Senior Brazilian official says judiciary won't be intimidated by US visa bans
In an escalation of tensions between U.S. President Donald Trump and the government of Latin America's largest economy, Washington imposed visa restrictions on Friday on Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, his family and other unnamed court officials.
The visa bans were a response to the Supreme Court's decision to issue search warrants and restraining orders targeting Trump ally Bolsonaro, who is accused of plotting a coup to overturn the results of a 2022 election he lost.
Solicitor general Jorge Messias, the top judicial official for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's executive branch, said in a statement posted on X that Prosecutor General Paulo Gonet was also targeted by the ban.
"Rest assured that no improper maneuver or sordid conspiratorial act will intimidate our country's judiciary in the independent and dignified exercise of its task," he added.
Messias said the Brazilian officials were subject to "arbitrary acts of visa revocation by a foreign nation on account of their fulfillment of their legitimate institutional responsibilities in accordance with constitutional terms."
In addition to Moraes, seven other justices from Brazil's 11-member Supreme Court were also hit by the U.S. visa restrictions, Government Institutional Relations Minister Gleisi Hoffmann said on Friday.
They include justices Luis Roberto Barroso, Dias Toffoli, Cristiano Zanin, Flavio Dino, Carmen Lucia, Edson Fachin, and Gilmar Mendes.
The Prosecutor General's Office and the Supreme Court did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Trump has criticised the proceedings against Bolsonaro as a "witch hunt", a term he has used to describe his own treatment by political opponents, and has called for the charges to be dropped. In a letter last week, he announced a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods starting August 1, opening the message with criticism of the trial.
Bolsonaro is on trial before Brazil's Supreme Court on charges of plotting a coup to stop Lula from taking office in January 2023.
The right-wing firebrand has denied that he led an attempt to overthrow the government but has acknowledged taking part in meetings aimed at reversing the election's outcome.
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Reuters
5 hours ago
- Reuters
North Korea says South Korea's overtures 'great miscalculation'
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The Guardian
12 hours ago
- The Guardian
How the riches of its graduates tied Edinburgh University to slavery
Robert Halliday Gunning was a Victorian success story, an Edinburgh-trained doctor who amassed a fortune in Brazil's goldmines before lavishing his wealth on philanthropic gifts. It also appears he was eaten by guilt. In later life, he ensured his legacy would be linked to acts of benevolence: from the 1880s onwards he paid for endowments, prizes, medals, lectures and academic posts at Edinburgh University, several of which still bear his name. Today they are worth £5.3m. Gunning, a former Edinburgh medical student and anatomist, had been enmeshed in Brazil's enslavement-based gold mining industry. Decades after slavery was criminalised in Britain, he was widely believed to own up to 40 enslaved people – a charge he denied. A recently discovered letter suggests his gifts were a calculated act of reputation washing. He told the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, another institution that enjoyed his largesse, he had 'come forward without being asked, to relieve my conscience, and leave behind what I cannot take away when life ends, and I feel it no sacrifice but an honour to do so'. Gunning was one of hundreds of Edinburgh graduates who made their fortunes from the transatlantic slave trade, on plantations in the Americas or profiting from the empire. They served as doctors on slave ships, administrators, lawyers to enslavers, merchants, plantation owners, or were slavers themselves. The scale of Edinburgh University's entanglements with transatlantic slavery and colonialism has been exposed by new research, commissioned by the university. It has established that Edinburgh raised the equivalent of tens of millions of pounds from donors implicated in slavery or colonial wealth-building. A study by Dr Simon Buck, a research fellow, has found Edinburgh raised at least £250,000 (in historical money) from slavery-linked and colonial donors from the late 1700s until well into the late 1800s. The university sought out those donors, despite bitter and public divisions among students and staff over the morality of enslavement. Buck calculates the donations were equivalent to at least £30m based on current retail prices, derived from tobacco, sugar, cotton, gold, silk, indigo, linen, iron and opium production and trading. Based on present-day earnings, a different measure, that is equivalent to £202m today, or as much as £845m based on the UK's growth in overall wealth and productivity since then. Buck calculates at least £6,258 (in historical money) was raised from hundreds of slavery- and empire-linked donors between 1789 and 1794, about 17% of the total philanthropic donations. That equates to about £1m today based on retail price inflation, or £11m based on growth in earnings. How we present the worth of historical sums of money There are different ways of calculating the present-day value of money spent in previous on work by the Measuring Worth Foundation, Edinburgh University's academics have adopted three measures: the most conservative model is relative price worth (RPW) which measures purchasing power, followed by relative wage or income worth (RWIW) and then finally relative output worth (ROW).For comparison, Edinburgh calculated that the £6,258 it raised in the 1790s to help build a new college building would be worth £955,000 today using the RPW model, £10.9m using the RWIW measure or as much as £78.7m using the ROW Guardian tends to use relative price worth as its main figure, but we have included the other measures for comparison. Similar networks were deployed to fund construction of a new medical school nearly a century later. Between 1873 and 1885, its fundraisers targeted alumni in Britain's colonies, principally India, the Caribbean, where indentured labour remained rife, and Brazil, where slavery was lawful until 1888. Other UK-based donors had also been enriched by slavery or slavery-derived wealth. In all, Buck calculates that £22,600 came from slavery-linked sources and £3,360 from empire-derived wealth, equivalent to 20% of the medical school's fundraising. As well as the many hundreds of one-off donations for those buildings derived from slavery or colonial wealth, the Edinburgh report found 27 specific endowments from donors directly linked to the slave trade and colonial profiteering. They were given to establish professorial chairs in music, agriculture and engineering, or to fund student bursaries, prizes and scholarships. Ten bequests are still active, including Gunning's, which are worth at least £9.4m today, a total that does not factor in the awards paid