S Carpenter

2024-04-27T15:13:00.000-06:00

Interpreter Handbook - Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada

2019-09-09T15:47:00.001-06:00

Interpreter Handbook - Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada

Brazil sacks hundreds of ‘left wing’ civil servants

2019-01-04T22:40:00.003-07:00

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/jair-bolsonaro-brazil-president-civil-servants-fire-far-right-left-wing-a8711116.html

Shehab Khan - The Independent - Friday, January 4, 2019

Brazil’s new president has authorised the dismissal of civil servants who do not share his far-right ideology, it has been reported.
Having taken office this week, Jair Bolsonaro has launched a purge of left-wing government officials with approximately 300 people expected to be dismissed.
Officials who are seen as being supportive of the previous left-wing and centrist governments will be removed to “clean the house”, Mr Bolsonaro’s chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni said.
“It’s the only way to govern with our ideas, our concepts and to carry out what Brazil’s society decided in its majority,” Mr Lorenzoni said, according to Die Welt.

He added that the vast proportion of those dismissed are on temporary contracts and their removal is necessary to “do away with the Socialist and Communist ideas that during 30 years have led us to the chaos in which we live.”
Mr Bolsonaro was elected to the Brazilian presidency on a far-right platform, where he promised to overhaul many aspects of life in Latin America’s largest nation.
In his first few hours in office he targeted Brazil’s indigenous groups, descendants of slaves and the LGBT community with executive orders.
During his presidential campaign Mr Bolsonaro, a former army captain and longtime congressman, said he would stop making what he calls concessions to native Brazilians and “Quilombolas”, as descendants of former slaves are known.
One of the orders he signed will make it all but impossible for new lands to be identified for indigenous communities.
Areas set aside for Quilombolas are also affected by the decision.
Another order removed the concerns of the LGBT community from consideration by the new human rights ministry.
Agencies contributed to this report

Brazil’s far right leader fires hundreds of ‘left wing’ civil servants

Shehab Khan @ShehabKhan

6-7 minutes

Brazil’s new president has authorised the dismissal of civil servants who do not share his far-right ideology, it has been reported.
Having taken office this week, Jair Bolsonaro has launched a purge of left-wing government officials with approximately 300 people expected to be dismissed.
Officials who are seen as being supportive of the previous left-wing and centrist governments will be removed to “clean the house”, Mr Bolsonaro’s chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni said.

“It’s the only way to govern with our ideas, our concepts and to carry out what Brazil’s society decided in its majority,” Mr Lorenzoni said, according to Die Welt.
He added that the vast proportion of those dismissed are on temporary contracts and their removal is necessary to “do away with the Socialist and Communist ideas that during 30 years have led us to the chaos in which we live.”
Mr Bolsonaro was elected to the Brazilian presidency on a far-right platform, where he promised to overhaul many aspects of life in Latin America’s largest nation.
In his first few hours in office he targeted Brazil’s indigenous groups, descendants of slaves and the LGBT community with executive orders.
During his presidential campaign Mr Bolsonaro, a former army captain and longtime congressman, said he would stop making what he calls concessions to native Brazilians and “Quilombolas”, as descendants of former slaves are known.
One of the orders he signed will make it all but impossible for new lands to be identified for indigenous communities.
Areas set aside for Quilombolas are also affected by the decision.

Another order removed the concerns of the LGBT community from consideration by the new human rights ministry.

Environment - Brazil 2019

2019-01-03T13:32:00.000-07:00

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/do-brazilians-really-care-about-the-environment/?

Do Brazilians Really Care about the Environment?

The election of Jair Bolsonaro as our next president suggests we don’t, but the truth is more complicated

By Carlos Souza on November 8, 2018

Brazil is the guardian of the planet’s largest tropical rainforest, where most of the Earth's biodiversity and forest carbon stocks are concentrated, and which possesses the world’s largest reservoir of fresh water. Its natural patrimony extends over other five unique biomes. Even though, recently elected President Jair Bolsonaro, with 55 percent of valid votes, had made clear during his campaign that the environmental agenda was not a priority.
Bolsonaro’s first moves after the election showed signs that he was going to merge the Ministry of the Environment with the Ministry of Agriculture. However, in response to initial critiques from academics, NGOs, conservationists, and part of the agribusiness sector—such a merger had been called an “extinction” by conservationists, anthropologists, and activists—Bolsonaro is backing down. But Bolsonaro has promised other actions that could negatively affect the environmental, such as allowing mining inside Protected Areas; ending he calls an “industry" of fines designed to enforce the environmental regulation; and making environmental licensing for infrastructure development and the use of pesticides more flexible.
Collateral effects of his promises during the presidential campaign to loosen environmental regulations have already begun. Deforestation in the Amazon region has risen, according to existing forest monitoring alerts (see SAD data from Imazon and DETER data from Inpe.), and more invasions of Protected Areas. This represents a worsening of an era of hard times for the environmental sector that began 2015 Dilma Russef and continued during the current administration of Michel Temer.

Our country is relatively young, having been in existence for only a little over 500 years. But the Amazon and the other biomes were there long before that, and home to several million indigenous people. In the past 100 years, we have reduced Brazil’s Atlantic Forest to less than 10 percent of its original extent; cleared 50 percent of the Cerrado savannah and almost 20 percent of the Amazon. Today more than 3,000 species are under threat of extinction. When I spoke with a Colombian IT entrepreneur about how to use data visualization and storytelling to engage more Brazilian citizens to support Protected Areas and nature, he said “you Brazilians should be proud of having inherited this immense natural patrimony.” And that is absolutely true.
I know that our country has other big social and economic challenges. The crime rate, with more than 60 thousand murders in 2016, is unacceptable. Corruption is entrenched in our society. The quality of public healthcare is low. And investment for education and science has drastically declined. Unemployment affects more than 13 million people, and the economy has been shrinking since 2014.
With his promise to vanish corruption, improve domestic security and rebuild the country’s economy (but without concrete proposals], Bolsonaro won the presidential election. Voters either didn’t mind or didn’t notice the dangers to the environment that were part his campaign. (Among these was a threat to leave the Paris Climate Accord during his campaign, although he seems to be backing away from that).
But I don’t believe that this is a sign that we Brazilian don’t care about the environment. In fact, a recent poll of more than a million voters revealed that 51 percent thought we should have more environmental protections, not less. Now is the right time for Brazilians to send a clear message to the new president and his ministers that the environmental agenda must be taken seriously.
So how can we do that? Our country has shown signs of extreme polarization and intolerance as a result of this election. Hence, the first step we must take is to reunite and restore our capacity to engage in dialogue and respect each other’s ideas. We must refuse to take a path toward intolerance, discrimination, racism or any sort of violence, and say no to the path of destroying our immense nature patrimony.

Secondly, we need to accelerate our environmental literacy. Most Brazilians people do not know that the Amazon rainforest is responsible for transporting water vapor to other regions in the country, which contributes to rainfall for agriculture production, hydroelectric energy, water use, and maintenance of aquatic biodiversity for food production. Most people do not know that reducing deforestation can slow down climate change and its negative impacts. And people don’t know that a large percentage of cleared lands are currently unproductive, which means we do not need to destroy even more of our forests to expand agriculture and cattle ranching.
Environmental literacy can also connect us with nature and improve our well-being. In 2017, 10 million people visited national parks in Brazil, an increase of 20 percent relative to 2016—and research has shown the psychological benefits of more engagement with nature. It reduces stress, strengthens our immune system, and makes us happier (see, for example the results of the 30 Days Wild challenge).
The third step is for the agribusiness sector in Brazil to recognize that nature is their best ally. Better soil management and maintenance of the forest to protect rivers, small streams and steep hillsides improves land productivity and makes land use sustainable in the long run. Several studies have shown that rainfall decreases in highly deforested landscapes, while CO₂ emissions increase, leading to extreme weather conditions, such as longer, more intense droughts, along changes to rainfall and an increase in wildfires. Expanding agriculture at the expense of forests will also tarnish the image of companies that pursue such practices. In fact, a number of international agribusinesses and corporations in the finance sector have signed agreements to develop a deforestation-free market.

I am not going to answer the question of whether we Brazilians care about the environment. Certainly, many of us do, including many of Bolsonaro’s voters. Many others do not understand the implications of policies that harm the environment. And a minority simply do not take environmental protection. seriously. Bolsonaro has demonstrated that he does not fall into the first group, but he can change.
But Brazilian citizens must embrace and take pride in the natural capital that we have inherited, and not forget our immense responsibility to our people, our planet and future generations. We must send the right signals to Bolsonaro about the importance of protecting our national patrimony.

Carlos Souza, PhD, is a senior researcher at the nonprofit organization Imazon. He conducts research on spatial analysis and on remote sensing for mapping and monitoring forest changes.

ONU: Brasil é exemplo de eleição afetada por 'desinformação'

2018-11-14T13:22:00.002-07:00

https://www.terra.com.br/noticias/chefe-da-onu-cita-brasil-como-exemplo-de-eleicao-afetada-por-desinformacao,dd2e15d20649c9c1e211c9c67c842962dqele5k1.html

14 NOV2018

17h35

atualizado às 17h55

Jamil Chade

Michelle Bachelet falou sobre os riscos da manipulação de dados coletados na internet e como podem afetar 'escolhas' das populações

A alta comissária de Direitos Humanos da ONU, Michelle Bachelet, cita o Brasil como exemplo de como a "desinformação" influenciou nas eleições, no mês passado. Num discurso realizado nesta quarta-feira na Universidade de Genebra, a chefe de Direitos Humanos das Nações Unidas tratou dos riscos da manipulação de dados coletados na internet e como podem afetar "escolhas" das populações.

"Em alguns países, um volume amplo de dados está sendo coletado por meio de monitoramento, e são usados para determinar pontuações pessoais ou negando acesso às oportunidades", alertou.

"Temos visto que os dados, uma vez coletados, podem ser usados para uma multiplicidade de objetivos que vão bem além das metas originais", declarou a ex-presidente do Chile. "Essa relação entre inteligência artificial e a coleta de dados sobre nossas personalidades e escolhas vão um passo além quando são usadas, por atores públicos ou privados, para manipular nossos pensamentos e mudar nossas escolhas", alertou.

