HOME |
RSS | 
The
2014 World Cup in Brazil is in serious trouble, folks. You see, Brazil
has banned alcoholic drinks at all Brazilian stadiums, and that's just
not cool with soccer's world governing body, FIFA.
So, in an effort to stand up for the rights beer lovers, FIFA said that beer "must be sold" in the World Cup:
In remarks to journalists in Rio de Janeiro, Mr Valcke sounded frustrated with Brazilian officials:
"Alcoholic drinks are part of the Fifa World Cup, so we're going to have them. Excuse me if I sound a bit arrogant but that's something we won't negotiate," he said.
"The fact that we have the right to sell beer has to be a part of the law."
Budweiser is a big sponsor of the World Cup, but I'm absolutely, positively sure that has nothing to do with Fifa's position on this: Link
Previously on Neatorama: Neatolicous Fun Facts: Beer
You’ve read about plants that eat animals, like the Venus Flytrap and the Pitcher Plant. Philcoxia does it, too, but you can’t see it, because this Brazilian plant works underground, using sticky leaves that grow under the soil. Researchers Caio Pereira and Peter Fritsch have been studying how Philcoxia gets its nutrients.
In 2007, Peter Fritsch found a possible answer. He noticed nematode worms stuck to the underground leaves, and reasoned that the plant was trapping and digesting them. Pereira, working with Fritsch, has now confirmed this hypothesis.
He found that Philcoxia’s underground leaves are littered with the bodies of dead nematodes. To check that the deaths aren’t coincidental, Pereira bred nematodes so that their bodies were full of nitrogen-15 – a rare and heavier-than-usual version of the element. He then “fed” the nematodes to Philcoxia. Two days later, Pereira found that 15 percent of the nitrogen-15 in the worms has been incorporated into the plant’s leaves. It was clear proof that Philcoxia was digesting the nematodes and absorbing the remains into their bodies.
Many meat-eating plants digest their prey with high concentrations of enzymes called phosphatases. Philcoxia does so too. Pereira found loads of the enzymes on Philcoxia’s leaves, which means that the plants are probably digesting the nematodes directly.
Read more at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link
The birth rate in Brazil has dropped to historically low levels. The average number of births per woman is now just 1.9, and the drop has been quite steep for the past 50 years. What happened? In this predominantly Catholic nation, families of ten or more children were once common, but now Brazilian women say “A fábrica está fechada,” meaning the factory is closed.
“What took 120 years in England took 40 years here,” [Brazilian demographer José Alberto] Carvalho told me one day. “Something happened.” At that moment he was talking about what happened in São Vicente de Minas, the town of his childhood, where nobody under 45 has a soccer-team-size roster of siblings anymore. But he might as well have been describing the entire female population of Brazil. For although there are many reasons Brazil’s fertility rate has dropped so far and so fast, central to them all are tough, resilient women who set out a few decades back, without encouragement from the government and over the pronouncements of their bishops, to start shutting down the factories any way they could.
National Geographic lays out six reasons for the relatively sudden empowerment of Brazilian women, some that are also affecting other nations. One of those reasons is television. Link
(Image credit: John Stanmeyer)
A bioluminescent mushroom was discovered in Brazil in 1840 and named Agaricus gardneri (in honor of botanist George Gardner, who discovered it). The species was not observed again until 2009! I read that and thought. “How could they not see it? It glows in the dark!” Then I realized that the Brazilian rainforest must be an intimidating place in the dark. That turned out to be the true story.
To catch the green glow of the bioluminescent mushroom, Desjardin and his long-time research partner in Brazil, Dr. Cassius Stevani, had to “go out on new moon nights and stumble around in the forest, running into trees,” he recalled, wary of nearby poisonous snakes and prowling jaguars.
But he said advances such as digital cameras have made it easier to track down bioluminescent fungi. New cameras allow researchers to photograph mushrooms that they suspect might be bioluminescent in darkened rooms and analyze the photos for a glow (sometimes one that’s not visible to the human eye) within a few minutes, compared to the 30 to 40 minutes required of regular film exposure.
