The Boys From Brazil

John Strege earns an Unplayable Lies shout-out for finding a great headlines, in the WaPo of all places.  See if you like it as much as I did:

In Brazil, unrest is simmering again, over bus fares, Olympic golf and Nazi cops

OK, that's quite the trifecta... now for details:

RIO DE JANEIRO — At 9 p.m. Friday, on a dark, cobbled street in the city center, the

violence that had been threatening to break out finally spluttered. Amid chants of “fascist!” two riot police in full armor were cornered in an alleyway. Something was thrown. Glass shattered. The boom and hiss of a tear-gas grenade sent the crowd running before it fizzled out. 

The protest was over a bus-fare increase. In its last hours, tension had flared — and been damped — again and again. As many as 2,000 demonstrators had passed by Rio’s Central Station, where in February last year a cameraman, Santiago Andrade, was killed by a flare fired by a protester. Inside the station concourse, a troupe of clowns in black-and-white face paint and anarchist insignia beat out frenzied rhythms on tin cans while masked youths leaped up and down, taunting a line of riot police with the chant “Look at me, here again!”

And lest you think the Nazi reference hyberbolic, there's this:

On Jan. 5, Col. Fábio de Souza, who in June 2013 was in charge of the Rio police riot squad — the “Shock Battalion” — was suspended for propagating Nazi ideology and violence against protesters in cellphone texts to fellow officers.

At the link in the excerpt we get these further revolting details:

The text conversations are reportedly taken from an internal investigation into an

assassination attempt on a rival officer, whose home was peppered with bullets in January 2014. 

Although De Souza was cleared of that wrongdoing, the messages appear to suggest he and other members of the battalion plotted to create what they called a “Reich” inside the organisation. Referred to by his fellows as a “Fuhrer”, De Souza described his group as “pure race and flawless”. 

In one chat, De Souza predicted he would take leadership of the paramilitary police in Rio and then said he would inflict a “nuclear winter” on his enemies: “You will see what revenge is.” When his colleagues outlined plans for a coup, De Souza responded by writing “Germany 1930 standard”.

This is so much fun, that I almost lost sight of the golf angle...it seems a subset of the Rio population is perturbed:

Last month, demonstrators selected a new target: golf, which will return to the Olympics for the first time since 1904. Since Dec. 6, a dozen or so people have formed the core of Occupy Golf — a makeshift camp on a highway median beside the site where the Olympic course is being constructed. 

On Jan. 6, Municipal Guards — an unarmed city police force — came to dismantle a homemade shelter built by the demonstrators. A tug-of-war developed as protesters clung to it. A student, Elson Soares Jr., 30, was handcuffed and forced into a police car where he says he was repeatedly hit in the face with a baton by a female guard, who broke his tooth. At one point, a rubber bullet was fired. 

Soares said by phone that the guard continued hitting him in the genital area and his legs as he was driven to a police station. “I thought it was a heavy torture,” he said.

 It couldn't be clearer that what this city and country need are an Olympics.  What could go wrong?

Meanwhile there is some good news, as Gil Hanse appeared on Morning Drive to let folks know the following:

After a series of setbacks, the Olympic Golf Course in Rio de Janeiro is finally finished.

Course designer Gil Hanse said Monday on Golf Channel’s “Morning Drive” that construction on the 2016 Olympics course is done and that “we’re now in full grow-in mode.” 

“By all accounts it’s going well,” he said. “We’re still hopeful – the project has obviously had a lot of setbacks here and there along the way, so I can’t expect that it’s going to be completely smooth going forward.

Good news no doubt, and with Hanse at the helm the golf course might be the only reason to watch the competition.  So, what do the Occupy Golf folks want?  Backk to the WaPo:

The golf course is being built in what protesters and Rio state prosecutors say is an environmentally protected area in the upmarket Rio beach suburb of Barra de Tijuca. Dubbed Rio’s Miami Beach, it is a real-estate hot spot of condominiums and shopping malls and the site of the Olympic Park and Olympic Village. 

The demonstrators say the golf course is damaging wildlife and is unnecessary because Rio already has two courses. The camp is in front of a showroom for the Riserva Golf luxury apartment complex being built adjacent to the course.

Biologist Marcello Mello said the golf course threatens endangered species that live on the reserve — including a white sand lizard, a species of cactus and a beach butterfly — and that the grass being planted is causing more damage.

Can't the butterflies, you know, fly to a more hospitable environment, one where the grass isn't causing so much damage?

But as I always remind you when posting these items, the powers that be in golf reliably inform us that this is the future of our game.