"Isso não é ficção científica", disse. "Seja na eleição presidencial dos EUA, no referendo sobre o Brexit no Reino Unido ou nas recentes eleições no Brasil e Quênia, onde pesquisas falsas e desinformação foram amplamente compartilhadas, estamos vendo um aumento do uso de campanhas de desinformação e robôs nas redes sociais para influenciar opiniões e escolhas de eleitores individuais", alertou.

"Talvez pensamos que isso não ocorre com nós mesmos: somos espertos suficientes para não ser afetados por um bando de robôs. Mas não tenho tanta certeza", disse.

"Aparentemente, a internet está ficando cada vez mais uma arena para forças muito sofisticadas para propaganda . seja por extremismo violento ou atores privados e mesmo autoridades estatais para objetivos políticos", advertiu.

"Nesse contexto, existe alguma dúvida de que nossa liberdade para pensar, acreditar, expressar ideias e fazer nossas escolhas e viver como queremos está sob ameaça?", questionou.

"Se nossos pensamentos, ideias e nossas relações podem ser previstas por instrumentos digitais, e mesmo alterado pela ação de programas digitais, então isso representa uma questão desafiadora e fundamental sobre nosso futuro."

Na avaliação de Bachelet, um dos desafios dos Estados no futuro será regular o mundo digital, além de trabalhar ao lado de de engenheiros e ativistas de direitos humanos para permitir que essa esfera possa ser um local de proteção de direitos humanos.

"A evolução do mundo digital é profundamente importante para os direitos humanos."

Por que a personalidade das pessoas muda (muitas vezes para pior) nas redes sociais? - BBC News Brasil

2018-10-15T22:17:00.001-06:00

Por que a personalidade das pessoas muda (muitas vezes para pior) nas redes sociais? - BBC News Brasil

How would a hard Brexit affect the Republic of Ireland? - BBC News

2018-10-15T01:02:00.001-06:00

How would a hard Brexit affect the Republic of Ireland? - BBC News

Alma italiana

2018-02-25T02:15:00.000-07:00

Alma Italiana

Em homenagem ao dia nacional do imigrante italiano, que é comemorado 21 de fevereiro, vamos falar um pouco sobre como é ter a alma italiana.

Primeiramente preciso dizer que ser dramático faz parte do pacote, exagerado, intenso e nada, absolutamente nada é algo tão simples quanto possa parecer.

Viver a vida de forma intensa, talvez essa seja uma boa definição. O sangue em ebulição que corre pelas veias não permite que nenhum sentimento seja morno. Ama demais, sofre demais, cuida demais, tem raiva demais, daquelas que parece que uma guerra será declarada, mas cinco minutos depois a guerra é cancelada porque sequer o motivo da briga é lembrado.

Também é verdade que alguns ranços vêm de encarnações passadas, é aquela implicância que já nasce no berço e madonna mia, nesse caso, melhor manter uma distância saudável de uns dois continentes.

O choro corre fácil, os olhos estão eternamente marejados e pode ser por saudades de alguma coisa que nem sabemos o que é, por lembrança de um ente querido que se foi ou pelo comercial de margarina. As emoções estão sempre à flor da pele e tudo é passional!

Assim como o choro fácil, igualmente o riso aparece, tão escandaloso quanto o choro, pois lembre-se, nada é morno. A nostalgia é um sentimento que já vem de fábrica e é praticamente uma marca de nascença.

Onde houver dois ou mais descendentes de italianos reunidos, aí haverá um tumulto. Não porque eles estejam brigando, mas porque o mundo acha que eles estão se matando, mas não, é só um bate-papo normal entre amigos.

Se você tiver que fazer um italiano ficar quieto, amarre-lhes as mãos. Na hora das refeições, por questões de segurança, também é melhor manter uma distância de meio metro um do outro, pois é comum facas passando, nas mãos voando, enquanto simplesmente se conversa, aos gritos, é claro.

A comida nunca será suficiente. Se não sobrou, você não fez o quanto deveria ter feito e, se não repetiu o prato umas três vezes é porque não gostou. Quebrar o macarrão é uma heresia e misturá-lo com arroz ou feijão é pecado mortal.

É falar palavrão o tempo todo, muitas vezes até para expressar carinho. A dica para diferenciar um xingamento de um elogio é olhar nos olhos, se estiver marejado, é carinho, porca miséria! Agora, se tiver sangue nos olhos… bem, fuja!

Daria para passar horas escrevendo, mas é desnecessário, pois não existem palavras suficientes para expressar o que é carregar esse sangue nas veias. O exagero e a intensidade fazem parte e isso causa alguns problemas, até de saúde, mas se quer saber, acho que nem saberia viver de outro jeito, pois teria que trocar de alma e isso não dá.

Se você convive com uma pessoa que tem a alma italiana, deixo algumas dicas: falar alto não significa estar nervoso, chorar por tudo ou por nada é normal, reações equilibradas não fazem parte do perfil, ignorar algo que incomoda é impossível, tudo vai doer mais, tudo vai causar mais sofrimento, mas se você tiver paciência, também terá muito amor, companheirismo e cuidado, pois não só as coisas negativas que são exageradas, as boas também!

Em minhas orações, agradeço aos meus nonnos, que saíram de uma cidadezinha, província de Veneza e imigraram para o Brasil, como muitos, fugindo da guerra e aqui se estabeleceram. Gratidão a todos os nossos ancestrais italianos, que imigraram para o mundo todo e espalharam e multiplicaram esse sangue quente, passional, mas de muita fibra, garra e amor pela vida!

25 maps that explain the English language - Vox

2017-04-13T15:03:00.001-06:00

25 maps that explain the English language - Vox

Artigo, Parágrafo, Inciso

2016-05-31T21:34:00.001-06:00

Article for translators: The Law of Business Organizations under the New Brazilian Civil Code

"... translating a legal text is like completing a jigsaw puzzle with pieces taken from a different one: nothing ever fits correctly."

This article was originally published at Translation Journal (http://accurapid.com/journal).

By Danilo Nogueira
(Professional translators, editors, consultants, trainers)
Brazil

danilo.tradutor@uol.com.br

Praias brasileiras

2016-02-23T12:02:00.000-07:00

http://camilavazvaz.jusbrasil.com.br/noticias/307325727/acelerada-privatizacao-das-praias-brasileiras?utm_campaign=newsletter-daily_20160223_2852&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter

Acelerada privatização das praias brasileiras

Novo retrocesso a enfrentar: sob as vistas grossas dos poderes locais e Judiciário, condomínios e comércios barram lazer de quem não tem propriedade ou poder de consumo.

Publicado por Camila Vaz - 1 dia atrás

Por Raquel Rolnik, em seu blog

Passou o carnaval, o verão vai terminando e com ele o frenesi dos brasileiros com nosso imenso litoral. Existe alguém que não gosta de passar férias de verão na praia, mergulhar no mar, caminhar pela areia, olhar o horizonte sem fim? No entanto, apesar de termos praias lindíssimas, e de todasserem, por definição, públicas, nem sempre é possível desfrutar desta paisagem tão especial… às vezes não conseguimos sequer enxergá-la.

Percorrendo nosso litoral, é cada vez mais comum que, de repente, a paisagem seja interrompida por muros altíssimos protegendo condomínios privados que bloqueiam a entrada para a praia e a visão do mar. Em algumas situações, as casas avançam com muros de contenção sobre a areia, e, com o avanço das marés, literalmente, eliminam a praia.

Quando não são os condomínios residenciais, são “barracas de praia” que se transformaram em verdadeiros complexos de lazer à beira-mar, em cima da areia, bloqueando e privatizando o usufruto da praia. Um exemplo impressionante é o de Porto Seguro, na Bahia. Quem passa pela estrada que liga esta cidade a Santa Cruz de Cabrália percorre uma série de empreendimentos gigantescos que incluem restaurantes, espaços para shows, playgrounds etc., e que impedem os pobres mortais de simplesmente ver ou mergulhar no belíssimo mar azul turquesa da cidade…

Isso é cada vez mais frequente… Mas é permitido? Não! De acordo com aConstituição Federal, as praias são bens da União. Além disso, a Lei7.661/1988, que regula o uso da costa marítima do nosso país, determina claramente, em seu Artigo 10, que “As praias são bens públicos de uso comum do povo, sendo assegurado, sempre, livre e franco acesso a elas e ao mar, em qualquer direção e sentido, ressalvados os trechos considerados de interesse de segurança nacional ou incluídos em áreas protegidas por legislação específica.”

Então, se a legislação não permite que a praia – pública – seja ocupada por esses empreendimentos, como é possível que estes existam há tanto tempo e continuem se multiplicando? No caso de Porto Seguro, como em muitas outras situações de privatização de praias, é a irresolução jurídica, ou seja, os processos que se estendem indefinidamente numa teia de recursos, agravos e táticas protelatórias, que mantém flagrante ilegalidade, garantindo os benefícios dos usurpadores.

Órgãos públicos como o Iphan (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional) e a SPU (Secretaria do Patrimônio da União), assim como promotores de vários ministérios públicos do país, ao tentar mandar abrir condomínios, derrubar muros e barracas, enfrentam o enorme poder político local e sua incidência sobre o poder jurídico, em benefício dos que desejam manter a situação como está, contrariando o interesse público.

Em Porto Seguro, por exemplo, no início da década de 2000, o Iphan emitiu ordens administrativas determinando a retirada das barracas que ocupam o litoral Norte da cidade, ou seja, as que estão à direita da estrada paralela ao mar, literalmente sobre a areia. Como não foram cumpridas, a questão foi judicializada: o Iphan recorreu à Justiça solicitando que esta ordenasse a retirada das barracas. Passados mais de dez anos, pouquíssimas ordens judiciais foram emitidas (menos de 10 barracas foram removidas, entre dezenas existentes) e, na maioria dos casos, os processos circulam nas diversas instâncias, com recursos e mais recursos…

O fato é que os donos destes empreendimentos são agentes locais poderosíssimos, que participam da direção política da cidade, ocupam cargos altos no Executivo e no Legislativo, têm laços estreitos com juízes e promotores… Enquanto isso, as barracas continuam firmes e a praia segue privatizada… E quem aprecia a tranquilidade e a amplidão da paisagem do mar vai ter que buscar isso em lugares cada vez mais raros e longínquos…

Fonte: Outraspalavras

translator-hub/the-big-list-of-freelance-translators-tips

2016-02-14T02:06:00.001-07:00

https://www.tomedes.com/translator-hub/the-big-list-of-freelance-translators-tips.php

How to Wrap a Gift Perfectly Every Time: Do It Diagonally

2015-12-14T17:41:00.001-07:00

How to Wrap a Gift Perfectly Every Time: Do It Diagonally

Communication and negotiation skills for freelance translators - Marketing tips for translators

2015-08-24T23:46:00.001-06:00

Communication and negotiation skills for freelance translators - Marketing tips for translators

Communication and negotiation skills for freelance translators

Image courtesy of jesadaphorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Did you know that just by focusing more on your communication and negotiation skills with your potential and existing clients, you can become more profitable and in demand? When I first started out, I was focusing solely on the actual translation part, on doing my job. Producing high quality translations is of course the cornerstone of our business, but if we pay attention to the following communication tips, we can create more profitable relationships with our clients and colleagues.

