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      Scientists Discover Similar Dinosaur Footprints on Opposite Sides of the Atlantic

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      More than 260 similar footprints found in Brazil and Cameroon help us understand a region that broke apart millions of years ago.They may be an ocean apart, but dinosaur footprints found in South America and Africa are so similar that their discovery suggests dinosaurs may have roamed a narrow corridor that connected the two continents before they split.Researchers found more than 260 footprints more than 3,700 miles apart in Brazil and Cameroon that were preserved in mud and silt where ancient rivers and lakes once stood, according to a study published Monday by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. The tracks were made 120 million years ago when Africa and South America were still connected as part of a supercontinent called Gondwana, the researchers found.According to the study, the Borborema Plateau in northeastern Brazil and the Koum Basin in northern Cameroon both contain similar geological structures that preserved dinosaur prints.The footprints discovered in those areas were similar in age, shape and geological context, said Dr. Louis L. Jacobs, a paleontologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas and the study’s lead author.Researchers discovered theropod footprints in the Sousa Basin of northeastern Brazil.Ismar de Souza CarvalhoIt is not surprising to make similar discoveries in regions that were once connected, Dr. Jacobs said, but the dinosaur tracks help us understand the geologic history of a region that broke apart millions of years ago. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Caused a Plane to Fall From the Sky in Brazil?

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      Officials are investigating potential causes of a plane crash that killed 62 people near São Paulo. Using videos and other clues, aviation experts have formed theories.Brazilian investigators on Saturday began analyzing the black boxes from a São Paulo-bound flight to try to understand why the passenger plane fell from 17,000 feet on Friday, in a crash that killed all 62 on board.But to aviation experts around the world who watched the videos showing the 89-foot plane spinning slowly as it plummeted before crashing almost directly on its belly, the question of what had happened was simple to answer: The plane had stalled.In other words, the plane’s wings had lost the lift needed to keep the aircraft aloft, causing it to stop flying and start falling.“You can’t get into a spin without stalling,” said John Cox, an airline pilot for 25 years who now aids plane crash investigations. “It’s A plus B equals C.”The question of why VoePass Flight 2283 might have stalled, however, remained a mystery.Did it lose significant speed? Did its nose pitch up too high? Did ice build up on its wings? Did an engine fail? Was its stall-warning system working? Were the two pilots tired or distracted?“The main thing we know is that it’s never one thing,” said Thomas Anthony, director of the aviation safety program at the University of Southern California.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brazil Police Accuse Bolsonaro of Embezzling Saudi Jewels

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      Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, may soon face criminal charges for stealing gifts he received from foreign leaders.Brazil’s federal police recommended that former President Jair Bolsonaro be criminally charged in a scheme to embezzle jewelry he received as gifts from foreign leaders while president, according to two people close to the investigation, adding another major legal challenge for Mr. Bolsonaro.The federal police accused Mr. Bolsonaro and 10 of his allies of trying to keep and sell expensive gifts that he received from foreign governments, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sealed case files. The police are seeking money laundering and criminal association charges against Mr. Bolsonaro and some of his allies, including former aides.In one case, Mr. Bolsonaro and his team sought to conceal $1 million worth of diamond jewelry that the former president received from the Saudi Arabian government, according to past investigative documents.In another, Mr. Bolsonaro’s team tried and failed to sell an 18-karat gold set from the Saudis for $50,000 at a Manhattan auction house during a Valentine’s Day sale last year, the documents show. In a third, they sold two luxury watches at a Pennsylvania mall for $68,000 and delivered some of the cash to Mr. Bolsonaro, the documents show.While Brazilian police call such recommended charges an “indictment” in Portuguese, Mr. Bolsonaro has not been charged. The country’s top federal prosecutor must now decide whether to charge Mr. Bolsonaro and force him to stand trial. That prosecutor and Brazil’s Supreme Court said they had not yet received the recommendations from police as of Thursday night.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Air Europa Flight Hits Severe Turbulence, Fracturing Necks and Skulls