The brave mycologists brought back photographs of the same mushroom, now renamed Neonothopanus gardneri. Read more about it at Science Daily. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Cassius V. Stevani/IQ-USP, Brazil)
Twenty
years ago, Brazil found itself in the grips of hyperinflation. Its inflation
rate hit 80% a month, and the country was in financial free fall.
Economists at the Catholic University in Rio came up with an unlikely - but ultimately successful - plan to rescue the country. And would you believe it, the plan calls for fake money:
Read the fascinating story over at NPR's Planet Money blog: Link - via Just UrbanismThe four friends set about explaining their idea. You have to slow down the creation of money, they explained. But, just as important, you have to stabilize people's faith in money itself. People have to be tricked into thinking money will hold its value.
The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable and trustworthy. The only catch: This currency would not be real. No coins, no bills. It was fake.
"We called it a Unit of Real Value — URV," Bacha says. "It was virtual; it didn't exist in fact."
Nature is always throwing weirdness at us, and today’s helping comes in the form of a hermaphroditic goat–a breedable male that can be milked.
A visitor to a goat show in Brazil did not hesitate to buy a hermaphrodite goat – a male goat that can be milked – when he first came across it. The goat is a clearly a Billy goat. And, translating the colloquial phrase “pai de chiqueiro”, implies that it can be mated with a female goat. But, as seen in the video, the scrotum region apparently serves a dual purpose of being a set of udders that can be squeezed to get milk.
The interview is in Portuguese, but is subtitled for the non-Brazilian. Click through for more information than you’ll ever need.
Link | Image: TV Tambaú, Brasil
Yep, that’s a long truck! According to commenters, this kind of transport is used to haul sugar cane in Brazil. Normally they only travel from farm to farm, and it is unusual to see one on a highway. -via the Presurfer
You might not be able to fly down to Rio for Carnival, but you can hear and feel a “bateria,” a samba school drum section, in this web toy from Brazil. Enjoy the rhythm, or toggle on and off the sections to hear how each instrument sounds: shaker, cuica, agogo, tambourine, snare drum, repique, and bass drum. Use the menu at the top of the site to see the actual instruments played or see how a samba parade is conducted. Link -Thanks, Alessandro Manoel!
Comments Off
A woman in Parauapebas, Brazil, was shocked to find her three-year-old behind the sofa, petting an alligator!
The woman snatched the child away and called the fire brigade, who trapped the 1.5m-long (5ft) alligator.
The firefighters said the family was lucky the reptile was not hungry.
Firefighter Captain Luiz Claudio Farias said it could have seriously hurt or even killed the boy.
The alligator was taken from the house and released in another area. Link -via Arbroath
(Image credit: Flickr user Mohammed Al-Naser)
Comments Off 
Michael Jackson may be dead, but his voice lives on in this Brazilian taxi driver
named Jean Walker.
The Buzz Log has a video clip of Jean singing the King of Pop’s Billy Jean, while driving through the streets of Minas Gerais: Link [embedded YouTube]
This photo by Vanderlei Almeida, of a dog sitting by the grave of her owner who died in the catastrophic landslides in Brazil, captures the essence of loyalty in man’s best friend.
The dog named "Leao," sits for a second consecutive day next to the grave of Cristina Maria Cesario Santana – and something tells me that she could sit there for quite a long time.
Previously on Neatorama: Dog awaits return of his master for 11 years
During the Civil War, Confederate leaders didn’t just want to defeat the Union Army, they wanted to create a giant Latin American empire.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, many Northerners and Southerners alike wanted the federal government to take a more aggressive approach to acquiring new territory. In fact, some private citizens, known as filibusters, took matters into their own hands. They raised small armies illegally; ventured into Mexico, Cuba, and South America; and attempted to seize control of the lands. One particularly successful filibuster, William Walker, actually made himself president of Nicaragua and ruled from 1856 to 1857.
For the most part, these filibusters were just men in search of adventure. Others, however, were Southern imperialists who wanted to conquer new territories in the tropics. Abolitionist forces in the North greatly opposed their efforts, and the debate over Southern expansion only increased tensions in a divided nation. As the country drifted into war, U.S. Vice President John Breckinridge of Kentucky warned that “the Southern states cannot afford to be shut off from all possibility of expansion towards the tropics by the hostile action of the federal government.”
But Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860 put an end to the argument. The anti-slavery president refused to compromise, and war broke out in April 1861.
CONFEDERATE COLONIES, SOUTH OF THE BORDER
Winning the war was clearly a higher priority for the Confederacy than conquering Latin America, but growth was certainly on the post-war agenda. Confederate president Jefferson Davis made sure the Confederate constitution included the the right to expand, and he filled his cabinet with men who thought similarly. He even hinted that the slave trade could be revived in “new acquisitions to be made south of the Rio Grande.”
During the Civil War, Confederate agents attempted to destabilize Mexico so that its territories would be easy to snatch up after the war. One rebel emissary to Mexico City, John T. Pickett, secretly fomented rebellion in several Mexican provinces with an eye to “the permanent possession of that beautiful country.” Pickett’s mission ended in failure in 1861, but fate dealt the South a better hand in 1863. French Emperor Napoleon III seized Mexico, and the move provided the South with the perfect excuse to “liberate” the country after the Civil War.
Of course, Mexico was just part of the pie the South hoped to inherit. Confederate leaders also had their eyes squarely on Brazil -a country of nearly 4 million square miles and more than 8 million people. Prior to the outbreak of the war, U.S. Naval Academy founder Matthew Maury dispatched two Navy officers to the Amazon basin, ostensibly to map the river for shipping. Instead, they were secretly plotting domination and collecting data about separatist movements in the region. When the South lost the war, Maury refused to abandon his plans. He helped 20,000 ex-rebels flee to Brazil, where they established the Confederate colonies of New Texas and Americana. To this day, hundreds of descendants of the Confederados still gather outside Americana to celebrate their shared heritage of rocking chairs and sweet potato pie. In a strange way, a part of the Old South still survives -thousands of miles below the U.S. border.
(Image source: Os Confederados)
__________________________
The above article is reprinted with permission from the July-August 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!
Doctors in Ipatinga, Brazil declared 88-year-old Maria das Dores dead when they found no vital signs. She was transferred from the hospital to a funeral home, where an official looked into her coffin and found her moving! Ms. Dores was immediately sent back to the hospital.
Custodia Amancio, daughter of the resuscitated Brazilian woman, said: “We are happy to know my mother is alive and unhappy with the lack of respect due her. We are still not sure if we will sue the municipality and hospital.
“She continues in the intensive ward treatment ward and we are praying that she will improve quickly.”
Ms. Dores suffers from blocked arteries and Alzheimer’s disease. Link -via Fark
An estimated 500 to 600 drug traffickers were hiding in the Complexo do Alemão area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Over several days last week, shootouts between police and gang members left at least 42 people dead and residents terrified. The Big Picture Blog has 40 photographs from the raids. Some may be disturbing. Link -via Metafilter
(Image credit: REUTERS/Sergio Moraes)
On October 17th, a landslide destroyed the pier at Chibatão Port on the Amazon River in Brazil. This video from a security camera shows the destruction as it happened. The river had been at it lowest level since records started being kept in 1902. A cracked developed along the river bank and cargo containers were sucked down as the banks collapsed. Link -Thanks, Chris!
A lot of people probably think "McDonald’s made me fat," but there’s one guy in Brazil who got the court of law to agree with him. Here’s the bizarre story of a man who sued McD for making him fat … and won!
A former manager of a McDonald’s franchise in Porto Allegre, Brazil, sued the hamburger chain for making him gain 65 pounds while he worked with them for over a dozen years. McDonald’s must pay him $17,500 as recompense for his weight gain, a Brazilian court ruled on Tuesday.
The 32-year-old man, whose identity wasn’t disclosed, complained that the company’s policy of mandatory food sampling caused him to balloon from about 155 lbs. to 231 lbs. while working at their restaurant in southern Brazil. [...]
The man said that he felt forced to taste everything on the menu to ensure the quality of the food because McDonald’s hired undercover customers to randomly visit restaurants and report back on quality.
