The conspirators used codenames to conceal their identities as they prepared for their mission: to plunge Brazil into chaos by assassinating a celebrity supreme court judge called Alexandre de Moraes.

On an encrypted messaging group, one plotter used the alias Brazil, another Japan and a third Austria.

“Each of them had the name of a team,” Moraes said this week as he denounced the alleged plot to murder him as part of an attempt to destroy South America’s largest democracy.

The group of football-loving would-be assassins abandoned their task at the last minute.

“I’m close to the position. Are you going to cancel the game?” the person codenamed Austria asked their associates on their Signal group at just before 9pm on 15 December 2022, as he lurked near Moraes’s home in Brazil’s capital, Brasília.

“Abort,” replied “Germany”, according to a federal police report.

The cinematic plot, nicknamed Operation Copa 2022 (Operation World Cup 2022) and involving at least six special forces troops, was at the heart of this week’s historic trial of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro. He was on Thursday sentenced to 27 years in prison for trying to stage a coup after he lost the 2022 election to his leftwing opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula.

“[He tried to] annihilate the essential pillars of the democratic rule-of-law state,” said Moraes as he accused Bolsonaro of being the leader of a sprawling conspiracy, which included plans to assassinate Lula and the vice-president-elect, Geraldo Alckmin, to stop them taking power on 1 January 2023.

Moraes said hitmen had planned to “neutralise” him using “extremely powerful weapons” capable of piercing his bullet-proof car; they also allegedly considered killing Lula during a public event with poison or drugs that would cause organ failure.

“I’m someone who should be really thankful to be alive,” Lula said last year after the alleged poison plot was revealed.

Bolsonaro has denied engineering a coup or being involved in an assassination plot, calling such claims “a little story”.

But Moraes said there was “ample evidence” indicating the far-right politician was aware of Operation World Cup 2022, which the judge said was part of a larger intrigue called Green and Yellow Dagger.

Police investigators said a copy of the blueprint for a “clandestine operation” with “terrorist hallmarks” was printed out in the presidential palace on 6 December 2022 by an army general called Mário Fernandes. At the time Gen Fernandes, who was arrested last year, was a senior official in Bolsonaro’s administration.

“This [plan] wasn’t printed out in a cave. It wasn’t printed out hidden away in a room of terrorists. It was printed out in the presidential palace. It was printed out in the seat of the Brazilian government … at the same moment that president Jair Messias Bolsonaro was there,” Moraes told the court on Tuesday as Bolsonaro’s trial reached its conclusion.

“The planning is so detailed that it even details the chances of success, what the collateral damage might be, what weaponry should be used,” added Moraes.

A copy of the Green and Yellow Dagger plan, obtained by federal police investigators, suggests plotters planned to use an arsenal that included assault rifles, a belt-fed machine gun and even a Swedish anti-tank weapon, used on the battlefield in Ukraine. “These are weapons of war commonly used by combat groups,” the police report says.

According to the investigators, the plan to assassinate Moraes was aborted only because a court session was delayed – and, more importantly, the commanders of the army and air force refused to endorse Bolsonaro’s coup plot.

Brazil has had more than a dozen coup attempts since it became a republic in 1889 but none, so far as is known, involved a plan to assassinate those being deposed.

The historian Lucas Pedretti said that did not necessarily mean such plots had not existed. Rather, the 2022 plot had come to light because, for the first time in history, the coup plotters had been investigated and put on trial.

Pedretti said the existence of the assassination plan was “shocking, but not so surprising”. The historian, who studies Brazil’s brutal 1964-85 military dictatorship, said the armed forces still promoted internally the idea that the bloody regime was a “necessary and legitimate response” to a supposed communist threat.

“And this is particularly true in the case of the special forces,” he said, referring to the army group to which the men accused of plotting to kill Moraes, Lula and Alckmin belonged.

Police believe the men involved in the Moraes murder plot were special forces operatives known as the “kids pretos” or “black cap boys” because of the black caps they wore. Pedretti said the group, set up during the cold war, still maintained the same “enemy elimination mindset”.

“In Bolsonaro’s attempted coup, spearheaded by him and his generals, they simply put that logic and the expertise of the ‘kids pretos’ at the service of the coup-mongering political project,” Pedretti said.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond has finally received a release date from Nintendo, following months of speculation.

As revealed at today’s Nintendo Direct livestream, Metroid Prime 4 will release on 4th December across both Switch and Switch 2.

The announcement came with a fresh look at the game, including Samus on a motorbike. Yes, you read that correctly.

Back in June, an advertisement for the game was seen on the London Underground stating the game was “out now”, though this was swiftly debunked by Nintendo.

Still, while the game officially had a 2025 launch window, rumours of a delay intensified over the summer, though Nintendo remained committed to a release this year.

In July the game popped up on the Korean ratings board and then, a month later, was rated by the ESRB. As such, a proper release date has been hotly anticipated.

Metroid Prime 4 is the long-awaited latest entry in Nintendo’s sci-fi series, that once again follows bounty hunter Samus Aran in first-person. This time, though, she’s got psychic powers.

I went hands-on with Metroid Prime 4 at Nintendo’s Switch 2 launch event, but wasn’t completely convinced by its mouse controls.

This is a news-in-brief story. This is part of our vision to bring you all the big news as part of a daily live report.