It is not only how we communicate in emails or on the phone, but everything we post online matters. I have heard many agencies and direct clients say that before they hire someone, they google them, and check out their presence on social media, and only use translators that give a positive impression online. That is why I wanted to create a special webinar with tips for good communication both directly and indirectly with clients and colleagues, plus talk about how to improve and protect your image online. Communication and negotiation skills for translators.

Have you ever experienced problems with a client? The cause is often poor communication, either from the client, from you, or from both. Here are some symptoms of poor communication.

Symptoms of poor communication

Being unsure what the client really wants
Not keeping records of your interactions with the client, or keeping poor records
Client seems to have an uneven attitude towards you

If you agree with any of the points above, your communication with the client could be improved.

How to improve communications with clients

Determine the client’s communication style (email, phone, face-to-face).
Keep better records of your interactions. Save emails, record when you talked to them over the phone or when you met them.
Pay attention to your communication tone, especially in email. It is easy to be too brief and direct in email conversations.
Be very specific and record project terms and expectations in advance.
Set appointments for communication so you can be more prepared.
Really listen. Pay attention to what the client says, instead of thinking ahead in the conversation.
Verify by repeating and recording in writing.
Keep it positive.

These are some basic tips to improve your communication with clients. We will go into more depth with these in the webinar, plus discuss tips for communicating effectively on social media to attract more clients, protecting your privacy and improving your social networking skills.Communication and negotiation skills for freelance translators.

the powers of Europe, which once divided Africa between them The New York Times

2015-06-25T17:46:00.001-06:00

Migrants Provoke an Identity Crisis in Europe - The New York Times

Migrants Provoke an Identity Crisis in Europe

By ALAN COWELLJUNE 25, 2015

DEAL, England — For centuries they sailed to the south, conquistadors and colonists, wresting control of a continent’s riches and imposing alien ways of faith and governance.

Yet, in recent weeks, watching the inexorable exodus of migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean toward Greece and Italy in leaky craft, it is tempting to wonder whether the tide has turned.

Now, it is the powers of Europe, which once divided Africa between them, that face an invasion that could reshape their societies.

The presence of outsiders seeking a niche in cosseted lands has long unsettled Europeans who boast of big-heartedness while protecting privileged lives built in part on oil, minerals and cheap labor from farther south.

But, more recently, xenophobia has gathered new strength, displayed in the rise of right-wing parties that oppose migration across the European Union’s open internal frontiers. It draws strength from the fear of The Other embodied in the migrants fleeing across the Mediterranean from Eritrea and Syria, Nigeria and Senegal — colonial-era creations overlaid with war, oppression, corruption or decline.

Just last week, voters in Denmark dumped their center-left government, shifting toward the far-right Danish People’s Party, which, like the insurgent National Front in France or the U.K. Independence Party in Britain, had once been relegated to a cantankerous European fringe.

And this week, European leaders, debating a plan to take in 40,000 asylum seekers across the Continent, confronted a stark choice to determine the very nature of their land. “If selfishness and fear prevail,” the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, wrote in The Guardian, “we risk losing the noble idea underpinning the European project.”

At a time of wider divisions over Greek debt and Britain’s discernible shift toward leaving the European Union, the question is this: What purpose will Europe serve if its successes are measured exclusively by the narrow self-interest individual states?

Here, on England’s south coast, history seems to offer one answer: It was ever thus.

On the ramparts of the 16th-century Deal Castle, built by Henry VIII to defend his realm against invaders, the long snouts of old cannons point out to sea, leading the eye across the English Channel, toward France.

Again, this week, that waterway was Britain’s bulwark against turmoil when a wildcat strike by French workers brought the port of Calais to a standstill. Tires were burned. Hundreds of England-bound trucks ground to a halt.

Most alarming for many Britons, some of the thousands of migrants camping out around Calais scrambled for hiding places in the log-jammed vehicles to cross the channel — the last hurdle of an odyssey that, according to United Nations figures, brought a record 150,000 migrants to Europe last year.

Arguably the south-north flow is one more sign of the failure to build a new order after the Cold War to contain divisions of belief, ethnicity and geopolitics.

Just last week, indeed, the United Nations produced the startling assessment that the number of people pushed out of their homes by combat, repression and unrest had reached a record 59.5 million — nearly 14 million of them in the past year alone.

That enormous wall of human misery stands behind those fleeing toward Europe, hundreds of them dying in the process.

Much of Europe’s putative response has focused on curbing human traffickers and turning back migrants with no legitimate claim on asylum. That approach, however, ignores what David Miliband, the head of the International Rescue Committee, called a broader effort to settle conflicts that force people from their own lands.

“By the time ships are pulling bodies from the Mediterranean,” he said in a speech last week, “it is too late.”

In the 19th century, Europe’s industrialization fueled the imperial drive for riches. In the 21st, the imperative has turned back on itself, offering portends of what Mr. Miliband called a “decade of disorder” — if not much longer.

Quite the Brazilian language, I say | Revista Pesquisa FAPESP

2015-06-23T14:56:00.001-06:00

Quite the Brazilian language, I say | Revista Pesquisa FAPESP

..

.Quite the Brazilian language, I say

Analysis of historical texts and interviews reveals the hallmarks of language in Brazil, the extent of the Hillbilly R and places where old ways of speaking can still be found

CARLOS FIORAVANTI | ED. 230 | APRIL 2015

Study for Partida da monção (Departure of the Monsoon), 1897, by Almeida Júnior (São Paulo State Pinacoteca Collection). The bandeirantes left Porto Feliz on their way to the Central-West region

The opportunity for simplicity, dispensing with theoretically essential grammatical elements and answering, “Yes, I did,” when someone asks, “Did you buy the car?” is one of the features that give Brazilian Portuguese flexibility and identity. An analysis of historical documents and field interviews over the past 30 years indicates that Brazilian Portuguese can already be considered as unique and different from European Portuguese as American English is different from British English. But Brazilian Portuguese is not yet its own language: perhaps it will be – in about 200 years according to experts– when it amasses the uniqueness that keeps Brazilians from fully understanding what a Portuguese native has to say.

The spread of Portuguese in Brazil, its regional variations and their possible explanations that cause an urubu (vulture) in São Paulo to be called a corvo in Brazil’s south, not to mention the sources of the language’s innovation, are emerging through the research being carried out by nearly 200 linguists. According to studies at the University of São Paulo (USP), one innovation of Brazilian Portuguese, which as yet has no equivalent in Portugal, is the Hillbilly R, whose pronunciation is so heavy that it could easily be rendered through the use of two or three ‘r’s, such as in porrrta (door) or carrrne (meat).

Simply associating the Hillbilly R with inland São Paulo State, however, is a geographical and historical inaccuracy, although the unabashed R has been the trademark of the hillbilly style made famous by actor Amácio Mazzaropi in 32 films produced from 1952 to 1980. By following the routes of the bandeirantes,17th-century Portuguese gold-seeking adventurers from the São Paulo region, linguists found the R, supposedly typical of São Paulo, in cities in the states of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Paraná, western Santa Catarina as well as in Rio Grande do Sul, shaping a way of speaking that is similar to 18th-century Portuguese. Those who have patience and keen hearing can also find, in Brazil’s central region – and in cities along the coast – the ‘sh’ sound, known as S chiado, a feature typically found in today’s Carioca accent associated with Rio de Janeiro, but which came over with the Portuguese in 1808 and was a sign of distinction because it represented the type of speech heard in the Portuguese Court. But even the Portuguese were not original: experts say that the S chiado, which turns esquina (corner) into shquina, came from the French nobles who were so admired by the Portuguese.

The study of the history of the Portuguese language in Brazil is bringing to light the characteristics that have been preserved from the Portuguese, such as the use of R in place of L, resulting in pranta (plant) instead of planta. The famous Portuguese author Camões recorded this replacement in Os Lusíadas – there we see frautas (flutes) in place of flautas – and São Paulo singer and composer Adoniran Barbosa left evidence of it in several compositions, among phrases such as “frechada do teu olhar”, (“your piercing look”) from the samba Tiro ao Álvaro. USP researchers have noted in field studies that inland residents in both Brazil and Portugal, especially less educated ones, still talk this way. Another sign of language preservation identified by experts from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, this time in historical documents, is use of a(s) gente(s) (the people) as a synonym for “us,” today one of the very signatures of Brazilian Portuguese.

Célia Lopes of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) found evidence of the use of a gente in documents dating back to the 16th century, and more often from the 19th century. It was a way to indicate the first person plural, meaning todo mundo(everyone), necessarily including oneself. According to Lopes, use of a gente often connotes disengagement and lack of definition: one who uses a gente does not generally make it clear if there is intent to commit to what is being said, or if the person uttering it sees himself as part of the group, like in “a gente precisa fazer” (“the people need to make”). The pronoun nós (we), as in “nós precisamos fazer” (“we need to make”), expresses responsibility and commitment. In the last 30 years, she notes that a gente has inserted itself into places previously occupied by nós and has become a resource commonly used by all ages and social classes throughout Brazil, despite the fact that grammar books continue to look somewhat askance at it.

Linguists from several Brazilian states are unearthing the roots of Brazilian Portuguese by studying personal and business correspondence, wills, travelogues, legal proceedings, letters to editors and advertisements from newspapers dating back to the 16th century, collected in institutions such as the National Library and the São Paulo State Public Archives. The team led by Célia Lopes has also found often underappreciated old letters and other linguistic treasures at the weekly antique fair held Saturdays at the Praça XV de Novembro in downtown Rio de Janeiro. “A student brought me wonderful letters found in the garbage,” she says.

