In Brazil, Police Overstep Court Order To Sieze Former President's Email 158
New submitter MythicalMan writes: During the search and seizure in the Lula Institute last Friday, [Brazil's] Federal Police threatened a computer technician with being taken under arrest, forcing him to give the administrator password of all email accounts @institutolula.org (hosted at Google). Such generic access was not granted by the court's mandate, which referred only to a few specific email accounts. See the information here (in Portuguese). The fact is worrying not only because of its illegality but also for its possible international repercussions, since Lula Institute corresponds with institutions, public figures and heads of state all around the world. Investigations of corruption in Brazil have been characterized by frequent leaks to the press and to opposition politicians who use them to attack the government of President Dilma Rousseff. The methods used by Brazilian prosecutors have been questioned not only by government supporters, but also by jurists, scholars and journalists.
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In the U.S. it's called "due process of law".
The constitutional guarantee of due process of law, found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, prohibits all levels of government from arbitrarily or unfairly depriving individuals of their basic constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property.
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Due+Process+of+Law [thefreedictionary.com]
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This is Brazil, not the US.
That's why I prefaced my comment with "In the U.S." However, the principle of due process of law should be a universal concept.
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Depends on how "due process" works.
I.E What kind of information is seized and stored? What unspoken things do warrants grant?
Re:Why is it an overstep (Score:4, Insightful)
This is Brazil, not the US.
You are correct. Instead of "Due Process of Law", it is called "Devido Processo Legal", specifically stated in the 1988 Constitution, article 5, LIV, among others.
If you want, I can cite specific articles from the process law (Código de Processo Penal) that are also applicable.
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Dear too coward to show your name,
How exactly will Brazil hold the torch of freedom when its police can't follow a simple court order? When half the elected officers are pushing for an illegal impeachment so they can stop an investigation that threatens them? Where pretty most every media outlet wages a non-stop PR war against a single party so that their chosen ones (the ones always involved but never mentioned) stand a chance to win the next presidential elections?
Give me a break. Speaking ill of your cou
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I find strange that: 1) corruption in Brazil, for these people, has just begun on January 1st, 2003 (when PT started their government) and 2) the corrupt people only are on PT and not on PSDB/DEM/name your right-wing party. Meanwhile, here on Sao Paulo state (where the same political group holds the power since 1982), we got massive corruption schemas that were never investigated: the Alston train affair, the irresponsible water manageme
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On the couch eating popcorn and giant amounts of Coca-cola, watching Trump eat your country by the fringes?
Donald Trump doesn't have the numbers to win the election, especially if he's getting less than 50% of the Republican votes. Something that Karl Rove pointed out in an Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-polls-trump-hasnt-won-1457566355 [wsj.com]
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His numbers are better than _ANY_ of the Republicans he is running against.
He's getting 35% to 45% of the votes per primary election, which means approximately two-thirds to one-half of Republican voters didn't vote for him. The question becomes will they vote for him as the nominee, if he gets the nomination since he won't have enough delegates to declare an outright victory. Republican voters are notorious for staying him on election day if their favorite candidate doesn't get the nomination. If a large portion of Republican voters stay home, the White House and the Senate will
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"We are a great people destined to a bright future."
Yea, not when your own people can't be bothered to stand up to the blatant corruption.
Re:Why is it an overstep (Score:4, Insightful)
What Brazil shows is that, despite having a size, population, and massive natural resources comparable to the US, politics and corruption vastly dominate the progress of a country, or lack thereof.
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it's consequence of an irresponsible an Brazillian traditional media media FUD...
* dear [brazilian, a think...] AC: you know that you are only spreading FUD, right?
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Again, a must say you are spreading FUD (if not, why the fear by posting as AC, in this case?)
* if you, at least, lived here (and see the "facts" that the press/media build, everyday), your opinion can have some relevance [but, it's not the case, non-Brazilian AC...]
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That's nothing! (Score:2)
(confusing, huh?)
