Brazil

Dr Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University tells us that the P1 Manaus variant of Covid currently ravaging Brazil is a threat to the world.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro is being blamed for his country’s deadliest episode of the pandemic yet – with a highly transmissible variant, and warnings from doctors reporting more young people being admitted to hospitals with the virus than ever before.

To Brazil now, where a record number of Covid deaths – more than 3,700 – were reported yesterday, leaving large parts of its health system now close to collapse.

Brazil has the second most confirmed cases in the world after the US, and as the country’s death toll nears 36,000, medics fear the peak is yet to come. 

The Brazilian President is struggling to explain why his country is fast becoming one of the worst casualties of the virus. 

Rescuers in Brazil are searching for any survivors after a huge dam collapsed – unleashing a cascade of mine waste and mud. At least nine people are dead and 400 still missing after the disaster struck at the Vale iron ore mine near Brumadinho in southeastern Brazil yesterday lunchtime. Officials say there’s now little chance…

Less than ten days before an election that’s divided Brazil, the populist far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro still holds a commanding lead over his rival. Latest polls show Mr Bolsonaro, a former army officer with extreme views on gay and minority rights and law enforcement, is set to take 59 percent of the vote in the run-off next Sunday.

The Sri Lankan government has denied its ambassador to Brazil is on the run, after a human rights group filed war crimes charges against him there.

A series of riots in jails across Brazil in recent months have left dozens of prisoners dead. The incidents, in a country with the third largest prison population in the world, have raised serious questions about conditions and staffing in Brazil’s jails.

More than a hundred thousand people in the Brazilian town of Chapeco have turned out to mourn the 71 people who died in a plane crash in Colombia – including most of the local football team. The Brazilian president led tributes to the victims at the ceremony in driving rain – saying the tragedy had…

Brazil has begun three days of national mourning after a charter plane carrying one of its top football teams crashed into the Colombian mountains, killing 75 people on board and leaving six survivors.

The director-general of the World Health Organisation warns that possible links between the Zika virus and babies with abnormally small heads are causing “extremely high” levels of concern.

Pregnant women are advised to avoid countries that have seen outbreaks of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, which doctors are linking to unusually high numbers of babies born with brain defects.

From beauty contests to angry protests, events are held around the world to mark International Women’s Day.