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David Ellison‘s Skydance Media just completed the $8 billion takeover of Paramount Global five weeks ago. Now, before Ellison and his team have even finished the work of laying off upwards of 2,000 employees at the newly merged Paramount Skydance to slash costs, the son of tech multibillionaire Larry Ellison is mulling what would currently be a $70 billion-plus deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery in its entirety.

The question is: Why now?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to wait until WBD splits in half — to form Warner Bros. (HBO Max and studios) and Discovery Global (TV networks) — a transaction CEO David Zaslav says is on track to be done in April 2026? The WBD separation is designed to boost the value of its streaming and studios businesses by carving off the declining TV arm. Paramount Skydance could make a play for the standalone Warner Bros. without assuming the baggage (including the lion’s share of WBD debt) of the entity that will house CNN, TNT, TBS, Discovery and other nets. And through a deal for standalone Warner Bros., Paramount Skydance would still get its hands on the key growth driver going forward: HBO Max. (The mind reels at what a fused HBO Max-Paramount+ might be rebranded.)

One possibility is that a Larry Ellison-backed M&A play for WBD has been part of the Skydance strategy all along. The idea would be “to consolidate media assets during a period of industry-wide instability and build a conglomerate with a streaming-first focus wrapped with TV and film studios and potentially a larger linear television portfolio,” MoffettNathanson analyst Robert Fishman wrote in a research note Thursday.

And the advantage of moving now is that it could “preempt a potential bidding war for only the Warner Bros. Streaming & Studios assets post-split,” Fishman noted. “By acting now, [Paramount Skydance] positions itself to secure the entire company before rivals can cherry-pick the most attractive assets.”

Indeed, prior to news of Paramount Skydance’s prepping a bid for WBD, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Wells Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall issued a note that pegged the future standalone Warner Bros. as “an attractive M&A candidate” — with Netflix “the most compelling buyer,” and other potential suitors including Amazon, Apple, Comcast, Sony and Paramount Skydance.

Regarding the separated Warner Bros. streaming and studios biz, Cahall wrote, “This will be the only large IP asset for sale at a time when most studios/streamers have big aspirations.” The analyst acknowledged that Netflix has not historically made any big M&A deals. But he opined a Netflix takeover of Warner Bros. had a number of benefits, including being able to “kickstart” a theatrical strategy for the streamer, help it scale video games and “most importantly [provide] premium content to members.” Cahall calculated the value of standalone Warner Bros. at around $65 billion.

To be sure, any Paramount Skydance offer for Warner Bros. Discovery would face big financial and regulatory obstacles — arguably much greater than Skydance-Paramount merger.

After Warner Bros. Discovery shares zoomed up 29% on the potential Paramount bid, WBD now has a market value of $40 billion. When adding in debt (minus cash and equivalents), the enterprise value of Warner Bros. Discovery is now about $71 billion. And that is a far bigger price than the Ellisons paid to swing Skydance-Paramount.

“We think the high debt leverage of WBD is an impediment to a high bid for WBD’s shares,” Kenneth Leon, director of industry and equity research at CFRA Research, said in a Sept. 11 note. He suggested that, even if Paramount Skydance wins a deal for Warner Bros. Discovery as a whole, it may “be only interested in the businesses that will become Warner Bros. and not see meaningful value creation from the Discovery Global media portfolio.”

But MoffettNathanson’s Fishman speculated that Paramount Skydance could see big benefits by pooling its TV business with WBD’s. “Overall, we would expect material cost synergies from the overlapping cable networks,” he wrote — i.e., layoffs. Fishman added there there are “presumably a high level of synergies from combining CBS News with CNN plus the long-term existing partnership between CBS and Turner with the NCAA’s March Madness Final Four.”

Then there’s the question of whether a Paramount-WBD tie-up could get regulatory approval, as it represents a more horizontal combination of two media giants than Skydance-Paramount. Skydance was largely a production company, with limited overlap with Paramount Global.

Already coming out against the notion of a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts), who wrote in a post on X Thursday that such a media merger “must be blocked as a dangerous concentration of power.”

The Trump administration OK’d the Skydance-Paramount merger, after Skydance made key concessions to the FCC including hiring a CBS News ombudsman to vet complaints of “bias” and promising to never bring back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives at the company. But Warren and others have alleged Paramount Global’s $16 million payment to Trump to settle his lawsuit (alleging CBS News’ “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an interview with then-VP Kamala Harris) was a “bribe” to get Trump’s blessing on their deal while Warren also called out Trump’s claim that the new owners of Paramount promised $20 million worth of free advertising. “Remember when Trump announced a multimillion-dollar secret deal with CEO David Ellison? And then — shocker — Trump approved Ellison buying CBS/Paramount,” Warren wrote in the post. “Now, Ellison wants to take over CNN/Warner Bros.” (Skydance and Paramount said they complied with all U.S. laws throughout the merger process, including antibribery laws.)

Whatever scenario ultimately unfolds, Zaslav for one seemingly will see his wish for media biz consolidation realized.

After Trump was elected to a second term in November 2024, Zaslav expressed optimism the new administration would facilitate industry M&A. Trump 2.0, Zaslav said, “may offer a pace of change and an opportunity for consolidation that may be quite different” and that it may “provide a real positive and accelerated impact on this industry that’s needed.”