According to the U.S. Geological Survey there are currently 34 populated places in 25 states named Springfield throughout the United States, including five in Wisconsin; additionally, there are at least 36 Springfield Townships, including 11 in Ohio. [wikipedia.org] ;)
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Re: Why is it an overstep (Score:2)
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I would like to add to all that, Hillary would be far worse. The only reason she isn't already answering for her crimes committed on her personal email server is because she has a D next to her name, just like the current president. Anyone rooting for Hillary should really look at Brazil and consider what a criminal in the presidency could do to our country.
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Anyone rooting for Hillary should really look at Brazil and consider what a criminal in the presidency could do to our country.
George W. and the Great Recession was a good example that. None of the Wall Street bankers went to prison for cratering the economy. The only person who got charged was a Russian programmer who took home modifications he made to open source software that Goldman Sach claimed were proprietary.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman-sachs-programmer [vanityfair.com]
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George W. and the Great Recession was a good example that
You mean the great recession caused by a deregulation that Bill Clinton signed into law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Funny how Bill Clinton's mistake cratered our economy once, but his wife would make a GREAT president :)
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You mean the great recession caused by a deregulation that Bill Clinton signed into law?
I do blame Bill Clinton for repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, and for the Dot Com Bust that came after he left office. But the Great Recession happened during George W.'s time in office.
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But, the Glass-Steagall act legalized the behavior which caused the Great Recession. But, the Great Recession occurred after Bush's time in office, so you could blame Obama with the same reasoning you are using to blame Bush, so I guess I should ask why you feel the Bush caused the Recession?
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I guess I should ask why you feel the Bush caused the Recession?
George W. should have replaced Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Low interest rates inflated the real estate and debt bubbles while Greenspan looked away, ignored the danger signals from the economy and resisted reforms to regulate the markets.
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But, the Great Recession occurred after Bush's time in office [...]
The Great Recession ended five months into Obama's first term in June 2009, when his administration was still getting started and supporting George W.'s policies. The Great Recession got started in 2007, not on January 20, 2009 as some people believe.
[...] so you could blame Obama with the same reasoning you are using to blame Bush [...]
I give Obama credit for a seven-year-old Wall Street bull market.
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/03/09/the-bull-market-is-seven-years-old-why-arent-people-more-excited/ [wsj.com]
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So, your assertion is that the recession is not still ongoing? You do realize that incomes have been flat for like 10 years, and there are still many people out of work. Wall street making money does not end the pain for the rest of the country.
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So, your assertion is that the recession is not still ongoing?
The recession has been over since June 2009. The consequences of the recession is still being worked today and will be felt for the next 20 years. And then reality will set in when people realizes that retired baby boomers outnumbers working people, Social Security and Medicare will consume two-thirds of the federal budget, and taxes will have to go up-up-up to pay for everything else. Politicians been kicking this can down the road since Ronald Reagan became president.
You do realize that incomes have been flat for like 10 years [...]
You do realize that inflation is below
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I do blame Bill Clinton for (...) the Dot Com Bust that came after he left office.
That was because Al Gore, inventor of the Information Superhighway, left with him. No wonder it blew up!
*ducks*
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i for one would love to see due process being followed
but when the people being investigated are the one who control the due process, and you are dealing with stuff that is so fragile as digital data, due process becomes a luxury which you shouldn't expect to last
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Lula has been hiding evidence, lying through his teeth with plenty of evidence that he can't hide against his ridiculous claims, moving compromising documents to secret places, and otherwise doing everything he can to obstruct the law.
In the United States, he would be entitled to fair trial. No matter how corrupt someone appears to the public at large, you can't deny him a fair trail and turn him over to a blood-thirsty mob. As I pointed out to another commenter, people who fight corruption are often corrupted themselves once they get into power. Why? Because they're too busy shoving the process of law where it doesn't shine.
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FYI: no wrongdoing investigated: he only got to be on testify on an investigated case (the "wrongdoing" was created by traditional media FUD...)
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I (and no one else, I think...) can't take your arguing seriously, since you are not brave enough to identify yourself - all I can do is warn others that you are trying to spread FUD...
sincerely yours
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which one?
:/ (besides that, how can I assume was the same AC that made the posts?)
