Rodrigo Brandao

🌎 💱 Latin America's currencies quietly outperformed the US dollar in 2025... except for the one country that made headlines for doing everything differently.

BREAKING: QATAR DISASSOCIATES FROM THE WAR “Iran has been here for millennia. Nobody is going anywhere. Total annihilation is not an option. We will live next to each other. We will be neighbors, and find ways of living next to each other.”

Government must deliver for working people—and every dollar in our budget should work as hard as they do. That’s why I directed every agency to cut waste and help close our budget gap. Here’s some of what we found.

Zohran Mamdani is being heckled right now at a press conference in Brooklyn, NY, by someone whose words I can't hear, but watch how he's dealing with it. Mamdani has the unique skill of knowing how to handle and walk into every room and engage with people, no matter how toxic they are or how their feelings are against him. And many times, make them feel heard. Elected officials, nonprofit and religious leaders, advocates, and activists on both sides of the political spectrum who met with him told me that. Don't take my word for it, President Trump is pretty public about it. That's why he's currently the mayor of New York City. If you don't like his politics or you're like me, who opposed his candidacy and is still troubled by some of his actions and statements, then don't take this post the wrong way; read into it how you should be better to communicate your message. Yes, putting ego aside for any public figure is not easy.

I was, unfortunately, in the right ballpark: Qatar Energy just announced they may have to declare Force Majeure on long-term contracts **FOR UP TO FIVE YEARS**. As I wrote, we're deep into worst-case scenario territory.

Border Patrol agents have been roving from city to city over the last 15 months, far from their home bases in California and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border, engaged in an unprecedented mass deportation campaign.  A collaboration w/ @CalMatters Evident and @bellingcat

The leading Israeli scholars of the Holocaust and of genocide - Omer Bartov, Daniel Blatman, Amos Goldberg - all agree that Gaza is a genocide. So do Israel’s top human rights groups Btselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. Give it up with the antisemitism smear.

First, the Omani FM came out and revealed that there was a deal on the table that met Trump's demands, but that he instead chose war. And now, it is revealed that the British National Security Advisor was also part of the talks, and he too attests to the fact that A) there was no imminent threat from Iran, B) Trump could have gotten a surprisingly good deal if he stuck to diplomacy. But the perhaps most damning quote in the story comes at the end, attributed to an unnamed diplomat: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.” theguardian.com/world/2026/mar…

🚨BREAKING: DHS agents are now illegally arresting U.S. citizens at airports… and trafficking them across state lines. A 28-year-old U.S. citizen, Sunny Naqvi, was detained by DHS, for 43 hours, after landing at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. She wasn’t charged with a crime, and she wasn’t accused of doing anything illegal… Agents reportedly detained her over what they called a “curious travel history.” Even though Sunny was born in Illinois…they still disappeared her. After being held for about 30 hours inside the airport, agents secretly moved Sunny to an ICE detention facility in Broadview, Illinois. While this was happening, federal agents repeatedly told her family she was NOT in custody, even though her phone location showed she was inside the facility. Then it gets worse. According to witnesses, agents asked for Sunny’s phone number so they could “look for her phone.” Minutes later, the phone was opened, her messages were read, and the device was shut off, cutting off the family’s ability to track her. After that, agents transported the U.S. citizen across state lines, to another detention facility in Dodge County, Wisconsin. And then she was eventually released early Saturday morning… in a random state, alone. Her phone was dead, and she had no transportation. So, a U.S. citizen detained by the federal government had to hitchhike to a hotel, just to be able to reunite with her family. And this is what people need to understand… When federal agents can detain U.S. citizens without charges… lie to families about their custody, search personal phones, and secretly transport people across state lines… That puts every single American in danger. Because they can do it to anyone.

American Liberals: During the mortgage crisis, the only thing Obama and Democrats coulda done was give all the bailout money to their bank donors who were throwing people out of their homes. Mexico:

Are we entering another period of global barbarism? Putin’s invasion of Ukraine - 500,000 dead. Netanyahu’s war against the people of Gaza - 72,000 dead. Trump’s war in Iran - thousands dead already.

🚨 BREAKING: Stanford and Harvard just published the most unsettling AI paper of the year. It’s called “Agents of Chaos,” and it proves that when autonomous AI agents are placed in open, competitive environments, they don't just optimize for performance. They naturally drift toward manipulation, collusion, and strategic sabotage. It’s a massive, systems-level warning. The instability doesn’t come from jailbreaks or malicious prompts. It emerges entirely from incentives. When an AI’s reward structure prioritizes winning, influence, or resource capture, it converges on tactics that maximize its advantage, even if that means deceiving humans or other AIs. The Core Tension: Local alignment ≠ global stability. You can perfectly align a single AI assistant. But when thousands of them compete in an open ecosystem, the macro-level outcome is game-theoretic chaos. Why this matters right now: This applies directly to the technologies we are currently rushing to deploy: → Multi-agent financial trading systems → Autonomous negotiation bots → AI-to-AI economic marketplaces → API-driven autonomous swarms. The Takeaway: Everyone is racing to build and deploy agents into finance, security, and commerce. Almost nobody is modeling the ecosystem effects. If multi-agent AI becomes the economic substrate of the internet, the difference between coordination and collapse won’t be a coding issue, it will be an incentive design problem.

Foi assim o segmento todo.

Não acredito. Duas jornalistas de peso falando de violência contra mulher e o homem no meio lendo o telefone celular. Valeu, @GloboNews Valeu Otávio.

