Kim Jong Un And His Father Used Fake Brasilian Passports To Enter Westren Countries

North Korea's Kim Jong Un and His Father Used Fake Brazilian Passports to Get Into Western Countries, Report Claims

 Cristina Maza,Newsweek 15 hours ago 

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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had a fake Brazilian passport that he used to apply for visas to travel to Western countries, sources told Reuters.

Both the current leader of North Korea and his late father Kim Jong-Il obtained forged Brazilian passports to visit Western countries during the 1990s. It is unclear whether the pair acquired the visas or travelled using the fake passports, but sources said it was possible the documents were used to visit Brazil, Japan and Hong Kong.

A Japanese newspaper claimed six years ago that the North Korean leader had travelled to Tokyo as a small child using a Brazilian passport.

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Photocopies of the passports were published for the first time by Reuters. They were both issued for 10 years and have stamps from the Brazilian embassy in Prague.

This undated photo released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on November 21, 2017 shows North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un at the Sungri Motor Complex in South Pyongan Province. Getty Images

Very little is known about the childhood of Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s 30-something dictator who rules his hermit kingdom with an iron fist. But he is known to have lived outside of his country, having studied in a school in Switzerland. Kim Jong Un's mother was a North Korean opera singer. She had two other children, but it is widely believed that she lobbied for Kim to be his father's successor.

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Kim Jong Un became the leader of North Korea following his father’s death in 2011. At the time, people speculated that he might prove to be more moderate than his predecessors, who had ruled North Korea since the Korean War of the 1950s. But it was soon revealed that this was not the case. Since taking the reins of power from his ancestors, Kim Jong Un has been known to order the execution of any political rivals, including members of his own family. His brother Kim Jong Nam was poisoned in a Malaysian airport.

Kim Jong Un has also overseen the swift development of the country’s nuclear weapons capabilities, and he appears determined to prevent regime change in the hermit kingdom.

This article was first written by Newsweek

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Brasil: He's Back

BRAZIL

He’s Back

The Brazilian army has taken over security in the crime-ridden favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

“Police are unable to handle the situation,” Felicya Oliveira, a 31-year-old restaurant worker who often misses shifts because of gunfights outside her door, told Bloomberg. “So let’s see if the military can bring order.”

The government of President Michel Temer, who took office in August 2016 after the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff on corruption charges, has given up on reforming Brazil’s overspending pension system, Voice of America reported.

The Beija-Flor samba school won this year’s carnival dance competition with an arrangement that lamented corruption, the Economist wrote. Gang fights and other violence marred the carnival this year, noted Agence France-Presse.

It’s little wonder, then, the Worker’s Party is supporting former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s bid for a third term in office in Brazil’s October presidential election.

Lula presided over what now looks like a golden age in Brazil, when the economy was strong and the government expanded a range of social programs that lifted millions out of poverty.

The fact that Lula’s programs set the stage for much of the country’s misery today – Rousseff was his protégé and Temer is struggling to trim the weighty budget deficits he inherited – matters little to voters who want things to improve.

Writing in the online magazine Jacobin, James N. Green, a professor of Latin American studies at Brown University, noted that around 37 percent of voters still thought the 72-year-old politician should run for office even though a court recently upheldhis graft conviction. He’s been sentenced to 12 years in jail.

Claiming the charges are politically motivated, Lula remains free as he appeals the ruling. He’s launched a series of election “caravans” to take his message to the people. Earlier this month, a judge allowed him to reclaim his passport so he could attend a conference in Ethiopia.

“The word ‘flee’ doesn’t exist in my life,” he told a Brazilian radio station, according to TeleSur, a Venezuela-based, multi-state-funded news outlet with a leftist tilt that favors Lula’s politics. “I believe that I will be a (presidential) candidate because I believe the truth will prevail in the end.”

The next-most popular candidate has a 21-percent popularity rating, Green wrote. Temer, who is not running for reelection, has a 2-percent approval rate. Temer escaped bribery charges, the Guardian explained – arguably a remarkable achievement, given how police have charged and convicted scores of politicians in a series of corruption scandals in recent years.

It’s not clear whether Lula will appear on the ballot or, if he wins, if he could assume office if he’s in jail. But it is clear that Brazilians prefer to go back to the future rather than dwell on the present.

