Tag: brazil

Indigenous Amazon tribe says New York Times story led to its members being smeared as porn addicts

An Indigenous tribe from the Brazilian Amazon has sued The New York Times, saying the newspaper’s reporting on the tribe’s first exposure to the internet led to its members being widely portrayed as technology-addled and addicted to pornography.

The Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley, a sovereign community of about 2,000 people in the rainforest, filed the defamation lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages this week in a court in Los Angeles.

It also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants, alleging that their stories amplified and sensationalized the Times’ reporting and smeared the tribe in the process.

The suit says the Times’ June 2024 story by reporter Jack Nicas on how the group was handling the introduction of satellite service through Elon Musk’s Starlink “portrayed the Marubo people as a community unable to handle basic exposure to the internet, highlighting allegations that their youth had become consumed by pornography.”

“These statements were not only inflammatory but conveyed to the average reader that the Marubo people had descended into moral and social decline as a direct result of internet access,” an amended version of the lawsuit filed Thursday says. “Such portrayals go far beyond cultural commentary; they directly attack the character, morality, and social standing of an entire people, suggesting they lack the discipline or values to function in the modern world.”

In a statement to The Associated Press, a Times spokesperson said: “Any fair reading of this piece shows a sensitive and nuanced exploration of the benefits and complications of new technology in a remote Indigenous village with a proud history and preserved culture. We intend to vigorously defend against the lawsuit.”

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US wants to exploit bases in Brazil and provoke the country over its role in BRICS

The plan by American diplomats to achieve rights for the United States to use Brazilian military bases is a radical maneuver and a political provocation against Brazil, particularly given its relationship with BRICS partners, especially China.

US diplomats linked to President Donald Trump’s Republican Party have been discussing in informal meetings with Brazilian interlocutors the unrestricted use of the Fernando de Noronha Airport base in the Atlantic Ocean and the Natal Air Base in Rio Grande do Norte.

According to DefesaNet, the excuse given to defend the plan is the so-called “historical right of operational return” for investments made by the US during the Cold War. Washington’s argument is also based on the fact that military assets financed in other countries can be reactivated based on tacit agreements or the principle of hemispheric reciprocity, especially in the context of a global threat, as well as contractual elements.

Despite being broken in 1977, the Brazil-US Military Assistance Agreement continues to be cited by US policy-making think tanks, such as the RAND Corporation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and The Heritage Foundation, as a reference to the so-called “hemispheric interoperability tradition.”

Furthermore, the Technological Safeguards Agreement (AST) — signed in 2019 under the administration of former president Jair Bolsonaro, created to enable the use of the Alcântara base — is often cited as a political and diplomatic precedent for new modalities of US military access to sensitive facilities under Brazilian control.

Behind the scenes, sources from the Ministry of Defense emphasize that Washington’s plan is unconstitutional since the 1988 Constitution prohibits the use of military installations by foreign forces without prior authorization from the National Congress.

At the same time, the request for bases by US diplomats has no real or concrete objective since neither the US nor Brazil is at war, and, therefore, there is no operational need. Rather, this is a political provocation made by the Trump administration. Given the fact that Brazil has a special relationship with Russia and China, countries that form the core of BRICS, Trump intends to create external and internal embarrassment for Brazil with this unreasonable request.

There are similarities with the US demands against Greenland, Canada, and Panama.

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Illegal Deported by Trump Now Accused of Planning Satanic ‘Execution of Children’ at Lady Gaga Concert

American citizens should continue to thank their lucky stars that President Donald Trump won last November.

Everyone knows one of the top accomplishments of his administration to date has been securing the border and beginning the mass deportation of criminal illegal aliens.

As border czar Tom Homan has said, the president’s direction is for “the worst to go first.”

Apparently, one of those worst was 44-year-old Brazilian national Luis da Silva, who was deported from the U.S. back to his home nation last month, the New York Post reported.

According to Brazilian officials, he was planning to commit mass murder at a Lady Gaga concert Saturday that was attended by over 2 million people at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach.

Da Silva “wanted to livestream the execution of children and set up bombs close to the stage during Gaga’s performance,” investigators said, according to the Post.

“He said that the singer was a Satanist and that he was going to perform a Satanist ritual too, killing a child during the show,” officer Felipe Curi, a Rio de Janeiro Civil Police secretary, told reporters Monday.

Police took da Silva and an alleged accomplice  — a 17-year-old boy — into custody just hours before the concert began.

