Rio de Janeiro
Favela activist killed: Tens of thousands of people protested across Brazil last week after a Rio politician was murdered in what federal prosecutors said appeared to be a hit by corrupt police officers. The only black woman on Rio’s 51-member City Council, Marielle Franco, 38, was a champion of women, gay people, and favela residents, and an outspoken critic of police brutality and the federal government’s February decision to put the army in charge of policing in Rio state. She was shot dead in her car shortly after leaving a black women’s empowerment event she had organized; Franco was hit by nine policeissue bullets, including four to the head. She had recently been appointed to a city commission conducting oversight of military policing in Rio. Police killed at least 1,200 people, mostly black men, in Rio last year, the highest number in a decade.