An aerial view showing a coffin being buried at the Vila Formosa cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, late last month. Brazil has been experiencing record numbers of coronavirus infections and COVID-19 deaths in recent weeks.
A new surge of COVID-19 in Brazil is filling hospitals and morgues, as the country s record daily death toll from the disease is nearing even the grim U.S. peak in January.
With less than two-thirds the population of the U.S., Brazil logged nearly 4,200 deaths on Tuesday. That is close to the peak U.S. daily death toll of 4,476 recorded on Jan. 12, according to data maintained by Johns Hopkins University.
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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro (center), greeting supporters while not wearing a mask, has a frosty relationship with the nation’s scientific community. Alan Santos/PR
‘A hostile environment.’ Brazilian scientists face rising attacks from Bolsonaro’s regime
Apr. 7, 2021 , 1:05 PM
Last week, scientists at the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), Brazil’s lead agency for studying and managing the nation’s vast protected areas, had to start abiding by an unwelcome new rule. It gives one of ICMBio’s top officials the authority to review all “manuscripts, texts and scientific compilations” before they are published.
Researchers fear President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, which has a markedly hostile relationship with Brazil’s scientific community, will use the reviews to censor studies that conflict with its ongoing efforts to weaken environmental protections. The administration says that is not the intent. But th
Ecocide: Should Destruction of the Planet Be a Crime?
To prosecute and imprison political leaders and corporate executives would require a parsing of legal boundaries and a recalibration of criminal accountability.
April 7, 2021
A refugee from Democratic Republic of Congo, collects water for their vegetable crops at a water pan in Kalobeyei settlement for refugees in Turkana County, Kenya on October 2, 2019. Credit: Luis Tato/AFP via Getty Images
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At many moments in history, humanity’s propensity for wanton destruction has demanded legal and moral restraint. One of those times, seared into modern consciousness, came at the close of World War II, when Soviet and Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau. Photographs and newsreels shocked the conscience of the world. Never had so many witnessed evidence of a crime so heinous, and so without precedent, that a new word genocide was needed to describe it, and in short or
As the Climate Crisis Grows, a Movement Gathers to Make ‘Ecocide’ an International Crime Against the Environment
International lawyers, environmentalists and a growing number of world leaders say “ecocide” widespread destruction of the environment would serve as a “moral red line” for the planet.
By Nicholas Kusnetz, Katie Surma and Yuliya Talmazan
April 7, 2021
The Fifth Crime:
First in a continuing series with NBC News about the campaign to make “ecocide” an international crime.
In 1948, after Nazi Germany exterminated millions of Jews and other minorities during World War II, the United Nations adopted a convention establishing a new crime so heinous it demanded collective action. Genocide, the nations declared, was “condemned by the civilized world” and justified intervention in the affairs of sovereign states.