* posting as AC makes you can't receive notifications on reply, making any kind of dialogue difficult
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Dirty Harry would murder a hundred innocent bystanders to get that punk who thought he could get away.
Dirty Harry stretched what was permissible for a police detective to do under the law but he would have never murdered bystanders to get at one punk.
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Well, yes and no. There are scenes in Dirty Harry and Magnum Force where Harry shoots into a crowd of people "to get at one punk". It almost makes the scenes somewhat humorous. Of course, as long as he has 100% confidence in his aim, and belief that his bullets won't penetrate and hit a bystander, I guess it's OK, but it's not exactly ideal police procedure.
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There are scenes in Dirty Harry and Magnum Force where Harry shoots into a crowd of people "to get at one punk".
How many bystanders were "murdered" as the OP wrote? Dirty Harry had a reputation for recklessness. Murdering bystanders would have run him out of the department.
But then, we're discussing a fictional character.
Real life is stranger than fiction.
All nine people wounded during a dramatic confrontation between police and a gunman outside the Empire State Building were struck by bullets fired by the two officers, police said Saturday, citing ballistics evidence.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/08/25/nypd-shooting-bystander-victims-hit-by-police-gunfire.html [foxnews.com]
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I'll bet both of those cops had seen Dirty Harry.
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I'll bet both of those cops had seen Dirty Harry.
Nah, "The Guantlet," where the house gets shot to pieces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht4PfYkJjoc [youtube.com]
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I have respect for someone who knows his Clint Eastwood movies.
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You do realize its a movie, right? Not real life?
Movie physics != Real Physics
In movies, people with gun shot wounds to the abdomen die in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days too ... but you don't care about that, eh?
You know aliens can't actually defy gravity like in independence day right?
I mean I could go on for days point out how movies don't actually represent reality, but its pretty silly of me to do so when the argument here is that a dude in a movie MIGHT have missed or the bullet MIGHT hav
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gun shot wounds to the abdomen die in seconds or minutes instead of hours or days
Well not all movies [imdb.com] .
That said too many people seem to believe that getting shot is instant death and that you go flying backwards when shot. Having shot a number of deer (thankfully all clean good shots) and also helped track down a few of my cousin's (he unfortunately has gut shot a couple), I have see deer run for miles for the better part of a day, as well as get shot through the heart, then hear the shot, run, and then tip over dead after 10-20 meters. I haven't ever dropped one but both my uncle and
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Well, of course. I even said as much ("But then, we're discussing a fictional character.")
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I can defy gravity. It doesn't do me any good, since gravity wins anyway, but I can defy it. "Do your worst, Gravity!" as the pen drops to the desk surface.
banana (Score:1)
This country is, after all, a a banana republic, what else can anyone else expect ?
biased article (Score:5, Insightful)
The article, written and hosted by instituto lula itself, should be taken with a grain of salt The institute is already under investigation because of massive cases corruption.
Also, someone leaked that the police would be seizing the institute, and they emptied it from most of its documents. Its like watergate in here, and the judge presiding the investigation has a lot of popular support because he is finally going for people which seemed to be untouchable in the past.
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if it were only Rede Globo broadcasting it, i might give you some reason to doubt that. But there isn't a single news outlet that is covering this situation in the same way. So, yeah...
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Corruption around the ex-president figure is so rampant that "due process of law" itself is a barrier to the due process, unfortunately.
As a citizen I can only approve what the police is doing.
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Then said citizen, besides being a coward that won't name himself, is also a moron.
Giving the state arbitrary powers is much more damaging than any politician can do in his lifetime.
You should now stop watching "Cidade Alerta" and such "quality" program on TV and maybe read a little bit on WHY we have due process of law and constitutional guarantees, because you put your foot deeper inside your mouth.
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Do you approve of them overstepping their bounds? What if your email account was one of the unrelated email accounts the police gained access to over and above what they were authorized to see?
If you don't care about this, I challenge you to publish the entire contents of your email account as you don't see anything wrong with it.
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Exactly, so why should the police have access to his email account along with the email accounts in the court order?
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many tell that all cases were created by the press (but it must be investigated anyway thought...)