A police complaint stated that the two “planned to use Molotov cocktails and explosive backpacks.”

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Lady Gaga Brazil Concert Bombing Suspect Was Deported from U.S. by Trump

A migrant deported from the United States is the suspected terrorist behind the bombing plot at a Lady Gaga concert in Brazil.

Brazilian authorities revealed this week that they arrested 44-year-old Luis da Silva after he planned to kill Lady Gaga fans at her blowout concert on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday.

The concert was attended by a record-breaking 2.5 million fans and da Silva wanted “livestream the execution of children and set up bombs close to the stage,” per the New York Post.

“He said that the singer was a Satanist and that he was going to perform a Satanist ritual too, killing a child during the show,” Rio de Janeiro Civil Police secretary, officer Felipe Curi, told reporters on Monday.

Brazilian authorities say da Silva was deported from the United States recently for unknown reasons. He was arrested along with a 17-year-old boy hours before the concert and the “pair allegedly used Discord to try and radicalize others, including teenagers, to carry out attacks against children and members of the LGBTQ+ community who were attending the concert,” according to the Post.

Sao Paulo congressman Erika Hilton wrote on X that da Silva led a group that “promoted pedophilia, misogyny and LGBTphobia through social media.”

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Meta Complies with Brazilian Court Order While Challenging Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s Demand for Journalist’s Instagram Data

Meta has launched a legal challenge against a ruling by controversial Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who compelled the tech giant to disclose data tied to the Instagram account of journalist Allan dos Santos. Though raising objections to the judge’s rationale, Meta affirmed it would still comply — at least for now.

The company confirmed it will deliver the requested data in a confidential filing, stating, “In compliance with the order and demonstrating good faith, Meta Platforms will provide the requested data, in a separate confidential procedure, within the period granted.”

Justice Alexandre de Moraes consistently stirs controversy with his heavy-handed censorship tactics, like banning social media accounts and blocking platforms such as Telegram and X when they defy him. Critics slam him for trampling free speech, overreaching his role, and acting like a one-man judge-jury-executioner, especially against Bolsonaro allies, while his clash with Elon Musk over X’s compliance has fueled accusations of authoritarianism.

The demand, issued last week, also targeted platform X, requiring both companies to provide the Federal Police with detailed information on Santos’s accounts within ten days — under threat of a R$100,000 ($17,362) daily fine for delay or refusal. The data request is broad, seeking registration details, IP addresses, and post content from mid-2024 through early 2025.

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Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Orders Arrest of US Citizen for Political Speech

Brazil’s pro-censorship Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes has issued an arrest warrant for Flavia Cordeiro Magalhaes, a US citizen of Brazilian origin, who has lived in Florida for over 20 years.

According to her legal representative, what Moraes is attempting to do here is lock up a US citizen for political speech expressed on US soil – meaning that the warrant in effect “raises questions about US sovereignty.”

Moraes appears to have first ordered Magalhaes’ X account blocked in Brazil because of a post from 2022, which she made while in the US.

According to Magalhaes, she was unaware of the block at the time, since she was not notified by the Brazilian court. But because she continued posting on X, this eventually led to an order to place her in pre-trial detention, under the pretext that she was allegedly in contempt of court.

That is supposed to have occurred when she traveled to Brazil in December 2023 and was told her Brazilian passport was “under restriction” – but even though she entered and left the country legally, using her US passport, Moraes decided to treat this as the use of “a false document” – and issue the pre-trial detention order in February of last year.

All this, despite Brazil’s federal police documents stating that Magalhaes traveled to and from Brazil legally.

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Cannabis Compound Discovered Inside Totally Different Plant

Scientists have discovered cannabidiol, a compound in cannabis known as CBD, in a common Brazilian plant, opening potential new avenues to produce the increasingly popular substance.

The team found CBD in the fruits and flowers of a plant known as Trema micrantha blume, a shrub which grows across much of the South American country and is often considered a weed, molecular biologist Rodrigo Moura Neto of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro told AFP in 2023.

CBD, increasingly used by some to treat conditions including epilepsy, chronic pain and anxiety, is one of the main active compounds in cannabis, along with tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC – the substance that makes users feel high.

The compound’s effectiveness as a medical treatment is still under research.

Neto said chemical analysis had found “Trema” contains CBD but not THC, raising the possibility of an abundant new source of the former – one that would not face the legal and regulatory hurdles of cannabis, which continues to be outlawed in many places, including Brazil.