Untitled from the bandeirante study, undated, by Henrique Bernardelli, (São Paulo State Pinacoteca Collection). Adventurers from São Paulo spread the Portuguese language by conquering other regions

From vossa mercê (your grace) to cê (you)
Historical documents provide proof that the Portuguese spoken in Brazil began to differentiate itself from European Portuguese at least four centuries ago. One indication of this separation is found in the 1793 book Memórias para a história da capitania de São Vicente(Historical Records of the Captaincy of São Paulo) written by São Vicente-born Father Gaspar da Madre de Deus, and later rewritten by Marcelino Pereira Cleto, a Portuguese, who was a judge in Santos. In comparing the two versions, José Simões of USP found 30 differences between the Brazilian and European Portuguese. One of them exists to this day: speakers of Brazilian Portuguese explicitly state the subject of sentences, such as in, “o rapaz me vendeu o carro, depois ele saiu correndo e ao atravessar a rua ele foi atropelado” (“the boy sold me the car, then he ran off and was run over as he crossed the street”). In European Portuguese, it would be more natural to omit the subject, which is already defined by the verb tense – “o rapaz vendeu-me o carro, depois saiu a correr…” (“the boy sold me the car, then ran off…”) –, resulting in a perfectly grammatical sentence, although it sounds a bit off to the Brazilian ear.

A resident of Portugal, if asked if he bought a car, would naturally respond “Sim, comprei-o,” (“Yes, I bought it”), making the verb complement explicit, “even among less educated speakers,” Simões says. He notes that the Portuguese use mesoclisis – “Dar-lhe-ei um carro, com certeza!” (“Of course I’ll give you a car!”) –, which would sound pedantic in Brazil. Another difference is the distance between the spoken language and the written language in Brazil. Instead of pronouncing the word ‘many’ asmuito, Brazilians instead say muinto. The pronoun você (you), which is already an abbreviated version of vossa mercê and vosmecê (the honorific “your grace”), is compacted even further to cê, and stuck onto the verb as in cevai? (“Are you going?”)

“The language we speak is not the same as the language we write,” says Simões, based on examples such as these. “Written and spoken Portuguese in Portugal are much closer to each other, although there are still regional differences.” Simões is adding to the textual analysis in his journeys through Portugal. “Ten years ago my relatives in Portugal said that they couldn’t understand what I was saying” he notes. “Today, probably due to the influence Brazilian soap operas have had on television, they say that I’m speaking a more correct Portuguese.”

“We have maintained the rhythm of speech while the Europeans began to speak more quickly starting in the 18th century,” notes Ataliba Castilho, professor emeritus of USP, who, over the last 40 years, has planned and coordinated several research projects about spoken Portuguese and the history of Portuguese in Brazil. “Up until the 16th century,” he says, “Brazilian and European Portuguese were like Spanish, with clearly enunciated syllables. The spoken word was much closer to the written word.” Célia Lopes adds another difference: Brazilian Portuguese keeps most of the vowels while the Europeans generally omit them, emphasizing the consonants, and calling ‘telephone’ atulfón.

There are also numerous words that have different meaning depending on which side of the Atlantic one is on. In Portugal, students at private universities pay not amensalidade (monthly tuition), but rather a propina. A bolsista (scholarship holder) in Portugal is a bolseiro. Since the Europeans did not adopt certain words used in Brazil, such as bunda (buttocks), a word originally from Africa, embarrassing moments often ensue. Vanderci Aguilera, a senior professor at Londrina State University (UEL) and one of the linguists tasked with recovering the history of Brazilian Portuguese, once took a Portuguese friend to a store. To see if a dress the friend had just tried on fit well over her backside, the friend asked: “O que achas do meu rabo?,” a question a Brazilian would understand as: “What do you think of my butt?”

The soldier and the farmer’s daughter
Found in the collection of documents about the evolution of Paulista Portuguese is a letter from 1807 written by Manoel Coelho, a soldier who allegedly seduced the daughter of a farmer. The girl’s father was furious when he found out and forced the young man to marry the girl. The soldier, however, put his foot down: he would not marry her, as he wrote, “nem por bem nem por mar”. Simões thought the reference to mar (sea) was a bit odd, considering the quid pro quo took place in what was then the village of São Paulo. But then he realized: “of course, the Hillbilly R! He meant to say ‘nem por bem nem por mal!’ (willingly or not)”. The soldier had written the words just as he would have spoken them. We do not know whether he ended up marrying the farmer’s daughter, but the exchange left valuable evidence of how people spoke in the early 19th century.

“The Hillbilly R was a characteristic of the spoken language in the village of São Paulo, which with gradual urbanization and the arrival of European immigrants, was pushed to the periphery or to other cities,” Simões says. “It was the language of thebandeirantes.” Experts believe that the earliest residents of the village of São Paulo, besides using porrta, would skip over the consonants in the middle of words, saying for ‘woman’ muié instead of mulher, for example. In order to capture indigenous people and later find gold, the bandeirantes first had to conquer inland São Paulo, taking with them their vocabulary and way of speaking. The exaggerated R can still be heard in the cities of what is known as the Mid-Tietê area, which includes Santana de Parnaíba, Pirapora do Bom Jesus, Sorocaba, Itu, Tietê, Porto Feliz and Piracicaba. The residents of these areas, especially those from the countryside, appeared in paintings by Ituan artist José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior until he was murdered by his lover’s husband in Piracicaba. The bandeirantes then proceeded to other forests in the huge Captaincy of São Paulo, established in 1709 with land from the current states of São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Tocantins, Minas Gerais, Paraná and Santa Catarina (see map).

Manoel Mourivaldo Almeida, also from USP, found signs of ancient Paulista Portuguese in Cuiabá, the capital of Mato Grosso State, which experienced relatively little linguistic or cultural interaction with other cities after the peak gold mining years ended two centuries ago. “Refined Portuguese from the 16th and 17th centuries had theS chiado,” Almeida concludes. “When they traveled to the Central-West region, Paulistas used to speak like today’s Cariocas!” Actor and theatre director Justino Astrevo de Aguiar from Cuiabá recognizes the Paulista and Carioca heritage, but thinks a more marked feature of the local way of speaking is the tendency of adding a D or T before or in the middle of words, as in djeito (way), cadju (cashew) or tchuva (rain), a feature of the pronunciation typical of the 17th century that Almeida also identified among residents of the states of Goiás, Minas Gerais, Maranhão and the Galicia region of Spain.

Almeida was able to develop his ear to Brazilian variations of Portuguese because of his own family history. The son of Portuguese parents, he was born in Piritiba, in inland Bahia State from where he left at age 7 to live in Jaciara, in inland Mato Grosso State. He became a professor at the Federal University of Cuiabá after spending 25 years there, and then moved to São Paulo in 2003. He acknowledges that he speaks like a Paulista in the most formal of circumstances – although he prefers to say éxtra (extra with an open ‘e’) instead of êxtra (with the closed ‘e’) as the Paulistas would –, but when he relaxes, he falls into the speaking rhythm of Bahia and the vocabulary of those who live in Mato Grosso. He has been studying the way people in Cuiabá speak since 1991, at the suggestion of a colleague, Professor Leônidas Querubim Avelino, an expert on Camões who had found signs of ancient Portuguese in that area. Avelino had told him about a blind backwoodsman from Livramento, a town 30 kilometers from Cuiabá, who had mentioned that he was “andando pusilo” (feeling faint), meaning weak. Avelino recognized pusilo as a shortened form of pusilânime (fainthearted), which is no longer used in Portugal.

“The residents of Cuiabá and some other cities, such as Cáceres and Barão de Melgado, in the state of Mato Grosso, and Corumbá, in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, preserve the 18th-century Paulista Portuguese more than those who live in the city of São Paulo. Inland Paulistas as well as those from the capital now say dia (day), with a hard d sound, while almost all of the rest of Brazil pronounces it as djia,” Almeida notes. “The manner of speaking can change depending on access to culture, motivation, and the ability to perceive and articulate sounds differently. Those who look to places further away from the large urban centers will find signs of preservation of the old Portuguese.”

Rua 25 de março, 1894, by Antonio Ferrigno (São Paulo State Pinacoteca Collection). The city of São Paulo had its own accent

From 1998 to 2003, a team led by Heitor Megale of USP followed the route of the 16th-century bandeirantes in search of traces of the ancient Portuguese language that had been maintained for four centuries. The interviews with residents ranging in age from 60 to 90 from nearly 40 cities and towns in the states of Minas Gerais, Goiás and Mato Grosso revealed forgotten words such as mamparra(pretending) and mensonha (lie), a word from one of the 15th-century poems by Francisco de Sá de Miranda, treição (treachery) used in inland Goiás to mean surpresa(surprise), and popular words still used in Portugal today such as despois (after),percisão (precision) and tristura (sadness), commonly found in the south of Minas Gerais State. What once seemed an anachronism has taken on value. Saying sancristia(sacristy) instead of sacristia was not an error, “but rather an influence that has been preserved from the past when the word was pronounced that way,” says the report in the Paracatu, Minas Gerais Jornal da Manhã dated December 20, 2001.

To the north, the Portuguese language expanded inland from the city of Salvador, capital of colonial Brazil for three centuries. Salvador was also a melting pot for language because it received large numbers of African slaves who learned Portuguese as a foreign language but who also offered their own vocabulary, to which indigenous words were added.

To prevent the language of Camões from becoming spoiled by mixing with the native dialects, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis de Pombal, state secretary of the Portuguese crown, decided to act. In 1757, Pombal expelled the Jesuits for, among other political reasons, teaching Christian doctrine in the local language, and he decreed Portuguese the official language of Brazil. Portuguese imposed itself on the native languages and is still the official language, although linguists warn that it cannot be called a national language because of the 180 indigenous languages spoken in Brazil (it is estimated that these numbered 1,200 when the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil). The linguistic amalgamation that reflects the mixture of those who founded Brazil largely explains the regional variations in vocabulary and rhythm, summarized on a map of speakers by the Museum of the Portuguese Language, in São Paulo. It is easy to find variations in a single state: residents in northern Minas Gerais State talk like Bahians, those from the central part of the state preserve mineirês, the authentic language spoken in Minas Gerais, those in southern Minas Gerais are heavily influenced by São Paulo and those in the east speak with a Carioca accent.