Also, he blamed the free lunches consisting of burgers, fries and ice cream, which contributed to his excessive weight gain during the course of employment.
Judge Joao Filho agreed with the man, and issued a ruling against the company, ordering them to pay $17500 to the ex-employee.
If you can’t beat ‘em, let ‘em be world record-breaking art: Brazil unveiled the world’s largest graffiti at 37,000 square feet (3,500 m2). Oddee has the exclusive photos: Link
In the past, people in Brazil have tried to smuggle cell phones into prisons using pigeons and toy helicopters. Recently, a boy was caught outside of the walls of a Brazilian prison trying to shoot cell phones into the yard using a bow and arrow:
Police say a 17-year-old teen was detained after he shot arrows with cell phones attached over the walls of a prison in southern Brazil to inmates waiting on the other side.
Authorities say the boy was caught after one of the arrows he launched struck a police officer on the back. The officer was not seriously injured because the cell phone was tied to the tip of the arrow and softened the impact.
Police Lt. Mauricio Cravo told RBS TV that a local gang hired the teen, giving him a professional bow and training him how to use it.
Link via Super Punch | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user andygee1 used under Creative Commons license
The good news: Tired of overcrowded cities? A pristine and uninhabited tropical island is still available.
The bad news: It’s filled with snakes.
Atlas Obscura has more on the intriguing Snake Island of Brazil:
Off the shore of Brazil, almost due south of the heart of São Paulo, is a Ilha de Queimada Grande. The island is untouched by human developers, and for very good reason. Researchers estimate that on the island live between one and five snakes per square meter. The snakes live on the many migratory birds (enough to keep the snake density remarkably high) that use the island as a resting point.
That figure might not be so terrible if the snakes were, say, 2 inches long and nonvenomous. The snakes on Queimada Grande, however, are a unique species of pit viper, the golden lancehead. The lancehead genus of snakes is responsible for 90% of Brazilian snakebite-related fatalities. The golden lanceheads that occupy Snake Island grow to well over half a meter long, and they possess a powerful fast-acting poison that melts the flesh around their bites. Golden lanceheads are so dangerous that, with the exception of some scientific outfits, the Brazilian Navy has expressly forbidden anyone from landing on the island.
http://atlasobscura.com/place/snake-island-ilha-de-queimada-grande
Gisele Bündchen and Alessandra Ambrosio are just two of many Brazilian beauties that rose to become supermodels.
But if you think that they accidentally stumble into the world of fashion and modeling, you’d be wrong. No, they were discovered by model scouts whose job is to hunt for attractive teens (and even pre-teens) and groom them into the world’s next supermodels.
Where do these scouts find beautiful people? Not in the big cities – they concentrate their search in "hotspots" in rural Brazil:
Before setting out in a pink S.U.V. to comb the schoolyards and shopping malls of southern Brazil, Alisson Chornak studies books, maps and Web sites to understand how the towns were colonized and how European their residents might look today.
The goal, he and other model scouts say, is to find the right genetic cocktail of German and Italian ancestry, perhaps with some Russian or other Slavic blood thrown in. Such a mix, they say, helps produce the tall, thin girls with straight hair, fair skin and light eyes that Brazil exports to the runways of New York, Milan and Paris with stunning success.
Alexei Barrionuevo of the New York Times has a fascinating look at the industry that hunts for the world’s next supermodel: Link | Video Clip (Photo: João Pina for The New York Times)
It looks like some belated April Fool joke but the Jabuticaba is a real tree which bears fruit on its trunk. It gives it a rather odd appearance but the fruit is tremendously popular in South America. People eat them like they were grapes.
It is also a popular ingredient in jellies and is also juiced to make a refreshing summer drink. What is more it can be fermented and made in to wine and strong liquor. After three days off the tree the fermentation will begin so sometimes, there is no choice. Honestly.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.