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Don’t Let the ‘Infaux Thugs’ Close Down Debate

Today’s censors wield cudgels with the word ‘information.’ Content they don’t like they call ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation.’ The justification is fake. The protection is faux protection. Pretending to protect people from bad information by means of censorship may be called infaux thuggery.

The cudgels are hidden, of course, but it is not hard to see through the pretence and discern the underlying message: knuckle under or we will hurt you.

The UK’s Online Safety Act exemplifies infaux thuggery, as does Brazil’s recent action against X (formerly Twitter). The Australian government is dominated by another gang of infaux thugs. The UK, sadly, not only practices infaux thuggery at home, it tutors the world in infaux thuggery.

The same goes for where I live, the United States. Kamala Harris threatens: ‘If you act as a megaphone for misinformation… we are going to hold you accountable.’ Hillary Clinton calls for criminalization of speech not to her liking. Harris’ running mate Tim Walz threatens: ‘There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation and hate speech.’

Thankfully, that’s not true, at least in the US. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. responded, the US Constitution ‘is exactly what prevents the government from stifling dissent by labeling something “hate speech” or “misinformation.”’ Alarmingly, former Secretary of State John Kerry recently lamented that the First Amendment ‘stands as a major block to…hammer it [“disinformation”] out of existence,’ and implied that that ‘is part of what this race, this election is all about.’

Of course, malicious actors, including enemy states, may spread lies to sow discord – especially online. So too can those who are simply ill-informed. Yet in the absence of censorship, big lies will be torn to shreds. In this battle, the infaux thugs are on the wrong side.

The infaux thugs use ‘information’ to confuse matters. The content they suppress is more aptly termed narratives, interpretations, opinions or judgments. Those terms are more capacious, befitting frank and open debate and controversy.

In their hostility to open debate, the infaux thugs are mounting an attack on modern civilisation. They evoke our crude instincts from pre-modern life, instincts for a small, simple society, in which the leader’s narrative must be believed by all and enforced upon the members of the band. If you don’t share the leader’s narrative, you are a miscreant. You are to be corrected, expelled or destroyed. At the very least, you are to shut up.

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G20 Ministers Meet in Brazil To Discuss “Disinformation” Censorship Agenda

Wrong time, wrong place, wrong group – or quite the opposite, depending on the point of view. But G20 ministers were meeting in Brazil last week, just as the country keeps putting its own democracy and laws to the serious test in an escalating “war” with Elon Musk’s X.

It took no time for G20 to show which side it’s taking in the battle between a government given to online censorship and in clear need of controlling the political and media narratives, versus a major social platform that has broken ranks with its peers as an obedient executioner of censorship, including on behalf of various governments.

G20 ministers who converged on Maceio in northern Brazil late last week didn’t quite spell all this out (does anybody speak clearly anymore? The higher, the fewer, as they say).

But, the writing is clearly on the wall: a statement issued on Friday is chock-full of words such as, “misinformation,” AI (and coming up with new regulation around this), and digital platforms’ “accountability.”

There is even talk of the need for online platforms to place themselves “in line with relevant policies and applicable legal frameworks.”

Was this written by Brazil’s government, or by G20, some might wonder, half-amused? However, the story is not amusing – one of the persistent arguments coming out of X is that the seemingly incessant flow of censorship demands is in fact breaking Brazil’s own Constitution and applicable law.

Therefore, this particular point in the G20 readout might sound not only like the organization itself falling in line with Brazil – and other autocratic-presenting governments – but also engaging in a fair amount of hypocrisy.

Not for nothing, Brazilian officials are happy with this turn of events.

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Brazil Leads Largest Free Speech Rally In History

Thousands of supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro flooded Sao Paulo’s main boulevard for an Independence Day rally Saturday, buoyed by the government’s blocking of tech billionaire Elon Musk’s X platform, a ban they say is proof of their political persecution.

A few thousand demonstrators, clad in the yellow-and-green colors of Brazil’s flag, poured onto Av. Paulista. References to the ban on X and images of Musk abounded.

“Thank you for defending our freedom,” read one banner praising the tech entrepreneur.

Saturday’s march was seen as a test of Bolsonaro’s capacity to mobilize turnout ahead of the October municipal elections, even though Brazil’s electoral court has barred him from running for office until 2030. It’s also something of a referendum on X, whose suspension has raised eyebrows even among some of Bolsonaro’s opponents all the while stoking the flames of Brazil’s deep-seated political polarization.

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