Shakira played a free show on Copacabana beach last night to a crowd of 2 million. Rio's city government paid $4 million to put it on. The city is expecting around $155 million in return.
The whole thing is a tourism program called "Todo Mundo no Rio," which means "Everyone in Rio." Every year through 2028, the city books one massive pop star for a free show on Copacabana. The city built it to fill hotels in May. That month sits between Rio's two peak tourism windows, and bookings would otherwise dip.
The first two years proved the model. Madonna's 2024 show pulled in 1.6 million people, and the local economy got about $60 million out of it. Lady Gaga came in 2025, drew 2.1 million, and brought in $109 million. Both weekends, the city's hotels were packed.
Shakira is on track to top them both. Rio's economic office is projecting around $155 million in spending at hotels, restaurants, taxis, and shops, plus another $250 million worth of news coverage worldwide that the city would otherwise have to buy through ads.
About 310,000 of last night's crowd flew or drove in from outside Rio. Airline bookings to the city were up 80% the week of the show compared to the same week in 2024. Hotels were full.
When the previous mayor was asked whether spending public money on a free Lady Gaga show was a good idea, he didn't dance around it. Yes, he said. He'd done the same for Madonna. The reason was simple: the shows fill the hotels and the restaurants, and the tax money rolls in.
2 million people is about the population of Paris. They were all standing on a 4-kilometer (2.5-mile) stretch of beach. The setup ran 16 video and audio towers down the coast so the back rows could still see and hear.
The city is generating roughly $40 of economic activity for every $1 of public money it puts in. They're doing it again in 2027.
Fun fact: Sarafina's character was actually based on Winnie Madikizela Mandela. Sarafina isn't about the 76 uprising, but the '85 state of emergency. The filmmakers knew they wouldn't get away with it if they made Sarafina an adult. So they made her a radical high school who could chant "free mandela", get arrested, tortured and still make it out alive...thats because THAT was Winnie's REALITY.
Infact Sarafina was brainstormed in mam'Winnie's kitchen.
🚨: Chinese biologist Hongmei Wang seeks to extend women's fertile life by making menstruation occur every 3 months.
Which would theoretically preserve more eggs and extend the fertile period.
@jemelehill@AuthorRandallB@MagicJohnson None. Michael Jackson had suicide bombers in other countries delaying their martyrdom so they could see him in concert.
I just heard someone on TikTok say "this is the first time in history women are dating men for their character. And that's why no one is dating." and she was right.
Oof. The DA’s first tender scandal in GNU. The tender was awarded in April 2026 to Lighthouse Publishers, a Cape Town-based company with no publishing history registered 3 days before tender applications opened.
In Brazil, Érica Pereira da Silveira Vicente burst into the room of her 11-year-old daughter after hearing screams.
As she barged through the door, she caught her boyfriend pinning her daughter down, attempting to rape her.
Later that night, Erica slipped a sedative into her boyfriend’s drink and waited for it to take effect.
Once drugged, she beat and stabbed him multiple times. She then cut off his genitals, set him on fire, and disposed of his body on a wasteland nearby.
That same night, Erica handed herself in and the case was sent to trial.
Prosecutors called it premeditated murder. Erica called it a mother protecting her daughter.
On March 24, 2026, after an emotional testimony, the members of the jury agreed with Erica.
She was acquitted of all charges.
No spazashop will trade in Vosloorus ext 9 until Mazwi is found we gave them 3days to return our child alive or they must start packing .. we are unapologetic
Having a baby physically shrinks part of a woman's brain. Having a second baby shrinks a totally different part. Scientists in Amsterdam just figured out why, and the explanation involves the same process that happens in teenage brains.
This is from a research group in Amsterdam called the Pregnancy Brain Lab. They published their findings in Nature Communications on February 19, 2026. The team scanned the brains of 110 women. 40 were about to have their first baby, 30 were about to have their second, and 40 had never been pregnant. They scanned everyone before pregnancy and again after birth.
The results were so consistent that a computer program could look at any of those brain scans and correctly tell whether the woman had been pregnant. Every single time.
When a woman has her first baby, the biggest changes happen in the part of the brain that handles thinking about yourself and other people. The same region that runs daydreaming and inner monologue. That whole area visibly shrinks. And it stays shrunk for at least six years after birth, according to a 2021 follow-up study by the same team.