Of paper kites and worms
For the past 10 years, a group of linguists has been studying one of the results of the linguistic amalgamation: the various names that a particular object could have, determined by interviews with 1,100 people in 250 locations. All over Brazil, the toy made with paper and sticks sent into the wind on a string known as a kite is calledpapagaio, pipa, raia or pandorga – or even coruja in the cities of Natal and João Pessoa –, according to the first volume of the Atlas linguístico do Brasil (Brazilian Linguistic Atlas) published in October 2014 with the findings of interviews from Brazil’s major cities (Editora UEL). The device with red, green and yellow lights that is used to regulate traffic at intersections goes by only one name in Rio de Janeiro and in Belo Horizonte: sinal. In Brazil’s northern and northeastern cities, however, it is also referred to as semáforo. Goiânia uses four names to refer to the same object: sinal, semáforo, sinaleiro and farol.

Now the search to explain these differences begins. “Where I was born, in Sertanópolis, 42 km from Londrina,” said Vanderci Aguilera, one of the Atlas coordinators, “we called a worm bicho de goiaba instead of bigato because of the Italian immigrants from inland São Paulo.” She says that the residents of Brazil’s three southern states use the word corvo because of the European influence, while people from the Southeast have preserved the Tupi name for vulture: urubu.

Cena de família de Adolfo Augusto Pinto (Adolfo Augusto Pinto family scene), 1891, by Almeida Júnior (São Paulo State Pinacoteca Collection). By the late 19th century, the pronoun você was more formal than tu

Each state – or region – has its own linguistic heritage, which has to be respected, say the experts. Aguilera cautions that Portuguese teachers should not reprimand students who call a hummingbird a cuitelo instead of abeija-flor, as is the custom in inland Paraná State. Nor should they reproach those who call a barbeque caro,churasco or baranco, as is customary among the many German and Polish descendants in the South. Instead they should teach other ways of speaking and let the children express themselves however they want to among family and friends. “No one speaks incorrectly,” she emphasizes. “Everyone speaks according to their life story, as it was transmitted to them by their families before school changed it. Our way of speaking is our identity and we have nothing to be ashamed of.”

There is such diversity in Brazilian Portuguese that, despite the efforts by national news announcers to create a neutral language, free of any local accents, “there is no national standard,” says Castilho. “There are differences in vocabulary, grammar, syntax and pronunciation even among the well-educated,” he says. Dissatisfied by theories from outside Brazil, Castilho established a multisystemic approach to language, whereby any linguistic expression operates on four planes (identified as grammar, semantics, discourse and lexicon) simultaneously, as a complex whole rather than individually. In his work with Verena Kewitz from USP, he has discussed this approach with graduate students and other experts from Brazil and elsewhere.

It is also clear that Brazilian Portuguese is constantly changing. Words may go out of fashion or take on new meaning. Almeida explained that Celciane Vasconcelos, one of the students in her group, determined that only the oldest residents of the coast of Paraná knew the word sumaca, which was the term for a particular type of boat that was once common, but is no longer built, making use of the former meaning of the word that today refers to a beach in Paraty (Rio de Janeiro State). The old ways of speaking may also come back into fashion. Linguists assure us that the Hillbilly R is making a comeback, even in São Paulo, and regaining status among country music singers. “The Hillbilly R is all the rage now,” says Aguilera. Or at least it is acceptable and part of one’s personal style like that of TV newscaster Sabrina Sato.

Love notes
Linguists have observed an increased use of informal forms of address. “I am 78 and should be addressed by senhor (formal you), but my younger students call me você(informal you),” says Castilho, apparently unbothered by the informality, inconceivable back when he was a student. The use of você, however, is not the only thing. Célia Lopes, along with her team from UFRJ, found that the tu form is prevalent in Porto Alegre and lives alongside você in Rio de Janeiro and Recife, while você is the prevailing pronoun in São Paulo, Curitiba, Belo Horizonte and Salvador. The tu form was once closer and less formal than você in the nearly 500 letters found in the online collection at UFRJ, nearly all written by poets, politicians and other personalities from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Since they still needed to determine how common people expressed themselves, Lopes and her team were overjoyed to find 13 notes written by Robertina de Souza to her lover and her husband in 1908. This material was part of a lawsuit brought against the husband who kicked his friend and his own wife out of their home when he found out that the two had an affair, and then he killed the former friend. In one of the 11 notes to her lover Álvaro Mattos, Robertina, who signed her notes Chininha, wrote: “Eu te adoro te amo até a morte sou tua só tu é meu só o meu coração e teu e o teu coracao é meu. Chininha e todinha tua ate a morte” (“I adore you I love you until death I am yours alone as you are mine alone my heart is yours and your heart is mine. Chininha, yours truly until death”). Her husband, Arthur Noronha, who was the recipient of only two notes, was treated much more formally: “Eu rezo pedindo a Deus para você me perdoar, mas creio que você não tem coragem de ver morrer um filho o filha,” (“I pray to God that you will forgive me, but I don’t think you’re brave enough to see a son or daughter die”). And later: “Não posso me separar de voce e do meu filho a não ser com a morte,” (“Only death will make me leave you and my son”). We do not know if she ever went home, but her husband was acquitted, claiming he killed the other man to defend his honor.

Another sign that Brazilian Portuguese has evolved is visible in hybrid constructions that feature a verb without pronoun agreement, such as tu não sabe? (“Don’t you know?”), as well as the combined use of personal pronouns você and tu, such as in the construction “se você precisar, vou te ajudar” (“If you need help, I can help you”). The European Portuguese would claim that this is just another example of Brazilians’ ability to mutilate the Portuguese language, but just maybe, they have no real reason to complain. Célia Lopes found a mixture of personal pronouns of address, which she and other linguists do not consider to be an error, in letters written by the Marquis do Lavradia, who was Brazil’s viceroy from 1769 to 1796, as well as in an interview given by the former President, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, two centuries later.

ProjectProject for the History of Paulista Brazilian Portuguese (PHPP – Hillbilly Project) (nº 11/51787-5); Grant Mechanism Thematic Project; Principal InvestigatorManoel Mourivaldo Santiago Almeida (USP); Investment R$87,372.10 (FAPESP).

Diário do Centro do Mundo » O dia em que o homem mais rico do Brasil pegou um elevador comum. Por Paulo Nogueira

2015-06-22T12:18:00.001-06:00

Diário do Centro do Mundo » O dia em que o homem mais rico do Brasil pegou um elevador comum. Por Paulo Nogueira

dia em que o homem mais rico do Brasil pegou um elevador comum. Por Paulo Nogueira

Lemann foi constrangido segundo Fernando Rodrigues

Um texto da grande mídia me chamou particularmente a atenção na semana passada.

O motivo é que ele era extraordinariamente revelador da mentalidade que domina as corporações jornalísticas.

O autor do texto é o jornalista Fernando Rodrigues, do UOL.

Ele escreveu sobre o “constrangimento” imposto ao “homem mais rico do país”, Jorge Paulo Lemann, por este ser obrigado a usar o elevador comum numa visita a Dilma no Palácio do Planalto.

Usar elevador comum é fonte de constrangimento: este é o ponto de Fernando Rodrigues.

Um fotógrafo reconheceu Lemann e registrou a cena. Rodrigues classificou-a, triunfante, como um “furo”.

Pobre sociedade brasileira.

Na Escandinávia, como Claudia Wallin mostrou em seus textos, juízes da Suprema Corte se locomovem de bicicleta de casa rumo ao trabalho. Dirigem seus próprios carros, pagam suas contas, lavam suas roupas.

E dividem os elevadores com as pessoas que querem subir ou descer.

Primeiros ministros também.

É uma cultura igualitária – e é aquela pela qual se bate o DCM.

No Brasil, pelo menos no Brasil das empresas de jornalismo, é o oposto. Um empresário pegar o elevador comum é um embaraço.

É uma coisa que reflete o que os jornalistas vêem em seu ambiente de trabalho. Quase sempre, quando os patrões chegam, os elevadores são imperialmente bloqueados aos demais funcionários.

Sua Majestade chegou.

Essa mentalidade está na raiz dos privilégios dados ao chamado 1%. Entende-se que eles não pertencem ao mesmo mundo de todos os outros, mas a uma esfera superior, digna do tratamento dispensado aos Luíses da França pré-Revolução.

Pegar seu próprio café passa a ser um insulto. Lavar sua própria sujeira, pior ainda. Dirigir seu próprio carro, nem pensar.

Aliás: quem falou em carro próprio?

Veja os juízes do STF. Não apenas andam de carros pagos pelos contribuintes como têm motoristas para levá-los a almoços e jantares que não pagarão com o seu dinheiro.

É isso também que leva um senador como Aécio a achar normal requisitar um avião da FAB, sustentado pelos contribuintes, para uma missão patética na Venezuela.

Na classe média, essa mentalidade é uma tragédia. Não lavamos nossos pratos, não fazemos nossa cama. E se quem faz isso por nós ascende socialmente, como aconteceu nos últimos anos, ficamos revoltados e vamos bater panelas.

Na Escandinávia, vigora a Janteloven, um código de conduta derivado do que vigorava nos romances de um escritor antigo local.

O primeiro mandamento é: “Não sou melhor que você e nem pior.” O lixeiro não é pior que o primeiro ministro, o milionário não é melhor que a faxineira.

No Brasil das companhias jornalísticas, um empresário sofre um constrangimento se pegar um elevador ao lado de gente comum.

O dia em que esse tipo de mentalidade desaparecer – e o DCM contribuirá para tanto, na medida de nossas modestas possibilidades – seremos uma sociedade enfim desenvolvida.

(Acompanhe as publicações do DCM no Facebook. Curta aqui).

Sobre o Autor

O jornalista Paulo Nogueira é fundador e diretor editorial do site de notícias e análises Diário do Centro do Mundo.

SOPA NO MEL Ivo Korytowski

2015-05-15T16:07:00.001-06:00

SOPA NO MEL Ivo Korytowski

4 Products You Should ALWAYS Have In Your Home

2015-03-27T23:18:00.001-06:00

4 Products You Should ALWAYS Have In Your Home

The Huffington Post | By Jessica Cumberbatch Anderson

Posted: 03/25/2015 2:00 pm EDT Updated: 03/26/2015 12:59 am EDT

We spend a lot of time in the bathroom. Roughly three years of our life, to be exact. To make sure we're making the most of that time (because, you know, showering and brushing your teeth aren't quite enough), entrepreneur Donal O'Conghaile has a few suggestions. But you'll need four basic ingredients: baking soda, vinegar, lemons, and petroleum jelly.