out over the past two centuries. The sums involved, Buck argues, are an underestimate. The lives of those who were enslaved are largely invisible, but some people have been identified. In 1817, Carpenter Quacco, Nanny Pungy, Phibba and Benneba were among 364 enslaved people registered by Samuel Athill, an Antigua-born medicine alumnus and donor who fought against abolition. There are glimpses of other sources of slavery- or empire-derived funding. Some were directly implicated in enslaving people. During the 1690s, before the union of the Scottish and English parliaments, several professors at the university, its rector and several future donors became investors in the Company of Scotland, a Scottish attempt to create a slavery-based plantation business. Best known for its failed attempt in 1699 to found a colony in Darién, Panama, the Company of Scotland traded in enslaved people and cargo linked to slavery in 1698, 1699, 1701 and 1708 in Madagascar and the Indian Ocean. There were bursaries active at Edinburgh until at least 1971 funded by its investors. According to the report, Edinburgh's town council, which originally owned the university, gave it money raised from taxing slavery-linked ships carrying tobacco, sugar and cotton in the port of Leith. Queen Anne, one of many British monarchs with clear links to transatlantic slavery, funded professorships. Many of the ways in which the university benefited from enslavement are hidden from view, but some are still very visible. Five of Edinburgh's best-known historical buildings were constructed with help from slavery-enriched donors: two former sites of the Royal Infirmary hospital – which was partly run using profits from a Jamaican plantation it owned; the St Cecilia's Hall music collection; the New College, built on the Mound by the Free Church of Scotland, and the Edinburgh College of Art. And the university's accountants were shrewd investors. Buck has discovered its slavery-derived wealth was invested in numerous Scottish Highland estates, war bonds, railway companies and colonial government bonds between 1896 and 1946. Limited time made it impossible to calculate how much profit those investments generated.
The Independent
14 hours ago
- The Independent
To host UN climate talks, Brazil chose one of its poorer cities. That's no accident
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"We cannot hide the fact that we are in the world with lots of inequalities and where sustainability and fighting climate change is something that has to get closer to people,' do Lago said. That's what Brazilian President President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has in mind, he said. 'When people will go to Belem, you are going to see a developing country and city with considerable infrastructure issues still with, in relative terms, a high percentage of poverty and President Lula thinks it's very important that we talk about climate thinking of all the forests, thinking of poverty and thinking of progress,' do Lago said. 'He wants everybody to see a city that can improve thanks to the results of these debates.' The rich and powerful — as well as poorer nations, activists and media — are already feeling a bit of that discomfort even before getting to Belem. Even with two years of notice, Brazil is way behind in having enough hotel rooms and other accommodations for a global conference that has had 90,000 attendees. The official United Nations COP30 website says Brazil would have an official booking portal by the end of April. But specific plans weren't announced till last week when Brazil said it arranged for two cruise ships with 6,000 beds to help with lodging, saying the country is ensuring 'accommodation for all countries' and starting a system where 98 poorer nations have the option to reserve first. Skyrocketing lodging costs are a problem, do Lago conceded. Some places have been charging $15,000 a night for one person and activists and others have talked of cutting back. But he said prices 'are already going down,' even as local media report otherwise. Do Lago said it will be a local holiday so residents can rent out their homes, adding "a significant supply of apartments.' Big year for climate negotiations This is a significant year for climate negotiations. The 2015 Paris climate agreement required countries to come up with their own plans to reduce the emissions of heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas and then to update those plans every five years. This year nearly every nation — the United States, the No. 2 carbon dioxide emitter and historically biggest polluter, withdrew from the accord earlier this year — has to submit their first plan update. Most of those updates are already late, but the United Nations wants countries to complete them by September when world leaders gather in New York. That would give the United Nations time to calculate how much they would curb future climate change if implemented — before the COP six weeks later. UN Secretary-General Antonio-Guterres, in an interview with AP, reiterated what officials want in those plans: that they cover each nation's entire economy, that they include all greenhouse gases and that they are in line with efforts to limit long-term human-caused warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. That target is the Paris agreement goal. And it's tough since the world is only a couple of tenths of a degree away and last year even temporarily shot past the 1.5 degree mark. Do Lago said he expects the countries' plans will fall short of keeping warming below the 1.5 degree mark, so tackling that gap will be a crucial element of negotiations. Some big things aren't on agenda, like $1.3 trillion for poorer nations Some of the negotiations' most important work won't be on the formal agenda, including these plans, do Lago said. Another is a road map to provide $1.3 trillion in financial help to poorer nations in dealing with climate change. And finally, he said, Brazil 'wants very much to talk about nature, about forests.' The nearby Amazon has been an important part of Earth's natural system to suck large amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but deforestation is a major threat to that. At times, parts of the Amazon have gone from reducing carbon dioxide in the air to increasing it, a 2021 study found. On Wednesday, the United Nation's top court ruled that a clean and healthy environment is a basic human right, a decision that may bolster efforts to come up with stronger action at the November climate conference, some activists said. 'Failure of a state to take appropriate action to protect the climate system ... may constitute an internationally wrongful act,' court President Yuji Iwasawa said during the hearing. Do Lago said the challenge for countries is to think of these emission-reduction plans not as a sacrifice but as a moment to change and grow. 'One of the objectives of this COP is that we hope we will be remembered as a COP of solutions, a COP in which people realized that this agenda is creating more opportunities and challenges,' do Lago said. ___ The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