Re:biased article (Score:4, Interesting)
The article, written and hosted by instituto lula itself, should be taken with a grain of salt The institute is already under investigation because of massive cases corruption.
Also, someone leaked that the police would be seizing the institute, and they emptied it from most of its documents. Its like watergate in here, and the judge presiding the investigation has a lot of popular support because he is finally going for people which seemed to be untouchable in the past.
Yes, this sounds like the police were worried that the sys admin was going to delete the server or something so they just demanded the admin passwords. Sure that would give them access to all the accounts, but it seems reasonable if there was a reasonable fear that the admin wasn't going to comply with the order. Yes the police should only look at the accounts that the courts ordered them to.
Now it looks like Slashdot has been used to spin coverage towards some false privacy debate when this is about corruption.
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had you marked as a friend for some reason, but changed to foe :)
pointing out that the article is form the offended party is one thing, but ignoring that they are right about the law is another.
then, the funny thing is, @hagnat compares this to watergate, but the current president is the one how put the laws that enabled the corruption to be prosecuted in the first place. So it is kinda the opposite of watergate.
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the law exists for a long long time already, its not something Dilma created
and she is also going to be investigated on accusations that she tried to disrupt the investigations
and i am not arguing if due process was followed or not
i am questioning whatever is written on instuto lula's article, cuz it might be full of lies created to discredit the investigation
the institute also critized how Lula was brought to justice to be interrogated, but it failed to highlight the fact the he was asked to come to justic
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friend or foe ? i didn't even knew about that system before you mentioned it /. is rather low
i wonder what i did in the past for you to mark me as friend, given that my participation on
thanks anyway :) ;)
and hope that you move me back to the friend side of the table in the future
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Re:hosted at Google (Score:4, Insightful)
No. It was not sensitive government e-mails. Instituto Lula is an NGO.
biased source (Score:3, Insightful)
Such generic access was not granted by the court's mandate, which referred only to a few specific email accounts. See the information here (in Portuguese).
It's important to note that the source is from Instituto Lula itself, which is the one being investigated.
There are legal procedures which the institute itself make take if it believes it was illegal,
but it seems that they limited themselves merely to blog that. Why?
Look at the source (Score:1)
Look at the source cited by this post, it's their own website. Lula and his institute are known for trying to manipulate public opinion in every possible way, but I not even for a second thought they would end up spreading their s*** on Slashdot.
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TFS spin (Score:1)
TFS puts a negative spin on the government's efforts investigate Brazil's broad corruption scandal, but the TFA's show overwhelming support by the Brazilian public and court systems:
"Many Brazilians believe that our existing legal system is poorly equipped to handle such massive illegality that is larger than the justice system itself," he said.
Crucially, Moro's [presiding Judge over the case] tactics have won the backing of higher courts in dealing with Brazil's biggest ever corruption scandal, in which a cartel of builders overcharged Petrobras for contracts, paying bribes to company directors and kickbacks to politicians.
Prosecutors have struck more than a dozen plea bargain deals and none of them have been denied by the Supreme Court, which has to approve testimony before it can be accepted as evidence.
This is such a huge corruption scandal that's gone on over a decade, Brazil is going to have to be very aggressive to clean the rot out of the system. Stories about "overreach" are coming from wealthy criminals who have hired reputation management/PR flacks feeding stories to gullible/corrupt journalists.
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Stories about "overreach" are coming from wealthy criminals who have hired reputation management/PR flacks feeding stories to gullible/corrupt journalists.
You don't consider "overreach" by the police as a form of corruption? For example, police in some jurisdictions of the U.S. seize assets under the drug laws because it's easier to raise money that way than ask taxpayers for a property tax increase.
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There are no allegations of overreach except by the corrupt officials that are being investigated. The public overwhelmingly support the investigations, the courts are on board with it, lot of plea deals and sentencing have already occurred to build a case against Lula.
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The public overwhelmingly support the investigations, the courts are on board with it, lot of plea deals and sentencing have already occurred to build a case against Lula.
