It’s the kind of article that will drive the Rio tourism board to litigate. In a new post, the Economist’s Gulliver blog reinforces Brazil’s outsized reputation for crime and murder. Just how bad is Brazil, according to the piece? Worse than even Mexico, the new global poster-child for murder and mayhem. The article is mostly […]
Private equity fund 3G agreed to buy Burger King on Thursday, in a deal valued at $4 billion. That makes 3G, controlled by a group of well-heeled Brazilians, the buyer of the most expensive fast food chain ever sold. 3G is said to be interested in expanding the burger giant’s presence in Latin America and […]
Anyone who has entered Mexico City’s Benito Juarez airport is met by a security check that requires the newly landed passenger to press a button for a traffic signal, which is permanently fixed in the airport terminal. Red means you will be randomly searched, and greens means you can avoid that annoyance for the day. […]
Mental stability has become a top concern of those half a mile above the 33 trapped miners in northern Chile. One day after discovering they were alive, the primary calculations began. Four months: that’s how long it is going to take to rescue the miners. After President Piñera dropped a few hints that they weren’t […]
In a recent interview Manuel Zelaya, the ex-president of Honduras, singled out Brazil, and specifically Lula, for keeping him alive after being ousted in a military coup. “Brazil saved my life” said Zelaya, who now lives in exile in the Dominican Republic. “Lula, Marco Aurélio and Celso Amorim saved my life because they gave me […]
Thirty-three Chilean miners are miraculously alive, 17 days after being trapped in a collapsed shaft. President Sabastian Pinera reported the good news today, after rescuers lowered a probe into the mine, which was sent back with a note attached saying they were all fine. Apparently, they survived by burrowing a hole under their shelter to […]
Earlier this week the anthropologist and historian Lilia Schwarcz gave her impressions on contemporary Brazil in an interview for the New York Review of Books blog. As part of her conversation with Roger Darton, Schwarcz points out that, with 130 recognized gradations of color, the issue of race is far more complex in Brazil than […]
Americans made a hero of “Sully” Sullenberger when he was able to glide his plane gently after losing engine power at take off and landing in the water next to New York city. In that crash, while the plane sank, everyone survived. This week in Colombia a crash occurred on the island of San Andreas, […]
One of the most widely believed myths about the harms of marijuana is that it leads to the use of more dangerous drugs. Drug policy experts have debunked this claim and time again, but the “gateway theory” still holds a certain amount of traction, not least because of the misinformation peddled by drug war proponents. […]
Almost eighteen months after it spread out of the rural state of Veracruz in Mexico and gripped North America’s largest metropolis, the H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic is over and done. That’s the ruling of World Health Organization. As it turns out, H1N1 was a rather benign strand of influenza, but it struck at an unexpected […]
In late July Haitian activists organized rallies in cities across the country to mark the 95th anniversary of the start of the US occupation of Haiti in 1915. Among the protestors’ concerns is the contingent of 11,000 uniformed UN personal – including 9,000 military troops – stationed in Haiti as part the United Nations Stabilization […]
The international community responded to January’s earthquake in Haiti with teams of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare experts. At first, the biggest problem to providing medical care to the hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors appeared to be a lack of electricity and inadequate sterilized space for surgery. As immediate infrastructure was addressed, many Haitians […]
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