When she has a second baby, that same area shifts a little more, but the biggest changes happen somewhere else. They happen in the part of the brain that controls what you focus on, and the part that controls how your body moves. Even the wiring between the brain and the muscles becomes more efficient. Lead researcher Milou Straathof said it looks like the brain rewiring itself for taking care of more than one kid at a time.
The shrinking sounds bad. The lab compares it to what happens in teenage brains during puberty. Hormones flood the brain and trigger a kind of cleanup. Weak connections between brain cells get cleared away. The strong ones stay and get stronger. The brain ends up smaller, but the connections that remain work faster. The hormonal flood of pregnancy seems to do the same thing.
Elseline Hoekzema, who runs the Pregnancy Brain Lab and has been studying this since 2017, told CNN: sometimes less is more.
The pattern is layered. The first pregnancy does the deep work on identity and how a mom thinks about her baby. The second pregnancy adds a new layer focused on attention and movement.
About one in five new mothers globally develops postpartum depression. The same brain circuits being remodeled here are the ones tied to mood and bonding with the baby. Mapping what a healthy maternal brain looks like is the first step toward catching when something goes wrong.
yes, i do and it’s actually more important than most people think
the blue flame is what u want, what everyone wants. it means the gas is getting enough oxygen so it burns clean and efficiently. it comes from complete combustion which produces heat, carbon dioxide and water vapor... hotter, safer and better for cooking.
the yellow/orange flame is a warning sign. it means incomplete combustion maybe cos the burner is dirty or airflow is blocked. that color can produce carbonmonoxide which is very dangerous for your health. it also wastes energy and gives you bad heat.
learn something 👍
In 1969, the South African government forcibly removed the Makuleke people from their ancestral land in the Pafuri region to make way for the expansion of the Kruger National Park.
The Makuleke had lived for more than a century in a well-watered country near the Limpopo river. Their staple food was mabele and millet, which unlike maize, one could get at least a bag or so even in a bad harvest year. They had plenty of water, wild fruit, guinea-fowl, buck and river fish.
This was until they were uprooted to an arid, reclaimed game reserve, where only mopane worms flourish, where they learned to eat the worms.
They were not politely asked to move either. Government demolisher vehicles came while the men were away working in the cities and the women struggled to build houses during the harsh winter months with no poles or grass to even build makeshift shelters.
The winter months passed into spring and into rainy summer. They ploughed their gardens but the harvest from the arid soil was nil. In the second year, rain drowned the young crops and the third year heat scorched the crops so badly they could be set on fire.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, “For four successive years there was nothing to reap. Death ravaged the settlement. In the fifth year there was some promise of a good year. But wild beasts, especially buffaloes, baboons, monkeys and buck, as well as hares, caused complete destruction. Those who set traps to catch them were jailed for five years and more. They were told they should have reported and asked the white Bantu commissioners to go and shoot these beasts. The beasts ravage at night and the white commissioners are hundreds of kilometres away!”
At nearby Sibasa, people had been resettled in the “wrong” place and within a year they had to be removed again. Upon removal, grass for thatch was hard to get and reclaiming the old thatch broke the grass and meant a leaky roof. When journalists came, the women sat in front of their half-thatched huts with no fire, no shelter for their pit latrines and no privacy whatsoever.
Women and children had to walk as far as six kilometres for water, balancing 20 to 25 litres on their heads and carrying in their hands litres to drink along the way. Irrigation dams were restricted for watering government cash crops.
One community demonstrator organised women and old men to dig out the dry bed of a stream to reserve water when the rain came. After two rainy months the water was full in the dam. Then came the dry season, women were allowed to climb up the dam wall and then down to the water, but the dam was black with tadpoles. They had no choice but to carry the tadpoles along and strain the water before drinking.
All of this hardship was unleashed upon natives under the guise of “nature conservation”. People who had lived sustainably with their environment for generations, who knew how to weather bad harvests and draw abundance from their rivers, were seen as obstacles to “preserving” nature and uprooted to a landscape that offered nothing but worms and poverty.
Today, that same land is celebrated as the Makuleke Contractual Park, a “biodiversity hotspot” with walking safaris. The tourists are never told that the ecological richness that they fly across the world to admire was paid for with the humiliation of the people who once called it home.