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      Four passengers were in intensive care after the flight from Spain to Uruguay hit turbulence that injured dozens. The plane made an emergency landing in Brazil.There were blood stains on an airplane seat and broken ceiling panels after severe turbulence forced an Air Europa flight to make an emergency landing in Natal, Brazil.Claudio Fernandez Arbes/Agence France-Presse, via Ugc/Afp Via Getty ImagesSevere turbulence on an Air Europa flight to Uruguay from Spain on Monday injured more than two dozen passengers, officials said, leaving several with neck and skull fractures, in at least the second case of severe injuries from turbulence worldwide in less than a month.Flight UX045 made an emergency landing early Monday in the seaside city of Natal, Brazil, after experiencing turbulence more than four hours into the flight from Madrid, according to flight data.Some passengers hit their heads during the turbulence, resulting in head, neck and chest injuries, according to Brazilian public health officials. Thirty-six passengers were treated for injuries and 23 were taken to a hospital, according to health and airport officials.Some of the passengers who received treatment were suffering from shock but no physical injuries, officials said. By Monday evening, five passengers were still hospitalized, four of them in intensive care, officials said.Passengers described a frightening scene on the Boeing 787 jet, with some people flying through the cabin. Two women told the news channel Telemundo that at least one passenger flew out of his seat and became embedded in the plane’s ceiling area.Two videos posted on social media appeared to show a man lying in an area near or above the plane’s overhead bins and then being helped down by two other passengers. Other photos and videos showed broken ceiling panels and seats.“A person was left hanging between the plastic ceiling and the metal roof behind it, and they had to be brought down,” Evangelina Saravia, a passenger from Uruguay, told Telemundo. “The same thing happened to a baby.”Another passenger, Romina Apai, said she had been sitting next to the man who became embedded in the ceiling. “He flew and got stuck in the roof, in the bin — we couldn’t find him,” she told Telemundo. When the plane stabilized, she added, “people fell on top of seats, on top of other people.”It is relatively rare for turbulence to cause such severe injuries. Just 163 serious injuries from aircraft turbulence were registered in the United States between 2009 and 2022, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.But Monday’s episode is the second such case in less than a month. In June, a 73-year-old man died when the Singapore Airlines flight he was traveling on dropped 6,000 feet in minutes. More than 70 other people on that flight were injured.Turbulence itself is common and is typically not dangerous. It is generally caused by changes in wind speed and direction, including storms and jet streams, and can lead to sudden changes in a plane’s altitude and speed. Passengers who are not wearing seatbelts can be injured because turbulence can lift them out of their seats.Recent studies suggest that climate change can make turbulence more common because increased carbon dioxide emissions can affect air currents. More

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      Backlash to Anitta’s Music Video Evokes a Painful History in Brazil

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      Outrage over the pop star’s new music video brought Brazil’s struggle with religious intolerance into view.Anitta, the popular Brazilian singer, was the target of intense backlash over the release of a music video in an episode that highlighted persistent religious intolerance and racism in Brazil.The furor began on Monday, when the 31-year-old pop star shared a preview of the video for her new song, “Aceita” (“Accept” in Portuguese), with her 65 million followers on Instagram. Within two hours, she lost 200,000 followers, she said.The video depicts the practices of her faith, Candomblé. Her Instagram account showed images of the artist dressed in religious garb with a Candomblé priest and stills of spiritual items and other iconography associated with the faith.Candomblé is considered a syncretic religion, meaning it draws from various faiths and traditions.It evolved from a mix of Yoruba, Fon and Bantu beliefs brought to what is now Brazil by enslaved West African people during the colonial expansion of the Portuguese empire, scholars said.Although they are practiced by only 2 percent of the population, Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé make up a disproportionate number of reported religious intolerance cases, according to a 2022 U.S. State Department report on religious freedom in Brazil.For centuries, Candomblé was relegated to the shadows. It was considered demonic sorcery and a public danger in an overwhelmingly Catholic society.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can Adriano Pedrosa Save the Venice Biennale? No Pressure.

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      Only workaholics and delusional optimists should organize a Venice Biennale, as the Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa discovered during the countless flights and midnight meetings that have crammed his calendar for the past two years.“This would probably have taken five years and a team of intense researchers,” Pedrosa said in a video interview, if he hadn’t spent more than a decade mulling the possibilities, most recently as the influential artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art.On April 16, when the press previews begin for the 60th international exposition, others will judge whether the 58-year-old curator has captured the zeitgeist of contemporary art with his two-pronged show, “Foreigners Everywhere,” in the sprawling spaces of the Giardini and the Arsenale.The title is a provocation, weighted by the anti-immigrant agendas of Italy, Hungary and other countries in the last few years. Pedrosa, however, speaks about celebrating the foreigner and the historic waves of migration across the planet, offering a catalog of synonyms — “Immigrant, émigré, expatriate” — even as he expands the concept. “I take this image of the foreigner and unfold it into the queer, the outsider, the Indigenous,” he said.Those themes are embodied by 331 artists, most of whom will be unfamiliar to even seasoned art snobs. They are divided here between two major sections, one focusing on contemporary art and another dedicated to work made in the 20th century. Most have arrived from the Global South without major gallery representation or a foothold in the museum circuit. For many visitors, it will be the first time experiencing the splintered abstractions of Zubeida Agha (1922-1997) from Pakistan, the expressive portraiture of Hatem El Mekki (1918-2003) from Tunisia and the colorful fantasies of Emiliano di Cavalcanti (1897-1976) from Brazil, among others.From the beginning, critics noticed that “Foreigners Everywhere” would serve as a somber — some say morose — tipping point: It’s the first Venice Biennale in recent years to showcase more dead artists than living ones.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brazil Police Recommend Criminal Charges Against Bolsonaro

