"It was an emotional reaction. I never imagined the gravity of it all."

Said Agostina Páez, a white Argentine woman, on trial for something she did when she was a tourist in Brazil.

She's quoted in "When Racism Is a Crime: Brazil Puts a Tourist on Trial for Word and Gesture/An Argentine woman, who is white, could face years in prison after being accused of racism. The case has set off intense debate in Argentina and Brazil" (NYT).

The video, recorded in January by an employee of the bar, showed Agostina Páez imitating a monkey and uttering a racist slur as she walked away.... Ms. Páez has said, online and in interviews, that the bar overcharged her and two Argentine friends. Then, as the women left, she claimed, the employees made obscene gestures toward them. 

Security camera footage from the bar, reviewed by The New York Times, appears to show an employee taunting the tourists as they were leaving the bar.

Here's the seemingly trivial interplay:

A statement from the prosecutor: "Brazil is being painted as this authoritarian country when we are only seeking justice for the harm done."

"Because women are doing it and women are the principal actors in this, it’s been stigmatized differently.... just another way to regulate women’s lives."

Said Camila Infanger, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of São Paulo, quoted in "Extremely Lifelike Dolls Cause a Frenzy in Brazil/To some, the dolls, known as reborn dolls, provide comfort, escape or just plain fun. But politicians across Brazil have tried to pass bills banning the dolls from public spaces" (NYT).

What's the "frenzy" supposedly in need of a legislative solution?

"I know for some people, a joke can be a cure and awaken good feelings, while for others, it can be a trigger and bring bad feelings."

"But I think it’s very unjust and even arrogant that someone’s optional pain could serve as a justification to impede the smile of others."

Said the Brazilian comedian, Leo Lins, quoted in "Brazilian comedian sentenced to 8 years in prison for ‘bigoted’ jokes/The ruling against comedian Leo Lins for jokes told in 2022 is shaping up as the next front in Brazil’s escalating struggle over freedom of expression" (WaP0).

From the judge who imposed that 8-year sentence: "Freedom of expression is not absolute nor unlimited.... When there is a confrontation between the fundamental precept of liberty of expression and the principles of human dignity and judicial equality, the latter should win out."

"Three major events have shaken up the social-media world in the past two weeks."

"First, French authorities detained Pavel Durov, the iconoclastic billionaire behind the online platform Telegram. Then, a judge suspended the microblogging service X in Brazil. Soon after, a federal appeals court in Pennsylvania ruled that the mother of a 10-year-old child who died copying a TikTok self-asphyxiation video can sue the service, circumventing a blanket legal immunity the company has long claimed. While each of these events took place in a different country with its own laws, together they demonstrate a sudden shift in the balance of power between governments and technology companies.... Finding the right balance between user safety and free expression will not be easy. It will require investing in existing institutions like the Federal Trade Commission to strengthen their capacity to check digital authoritarianism, anti-competitive behavior and anti-consumer business models or features, and building new ones that lay out bright lines for transparency and accountability online...."

Writes Alexander B. Howard, the founder of Civic Texts, in "Has the Tide Turned for TikTok, Telegram and X?" (NYT).

"The free show... was a grand finale to the pop superstar’s latest world tour, which has delivered 80 performances since last October...."

"[C]oncert crowd sizes can be difficult to gauge; Riotur, the municipality’s tourism department, estimated that 1.6 million people flooded onto the 2.4-mile stretch of sand on Saturday that had been turned into a roughly $12 million playground surrounding the 8,700-square-foot stage. It was the culmination of days of Madonna-mania in the city, where talk of the singer, 65, was inescapable. Her songs spilled out of stores and car stereos. Fans assembled outside her hotel and shouted her name. Updates about the concert, which was broadcast on the network Globo TV, dominated local media reports...."

From "Madonna Brings Massive Free Concert to Rio, Capping Celebration Tour/The pop superstar performed a final date on her global trek marking four decades of hits: a set on Copacabana Beach before the largest live crowd of her career" (NYT).

"'Here we are, the most beautiful place in the world,' Madonna announced.... 'This is magic.'... 'You have always been there for me,' she said. 'That flag: that green-and-yellow flag, I see it everywhere. I feel it in my heart.'"

"Modernist furniture was burned, portraits defaced, sculptures decapitated and ceramics smashed. Carpets were found soaked with water..."

