Fausta's Blog

A huge story mostly ignored in the USA, protests in all the major cities (link in Portugese), with 240,000 at 11 state capitals,

Drudge:

CARNIVAL: BRAZIL BURNS...
Bus fare rise last straw...
Protest World Cup costs...

BBC:
Protests spread throughout Brazil
As many as 200,000 people march through Brazil’s biggest cities, as protests over public transport costs and the expense of the World Cup spread.

Julia Carneiro
BBC Brasil, Sao Paulo
The mass of people gathered at Sao Paulo’s Largo da Batata was impressive – but more impressive was that after the demonstration began, thousands more kept arriving, streaming peacefully towards the city’s main avenues in a constant flow.

Their bright banners bore diverse demands – but all reflected a fatigue with what people here get from the state. I repeatedly heard the word “tired”: protesters told me they were tired of corruption, of nepotism, of high taxes paid for poor public services.

WSJ:
Anger Spills Onto Brazil’s Streets
Tens of thousands of Brazilian marchers gathered in São Paulo and in other cities after a small protest against bus-fare increases last week blossomed into demonstrations against everything from overspending to build World Cup stadiums to corruption.

“The protests on the street go straight to the heart of the long-term problems of Brazil, a series of complaints that are hard to fix, and a sense of business as usual in government,” said Matias Spektor, an author and associate professor at Brazil’s Getulio Vargas Foundation university. “The political climate has changed.”

Al Jazeera:

NYTimes:
Thousands Gather for Protests in Brazil’s Largest Cities (slide show at the link)

One issue surging to the fore involves anger over stadium projects in various cities ahead of the 2014 World Cup, which Brazil is preparing to host. Some projects have been hindered by cost overruns and delays, the unfinished structures standing as testament to an injection of resources into sports arenas at a time when schools and public transit systems need upgrades.

The huge expenses involved with the upcoming World Cup and Olympics have been criticized by many Brazilians for years; it’s only now that it’s coming to a head.

Meanwhile, the Joao Havelange stadium in Rio, to be used at the 2016 Olympics, will not open before 2015 due to roof repairs.

More photos of the demonstrations at Noticias 24.

UPDATE,
Linked by Babalu Blog. Thank you!

Two weeks ago, Cristina Fernández saw fit to run this ad on TV,

The ad features

Fernando Zylberberg, a member of the Argentine men’s hockey team running through the streets of the Falklands capital Port Stanley with the slogan “to compete on English soil, we train on Argentine soil.” The advert included scenes of Mr. Zylberberg training on the steps of the Island’s Great War Memorial, which commemorates British sailors who gave their lives fighting the Germans in 1914.

The Olympic Committee has no sense of humor:

The IOC said the 2012 Games should not be a forum to raise political issues.
It added that it “regrets any attempts to use the spotlight of the games for that end.”

The IOC said it had contacted the Argentinian National Olympic Committee about the advert and received assurances that the games would not be used as a political platform.

‘Not political’
“The Olympic Games should not be a forum to raise political issues and the IOC regrets any attempts to use the spotlight of the games for that end,” the IOC added.

And then, Zylberberg’s own team dropped him,

as The Telegraph revealed today, the hockey player featured in the Falklands-set propaganda piece is now likely to miss the London Olympics, after being “virtually ruled out after being excluded from the 18-man Argentine hockey squad taking part in a 10-day tournament in Malaysia from May 24.” His shameless use as a political pawn by the Kirchner administration is undoubtedly a key factor in the decision by Argentina’s own Olympic Committee to drop him, after they distanced themselves from the controversial advertisement.

Zylberberg will probably be offerred a job in Cristina’s bureaucracy.

In the meantime, the European Parliament passed a resolution condemning Argentina’s nationalisation of YPF and called for a partial suspension of tariffs that benefit exports from the South American country to the EU.

LATIN AMERICA
Al-Qaeda Links to South American Drug Lords Threaten U.S.

Via Theo Spark,

ARGENTINA
Despite Argentina’s efforts, artifacts of Juan Peron, Evita in private hands

Argentine opposition calls for investigation into government ad spending

Politics in Argentina
Down among the underclass
A prelude to a dirty campaign

BOLIVIA
Protests in Bolivia
Fuel on the fire
Evo Morales is hoist with his own petard

BRAZIL
Go south, young scientist
An emerging power in research

The 2016 Olympics: Hoping for the best; preparing for the worst

Will Brazil’s New President Govern as Successfully as Her Predecessor?