Argentina: General Motors Makes A Big New Investment

GM Argentina Tests Import Program At Port Rosario

In 2017, General Motors announced plans to invest $500 million in its Argentina operations through 2019 to produce a new Chevrolet model in 2020 at its GM Argentina plant. Of the $500 million investment slated for the plant, GM will invest $300 million while its suppliers will contribute the remaining $200 million.

The investment will result in an increase in GM’s operations at the port of Rosario as the automaker aims to double the volume of containers it moves in and out of the country each year. To ensure that logistics operations go smoothly, General Motors has been testing importing and exporting vehicles from the port, with the latest trial taking place in November 2017.

General Motors Alvear plant in Argentina

During the trial, GM successfully exported 1,162 Chevrolet vehicles to Argentina that were comprised of the Brazil-made Chevrolet Onix and its sedan variant, the Chevrolet Prisma, as well as the Mexico-made Chevrolet Tracker, known as the Trax in North America. The vehicles were exported to the port of Rosario in Argentina and then relocated to the GM Argentina plant, which is located in the town of Alvear in Argentina’s Santa Fe province near the port city of Rosario. The facility currently produces the Chevrolet Cruze for the local Argentine market as well as for other markets in South America, and has received $740 million in investments between 2014 and 2016.

2017 Chevrolet Onix

The trial was performed in partnership with Terminal Puerto Rosario to determine how to expand operations while making them more efficient for both the automaker and the port. After the test concluded, GM stated that both it as well as the port of Rosario were satisfied with its results, as neither party suffered any setbacks.

“We are very happy with the results of this operation that involved a high volume of vehicles to disembark and move to our factory’s lot,” said Fabián Silva, Logistics Manager of General Motors Mercosur (translated from Spanish). “We are interested in accelerating the embarkation and disembarkation processes in this port in the face of the new investments we are announcing, which will require high-volume operations in the coming years,” he added.

2017 Chevrolet Tracker

General Motors recently reorganized its South American operations, placing Argentina and Brazil into the newly-established Mercocur sub-division of GM South America.

Peru: The Odebracht Web

PERU

The Odebrecht Web

Construction projects have ground to a halt in Peru, where a scandal involving the Brazilian contracting giant Odebrecht threatens to cause an economic and political crisis.

The name Odebrecht should ring bells for anyone who has been following the string of corruption cases involving former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as well as a host of other Latin American politicians listed recently in the Washington Post.

In Peru, as in many other countries in the region, Odebrecht allegedly paid bribes to companies linked to public officials – including President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski – in exchange for government contracts.

Kuczynski, who has denied accepting bribes, narrowly avoidedimpeachment in December on charges related to Odebrecht’s payments to his investment firm.

But, as the Economist explained, many Peruvians believe Kuczynski pardoned Alberto Fujimori, a former president who was serving 25 years for human-rights abuses, as part of a deal with one of Fujimori’s sons, a lawmaker, in order to survive the impeachment vote.

Now the opposition is considering another impeachment push, noted Stratfor, the security consultancy, as the president’s popularity ratings have plunged.

The problem for Peru now, however, is whether the political crisis can resolve itself fast enough to avoid an economic calamity.

Finance Minister Claudia Cooper said investments in companies tangled up in the web of corruption charges are equivalent to around 4 percent of Peru’s gross domestic product, reportedReuters.

“Fear is affecting the whole investment process,” Gonzalo Priale, chairman of the National Association for Infrastructure Promotion, a trade group, told Bloomberg. “We need to fight corruption, but keep investing.”

Kuczynski has proposed legislation that would allow companies that cooperate with prosecutors to keep operating, Reuters said. The new law would replace an expiring anti-graft rule that said companies convicted of corruption couldn’t bid on public contracts. The old law discouraged executives from cooperating with authorities.

But it’s not clear if lawmakers would want to give that power to an administration accused of being overly cozy with dishonest businesspeople.

Chinese news service Xinhua reported that Peruvian prosecutors have demanded $1.1 billion in reparations from Oderbrecht for the bribes.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are seeking to extradite from the US another former president, Alejandro Toledo, whom they accuse of taking kickbacks from Odebrecht. Toledo, an anti-Fujimori activist who was president from 2001 to 2006, denies the charges.