Former British Army officer Ed Stafford is well on his way to becoming the first person to hike the entire length of the Amazon river, from its source to its mouth. He’s been hiking for 612 days and hopes to complete the journey in August. In The Daily Mail, Mark Barrowcliffe writes:
The challenges he faces are monumental. So monumental, in fact, that Arctic explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes has written to Ed to warn him that the stage in front of him – the deep Brazilian jungle – will be ‘difficult’. You can take it that this is something of an understatement, given that it comes from a man who once sawed off his own fingers after they became frostbitten.[...]
His average day would kill most people. Up at dawn, he walks for around eight hours, until 3pm. At this stage of the journey he will be lucky to have covered 7km in that time. This is jungle, real jungle – and you pay for every step with willsapping swings of the machete.
It’s like clearing the thickest hedge you could imagine for a whole working day. Only this hedge is filled with razor grass – which is pretty much as the name implies, grass that will cut exposed flesh to ribbons – huge thorns and spines on trees sharp enough to go straight through a carelessly placed hand, deadly snakes, poisonous spiders and foot-long centipedes so venomous that they can blister your skin with a touch. Oh, and the odd man-eating big cat. Specifically, jaguars.
Link via Radley Balko | Photo: The Daily Mail
National Geographic video link.
Last year Neatorama offered a link to a Telegraph article about a remote Brazilian village with, in Miss Cellania’s words, a “bazillion Brazilian” twins. Now Candido Godol will be the subject of an upcoming documentary in a National Geographic’s Explorer program.
The statistics are jaw-dropping: 44 pairs of twins in 80 families in a 1.5-square-mile area – a rate 1000% above the global average. Some scientists attribute this to a “founder effect” since many of these Brazilians are descendants of German immigrants who clustered in this remote outback area. Others wonder about environmental contamination or simple chance. The National Geographic program will apparently focus on the more tabloid-worthy “Joseph Mengele-was-here” hypothesis.
Via Reddit, where there is a discussion thread.
|
A REAL LIFE "OCEAN'S ELEVEN": The 2003 ANTWERP DIAMOND HEIST
HOW THEY DID IT: Not ones to rush into something this big, the Turin boys began laying the groundwork for the project three years prior. Posing as a company owner, Notarbartolo rented an office in the Center in 2000 and proceeded to obtain copies of master keys and learn how the alarm system worked. Then, the group waited for the perfect distraction - the Diamond Games tennis tournament on February 15-16, 2003. As Venus Williams wowed throngs of spectators (many of them Diamond Center employees and security guards), Nortarbartolo's crew used their duplicate keys to sneak into 123 of the building's underground vaults. Simply riding the elevator down to the basement, they deactivated a motion sensor and taped over light detectors. Then, instead of just covering the lenses of the CCTV (closed circuit television) security cameras, they avoided suspicion by replacing the tapes with previously recorded footage. Of course, the biggest hurdle was getting past the vault's 12-inch thick doors. Knowing the doors were equipped with internal magnets that would set off alarms if they detached, the robbers drilled through the bolts, carefully taped the magnets together, and moved them out of the way so that they wouldn't separate. After that, all they had to do was break the locks to the safety deposit boxes, rake in the diamonds, and then quietly flee the scene. To escape undetected, they memorized the surveillance patterns of the 24-hour police patrols outside the building. (Hey, they didn't have nicknames like “The King of Thieves” and “The Magician with the Keys” for nothing.) Amazingly, even though the heist took place early Sunday morning, authorities didn't discover anything suspicious until Monday. HOW THEY GOT CAUGHT: Here's a tip for would-be thieves: If you leave the crime scene with a bag full of diamonds and then dispose of the bags on the road leading out of the city, make sure you don't leave your half-eaten sandwich in one of them. Inspectors used DNA evidence found on the food to nab Notarbartolo, and further DNA traces in the vault to arrest two other gang members. In 2005, he was convicted, sentenced to 10 years in prison, and fined $1.3 million. Meanwhile, none of the diamonds have been recovered. Some have microscopic inscriptions on them that would reveal their identity, but only if the thieves ever decide to sell them legally. (Photo and a very interesting in-depth story by Joshua Davis at Wired Magazine) BRUTE STRENGTH AND NUMBERS: THE SECURITAS DEPOT ROBBERY