CUBA
Hiding Fidel’s Fortune

More on that “excellent free healthcare”, We will not forget.

So Much For Cuban Economic Reform
The Communist Party affirms that ‘central planning and not the market will be supreme.’

HAITI
The year of surviving in squalor
Even allowing for some unique difficulties, the efforts of the government and outsiders to rebuild have been disappointing

HONDURAS
Guest Blog: The New Wikileak from Le Monde

MEXICO
A pax narcotica?

In Acapulco, Fifteen bodies found in Mexico tourist city: report

La Familia’s networks in the USA, “La Familia” y su red de operación en EU
Testigos protegidos revelaron por separado parte del esquema que La Familia Michoacana seguía para trasladar droga a EU, así como los principales encargados de la organización criminal en ese país tanto para la recepción, distribución, venta y el lavado de dinero

Food in Mexico
Centéotl’s pricier feast
The tortilla-makers cry wolf

PUERTO RICO
Celebration highlights Puerto Rican holiday traditions

VENEZUELA
Chavismo is unable to escape its Manichean make up, or how to look at the world through red/green glasses

… Wenlock and Mandeville were born:

Mandeville?

Stoke Mandeville’s famous spinal injuries unit meanwhile was where the Paralympic movement began, and the naming of one mascot after the hospital is an explicit attempt to raise the profile of the Paralympic Games.

Mandeville’s designers unfortunately had the bad taste of making his crotch an incontinent blue. Ugh.

The reviews are in:

Two parts-Pokemon to one-part lava lamp with yellow ‘Taxi’ lights on their foreheads

Betsy:

the stupidest and downright ugliest Olympic mascots ever

Stephen Bayley:

“If the Games are going to be remembered by their art then we can declare them a calamitous failure already.”

Greg Pollowitz:

London, We’re Laughing at You, not with You

Tammy Bruce:

Lesson? Don’t Smoke Crack When Designing Olympic Mascots

Moe Lane:

It must be a fascinating planet that the designer of this must be from: I wish that I could visit it.

UPDATE
Welcome, Tammy Bruce readers! Please visit often.

Giuliani To Provide Security Consulting For Rio Olympics

Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s consulting firm is being hired by the city of Rio de Janeiro to help make the city safe for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

Giuliani visited a slum in Rio on Friday and praised the city’s efforts to bring order to violence-plagued areas filled with drug traffickers.

He says Rio can be a safe city before the Games begin.

The governor of Rio says the firm is being contracted to give security advice. Details of the deal were not disclosed.

Take it away, Peter!

Same song, with Hugh Jackman as Peter Allen,

In today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern:

Sixty million people lost electricity yesterday in Brazil after a huge power grid failure. The entire country of Paraguay was also affected by the blackout. Photos here

Will this affect the Olympics?

Update
Commenting on Facebook, Dominick reminds us of Brazil’s national motto, “ORDEM E PROGRESSO”.

So much for that.

UPDATE 2
Jungle Mom, writing from Paraguay describes the Power outages

The Economist has an article on just how far Brazil will have to go,

Holding the games will require effort and expense on a scale that Rio, a problem-studded metropolis of 12m (half of whom live in the city itself), has never seen. Apart from new stadiums and other sports facilities of all kinds, the plans call for new bridges and roads, and a doubling in the number of hotel rooms. To revamp a chaotic transport system, engineers will blast through granite mountains to extend the metro from Ipanema to Barra da Tijuca, 13.5km (8.4 miles) away. Tens of thousands of athletes must be squired to scattered events through some of the worst traffic in the Americas.

The police, already overstretched, must keep the Olympians safe from some of Latin America’s most brazen criminals—they committed over 2,000 murders in the city itself last year. Where padding public-works contracts and sticky-fingered politicians are the norm, who will make sure the $14.4 billion budgeted for the games will be put to good use—to say nothing of up to $50 billion in indirect investment?

Will they be able to pull it off?

We shall find out in time.

In today’s podcast at 11AM Eastern: Rio and the crime problem

Ever since the International Olympic Committee selected Rio for the 2016 Olympic Games, all I have heard in every conversation on the subject (which was the hot topic even at tango last night) is how will the country deal with the tremendous crime rate.

Today’s Bloomberg article points out how high:

Rio is one of the most violent cities in the world, according to a ranking by Web site RealClearWorld. Home to about 7 million people, it recorded 2,069 murders last year compared with 510 in Chicago, a city of 2.8 million and a finalist contender for the games.

Including the police’s own rogue squad,

The police commit one in five of the murders, according to the United Nations high commissioner for Human Rights.

