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Brazilian filmmaker Petra Costa's latest documentary, Apocalypse in the Tropics, explores the impact of evangelical Christianity on Brazil's political landscape. Once a small minority, evangelicals now constitute about 30% of Brazil's population and played a key role in the rise of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. "It's one of the fastest-growing religious shifts in the history of mankind," Costa tells Democracy Now! She says right-wing evangelicalism in Brazil is largely a U.S. import, after Washington sought to undermine the influence of left-wing Catholic teachings during the Cold War.
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to impose 50% tariffs on Brazil, partly as retribution for what he calls the "witch hunt" against Bolsonaro, now facing trial in Brazil for an alleged coup attempt following his defeat in the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Apocalypse in the Tropics is available on Netflix starting July 14. Costa's previous film, The Edge of Democracy, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
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Representative Adriano Espaillat, the most powerful Latino leader in New York City, will back Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor.
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English is the official language of the West African country, which was founded in part by freed American slaves.
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Momentum has been building behind a bipartisan bill to impose sanctions on countries that purchase Russian oil, as Republicans work behind the scenes to win President Trump's support.
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President Trump met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House for a second straight day Tuesday, as Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, claimed Israel and Hamas were nearing a breakthrough on a ceasefire agreement. Israeli media are reporting Netanyahu is under "extreme" pressure to reach a 60-day ceasefire deal, but Netanyahu's "interests and the interests of his government remain to make this a perpetual, ongoing war," says Matt Duss, executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. The U.S.-Israeli proposal would see 10 living Israeli hostages released, along with the bodies of deceased hostages, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. Hamas negotiators are also seeking the withdrawal of Israeli forces, guarantees for an end to the war, the resumption of humanitarian aid shipments overseen by the U.N. and the International Committee of the Red Cross, and an end to the operations of the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
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We speak to Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at Jewish Currents, about changing popular opinion in the U.S. toward Israel and Palestine. "I'm not sure there's any political issue in the United States, perhaps other than gay marriage, over the last couple of decades where public opinion has shifted as fast," he says, citing the surprise victory of pro-Palestinian mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in New York City's Democratic primary as evidence of a shifting political landscape. We also discuss a recent article in The New York Times that criticizes Mamdani, a Ugandan-born Indian Muslim who immigrated to the U.S. as a child, for self-identifying as both Asian and Black/African American on a college application. Beinart, whose own parents are of European Jewish background and were raised in multiracial South Africa, explains how the limitations of formal racial categories often elide the true complexity of racial, ethnic and national identity. "It's not the case that Zohran Mamdani was trying to pull some sleight of hand to try to take advantage of affirmative action. This was a very deep statement about what he believed it was to have grown up in Uganda," he says.
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump this week in Washington, D.C. Trump and Netanyahu are discussing Israel's war in Gaza, with Netanyahu suggesting that new plans for the forced relocation of refugees to other countries would give Palestinians the "freedom" to choose. But what Palestinians actually want is "the freedom to return to the places from which their families were expelled," says Peter Beinart, editor-at-large at Jewish Currents and the author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. "What kind of freedom is it when you have an area where most of the buildings and the hospitals and the schools and the bakeries and the agriculture have all been destroyed, where you have more child amputees than any other place on Earth?"
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