"... from the buildings’ sprinkler systems, as well as with urine. The rioters — die-hard supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro who refuse to accept his election defeat — marred the iconic marble ramp leading up the presidential palace with scratches... Into a historic wooden table at the Supreme Court they carved 'Supreme are the people'.... Among the artworks destroyed was a 17th-century clock made by Balthazar Martinot.... A 60-year-old bronze sculpture of a flautist by Bruno Giorgi was also trashed... Vandals pitched rocks through the canvas of a mural by Emiliano Di Calvalcanti. The presidential palace said in its statement that the painting, 'As Mulatas,' is valued at some $1.5 million.... 'The damage was not random, it was obviously deliberate,' Rogerio Carvalho, the presidential palace’s curator, said in an interview while sitting before the disfigured painting. The work 'was perforated in seven places using rocks taken from the square with a pickaxe. Which is to say, there is a movement of intolerance toward what this palace represents.'"

From "Brazil rioters destroyed priceless artistic treasures in assault on capital city" (NY Post).

AND: In other attack-on-art-news: "As Russians Steal Ukraine’s Art, They Attack Its Identity, Too/Russian forces have looted tens of thousands of pieces, including avant-garde oil paintings and Scythian gold. Experts say it is the biggest art heist since the Nazis in World War II, intended to strip Ukraine of its cultural heritage" (NYT).

"Bolsonaro grew up in Eldorado, a town of some 15,000 people in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest, where his father practiced dentistry without a degree until the arrival of certified dentists prompted him to shift to work on prosthetics."

I'm reading the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Jair Bolsonaro.

I don't really know where to jump in on this Bolsonaro uprising, but that sentence enchanted me — Eldorado, the rainforest, the intrusion of government (in the form of the licensing of dentists, displacing the father), prosthetics. I got distracted.

Now that I've got a post open though, I'll just pose the question that occurred to me. I'm not going to plod through the set up for this question, which I trust you'll get:

Do you think Donald "January 6th" Trump is envious of Jair "January 8th" Bolsonaro?

"Mr. Bolsonaro was supposed to pass Mr. Lula the presidential sash... an important symbol of the peaceful transition of power..."

"... in a nation where many people still recall the 21-year military dictatorship that ended in 1985. Instead, Mr. Bolsonaro woke up Sunday thousands of miles away, in a rented house owned by a professional mixed-martial-arts fighter a few miles from Disney World. Facing various investigations from his time in his office, Mr. Bolsonaro flew to Orlando on Friday night.... Mr. Bolsonaro had questioned the reliability of Brazil’s election systems for months, without evidence, and when he lost in October, he refused to concede unequivocally. In a sort of farewell address on Friday, breaking weeks of near silence, he said... 'Within the laws, respecting the Constitution, I searched for a way out of this.... We live in a democracy or we don’t... No one wants an adventure.'...  [At the inauguration, a] voice then announced that Mr. Lula would accept the green-and-yellow sash from 'the Brazilian people,' and Aline Sousa, a 33-year-old garbage collector, played the role of Mr. Bolsonaro and placed the sash on the new president."

The NYT reports in "Lula Becomes Brazil’s President, With Bolsonaro in Florida/Brazil inaugurates its new president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on Sunday. Facing investigations, former President Jair Bolsonaro has taken refuge in Orlando."

Sash presentation at 1:00:

"The Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has been admitted to hospital... after being struck down by an unremitting bout of the hiccups which has lasted for more than 10 days...."

"In a recent social media broadcast, Bolsonaro said his hiccups problem had started after he underwent dental surgery on 3 June, and blamed it on drugs he had been prescribed. The Folha said Bolsonaro had undergone a series of surgical procedures since his election-trail stabbing, an event many believe helped propel him to the presidency. Less than two months later he won a landslide election victory against his leftwing rival, Fernando Haddad."

The Guardian reports.

"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... In a Facebook post, Notari said the scarlet hillside vulva was intended to 'question the relationship between nature and culture in our phallocentric and anthropocentric western society' and provoke debate over the 'problematisation of gender.'...  Bolsonaro’s US-based political guru, the professional polemicist Olavo de Carvalho, weighed in with a customarily foul-mouthed tweet."

The Guardian reports.

The "foul-mouthed tweet" isn't quoted (in Portuguese or in translation), but I clicked through to Twitter and read: "Por que estão falando mal da buceta de 33 metros em vez de enfrentá-la com um pirocão?" And I have Google-translated it for you: "Why are they talking bad about the 33-meter pussy instead of facing it with a dick?" 

I guess he's suggesting that opponents of the hillside ought to devise a way to rape it, or no, maybe he's just calling for equality and would like another hillside with a sculpture representing male genitalia. Google translates "enfrentá" as "facing," but also as "confronting" or "encountering." 