In these four household staples lies the potential to clean the toilet bowl, unclog the drain and disinfect surfaces, according to an infographicO'Conghaile created:

The goal? "To ditch all the single-use products stashed in your bathroom cabinets for simpler alternatives," O'Conghaile says. But he's also got a monetary mission in mind. O'Conghaile recently launched a Kickstarter campaign, where he's peddling his "life hack poster" and one other, featuring strategies for a better night's sleep. Check out his tips on being better in the bathroom, and more clever uses for baking soda in the slideshow below.

Have something to say? Check out HuffPost Home on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

Are you an architect, designer or blogger and would like to get your work seen on HuffPost Home? Reach out to us at homesubmissions@huffingtonpost.com with the subject line "Project submission." (All PR pitches sent to this address will be ignored.)

Fiber-Famished Gut Microbes Linked to Poor Health - Scientific American

2015-03-23T16:46:00.001-06:00

Fiber-Famished Gut Microbes Linked to Poor Health - Scientific American

Fiber-Famished Gut Microbes Linked to Poor Health

While probiotics receive more attention, key fibers remain the workhorses in maintaining a healthy gut microbiome

March 23, 2015 |By Katherine Harmon Courage

Fiber has long been linked to better health, but new research shows how the gut microbiota might play a role in this pattern.
Credit: Joe Belanger/Thinkstock

KEYSTONE, Colo.—Your gut is the site of constant turf wars. Hundreds of bacterial species—along with fungi, archaea and viruses—do battle daily, competing for resources. Some companies advocate for consuming more probiotics, live beneficial bacteria, to improve microbial communities in our gut, but more and more research supports the idea that the most powerful approach might be to better feed the good bacteria we already harbor. Their meal of choice? Fiber.

Fiber has long been linked to better health, but new research shows how the gut microbiota might play a role in this pattern. One investigation discovered that adding more fiber to the diet can trigger a shift from a microbial profile linked to obesity to one correlated with a leaner physique. Another recent study shows that when microbes are starved of fiber, they can start to feed on the protective mucus lining of the gut, possibly triggering inflammation and disease.

"Diet is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing the microbiota," Justin Sonnenburg, a biologist at Stanford University, said earlier this month at a Keystone Symposia conference on the gut microbiome. "Dietary fiber and diversity of the microbiota complement each other for better health outcomes." In particular, beneficial microbes feast on fermentable fibers—which can come from various vegetables, whole grains and other foods—that resist digestion by human-made enzymes as they travel down the digestive tract. These fibers arrive in the large intestine relatively intact, ready to be devoured by our microbial multitudes. Microbes can extract the fiber's extra energy, nutrients, vitamins and other compounds for us. Short-chain fatty acids obtained from fiber are of particular interest, as they have been linked to improved immune function, decreased inflammation and protection against obesity.

Today's Western diet, however, is exceedingly fiber-poor by historical standards. It contains roughly 15 grams of fiber daily, Sonnenburg noted. For most of our early history as hunter-gatherers, we were likely eating close to 10 times that amount of fiber each day. "Imagine the effect that has on our microbiota over the course of our evolution," he said.

Your bugs are what you eat
Not all helpful fiber, however, needs to come from the roots and roughage for which our ancestors foraged, new research suggests. Kelly Swanson, a professor of comparative nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his team found that simply adding a fiber-enriched snack bar to subjects' daily diets could swing microbial profiles in a matter of weeks. In a small study of 21 healthy adults with average U.S. fiber intake, one daily fiber snack bar (containing 21 grams of fiber) for three weeks significantly increased the number of Bacteroidetes bacteria and decreased the number of Firmicutes compared with levels before the study or after three weeks of eating fiber-free bars. Such a ratio—of more Bacteroidetes to fewer Firmicutes—is correlated with lower BMI. The findings were published in the January issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

"We've known forever that if you eat a lot of fiber, you lose weight," Swanson says. His and other recent studies suggest that our gut microbes are a key player in this relationship. In addition to identifying groups of bacteria, a genome scan revealed a shifting pattern of genes active in the gut microbes. As fiber consumption increased, the activity of genes associated with protein metabolism declined, a finding that researchers hope will help them understand the complicated puzzle of diet and weight loss. "We're getting closer to what is actually cause and effect," Swanson says.

Feed the microbes so they don't feed on you
As gut microbes are starved of fermentable fiber, some do die off. Others, however, are able to switch to another food source in the gut: the mucus lining that helps keep the gut wall intact and free from infection.

In a recent study presented at the Keystone meeting, Eric Martens of the University of Michigan Medical School, postdoctoral researcher Mahesh Desai and their colleagues found that this fuel switch had striking consequences in rodents. A group of mice fed a high-fiber diet had healthy gut lining, but for mice on a fiber-free diet, "the mucus layer becomes dramatically diminished," he explained at the meeting. This shift might sometimes have severe health consequences. Research by a Swedish team, published last year in the journal Gut, showed a link between bacteria penetrating the mucus layer and ulcerative colitis, a painful chronic bowel disease.

A third group of mice received high-fiber chow and fiber-free chow on alternating days—"like what we would do if we were being bad and eating McDonald's one day and eating our whole grains the next," Martens joked. Even the part-time high-fiber diet was not enough to keep guts healthy: these mice had a mucus layer about half the thickness of mice on the consistently high-fiber diet. If we can extend these results to humans, he said, it "tells us that even eating your whole fiber foods every other day is still not enough to protect you. You need to eat a high-fiber diet every day to keep a healthy gut." Along the same lines, Swanson's group found that the gut microbiomes of his adult subjects reverted back to initial profiles as soon as the high-fiber bars were discontinued.

Martens and his colleagues also observed that mice on the consistently high-fiber diet consumed fewer calories and were slimmer than those on the fiber-free diet, showing that fiber benefits the body in multiple ways. "Studies like this are great because it's getting at the mechanisms to explain why fiber is beneficial," Swanson says.

As all this work underscores, the gut microbiome is exceptionally plastic. Such rapid, diet-influenced changes likely served us well over the course of our evolutionary history—shifting faster than our own physiology could, wrote Justin Sonnenburg andErica Sonnenburg in a November 2014 article in Cell Metabolism. "In delegating part of our digestion and calorie harvest to our gut residents, the microbial part of our biology could easily adjust to day-to-day or season-to-season variation in available food," they noted. New studies continue to demonstrate that microbial changes due to diet are "largely reversible on short time scales." But the question remains as to how chronic low-fiber intake—over a lifetime or generations—might permanently alter our guts and our health.

Scams increasing as Calgary economy takes a downturn | Calgary Herald

2015-03-23T14:24:00.001-06:00

MARIO TONEGUZZI, CALGARY HERALDMore from Mario Toneguzzi, Calgary Herald

Published on: March 23, 2015

Last Updated: March 23, 2015 1:59 PM MDT

Scams increasing as Calgary economy takes a downturn | Calgary Herald

Leah Brownridge, spokesperson for the Better Business Bureau serving southern Alberta and East Kootenays, said the organization definitely sees an increase in scams especially during an economic downturn like the one Calgary is currently experiencing.

“Scammers really try to prey on people’s emotions, trust and their generosity and all of those things are at their highest when you’re facing a hard time or an economic downturn, especially job-wise,’ said Brownridge. “So in this current situation we are seeing more scams pop up unfortunately and those would be work-from-home scams, employment scams.”

Brownridge said the BBB is aware of the restaurant scam as described by Kanai.

On Monday, Calgary-based WestJet Airlines announced it had uncovered a scam involving a deeply discounted airfare offer for registrants of an upcoming conference in the U.S.

While regularly monitoring WestJet’s credit card transactions, the company discovered a spike in the number using a Discover credit card — an American card. Further investigation found that the credit cards had been stolen to purchase airfare on WestJet.

There was also an individual who advertised on a personal Facebook page a way to get deeply discounted airfare, on return flights for up to 50 per cent off, between Toronto and Las Vegas for an upcoming global training conference in Las Vegas next month. The conference is legitimate, said Robert Palmer, spokesperson for WestJet.

As many as 100 conference registrants accepted the offer and paid for airfare only to discover that their ticket was not valid because it had been purchased with other stolen credit cards, he said.

“We handed the whole mess over to the Toronto police service last week for further investigation to determine criminal charges,” said Palmer.

WestJet continues to deal with a phone scam, which has been around for about five years, where people are contacted about winning a certain number of WestJet dollars and if they are interested in redeeming the dollars or finding out how they can receive them they are re-directed to a “quasi-legitimate vacation company,” said Palmer.

“We’ve identified five of them that use this same telemarketing firm and they are in Cancun as far as we can tell.”

Recently, the BBB warned people to “exercise extreme caution” when responding to unsolicited emails, text messages and high-paying job offers.

The BBB had about 10 consumer inquiries in the past two weeks about a mystery shopper scam.

The scam starts with an unsolicited offer to become a mystery shopper or secret shopper. If a person indicates interest in it, they receive a cheque in the mail with instructions for their assignment. They are asked to deposit or cash the cheque and keep a portion of the funds as payment for the job. The remaining funds are to be used to send a wire money transfer to test the company’s procedure and customer service skills. The cheque eventually bounces and the person is held accountable to pay for the funds that were wired.

Just last week, Service Alberta warned people to beware of phoney websites “preying on desperate” job seekers.

“Fraudulent websites posing as legitimate Alberta employers are appearing on the Internet, offering positions in Alberta’s oilpatch — jobs that do not exist,” said the government department on its website.

“A downturn in oil prices means greater competition for work in Alberta and scammers are targeting job seekers in Canada and beyond.”

It cited, as an example, a website for a fictitious business called Daglo Oil & Gas Co. — dagloagency.com — which has been offering employment for a fee paid in advance.

“The fee demand is usually under the guise of work visas, travel expenses or other pre-screening,” said the government.

“After the money is paid, the job seeker finds out there is no real company and no real job. In fact, there is little more than a flashy website, much of which has been copied from a legitimate Alberta oil and gas firm.”

