Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Brazil’s relationship with the United States has swung up and down like a roller coaster. It has been improving slowly and only through intense Brazilian diplomacy, but at any moment it can deteriorate rapidly again with a new blow from Washington. “We cannot accept the way the United States has treated Brazil this week,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared on Wednesday at a cabinet meeting in Brasília. Lula was referring to the Trump administration’s threat to impose new tariffs days after the U.S. designated two Brazilian criminal gangs as terrorist organizations. The left-wing president has again wrapped himself in the national flag and accused the Bolsonaros — former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and his son, the senator Flávio Bolsonaro — of being traitors to the homeland for encouraging Trump’s interference.

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A line circles the globe at roughly 30 degrees north of Mexico: it dips, rises and wavers, dividing the world along economic lines. In Asia, it climbs and then drops to exclude Japan, Australia, and New Zealand from the “South.” This world map, split by what became known as the Brandt Line, appeared in the 1980 UNESCO report North–South: A Programme for Survival, coordinated by then–German chancellor Willy Brandt. The line blurred the familiar Cold War geography — even softening the contours of the Non‑Aligned Movement, born at the 1961 Belgrade summit and led by Yugoslavia, India, Egypt, Indonesia, and Ghana as a way to distance themselves from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

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Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and a hopeful presidential contender in a few months, fired his marketing chief last week. He has been maneuvering for days to desperately obtain a photograph that, he believes, could pull him out of the crisis that has shaken his campaign.

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When he arrives at his office in the morning, Rio de Janeiro Police Chief Rita Salim knows that throughout the course of the day, two or three people will come in to report having been a victim of racism. Some will do so after having lived a life of discrimination based on the color of their skin. “Many victims come when they can’t take it any more, the drop that made the cup overflow,” she says in an interview at her office. It’s a sorry state of affairs — but at the same time, there is hope. The veil of silence and shame that historically covered up this kind of discrimination is lifting. Brazil documented more than 7,000 complaints of racism in 2025, 67% more than the year before.

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The United States will add two of Brazil’s most powerful organized crime gangs, Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), to its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations effective June 5, the State Department announced. In addition, Washington has designated both groups as Specially Designated Global Terrorists as of this Thursday, adding them to a list that includes Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and Hezbollah.

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One of them, Marcos, refuses to wear clothes or shoes. He also cannot tolerate being touched or interacting with others. He is unable to speak. Such are the consequences of decades of neglect and inhuman treatment at an asylum where he was sent at age 10, the most infamous one in Brazil’s history. On Monday the Hospital-Colônia de Barbacena, where some 60,000 Brazilians died of hunger, cold and diarrhea up through the 1980s, closed its doors for good, and with it the cruellest chapter in Brazilian psychiatry. The last surviving patients — 14 elderly, ill people with no families and severe aftereffects, including Marcos — have been given a new home: a house in the rural area of Barbacena, still known as the city of the madmen.

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While waiting to complete paperwork at a notary’s office, Ms. Ivone Souza Silva, 64, who has deep-set circles under her eyes and shoulder-length hair, smiles as she recalls a childhood anecdote: “At school, the surname of half the class or almost half was Silva, like me… And like Ayrton Senna.” And so, unexpectedly, this housewife mentions a fact many of her fellow Brazilians do not know about the Formula 1 champion whose death behind the wheel at the peak of his career in 1994 shocked the sporting world. On Wednesday morning she learned that his full name was Ayrton Senna da Silva.

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U.S. President Donald Trump gave a boost on Tuesday to the presidential bid of Brazilian senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, by receiving him in the Oval Office, 19 days after meeting there with Brazil’s president, former union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Barring a surprise, Lula and Bolsonaro’s son are expected to face each other at the ballot box in October. Flávio Bolsonaro’s team hopes the photo with Trump will help him overcome a popularity crisis and consolidate his candidacy.

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