The gang’s are out of control,

Stray bullets from rival drug gangs battling to control more than 1,000 shantytowns ringing the so-called “Marvelous City” claim dozens of lives each year, police say. The gangs often stop traffic along the main airport road to steal money and cell phones. So-called flash-kidnappings — where victims are taken to ATMs to withdraw cash — are also common, the security secretariat says.

Rio’s bid to the IOC proposed investments of $11.1 billion, mostly on infrastructure, but on Friday O Globo reported that the government is putting together a commission to come up with a final budget. Whether that budget will even show a crime containment amount remains to be seen.

While Brazil has all the potential to become a world power, its problems are deep; Carlos Alberto Montaner explains how far the country has to go before it’s even in the running – IF (a very big if) they are so inclined to begin with

Brazil is the size of the United States, with a population of 200 million, and has certain partially developed zones, such as Sao Paulo. But it is far from being a regional power. Brazil’s economy totals barely $2 trillion, and the nation is not the leader or an innovative force in any really important field. More than 30 percent of its population is very poor.

It has one of the world’s most unequal distributions of income, while its annual per-capita income, measured in terms of purchasing power parity, is barely $10,000. Eight Latin American countries surpass it in this regard, and one of them, Chile, does so by 50 percent.

Brazil’s level of corruption — 3.5, according to Transparency International — is shameful and worse than that of several African countries.

It maintains a protected economy that hampers competition and intense international trade. The Index of Economic Freedom assigns it a value of 56.7, which translates into a “nonfree economy” (the Index contains 104 countries that are freer than Brazil). Its bureaucracy is slow and clumsy. Its universities are mediocre, with few excellent learning centers. The number of its original scientific patents is ridiculously low, smaller than that of Israel, whose population is only eight million.

Brazil has much to gain,

The games will inject $51.1 billion into Latin America’s largest economy through 2027 and add 120,000 jobs a year through 2016, according to a study by a Sao Paulo business school for the Ministry of Sports.

So does Lula:

Lula, who must step down next year after his second term, may be more than a spectator at the 2016 Olympics. With his legacy cemented by landing South America’s first games, and a 77 percent approval rating after almost seven years in office, he’s an automatic contender to run again in 2015.

Meanwhile, over at Copacabana beach, there’s a new celebration party going on today.

This just in:
The Washington Post reports that

Chicago Out of Running to Host 2016 Olympics
COPENHAGEN, Oct. 2 – Chicago was eliminated after the first round of voting on contenders to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, leaving Rio, Madrid and Tokyo to contend for the bid.

Chicago was hoping to become the first U.S. city to host the Summer Games since Atlanta in 1996 and the first to host any Olympics since Salt Lake City hosted the Winter Games in 2002.

Drudge‘s headline:

WORLD REJECTS OBAMA: CHICAGO OUT IN FIRST ROUND
THE EGO HAS LANDED

The WSJ: Chicago Eliminated for 2016 Olympics; Rio, Madrid Remain

The city of Chicago was eliminated in the first round of voting for the 2016 Summer Games, in a blow to President Barack Obama.

President Obama lent the full force of the White House to the effort and flew to Copenhagen overnight to deliver a 7-minute speech to the IOC Friday morning. In addition, Michelle Obama spent much of this week in Copenhagen personally lobbying IOC members.

Tokyo was eliminated in the second round of voting. Its elimination was not unexpected, since the IOC was unlikely too return the Games to Asia so soon after Beijing. Tokyo’s bid received high technical marks in an evaluation, but lacked widespread public support during the bid process.

Madrid and Rio remain. The winner must receive 51% of the 100-plus votes.

Chicago’s boosters spent $48 million on the four-year campaign but, as always faced the obstacle of geographical loyalty. More than 40% of the IOC is European, and with competition from Rio, the U.S. could not count on support of members from South America, who were trying to bring the Olympics to their continent for the first time. Chicago2016′s budget also relied on some $4.8 billion in funding from the private sector, while other candidate cities had promises of billions of dollars of financial guarantees.

I wonder how Obama, Michelle and Oprah are going to spin this one while they wipe the egg off their faces.

(My bet is that Rio will get it. We’ll see.)

Here’s a photo from last evening: POTUS, FLOTUS, TOTUS,

Snark, and more snark,

I’m sure that Obama will be a lot more persuasive with the Iranians.

Update
International Olympic Committee staffed by racists, which just named Rio as the host.

CNN announcer flips out,

The Anchoress asks, Did the IOC recognise a weak horse?