The website lists a corporate office in Calgary and has pictures of an executive team which turns out to be from Calgary-based Connacher Oil and Gas Ltd.

mtoneguzzi@calgaryherald.com

Twitter.com/MTone123

EuroVoc glossaries – The Alexandria Library

2015-02-18T14:22:00.001-07:00

EuroVoc glossaries – The Alexandria Library

Free download – EuroVoc glossaries

The Publications Office of the European Union is an interinstitutional office that publishes and disseminates the publications of the institutions and other bodies of the European Union.

It publishes the Official Journal of the European Union, produces or co-produces general publications and informational material on the activities of the bodies of the EU and provides a number of online services giving free access to information.

The Publications Office manages for example EuroVoc, a multilingual thesaurus on the EU terminology. It contains terms in 23 EU languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish), plus Serbian. Its users include the European Parliament, the Publications Office, national and regional parliaments in Europe, plus national governments and private users around the world. It serves as the basis for the domain names used in the European Union’s terminology database: Inter-Active Terminology for Europe.

EuroVoc covers a wide range of fields from politics and geography to science and energy, through technologies or law (basically all the activity fields of the European Union institutions). Some fields are more highly developed than others because they are more closely related to the EU’s centres of interest. Thus, for example, the names of the regions of each EU Member State are in EuroVoc but not those of third countries.

The thesaurus was manually processed by Delphine Guérou in order to create the Eurovoc glossaries you will find below.

The download is free and unlimited (you can download as many glossaries as you want) and there is no catch: you will not be signed up to any mailing list or else. We’d however appreciate if you could take the time to share a link to Alexandria and the Resource Center on your social media accounts and/or with your colleagues and contacts!

censura judicial mais sinistra do que as repressões sobre a mídia durante 21 anos de ditadura militar

2015-02-11T16:53:00.001-07:00

Segundo tempo para a imprensa brasileira - Committee to Protect Journalists

Segundo tempo para a imprensa brasileira

Tamanho do texto Imprimir

3. Censura através dos tribunais

Por John Otis

Publicado desde 1824 na cidade brasileira de Recife, Pernambuco, no nordeste do país, o Diário de Pernambuco é o mais antigo jornal diário da América do Sul ainda em circulação. Ao longo dos seus 190 anos o jornal mexeu com interesses poderosos e foi censurado por regimes militares do Brasil. Mas, no ano passado, o Diário de Pernambucosofreu seu primeiro caso de censura oficial desde que o Brasil voltou à democracia em 1985.

A polícia, soldados e jornalistas tomam posição durante operação em uma favela na capital em novembro de 2010. (Reuters/Sergio Moraes)

Em agosto de 2013, o jornal noticiou que Guilherme Uchoa, o presidente da Assembleia Legislativa do Estado de Pernambuco, foi alvo de uma investigação sobre tráfico de influência. Ele foi acusado pelo Ministério Público do Estado de favorecer sua filha, uma advogada que estava tentando ajudar seu cliente a acelerar o processo de adoção de uma criança. Uchoa negou as acusações e não foi considerado culpado.

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As notícias sobre a investigação, no entanto, tornaram-se um grande furo jornalístico que produziu um frenesi de cobertura na mídia do Recife. Então, de repente, o nome de Uchoa desapareceu das reportagens. Argumentando que seu nome e imagem estavam sendo indevidamente prejudicados, Uchoa convenceu um juiz local a impedir que o Diário de Pernambuco, a emissora de TV que pertence ao mesmo grupo e o diário rival Jornal do Commercio relacionassem o nome de Uchoa à investigação. O juiz advertiu que, para cada dia que esses meios de comunicação ignorassem a liminar, eles seriam multados em R$ 48.000.

A liminar foi suspensa depois de uma semana, mas o silêncio forçado foi constrangedor. Cercado por repórteres e editores na apertada redação do segundo andar do jornal, Paulo Goethe, editor executivo doDiário de Pernambuco, disse ao CPJ: "Essa é uma maneira muito sofisticada de pressionar a mídia."

Conhecida como censura judicial, tais ações legais constituem uma forma ardilosa de violar a Constituição do Brasil. Ainda que a Constituição de 1988 garanta a liberdade de imprensa, proibindo a censura, políticos, empresários e celebridades têm usado as leis destinadas a garantir a privacidade dos cidadãos comuns para silenciar a mídia.

Muitas vezes recorrendo a suas estreitas ligações com os juízes locais, essa parcela da elite tem obtido ordens judiciais que efetivamente evitam ou desencorajam reportagens críticas, fazendo com que sejam extremamente onerosas para os meios de comunicação e jornalistas independentes publicar reportagens pouco lisonjeiras a seu respeito. Em alguns casos, não é uma questão de calúnia. Em vez de contestar os detalhes das reportagens publicadas, essas figuras públicas tentam impedir a publicação da notícia, alegando que invade sua privacidade e mancha sua honra.

A censura judicial é amplamente considerada o segundo maior problema enfrentado pelos meios de comunicação no Brasil, após a violência contra jornalistas. Os alvos da censura judicial vão desde grandes jornais metropolitanos e empresas de Internet como o Google até blogueiros independentes situados em cidades remotas. Como o noticiário de televisão é divulgado em tempo real e as emissoras brasileiras divulgam apenas uma fração de seus vídeos de notícias on-line, eles têm conseguido evitar a censura judicial, embora tenha havido algumas exceções.

Incapazes de pagar os custos jurídicos de se defender em tribunal, os jornais procuram evitar reportagens controversas e alguns blogueiros independentes de notícias pararam de escrever, disse Taís Gasparian, advogada de São Paulo, que defende jornalistas com frequência.

Em entrevista ao CPJ, Ricardo Pedreira, diretor-executivo da Associação Nacional de Jornais, com sede em Brasília, disse que a censura judicial "é totalmente inconstitucional, prejudicando a sociedade brasileira, pois as pessoas não estão recebendo todas as informações às quais deveriam ter acesso".

Desde 2005, a Associação Nacional de Jornais registrou 25 casos de censura judicial. Esse número não inclui os milhares de s de notícias ou vídeos do YouTube com conteúdo crítico que o Google Brasil e o UOL, a maior empresa de Internet e portal de notícias do Brasil, foram obrigados a eliminar em virtude de ordens judiciais. O YouTube é de propriedade do Google.

Muitos casos de censura judicial são revogados, em parte, porque os juízes dos tribunais de recursos muitas vezes têm níveis mais elevados de educação do que os magistrados das cidades pequenas e não possuem laços pessoais com os políticos locais, disse Pedreira. Mas o processo de apelação é caro e pode levar meses ou anos, e até lá a notícia permanece censurada.

Durante as eleições municipais de 2012 no Brasil, por exemplo, juízes em várias cidades intervieram em nome de candidatos políticos para impedir os jornais de publicar pesquisas eleitorais desfavoráveis. Quando as decisões iniciais foram derrubadas, as pesquisas estavam desatualizadas, disse Guilherme Alpendre, diretor-executivo da Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo, ou ABRAJI.

Os alvos da censura judicial vão de grandes jornais metropolitanos, na foto, a empresas de internet e blogueiros independentes. (Reuters / Paulo Whitaker)

Alpendre disse que considera a censura judicial mais sinistra do que as repressões sobre a mídia durante 21 anos de ditadura militar no país.

"Durante a ditadura, um censor sentava-se em uma reunião editorial e dizia 'não' a esta história ou 'sim' a essa história", relatou Alpendre ao CPJ. "Mas o que está acontecendo agora é pior porque acontece no contexto da democracia no Brasil."

Membros proeminentes do Judiciário brasileiro minimizam a ameaça.

A autoridade máxima do Poder Judiciário, Joaquim Barbosa, e um de seus antecessores, Antonio Cesar Peluso, disseram ao CPJ que os casos de censura judicial são raros, que muitas decisões são anuladas em recursos e que a questão não constitui uma séria ameaça à liberdade de expressão.

"A censura prévia é ruim, é ilegal, e, infelizmente, há aqueles que cometem erros, e isso é o que está acontecendo no Brasil. Esses casos específicos de censura são erros involuntários cometidos por alguns juízes", disse Barbosa durante um congresso internacional sobre jornalismo investigativo realizado no Brasil no final de 2013. Ele não respondeu ao pedido recente do CPJ para comentar o assunto.

Especialistas jurídicos culpam vários fatores pelo aumento da censura judicial. Após o retorno do país à democracia, em 1985, os cidadãos passaram a se sentir mais capazes de defender seus direitos e, como um todo, o Brasil tornou-se uma sociedade mais litigiosa. Nas palavras de Gasparian: "Todo mundo começou a processar todo mundo."

Além disso, Código Civil Brasileiro de 2002 contém quatro artigos ambíguos que protegem a privacidade, mas se chocam frontalmente com a declaração da Constituição a respeito da liberdade de expressão.

Por exemplo, o artigo 17 do Código Civil proíbe a divulgação de informações pessoais que possam "prejudicar a honra" de um indivíduo. Ao contrário dos Estados Unidos, onde a Suprema Corte determinou que as autoridades públicas têm o elevado ônus da prova nos casos de alegada difamação ou calúnia, o Judiciário do Brasil não estabeleceu tal norma. Como resultado, os políticos no Brasil têm aproveitado os artigos de privacidade para refrear a liberdade de expressão.

Há o caso, também, dos ricos e famosos, que levou a uma proibição, atualmente em vigor, relativamente à publicação de biografias não autorizadas no Brasil. A ação judicial mais conhecida foi requerida, em 2007, pelo cantor brasileiro Roberto Carlos, o qual, alegando que sua privacidade havia sido violada nos termos dos artigos 20 e 21 do Código Civil, forçou uma editora a retirar uma biografia não autorizada das livrarias. O autor Paulo Cesar de Araújo havia dedicado 15 anos de trabalho no livro.

Muitos juristas argumentam que os artigos sobre privacidade que constam do Código Civil são inconstitucionais. Mas, apesar das contínuas contestações da legalidade dos quatro artigos, eles permanecem em vigor e são muitas vezes invocados pelos juízes quando se pronunciam a favor dos queixosos em casos contra jornalistas.

O caso mais proeminente e mais duradouro envolve uma disputa entre a família de José Sarney, ex-presidente do Brasil, que é agora um senador influente, e o jornal O Estado de São Paulo. Em 2009, O Estado começou a publicar artigos - baseados em parte em transcrições vazadas de conversas telefônicas que foram realizadas durante uma investigação federal - alegando que Sarney usou sua posição no Senado para conceder empregos e dar aumentos a seus amigos e familiares. Por meio de seus advogados e em um comunicado em seu site, Sarney negou as acusações.

