Setting The Theater.

The one and only Mikaela Shiffrin.

1. The Economist:

At around 3pm in Brasília, the capital (of Brazil), thousands of bolsonaristas stormed the modernist buildings of Congress and the Supreme Court, along with the presidential palace, breaking windows and damaging furniture. Many of the insurrectionists had been camped out in front of federal army headquarters since October, when Mr Bolsonaro lost a tight election to Lula, as the leftist current president is known. Led by Mr Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, to believe that the election was stolen, they begged the army to stage a coup.

On Sunday, perhaps realizing that no coup was coming, the bolsonaristas decided to take matters into their own hands. Although the rampage occurred during a congressional recess, meaning the invaded buildings were mostly empty, it bore striking similarities to the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6th, 2021 by followers of Donald Trump. In the Senate, the bolsonaristas climbed onto the stage and slid down it as if it were a playground slide. In the Supreme Court, they ripped a door of one of the justice’s quarters from its hinges and posted photos of themselves on social media hoisting it in the air as if it were a trophy.

But if the riots in Washington revealed lapses in police intelligence and co-ordination, their Brazilian counterpart laid evidence to something more sinister. While there is no evidence that the police were complicit in the insurrection, they were, at the very least, passive. Shortly after the invasion of congress began in Brasília, a group of officers were caught on film chatting with protesters, taking selfies and filming the chaos rather than acting to stop it. Requests for backup from the head of the Senate police to the governor of the federal district of Brasília, who is an ally of Mr Bolsonaro, were ignored until late in the afternoon. (Source: economist.com)