Obviously, I am incapable of assessing the humor or hatefulness of a Portuguese tweet. One idea is to translate the responses at Twitter. For example: "Professor Olavo, you are a great intellectual and an exceptional teacher. But this compulsion for hostility and bad words related to sexual organs and waste are symptoms of psychiatric disorder. Try to treat yourself, your ideas will gain more strength!"

If you search for monumental constructions that represent genitalia, the vast majority of what you will find is male. Here's the Wikipedia article on "Phallic Architecture." There's no way feminist sculptors could ever carve enough concrete into hillsides even to begin to achieve equity. 

For another example of a monumental vagina sculpture, see "The Dirty Corner," a gigantic construction at Versailles, by Anish Kapoor, who described it as "the vagina of the queen coming into power." The article at the link — from BBC in 2015 — quotes a random German tourist: "It's confusing, a big vagina and a palace. It's one of the most famous places in Paris and I just wanted to see it and I saw this building, this statue, and I don't know what it is." That sculpture has been vandalized, and Kapoor, who is male, has denied calling it a vagina: "I never said vagina—I said ‘she sits here on the lawn’ or something to that effect."

Ah! The difficulties of translation!

"Forest fires are common in the Amazon during the dry season, which runs from July to October. They can be caused by naturally occurring events..."

"... such as by lightning strikes, but also by farmers and loggers clearing land for crops or grazing. Activists say the anti-environment rhetoric of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has encouraged such tree-clearing activities. In response, Mr Bolsonaro, a long-time climate sceptic, accused non-governmental organisations of starting the fires themselves to damage his government's image."

From "The Amazon in Brazil is on fire - how bad is it?" (BBC).

"One researcher... accused the dogs in the National Park of Brasilia, where they hunted in massive packs, of scaring off natural predators."

"It was found that the closer humans lived to a nature preserve, the more likely dogs had penetrated it But perhaps most striking? The dogs were neither feral nor domestic — but somewhere in between. 'All the dogs we detected had an "owner" or a person that the animal has a bond with... The species population increases following human populations, exacerbating their potential impact on wildlife.'... [Researchers] set up cameras and discovered dozens of dogs in the [Tijuca forest, one of the world’s largest urban woodlands]. They estimated more than 100 dogs were in the park — not residents, it turned out, so much as frequent visitors, tracking in from nearby favelas. 'These are people who are very poor... They don’t have money to build walls. . . . When the owners leave for work, the dog leaves, too, and only returns when the owner comes back to the house from work.' The owners often have no idea what their dogs are up to. Even if they were told... they almost certainly wouldn’t believe it.... 'We’d do interviews with the farmers: "Have you seen these dogs?" And they’d say, "Yeah, but my dogs aren’t the problem; it’s my neighbor’s dogs."'"

From "The dog is one of the world’s most destructive mammals. Brazil proves it" (WaPo).

"Brazil on Sunday became the latest country to drift toward the far right, electing a strident populist as president in the nation’s most radical political change..."

"... since democracy was restored more than 30 years ago. The new president, Jair Bolsonaro, has exalted the country’s military dictatorship, advocated torture and threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents. He won by tapping into a deep well of resentment at the status quo in Brazil — a country whiplashed by rising crime and two years of political and economic turmoil — and by presenting himself as the alternative.... Hundreds of supporters gathered outside Mr. Bolsonaro’s seaside home in Rio de Janeiro, jumping and hugging each other when the results were announced. As golden fireworks lit up the sky, they chanted 'mito,' or legend, paying homage to their president-elect."

The NYT reports.

ADDED: Drift?

"Huge collections of feather work and masks from indigenous peoples of South America were also consumed in the fire..."

"... as well as pottery and artifacts of a culture that made shell mounds along what is now Brazil’s Atlantic Coast for thousands of years. While some of the biological collections may be replenished, this cultural history is simply gone. Carlos Fausto, a professor of anthropology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said this material memory of Brazilian history was 'just irreplaceable.'... 'What is the value of the cultural heritage of a country?... It is beyond value.'"

From "What Was Lost in the Brazil Museum Fire/Some items in the collection are irreplaceable to science, as well as the country’s national memory" (NYT). At the link, many photographs of things that are now reduced to ash.

The "indigenous man in the hole" — the last survivor of an uncontacted Amazon tribe — who has lived alone for at least 22 years.

"Semi-naked and swinging an axe vigorously as he fells a tree, the man, believed to be in his 50s, has never been filmed so clearly before and appears to be in excellent health."