HOW THEY DID IT: Picture this: You're driving along a road in Stockbury, England, when the whirring sirens of an unmarked police car startle you from your evening commute. You roll down your window and chipper police officer tells you he needs to speak with you - in his vehicle. Oops, you've just been kidnapped. That's how Colin Dixon was unwittingly reeled into one of the biggest heists of the century. The crooks handcuffed Dixon - a manager at the Securitas cash collection and money transport company - and told him his family would be killed if he didn't comply. Meanwhile, fellow gang members abducted Dixon's wife and son, posing once again as police offices with a fake story about “an accident involving your husband”. The manager led the thieves to the Securitas depot in Tonbridge, where the criminals- wielding guns and cloaked in knit caps - accosted another 14 employees and made off with a giant trick full of loot. While the event was certainly traumatic for all the victims, fortunately, no one was injured. HOW THEY GOT CAUGHT: Good old-fashioned police work. Apparently, it takes a lot of accomplices to stage multiple kidnappings. In total, investigators have arrested about 30 people in connection with the crime, including drivers, face police, a car dealer, a salesman, a roofer, and a hairdresser named Kim Shackleton. Guess where she's headed? BRAZIL'S BIG DIG: THE TUNNEL RATS BANK ROBBERY
HOW THE DID IT: For the 23 or so suspected gang members involved in this operation, the first step was posing as a company that was renting an office building- which just happened to be located near a bank. Cleverly enough, the crooks set up an artificial business as an artificial turf com - called Grama Sintetica, complete with artificial employees and fancy logo. For weeks, a group of men worked around the clock digging a tunnel leading two city blocks over to the Central Bank building Somehow, the process was so shrewdly executed that Grama Sintetica's neighbors failed to notice that a van was transporting several loads of dirt away from the building each day. And if their stealthy moves don‘t seem impressive enough, consider the tunnel itself: In it, the gang installed electric lighting, air conditioning, and wood-paneled walls (to make sure the tunnel didn't collapse). To pull off the heist, the gang managed to break through the bank's three-and-a-half-foot-wide vault floor, using (as police later discovered) a bolt cutter, a drill, an electric saw, and a blow torch. Over the course of the weekend, they eventually removed five containers full of bank notes, weighing nearly 7,700 lbs. Unbelievably, nobody discovered the theft until that Monday. All told, the heist required experts in electrical engineering, global positioning systems, excavation, and, of course, theft. The most brilliant idea, though? Picking a crowded, noisy area in Brazil for the heist, reasoning that no one would notice the sound of tools and digging in the daily commotion. HOW THEY GOT CAUGHT: The thieves did a good job of covering their tracks (they used a white powder at the crime scene to hide fingerprints), but apparently, tunneling underneath nations is a little trickier. Attempts to transport the money out of the country using truck transports and chartered planes failed, and the assumed mastermind behind the theft, Luis Ribeiro, eventually turned up murdered. So far, the police have arrested a few dozen suspected members of the gang. NOT-SO-GOOD FELLAS: THE LUFTHANSA AIRPORT HEIST
HOW THEY DID IT: The wrong way - with brute force. Even
though it became source material for the 1990 film “GoodFellas HOW THEY GOT CAUGHT: Unlike the other heists, in which some gang members fled the country to hide, the Lufthansa Airlines gangsters stuck around. Not only that, but they made the mistake of displaying their newfound wealth a bit too obviously. The police had a pretty good idea who was behind the crime, and it wasn't long before snitches implicated Werner and a few others. Many of the participants were murdered before they could squeal, while still others became informants and joined the Witness Protection Program. Werner, who organized but didn't participate in the actual theft, was the only one convicted for a role in the heist. |
|
 |
The article above, written by John Brandon, appeared in the Jan - Feb 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission. Don't forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss' extremely entertaining website and blog today!
|
The family of 59-year-old Ademir Jorge Goncalves of Santo Antonio da Platina, Brazil identified his body after a fatal traffic accident. The funeral was held the next day, which is customary in Brazil. Imagine their shock when Goncalves himself appeared at the funeral service!