A família Sarney pediu ajuda a um juiz de Brasília, um amigo da família que tinha sido recentemente fotografado em uma festa suntuosa com os Sarney, de acordo com Ricardo Gandour, diretor de conteúdo e editor-executivo do Grupo Estado, proprietário do jornal. Com base no artigo 17 do Código Civil, o juiz emitiu uma liminar impedindo O Estado de publicar qualquer outra reportagem sobre as denúncias, sob pena de pagar uma multa diária de R$ 143.000. Mais de quatro anos depois, o recurso impetrado pelo jornal O Estado ainda se encontra pendente de julgamento e a liminar continua em vigor.

"Estamos lutando, mas temos de respeitar a lei", disse Gandour ao CPJ. O Poder Judiciário no Brasil, acrescentou, "está se tornando desproporcionalmente poderoso em comparação com os outros poderes do governo."

Em alguns casos, outros meios de comunicação foram autorizados a informar sobre temas proibidos em outras regiões do país, como ocorreu nos casos de Sarney e do Diário de Pernambuco. Mas a possibilidade de ser penalizado com uma multa ou ordem de silenciamento é muitas vezes suficiente para manter outros meios de comunicação calados.

O ex-presidente brasileiro José Sarney tem travado uma batalha judicial contra o jornal O Estado de São Paulo. (Reuters / Ueslei Marcelino)

Mesmo quando as empresas de mídia ganham na justiça, elas perdem de outras formas, porque essas batalhas jurídicas podem ser caras e muito demoradas.

Tomemos o caso da Folha de São Paulo, que publicou em 2007 umainvestigação realizada por Elvira Lobato sobre o florescente império de negócios da Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus, sediada no Rio de Janeiro. O artigo de Lobato afirmou que a igreja, um movimento neopentecostal, usou uma empresa em um paraíso fiscal para canalizar contribuições de seguidores para 19 empresas de propriedade da igreja, que incluem estações de rádio e televisão, jornais, agências de viagens e imobiliárias.

A igreja negou a denúncia e, a seu pedido, membros da Igreja em todo o Brasil entraram com 109 ações civis de difamação contra Lobato, alegando que ela tinha ofendido sua fé. A estratégia da igreja equivalia a uma guerra jurídica de desgaste. A ideia era apresentar tantos processos em tantas cidades que seria impossível para Lobato contestá-los todos.

Os advogados de Lobato e da Folha tiveram que viajar milhares de quilômetros para participar das audiências obrigatórias em tribunais de cidades tão distantes como Xapuri, perto da fronteira brasileira com o Peru - cerca de 4.000 quilômetros da residência da repórter no Rio de Janeiro. Até agora, 97 petições foram rejeitadas, enquanto o resto encontra-se pendente. Mas o jornal gastou enormes somas em passagens aéreas, hotéis e honorários advocatícios.

"Foi uma experiência infernal", disse Lobato ao CPJ.

Jornais menores e jornalistas independentes, ela disse, não têm capacidade financeira para lutar contra a censura judicial.

Um desses jornalistas é o blogueiro paulista Fábio Pannunzio. Ele trabalhou durante 30 anos como repórter de rádio e TV e foi processado apenas uma vez. Mas, como o autor do Blog do Pannunzio, que denuncia a corrupção do governo com frequência, ele foi processado oito vezes em quatro anos. Enfrentando enormes despesas com advogados, ele encerrou seu blog em 2012.

"Como blogueiro, escrevi acusações semelhantes às que eu diria na televisão, mas fui processado como um indivíduo", disse Pannunzio ao Centro Knight para o Jornalismo nas Américas, da Universidade do Texas, pouco depois de encerrar seu blog. "As pessoas que eu estava denunciando não queriam enfrentar uma grande emissora com uma infraestrutura de uma grande empresa. Eles queriam um alvo que consideravam mais vulnerável à censura."

Embora os jornalistas independentes possam ser alvos mais fáceis para a censura judicial, figuras públicas não têm medo de ir atrás de grandes empresas de mídia e gigantes da Internet, como o Google.

Todas as semanas, o Google Brasil recebe ordens de juízes em todo o país para remover de seu mecanismo de busca s de notícias consideradas ofensivas para os políticos e outras figuras públicas. A empresa também foi condenada a retirar vídeos do YouTube e de entregar informações para a polícia sobre as pessoas que fizeram oupload do conteúdo, que poderiam então ser investigadas por ofender ou difamar autoridades públicas.

No mais recente relatório de transparência do Google, relativo ao primeiro semestre de 2013, a empresa disse que tinha recebido ordens de juízes brasileiros para remover cerca de 400 postagens e de blogs. Embora o número de ordens judiciais tenha diminuído em relação ao mesmo período do ano anterior, continua a ser muito maior do que o número de pedidos similares que o Google recebe na maioria dos outros países.

Os advogados do Google contestam os casos, mas muitas vezes perdem. Marcel Leonardi, diretor do Google Brasil para políticas públicas, disse ao CPJ que a empresa faz grandes esforços para evitar a entrega de dados para as autoridades governamentais. A equipe jurídica do Google analisa cada pedido do governo para ter acesso aos dados do usuário e resiste quando os pedidos são excessivamente amplos ou não seguem o procedimento correto, disse ele.

"A liberdade de expressão é importante para nós", ele disse. "O livre fluxo de informações é essencial para a criatividade e inovação, e leva ao crescimento econômico para os países e empresas."

Rodrigo Flores, diretor de conteúdo do UOL, disse que sua empresa recebe ordens semelhantes cerca de uma vez por mês e que elas "criam um ambiente de temor". A maioria das ordens são iniciativas de políticos que procuram remover os para notícias detalhando acusações de corrupção ou outro delito.

"Eles acreditam sinceramente que podem apagar a história", disse Flores.

Mas, para alguns juristas, um forte argumento pode ser levantado para apagar de reportagens, especialmente quando estão desatualizados e são imprecisos.

Augusto de Arruda Botelho é presidente de um Grupo de Advogados, em São Paulo, conhecido como IDDD, que apoia os direitos de defesa dos brasileiros. Ele disse ao CPJ que não há nada mais justo do que obrigar os mecanismos de busca e sites de notícias a eliminar para reportagens sobre acusações que tiveram um grande impacto na imprensa, mas que mais tarde se mostraram infundadas.

Ele também acusa os jornalistas de instintivamente publicar denúncias sensacionalistas, mas não publicar matérias posteriores quando as acusações são descartadas ou quando os réus são inocentados. "Muitas vezes os jornalistas ignoram o princípio jornalístico de divulgar o outro lado da história", disse ele.

Arruda Botelho diz que não é fã de políticos que invocam as leis de privacidade para inviabilizar investigações jornalísticas de delitos. Mas, ao mesmo tempo, ele defendeu vigorosamente o direito de figuras públicas comparecem perante um juiz e pedir uma liminar.

"Eu acho que é um direito de todos bater à porta dos tribunais e dizer: 'Eu acho que meus direitos não estão sendo respeitados', ele disse. "Mesmo as autoridades públicas devem ter sua inocência presumida."

Seus esforços para criar armadilhas para os jornalistas podem, às vezes, fazer com o que o tiro saía pela culatra.

Durante a vigência da ordem judicial liminar contra os meios de comunicação em Recife, notícias subsequentes - omitindo o nome de Uchoa - incluíram vários outros detalhes importantes sobre o político que os leitores podiam facilmente identificá-lo. Uchoa recebeu muitas críticas na mídia nacional e, finalmente, recuou. A liminar foi retirada e Uchoa afirmou que foi tudo um grande mal-entendido.

Goethe, do Diário de Pernambuco, espera que as repercussões do caso Uchoa dissuada outros políticos de ir pelo mesmo caminho jurídico. Mas, a poucos quarteirões de distância, no Jornal do Commercio, a editora-executiva do jornal, Maria Luiza Borges, continua preocupada.

"Nossos políticos são arrogantes", Borges disse ao CPJ. "Eles não admitem ter falhas. Eles não lidam com reportagens negativas de uma forma democrática."

NOTA DO EDITOR: O nono parágrafo foi corrigido para refletir que Ricardo Pedreira é diretor-executivo da Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo, não presidente como afirmou anteriormente.

John Otis, correspondente do programa das Américas do CPJ nos Andes, trabalha como correspondente da revista Time e para o Global Post. Ele foi o autor do livro Lei da Selva de 2010, sobre empreiteiros militares americanos sequestrados por rebeldes colombianos e mora em Bogotá, Colômbia.

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Communication and negotiation skills for freelance translators - Marketing tips for translators

Symptoms of poor communication

How to improve communications with clients

the powers of Europe, which once divided Africa between them The New York Times

Graphic: What’s Behind the Surge in Refugees Crossing the Mediterranean Sea

Migrants Target Trucks in France

Quite the Brazilian language, I say | Revista Pesquisa FAPESP

.Quite the Brazilian language, I say

Diário do Centro do Mundo » O dia em que o homem mais rico do Brasil pegou um elevador comum. Por Paulo Nogueira

dia em que o homem mais rico do Brasil pegou um elevador comum. Por Paulo Nogueira

Sobre o Autor

SOPA NO MEL Ivo Korytowski

4 Products You Should ALWAYS Have In Your Home

4 Products You Should ALWAYS Have In Your Home

Fiber-Famished Gut Microbes Linked to Poor Health - Scientific American

Scams increasing as Calgary economy takes a downturn | Calgary Herald

EuroVoc glossaries – The Alexandria Library

EuroVoc glossaries, the EU’s multilingual thesaurusHome » Translation Resources » Glossaries Download Centre » EuroVoc glossaries, the EU’s multilingual thesaurus

censura judicial mais sinistra do que as repressões sobre a mídia durante 21 anos de ditadura militar

3. Censura através dos tribunais

Segundo tempo para a imprensa brasileira • ÍNDICEImpressão:• Download o pdfEm outro idioma:• Inglês

EuroVoc glossaries, the EU’s multilingual thesaurus
Home » Translation Resources » Glossaries Download Centre » EuroVoc glossaries, the EU’s multilingual thesaurus

Segundo tempo para
a imprensa brasileira
• ÍNDICE
Impressão:
• Download o pdf
Em outro idioma:
• Inglês