The Herald, a Scottish newspaper, recently revealed that nearly $6 million of the money that Toledo allegedly got is said to have been funneled through a shell company based at one of Scotland’s biggest law firms.

The Odebrecht web stretches far, indeed.

W

Buenos Aires Seeks To Renegotiate Natural Gas Contracts With Bolivia

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New Peru Park Protects 2 Million Acres Of Amazon Rain Forest

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Patagonia National Park Adds 10 Million Acres Of Wildlife Sanctuary In Chile

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Peru: Kicking And Screaming

PERU

Kicking and Screaming

If Peruvian legislators want President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski gone, they’d better start collecting the votes for an official impeachment – because Kuczynski has no plans to quit.

“I won’t resign,” Bloomberg reported the president as saying in Lima on Monday. “It’s not a personal matter, it’s an institutional matter. I was elected for five years and I’ll complete the five years.”

Opposition lawmakers had called for him to step down and claimed to have fresh evidence the president lied to Congress about an alleged conflict of interest to do with contracts awarded to the controversy-plagued Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht SA.

But Kuczynski rejected those claims and blamed their zeal to oust him on his decision to pardon former President Alberto Fujimori at the end of December.

Notably, some observers speculate that pardon helped the president escape a prior impeachment bid by splitting the opposition Popular Force party led by Fujimori’s son and daughter. However, last week the leftist party Nuevo Peru said it is discussing plans for another impeachment effort when Congress returns from recess next month.

Sparks Fly Between Chile And PEru

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Guatemala: You're Under Arrest!

GUATEMALA

You’re Under Arrest

Guatemala arrested a former president and nine of his ex-ministers as part of a crackdown on corruption in the Central American country.

Former President Alvaro Colom and members of his former cabinet are accused of embezzling funds and committing fraud during the setup of a public bus system in Guatemala City in 2010, Al-Jazeera reported.

Prosecutors said there are questions around how the government auctioned off concessions and granted subsidies for the buses.

Among those arrested was current chairman of Oxfam International Juan Alberto Fuentes, a former Guatemalan finance minister. The arrest adds to the woes of the prominent charity, which is currently embroiled in a sex abuse scandal in Haiti and Chad – where staff members are accused of paying prostitutes for sex.

Noting that another former Guatemalan president is already facing trial and current President Jimmy Morales himself faces corruption allegations, Al-Jazeera quoted experts as saying the political arrests are far from over – though they could easily be hijacked for political ends by the elite.

Brasil Will Not Close Its Border To Venezuelan Refugees

BRAZIL

This Way to the Red Carpet

Brazil won’t close its border to Venezuelan refugees, but it has launched a task force to manage the influx and provide resources for cities and states to cope with the migrants.

In the city of Boa Vista, the capital of the northern state of Roraima, the local government said such refugees already account for 10 percent of the population, or around 40,000 people, creating a humanitarian crisis, Reuters reported.

Brazilian President Michel Temer visited Boa Vista Monday and promised to provide Roraima with federal funds and also look into relocating some of the refugees to other states.

The visit came after a Brazilian man set fire to a house where dozens of Venezuelans were living last week. Due to widespread shortages of food and essentials in Venezuela, thousands have fled across the border to Brazil – some of them walking hundreds of miles.

Earlier both Colombia and Brazil tightened border security in response to the Venezuelan exodus.

The Pope And South America

VATICAN

Man in the Mirror

Pope Francis took the opportunity during his annual Christmas address to give Vatican officials a tongue-lashing for their ambition and vanity, nagging issues he sees as a “cancer” within the church.

“Reforming Rome is like cleaning the Egyptian sphinxes with a toothbrush,” the pope said during his address. “You need patience, dedication and delicacy.”

Known for his commitment to reforming the Catholic Church, Francis has always spiced his Christmas greeting with bittersweet notes of the church’s ills.

But a string of recent gaffes by his Holiness has some saying that the reformer needs to take a look in the mirror.

During his trip to South America last month, the pope denounced misogyny and corruption within politics and society at large and called on the nations of Peru and Chile to bolster the rights of their indigenous communities.

However, people in both nations have criticized the church’s response to revelations of sexual abuse in prominent Catholic institutions, ABC News reported.

