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Orange-juice makers consider using other fruits after prices go ‘bananas’

✇The Guardian
Sarah Butler

Global industry ‘in crisis’ as fears about Brazilian harvest help push wholesale prices to record highs

Orange juice makers are considering turning to alternative fruits such as mandarins as wholesale prices have “gone bananas” amid fears of poor harvests in Brazil.

Prices of orange juice reached a new high of $4.95 (£3.88) a lb on commodity markets this week after growers in the main orange producing areas of Brazil said they were expecting the harvest to be 24% down on last year at 232m 40.8kg boxes – worse than the 15% fall previously predicted.

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© Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/REUTERS

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© Photograph: Paulo Whitaker/REUTERS

He was given 170 years for crimes he didn’t commit. His lawyers say it could happen again

✇The Guardian
Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro

Carlos Edmilson da Silva served 12 years in Brazil before being freed, after a widely used police practice led to a false arrest

Carlos Edmilson da Silva had already served three years in prison for a crime he had not committed when he was arrested in the Brazilian city of Barueri and accused of a string of horrific rapes.

His face was plastered across newspapers and TV reports, where he was dubbed the “maniac of Castello Branco”, after the highway where 12 women had been raped over two years.

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© Photograph: Innocence Project Brazil

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© Photograph: Innocence Project Brazil

‘I’ve seen things no one should go through’: the overwhelming scale of loss in Brazil’s floods

✇The Guardian
Fernanda Canofre in Canoas， Brazil

In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, authorities are struggling to find shelter for half a million displaced people as a health crisis looms

As the rain poured down during the night of 3 May, a stream of people began to arrive at the Lutheran University of Brazil in Canoas, a city in the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul. For a week, heavy rains had been pummelling the landscape, raising river levels and flooding homes, forcing many to seek shelter elsewhere.

Three weeks later, the university harbours thousands of people and is the largest camp for the displaced amid a growing humanitarian crisis in the state of 10 million inhabitants. More than 580,000 people have been displaced, with almost 70,000 of them depending on shelters, according to a state government report. A total of 2.3 million people have been affected by the torrential rain and floods.

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© Photograph: Daniel Marenco/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Daniel Marenco/The Guardian

Motel Destino review – terrifically acted Brazilian erotic noir thriller

✇The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw

Cannes film festival
A young man on the run from a mob boss lands an unlikely job in a brutally functional love motel and starts a passionate affair with the manager’s wife

As motel names go, it’s certainly more portentous than “Bates”. But destiny of a sort, shaped by class and money and family abuse, is waiting for the hero and heroine of this movie. This is an erotic noir thriller from Karim Aïnouz; a noir lit mostly by bright sunshine, shot with garish glee by Hélène Louvart. It takes place in a brutally functional love motel near the beach in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Ceará; this is a place from which the couple are fated to be expelled naked, like Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Motel Destino is co-written by Wislan Esmeraldo and Mauricio Zacharias and directed by Aïnouz who had a film in the Cannes competition just last year, an atypically florid historical costume drama called Firebrand, with Jude Law as the fleshily hindquartered Henry VIII. This is a leaner, meaner movie and Aïnouz is more engaged. Heraldo, played by Iago Xavier, is a young guy employed by a drug-dealing mob matriarch along with his brother, who is trying to dissuade him from his plans to leave the neighbourhood and try his luck in Sāo Paulo.

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© Photograph: Santoro

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© Photograph: Santoro

Latin America labels ultra-processed foods. Will the US follow?

✇The Guardian
Cecilia Nowell

In 2010, Mexico led the way, followed by Ecuador, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina and Colombia

Candy lines every inch of the mercado de dulces in Mexico City’s historic center. Tantalizing strawberry-flavored chocolates and Tajín-covered mango gummies pack the narrow aisles of the meandering marketplace. But many of the colorful packages are somewhat dampened by black stop signs printed on their fronts. Alongside dreamy descriptions of creamy and chocolatey confections, the stop signs warn “Excess calories” or “Excess sugars”. For some customers, the warnings are enough for them to pause and reconsider their purchases.

Latin America is leading the world in a movement to print nutritional warning labels on the fronts of food packages. Currently, the labels warn when a food product exceeds a consumer’s daily recommended value of any “nutrient of concern” – namely, sugar, salt or saturated fat (some countries have added trans fats, artificial sweeteners and caffeine). But research led by scientists across the continent is increasingly pointing towards another factor consumers may want to consider: how processed a food is.

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© Photograph: Alberto Valdés/EPA

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© Photograph: Alberto Valdés/EPA

More than third of Amazon rainforest struggling to recover from drought, study finds

✇The Guardian
Jonathan Watts

‘Critical slowing down’ of recovery raises concern over forest’s resilience to ecosystem collapse

More than a third of the Amazon rainforest is struggling to recover from drought, according to a new study that warns of a “critical slowing down” of this globally important ecosystem.

The signs of weakening resilience raise concerns that the world’s greatest tropical forest – and biggest terrestrial carbon sink – is degrading towards a point of no return.

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© Photograph: Andre Coelho/EPA

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© Photograph: Andre Coelho/EPA

Brazil counts cost of worst-ever floods with little hope of waters receding soon

✇The Guardian
Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro

Death toll in southern state of Rio Grande do Sul increasing daily as authorities plan four ‘tent cities’ for 77,000 displaced people

Three weeks after one of Brazil’s worst-ever floods hit its southernmost state, killing 155 people and forcing 540,000 from their homes, experts have warned that water levels will take at least another two weeks to drop.

The death toll across Rio Grande do Sul is still increasing daily, and more than 77,000 displaced people remain in public shelters, prompting the state government to announce plans to build four temporary “tent cities” to accommodate them.

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© Photograph: Jefferson Bernardes/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Jefferson Bernardes/Getty Images

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