“He is very well, hunting, maintaining some plantations of papaya, corn,” said Altair Algayer, a regional coordinator for the Brazilian government indigenous agency Funai in the Amazon state of Rondônia, who was with the team who filmed the footage from a distance. “He has good health and a good physical shape doing all those exercises.”...

Loggers, farmers and land grabbers murdered and expelled indigenous populations in the area in the 1970s and 1980s, and the man is believed to be the only survivor of a group of six killed during an attack by farmers in 1995. He was first located in 1996 and has been monitored by Funai ever since.

Funai has a policy of avoiding contact with isolated groups and has protected his area since the 1990s. The indigenous reserve of Tanaru was legally set up in 2015. Axes, machetes and seeds traditionally planted by indigenous people have been left for the man to find, Algayer said, but he clearly wants nothing to do with mainstream society.

“I understand his decision,” said Algayer. “It is his sign of resistance, and a little repudiation, hate, knowing the story he went through.”

They read his mind, this poor man who's been alone so long. How could they know what he feels is hate and not fear and that his desire is to resist and that he is not endlessly hoping for a friend?

"Before the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn pledged to spend $10 billion and create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, the company made a similar promise in Brazil."

"At a news conference in Brazil, Foxconn officials unveiled plans to invest billions of dollars and build one of the world’s biggest manufacturing hubs in the state of São Paulo. The government had high expectations that the project would yield 100,000 jobs. Six years later, Brazil is still waiting for most of those jobs to materialize.... In China, Foxconn has built vast factories backed by large government subsidies.... But the model does not translate easily to other countries, where Foxconn must navigate different social, political and labor conditions...."

From the NYT, "Before Wisconsin, Foxconn Vowed Big Spending in Brazil. Few Jobs Have Come.."

"Ten members of ‘lost’ Amazon tribe are ‘killed, chopped up and thrown in river by gold miners hellbent on seizing their land.'"

"A complaint has been filed with prosecutors in South America after the alleged killers went into a bar and bragged about what they had done," the UK Sun reports.

Here's the NYT report. Excerpt:

“If the investigation confirms the reports, it will be yet another genocidal massacre resulting directly from the Brazilian government’s failure to protect isolated tribes — something that is guaranteed in the Constitution,” said Sarah Shenker, a senior campaigner with the rights group....

“When their land is protected, they thrive,” said Ms. Shenker... “When their land is invaded, they can be wiped out.”

"To think that in the 21st century, there are still people who have no contact with civilization, living like their ancestors did 20,000 years ago..."

"... it’s a powerful emotion," said the photographer who plied his trade from a helicopter.

Stuckert’s close-up photographs taken near Brazil’s border with Peru show details about these Indians that had previously escaped the notice of experts, such as their use of elaborate body paint and the way they cut their hair. “We thought they all cut their hair in the same way,” said José Carlos Meirelles, who has worked with and studied Brazil’s indigenous tribes for more than 40 years. “Not true. You can see they have many different styles. Some look very punk.”

If they're important because they're been left isolated, isn't it important to leave them isolated? I know the imposition is defended as helpful in convincing us to continue to preserve their isolation. A sad testimony to our lack of imagination. I found "Some look very punk" especially sad. 

"The American swimmers who claimed they were assaulted at gunpoint over the weekend by assailants posing as police officers fabricated their account of the episode..."

"... according to Brazilian investigators...."

At the gas station, which is in Barra da Tijuca, on the route to the athletes’ village, the swimmers went to the bathroom. In the process, according to the account by investigators, damage was done to the bathroom door and a discussion ensued with the manager and a security guard.

Someone at the gas station called the police, but by the time a police car arrived at the scene, the swimmers were gone. Witnesses, including a person who offered to translate for the swimmers, said that they paid money to the manager before leaving....

“This incident has caused so much damage to Rio’s brand abroad that I think Brazilians deserve a clear, consistent account of what happened,” said Brian Winter, vice president for policy at Americas Society and Council of the Americas.

The entire episode, Winter said, “has tapped into one of Brazilians’ biggest pet peeves — gringos who treat their country like a third-rate spring break destination where you can lie to the cops and get away with it.”

ADDED: Security camera footage.

"Brazilian police have arrested 10 people suspected of planning terrorist acts during the Olympics...."

"The group was inspired by ISIS and only had contact with the group via the Internet..."

Earlier this week, a jihadi channel on the messaging app Telegram called for attacks against the Games and detailed targets and methods, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.

SITE said a message was posted to "Inspire the Believers!" saying, "Lone wolf from anywhere in the world can move to Brazil now."