That may be the case. But the public, police and courts have an obligation to ensure that there is no overreach is being committed. Just because the unpopular target of the investigation is crying foul doesn't mean that the accusations are entirely baseless.
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Totally different mentality between them and you or I. It makes me think it's a social construct. It's more widely seen in areas where they don't (at least nominally) quite have the same level of protections afforded by their constitution and/or are acclimated to living in an area where corruption is more wide-scale.
The behavior/belief or expression is similar to what you see from the Americans who say things like, "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to worry about. I'm glad that they're doing this t
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Its the kind of "integrity of the process" argument that anti-democracy cretins use to subvert justice.
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." — The Who
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A cynical paen to the corrupt, established order if there ever was one.
People who fight corruption are often corrupted themselves once they get into power. For example, Imelda Marcos and son are trying to reclaim the presidency in the Philippines after a generation of the "People Power" revolution petered out into corruption.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/08/corruption-philippines [economist.com]
[...] the writer of the lyric has a net worth of $105 million.
In short, anyone who is rich because of their hard work must be corrupt.
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No they aren't.
That's exactly how they become corrupted because they don't think it can happen to them.
Strawman.
I love how you divide the world between the non-rich and the rich.
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This corruption scandal has been going on for more than two decades, perhaps 3. Funny thing that only a single party (that ranks as the third one most mentioned in this investigation) is being dragged through the mud. It's notable the former presidential candidate that leads the largest opposition party (if you don't count the opposing half of the largest government coalition party) has been named no less than five times by different witnesses and yet has been spared from the media spotlights. And, mind you
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I second that!
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This is such a huge corruption scandal that's gone on over a decade, Brazil is going to have to be very aggressive to clean the rot out of the system. Stories about "overreach" are coming from wealthy criminals who have hired reputation management/PR flacks feeding stories to gullible/corrupt journalists.
Be careful what you wish for. The same tools used in a "war" against corruption could in the future be used against less famous and less wealthy people whose main crime would be merely their failure to follow the rules of an overly complex legal system. I'm all for hounding mass murderers and dictators down to their retirement homes. But if it's a matter of finding out simply whether the money was properly recorded in some ledger, which is the only proof you're likely to get in a corruption case short of a
It's news to me, coming from traditional media... (Score:2)
* Brazilian media is better described as an oligopoly [wikipedia.org] : the National Constitution explicit forbids crossed property of TV, radio and newspaper (as common in other markets, ie, FCC make something like it in US...), but the media owners ignore that to the point it is a joke nowadays
hogwash (Score:2, Insightful)
This summary is full of misinformation, and it's very biased. MythicalMan's previous submissions show how slanted he is about Brazilian politics.
The allegations of illegality mentioned in the summary are backed up by a link to the Instituto Lula's website itself, hardly a neutral, trustworthy party.
As to the Yahoo article, it has been grossly summarized, and also contains errors itself. There has been no detention without charges, only detentions before trial, as some of the accused have tried to leave the
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Dear Anonymous Coward,
My only political comment in the past here at /. was a report about the reaction in Brazil against Rede Globo. Globo is kowingly a long-time supporter of authoritarianism and corruption. They even attempted to apologize [independent.co.uk] for supporting the dictatorship that ousted President João Goulatr, in 1964. Brazil has a so terrible media landscape that Reporters Without Borders called it “the country of 30 Berlusconis [rsf.org]”. The fact that Globo and Brazilian media are attempting to ous
Darn! (Score:2)
Corrupt government freaking out ALERT (Score:1)
Most of what is in the article has been invented without factual basis.
There is a huge politic crisis in this (irrelevant) and weird country sitting in one of the most corrupt regions in this world, South America.
Government is going down. Former corrupt president "Lula" and his congregates are going down. They are going to jail.
Brazil suffered an incommensurable heist supported by local ignorant people. Now the country is moving toward a violent crash
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21684779-disaster-l
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This post is biased (Score:1)
I wonder if it's necessary (Score:2)
Re: "Seize" (Score:1, Insightful)
FORA DILMA! LULA NA CADEIA!
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I'm pretty sure Slashdot is a US site. From where did you get that EU thing?
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Kind of like the National Socialists.