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      The federal police accused the former president of falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination records. Brazil’s federal police recommended former President Jair Bolsonaro be criminally charged in a scheme to falsify his Covid-19 vaccine card, partly to travel to the United States during the pandemic, in the latest sign of criminal investigations closing in on the former president.Federal prosecutors will now decide whether to pursue the case. If they do, it would be the first time the former president has faced criminal charges.Brazilian police accused Mr. Bolsonaro of ordering a top deputy to obtain falsified Covid-19 vaccination records for himself and his daughter, 13, in late 2022, just before the former president traveled to Florida to stay for three months following his election loss. Brazilian police said they were awaiting an answer from the U.S. Justice Department on whether Mr. Bolsonaro used a fake vaccination card to enter the United States, which could bring different criminal charges. At the time, most international visitors to the U.S. were required to show proof of Covid-19 vaccination to enter the country.Mr. Bolsonaro has said he did not receive the Covid-19 vaccine, but he has denied accusations that he was involved in any plan to falsify his vaccination records. His lawyer said in a text message that he was still reviewing the accusations.Mr. Bolsonaro, if convicted of forging his vaccine card, could face prison time.The federal police’s indictment is the first time the various investigations into Mr. Bolsonaro have moved toward charges. Mr. Bolsonaro has been subject to questioning and searches as part of several inquiries, including into the selling of watches and jewels he received as presidential gifts from Saudi Arabia and accusations that he worked with top government officials to hatch a plan to try to hold onto power following his 2022 election loss. Brazil’s electoral court has already ruled Mr. Bolsonaro ineligible for public office until 2030 for spreading false information about Brazil’s voting systems on state television, forcing him to sit out the next presidential contest in 2026.During the pandemic, Mr. Bolsonaro was critical of the Covid-19 vaccine, notoriously joking that it would turn people into alligators and instead promoting unproven treatments, such as an antimalarial drug called hydroxychloroquine. His administration hesitated to secure vaccines when they were first being distributed, exacerbating the pandemic in Brazil, according to a Brazilian congressional investigation that recommended the former president be charged with “crimes against humanity,” among other charges, for his actions during the pandemic. The prosecutor at the time did not charge him. Nearly 600,000 people died in Brazil because of Covid-19, the second-highest national death count after the United States.In May 2023, the police searched Mr. Bolsonaro’s home, confiscated his cellphone and arrested one of his closest aides and two of his security guards as part of the investigation into the fake vaccination records.Flávia Milhorance More

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      A Painter’s Role? Capturing the Sparkle of a Gemstone

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      As one artist wrote: “Luxury is not found in the cold pixels of our phone or computer.”There are myriad words to describe how light enters and reflects in diamonds and gemstones. They glisten and sparkle, twinkle and dazzle. Often they are luminescent, sometimes brilliant and certainly eye-catching.But conveying those sentiments artistically, as in a drawing or painting, requires an entirely different kind of articulation. And as times have changed, so have the techniques used to capture jewelry, as well as the reasons for depicting it.“There is a code to always respect so that the eye can read the volume and the jewelers can understand the design,” Estelle Lagarde, 29, a gouache painter and jewelry designer in the Haute-Savoie region of eastern France, wrote in an email. “The light always comes from the top, at 45 degrees to the left. Thanks to this code, we know where to place the shadows and light.”Ms. Lagarde’s use of that code, which guides artisans turning designers’ ideas into reality, can be seen in her meticulously detailed images of jewelry and watches. She begins each project the same way: making a contour drawing using a software program, “in order to have the exact dimensions of the technical drawing and the contours of the piece.” She then prints the sketch on a sheet of gray paper and fills its curves and spaces using paint pigments and a long, thin hair brush, called a rigger brush, that allows her to paint fine lines and intricate details.She has created artworks for watch brands such as Vacheron Constantin, MB&F and Purnell and for jewelry companies including Messika and her own Lagarde Jewelry. And she always sells her jewelry with its matching painting, and also accepts painting commissions. Currently, a ring called Pop Candy (21,000 euros, or $22,630) is her entry level piece.The Pop Candy ring.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More