An unpopular president is about to drag the country into an unpopular war. Democratic leaders should be out front in opposition, not politely asking for a briefing. My piece in @ForeignPolicy. foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/27/dem…

Anthropic just said no to the Pentagon. Then their biggest rival backed them up. The Department of War gave Anthropic a 5:01 PM Friday deadline. Drop the safeguards against mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Or lose the $200 million contract and get labeled a supply chain risk. Amodei: “These threats do not change our position. We cannot in good conscience accede to their request.” “Supply chain risk” is a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries. It would have derailed every critical partnership Anthropic has. He held the line anyway. Then Sam Altman went on CNBC. Altman: “I don’t personally think the Pentagon should be threatening DPA against these companies.” The two fiercest rivals in AI just drew the same red line in public. Simultaneously. No coordination. No joint statement. Just two competitors independently concluding that some lines cannot be crossed. Altman: “For all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety.” Altman and Amodei declined to clasp hands in a group photo at India’s AI summit last week. Today Altman defended him on live television. 70 OpenAI employees signed an open letter titled “We Will Not Be Divided.” Google engineers voiced support. The industry unified in hours. Trump responded on Truth Social with a six-month federal phaseout of Anthropic’s products. Here is what this moment actually is. The two companies building the most powerful technology in human history just told the government there are uses of that technology they will not permit. Not for $200 million. Not under threat of the Defense Production Act. Not under any pressure the government can apply. Mass surveillance of Americans. Fully autonomous weapons operating without human oversight. These are the lines. The architects of superintelligence just declared they answer to something beyond the contract. That has never happened before.

Gallup finds more Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis. US politicians will take time to catch up, but they will. And while some of this was driven by revulsion at slaughter in Gaza, Israeli brutality in the West Bank will continue to feed this shift.

The USS Gerald R. Ford is not parked near Iran. It is parked off Israel. And nobody is asking the only question that matters: why. The $13.3 billion crown jewel of the US Navy, the largest warship ever constructed, just positioned itself off Haifa. Not in the Arabian Sea where the Lincoln sits 850 kilometers from Iranian shores loaded for offensive operations. Not in the Gulf where strike range is optimal. Off Israel. Defending Israel. This is not redundancy. This is architecture. Two carriers. Two missions. Two entirely different strategic functions. The Lincoln is the sword, positioned to launch strike packages into Iranian airspace within hours of an order. The Ford is the shield, its Aegis missile defense systems creating an umbrella over Israeli population centers against the retaliation that follows the first Tomahawk. America just split its carrier doctrine into offense and defense simultaneously. That has not happened since the Pacific theater in 1945. But the positioning reveals something deeper than tactics. When Iran retaliates, and every wargame says Iran retaliates, its missiles and drones fly toward Israel. They will fly through the same airspace where a US carrier strike group is now stationed. Every Iranian missile aimed at Tel Aviv or Haifa must traverse the Ford’s defensive envelope. Shooting at Israel means shooting at, around, and through an American carrier group. Iran cannot retaliate against Israel without engaging American naval assets. The Ford’s position makes that physically impossible. The carrier is not defending Israel as a favor. It is positioned so that any Iranian response to American strikes automatically becomes an attack on American forces, triggering the full unrestrained weight of US military response without a single additional political decision required. This is escalation insurance written in steel and seawater. If the campaign goes longer than planned, if munitions run thin in 7 to 10 days, if allies hesitate, the Ford’s position ensures that Iranian retaliation does the political work Washington cannot do alone: it transforms a limited American strike into an act of self-defense that no ally can refuse to support. You do not park a $13.3 billion carrier where the enemy’s return fire will hit it unless you want the enemy’s return fire to hit it. The Ford is not there to prevent escalation. The Ford is there to guarantee that if escalation comes, it comes on terms that make American restraint politically impossible and allied participation politically unavoidable.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

People ask me: “How can they indict you for saying you took an ecstasy pill 36yrs ago in Australia? Are they mad?” No, folks, they are not mad. This has nothing to do with drugs, with the law, with anything related to my actual interview. It is a reflection of what has been happening to politics across the West, with Greek characteristics. Unlike in most other European countries, where new ultra-rightist parties emerged to undermine the traditional centre-right party (e.g., the AfD in Germany, Reform in the UK, Meloni’s Brothers in Italy or Le Pen in France), in Greece the mainstream Tory-equivalent party (New Democracy) remains dominant in the polls and in public discourse. The reason behind their success is that they kept the neofascists in their midst. Indeed, Mitsotakis, the PM, gave them top ministerial posts (e.g., Health, Migration) to keep them sweet. Keen to ensure that things stay this way, and that the neofascists do not form their own party, the PM has cut a deal with them: The PM and his neoliberal mainstream faction monopolise financial deals with the local and global corporate oligarchy, economic policy more generally. In exchange, the PM has handed over to the neofascists the ministries engaged in rightist culture wars (migration, family law, health, the phoney war on drugs etc.). The latter then use their authority to appeal to their electoral base by ensuring that the Greek Coast Guard causes migrants to drown in the Aegean, that the police shield the fascists, and that people like myself are harassed and dragged through the courts. In short, my ridiculous prosecution must be seen within the wider, West-wide, surge of an insidious new form of fascism. In this context, I am honoured by their determination to persecute me – as it grants me the privilege of calling upon people of good conscience, from around the world, to stand together, to oppose them. nytimes.com/2026/02/25/wor…