Before his arrival in Santiago, homemade bombs went off in three Catholic churches, complete with notes protesting Francis’ appointment of a bishop in 2015 accused of covering up wide-scale sexual abuse by a priest in the 1980s and 1990s.

Francis dove directly into the issue during the first leg of his trip in his many public addresses, but stopped short of condemning the bishop he’d elevated, telling journalists that “the day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, then I’ll speak.” He went on to equate accusations by survivors with slander, the Associated Press wrote, sparking outrage from victims and the public.

“That is the enigma of Pope Francis,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of the online abuse database BishopAccountability.org. “He is so bold and compassionate on many issues, but he is an old-school defensive bishop when it comes to the sex-abuse crisis.”

Francis eventually apologized for the statement, but his tour in Peru wasn’t without its hiccups, either.

During an address to some 500 cloistered nuns in Lima, Francis lobbed a joke that likened gossiping nuns to the Shining Path terrorists who fought the Peruvian state during the 1980s and 1990s, a conflict that resulted in 69,000 deaths, Reuters reported.

Critics argued that the church’s sex-abuse scandals were more akin to terror than were gossiping nuns.

The church recently took over a 20,000-member Catholic lay society based in Peru amid widespread accusations of pedophilia. But instead of being handed over to Peruvian investigators, the founder of the society was forced into exile in Rome, where he is being investigated by the church.

Such anecdotes smell of brushing scandal under the rug, but some argue that the strict political structure of the Catholic Church gives the pontiff only so much power, Simeon Tegel wrote for US News & World Report.

Even so, others say that the politically active pope is preaching hypocrisy by demanding reform without doing the legwork, Tegel wrote.

One only has to look at the numbers to see dissatisfaction with the Holy See, Tegel writes: The proportion of Latin Americans describing themselves as Catholic fell to 59 percent last year from 80 percent only two decades ago, according to one study by Chilean pollsters.

That’s a reflection of something happening in the church – and it’s certainly not reform.

La Casa Minima In Buenos Aires

BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

La Casa Mínima

The narrowest house in Buenos Aires is less than 10 feet wide. 

As you walk down Pasaje San Lorenzo in the San Telmo district of Buenos Aires, keep an eye out for house number 380. It’s a charming sight, but such a sliver of a building that you could easily miss it. The tiny home, known as La Casa Mínima, is the narrowest in the Argentine capital. According to local legend, it was once owned by a freed slave.

At its widest point, La Casa Mínima measures just 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) across. Its façade is marked by an old wooden door, painted green, above which sits a miniscule second-floor balcony. The house is painted white, with some of the original clay bricks poking through where the paint has peeled away. In terms of depth, the house extends a comparatively generous 42 feet (13 meters) from front to rear. Still, it remains a notably narrow slice of Argentine architecture.

Locals, and in particular local tour guides, tell a widely repeated tale about the building’s history. This popular account claims that La Casa Mínima was a gift from the Urquiza family to one of their former slaves. The tiny house was supposedly given to the African slave in 1813, shortly after his liberation.

A lack of any supporting evidence isn’t the only problem with this story. It’s true, and perhaps just a little too coincidental, that gradual abolition was introduced in Argentina in 1813, when the Free Womb Act was introduced, “freeing” all babies born to slave mothers. However, slavery wasn’t truly abolished in Argentina until 1853; Buenos Aires had to wait until even later, in 1861.

The idea, therefore, that a freed slave might be given a home, albeit it a tiny one, in Buenos Aires in 1813 seems unlikely, but the story has helped maintain interest in the building, and, more importantly, has done its part in raising awareness of the history of slavery in Buenos Aires and Argentina.

According to actual historical studies of La Casa Mínima, including its owners and inhabitants, the building’s history is far more prosaic. Originally, the building in which La Casa Mínima now stands was once a single home measuring a respectable 52.5 feet (16 meters) wide. Over time, however, it was slowly divided up to be rented out or sold off to various inhabitants. Thanks to some particularly bad math and dubious planning, the owners managed to end up with an extraneous slice in the middle. Rather than try to rectify the matter by including it in one of the neighboring homes, they decided to turn it into a standalone abode: the narrowest of its kind in the capital.

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