Brazil nuclear leader's arrest may stymie its atomic ambitions

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1. Brazil Arrests Nuclear Chief in Widening of Graft Case

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/world/americas/brazil-arrests-nuclear-chief-in-widening-of-graft-case.html?_r=0

Brazil Arrests Nuclear Chief in Widening of Graft Case
By SIMON ROMEROJULY 28, 2015

RIO DE JANEIRO — The sweeping corruption scandal shaking Brazil’s establishment intensified on Tuesday after the police arrested the mastermind of the military’s secret nuclear program during the 1970s and ’80s.

With the arrest of that figure, Othon Luiz Pinheiro da Silva, a retired navy admiral, what started as a bribery inquiry at the national oil company, Petrobras, seems to have taken on a life of its own, with one prominent figure after another becoming ensnared in accusations of a broad web of graft involving state-controlled enterprises and some of the country’s most powerful private companies.

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During the military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985, Mr. Pinheiro da Silva, a nuclear engineer educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, oversaw a clandestine operation to build reactors for submarines.

“Corruption in Brazil is endemic and is in the process of metastasis,” Athayde Ribeiro Costa, a public prosecutor, told reporters.

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