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Weekly Report - 09 June 2016 (WR-16-22)

BRAZIL: ‘The circus catches fire’

Throughout Brazil’s political and economic crisis, the country’s many social media obsessives have rarely passed up the opportunity for a joke. So on Wednesday, 8 June, the Internet lit up with various memes circulating about Newton Ishii, the so-called ‘Japanese from the Fed’, a federal police officer of Japanese descent pictured in many of the arrests of high-profile suspects in ‘Operation Car Wash’, the investigation into corruption involving the state-run oil giant Petrobras. Songs were written in his honour and over 25,000 masks of his face were sold during Carnival, so the news that the man himself – a symbol of the fight against corruption – had been arrested on smuggling charges moved many Brazilians to new levels of hollow amusement.

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