What family members didn’t know was that Goncalves had spent the night at a truck stop talking with friends over drinks of a sugarcane liquor known as cachaca, his niece Rosa Sampaio told the O Globo newspaper. He did not get word about his own funeral until it was already happening Monday morning.
A police spokesman in the town of Santo Antonio da Platina said Goncalves rushed to the funeral to let family members know he was not dead.
“The corpse was badly disfigured, but dressed in similar clothing,” said the police spokesman, who talked on condition of anonymity as he wasn’t authorized to discuss the case. “People are afraid to look for very long when they identify bodies, and I think that is what happened in this case.”
The victim has since been identified and the remains sent to the correct family. Link -via reddit
(image credit: Flickr user Hipolito Luiz)
Can you imagine driving 500 miles on one road? Not a highway, not a freeway, a road. In central Brazil, there is such a road.
There is a road in central Brazil that is 497 miles long. Big deal you say? We are talking about a street, one street, that stretches the equivilent of New York City to Cleveland, and then some, or from Los Angles to Flagstaff, AZ. That’s a huge freaking road.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ninigoat.
Remember the story of how prisoners in Brazil have been smuggling in cell phones using pigeons?
Well, that’s low tech compared to what these other prisoners did:
Four suspects were arrested late on Sunday outside a maximum security facility in the southern town of Presidente Venceslau in Brazil’s Sao Paulo state after the mini-chopper, 14 mobile telephones and the equivalent of 500 dollars in cash were found in their rented car, according to reports in local media.
Note that this is also in Brazil: what’s up with that? Can’t they smuggle things the good ol’ fashioned way – in their butts – just like all other prisoners do in the rest of the world?
In a new book, an Argentine historian asserts that Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele is responsible for the astonishing rate of twins in Candido Godoi, Brazil. Jorge Camarasa makes the claim that Mengele ministered to both humans and livestock of the town during the 1960s under the name Rudolph Weiss in the book Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America.
For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.
But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.
The normal rate of twin births is one out of every 80 pregnancies. Link -via Reddit
Those distinctive eyes, nose and lips are the hallmark of a Brazilian street artist Mundano. But instead of graffiti, this particular one graces the whole facade of a building in São Paulo. I can just imagine the lower "lips" rolling up when the store opens for the day.
Found at Wooster Collective, where one would find such things: Link | More of Mundano’s street art on Flickr
If
you thought George Clooney's Ocean's Eleven character was smooth, check
out the velvet finish on criminal mastermind 
February
must be a good month for crime. In February 2006, three years after the
Antwerp diamond heist, a Securitas money depot in England was robbed by
a band of thieves who coordinated simultaneous kidnappings. They made
off with a jaw-dropping $92.5 Million (US) in cash - most of it unmarked.
Today, it's considered the largest cash robbery in British history. (Photo:
PA, via 
Sometimes
there's a light at the end of the tunnel, other times, there's $72 million
(US). Such was the case in August 2005, when a group of criminals in Fortaleza,
Brazil, used their 260-ft. long secret passageway to make off with some
serious loot. The trick: Spending three months excavating the thing and
tediously sneaking vanloads of dirt past the thousands of workers in the
busy urban area above. (Photo: AP, via 
In
1978, Lufthansa Airlines employee Louis Werner knew two important things:
First, that a Lufthansa airplane occasionally transported unmarked bills
from West Germany to New York's Kennedy Airport, where they were temporarily
held in nothing more than cardboard boxes locked inside a vault. Second,
that he owed about $20,000 in gambling debts to his bookie.
”
(plus several books and even a few copycat crimes), the Lufthansa Airport
Heist was a brutal affair. Using a few helpful tips from Werner, infamous
crime lord Jimmy Burke put together an operation that involved several
phases - breaking into the airport's cargo terminal, handcuffing employees,
and subduing guards. Once inside the vault, they found 72 boxes of cash
and jewelry totaling about $6 million (instead of the $2 million they'd
expected). As for the getaway, the gang used bloody force to make sure
no employees reported the crime until long after they'd left the airport.
The entire robbery took only 64 minutes, but it became one of the most
complex and lucrative heists in U.S. history.
