Instead, they were set by people, mostly people looking to clear land for mining, cattle ranching, and soybean farming industries. And most of this clearing is conducted illegally, by actors with ties to a years-old criminal network in the country.

 

“Deforestation today has very strong ties to organized crime,” Claudio Angelo, head of communications at Brazil’s Climate Observatory, said in an email.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Feds pushed to abandon trade talks with Brazil over Amazon deforestation

 

 

OTTAWA — The federal government is being urged to halt trade talks with Brazil after another summer of record-breaking fires in the Amazon rainforest.

 

New data from Brazil’s own space agency show the fire devastation in the rainforest even worse this year than in 2019, when 30 per cent more of the forest was destroyed compared to the year before.

 

Between January and the end of July, an area almost twice the size of Prince Edward Island had burned, and recent reports show the trend continued in August.

 

France and Germany have both halted further movement to ratify Europe’s free trade deal with the Mercosur bloc, which includes Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. Greenpeace Canada campaign manager Reykia Fick said Canada needs to pull out of trade talks with Mercosur too.

 

“The government cannot be rewarding the destruction of the Amazon,” she said. “It cannot be opening the market to precisely the products that are driving the devastating Amazon fires and ongoing deforestation and destruction that we see, and claim to be responsible about climate change.”

 

Click on the link for the full article

[China]

Police find cash hidden between Bolsonaro ally's buttocks

 

Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to portray himself as an anti-corruption crusader have suffered another blow after police reportedly seized a wad of banknotes from between the clenched buttocks of one of his allies.

 

Chico Rodrigues, the Brazilian president’s deputy leader in the senate, was reportedly caught with the concealed bundle on Wednesday during a police search of his home. The raid was part of an operation against the suspected misappropriation of public funds for fighting Covid-19.

 

The Estado de São Paulo newspaper said two sources told it 30,000 reais (more than £4,100) were stashed in the underpants of Rodrigues, a senator for the Amazon state of Roraima.

 

“To give you a sense of just how preposterous the situation was, some of the recovered notes were stained with faeces,” reported Revista Crusoé, the conservative magazine that broke the story.

 

Click on the link for the full article 

[China]

Brazil President Bolsonaro Has a Bizarre Warning About Covid-19 Vaccine: 'If You Turn into Alligator...'

 

Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro has said that he will not need the Covid-19 vaccine since he has already had coronavirus and therefore, Covid-19 antibodies as well.

 

According to Brazilian media, UOL, Bolsonaro also warned those planning to take the Covid-19 vaccine in the country that if they turn into alligators or grow beards post-inoculation, then it is their problem.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Larry]

Points for creativity.  

 

Trump usually has to have somebody else come up with goofball justifications to harm the public health.  

 

[Jabbyrwock]

1 hour ago, China said:

 

According to Brazilian media, UOL, Bolsonaro also warned those planning to take the Covid-19 vaccine in the country that if they turn into alligators or grow beards post-inoculation, then it is their problem.

 

 

New Anti-vaxxer spokesman:

 

 

[visionary]

https://twitter.com/afp/status/1346796156504817665?s=21

 

 

 

Edited January 6, 2021 by visionary