The EU welcomes Cambodia’s decision to join the Multi-party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement (MPIA) for WTO members, contributing to efforts to uphold a rules-based multilateral trading system.
With Cambodia’s participation, the MPIA now covers 62 World Trade Organization (WTO) members and 60.4% of world trade.
The MPIA brings together participants from all continents and at different levels of development, united by a shared commitment to upholding the rules-based trading system.
The MPIA preserves the right to appeal in trade disputes among participating WTO members, at a time when the WTO’s Appellate Body remains non-functioning. It helps ensure that disputes can continue to be resolved in an orderly and binding manner, avoiding appeals 'into the void'.
“I welcome Cambodia to the MPIA. The arrangement plays an important role in upholding the rules-based trading system. Each new participant helps reinforce the predictability, stability and credibility of global trade rules. I encourage other WTO members to join the MPIA,” said EU Trade and Economic Security Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič.
The MPIA was established in 2020 and has proven its effectiveness in many WTO disputes.
Under the MPIA, appeals are heard by arbitrators randomly selected from a pool of 10 standing appeal arbitrators set up by the participating WTO members. These arbitrators are persons of recognised authority, with demonstrated expertise in law, international trade and WTO agreements.
The MPIA is open to all WTO members as a practical tool for appeal arbitration, pending the restoration of a reformed and fully functioning WTO dispute settlement system.
As of 1 June 2025, the MPIA has an updated pool of appeal arbitrators to ensure that appeals continue to be heard by independent arbitrators of the highest calibre.
At the WTO Ministerial Conference that took place earlier this year, MPIA ministers stressed the importance of the MPIA for the security and predictability of the multilateral trading system.
The current MPIA participants are Australia, Barbados, Benin, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, China, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the European Union (and its Member States), Guatemala, Hong Kong (China), Iceland, Japan, Liechtenstein, Macao (China), Malaysia, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, Switzerland, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Uruguay and Vietnam.
MC14: Supporting the rules-based multilateral trading system: the role of the MPIA
O Polo “Casimiro de Brito” da Biblioteca Municipal de Loulé, em Almancil, celebra os 70 anos de “Grande Sertão: Veredas”, romance icónico do autor João Guimarães Rosa.
A atividade, realizada em parceria com a UALG, Município de Montemor-o-Novo e Fundação José Saramago, tem lugar no dia 11 de setembro, pelas 18h.
Em 2026, comemoram-se os 70 anos da publicação de “Grande Sertão: Veredas” (1956), obra maior de João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967) e um dos marcos da Literatura de língua portuguesa. O evento proposto assinala esta efeméride em Loulé, trazendo o universo rosiano ao Algarve através de três dimensões complementares: a narração oral, a criação artística e a reflexão sobre literatura, território e turismo cultural.
A iniciativa articula-se com a vinda a Portugal de Dôra Guimarães e Thiago Goulart, a convite da Fundação José Saramago e da Câmara Municipal de Montemor-o-Novo, e com a estância de investigação na UAlg de Diomira Faria, diretora do Espaço do Conhecimento UFMG – Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais e cocuradora da exposição “Sertão Mundo”, dedicada à obra rosiana e às suas reverberações pelo mundo.
O encontro pretende demonstrar que a exposição “Sertão Mundo” e o trabalho de narração oral do Grupo Miguilim podem constituir modelos replicáveis nos territórios do Algarve e adaptáveis a outros autores, portugueses e lusófonos, constituindo instrumentos concretos de mediação literária, de reforço identitário e de desenvolvimento local.
Para além de uma sessão de narração oral, o momento contará com a mesa-redonda “O sertão está em toda a parte: turismo literário e desenvolvimento dos territórios, de Cordisburgo ao Algarve”.
A atividade é de entrada livre.
Europe is rearming. Defence budgets are rising, factories are expanding, and new EU instruments are pouring money into ammunition production and joint procurement. But money is only part of Europe’s defence problems. The main constraint is that its systems remain slow, fragmented and poorly suited to an age when military technology can change in months rather than decades.
Three transformations are hitting the continent at once. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought back large-scale war to European soil. Washington’s growing focus on the Indo-Pacific, its renewed interest in Greenland and its push to move NATO from “burden sharing” towards what might be called “burden shifting” mean that Europe will have to provide not only more money for the alliance but also a larger share of its combat power. At the same time, technology is changing warfare faster than traditional procurement systems can keep up.
At present, procurement systems work as follows: a military identifies a requirement; officials draw up specifications; companies compete for a contract and, years later, a system enters service. The problem is that, by then, the technologies shaping the battlefield may have changed dramatically. Promising technologies can become obsolete or fall by the wayside before they ever reach soldiers.
Ukraine has demonstrated a different model. Operational problems generate ideas; engineers turn them into prototypes; soldiers test them; manufacturers improve and scale them; battlefield experience feeds into the next iteration. Technology can also work in the other direction: new capabilities, such as cheap drones, can create tactics that planners had not previously considered.
The real measure of defence-industrial success should not be how many platforms roll off the line, but how fast capability can be imagined, built, tested, industrialised, fielded and adapted again
Europe needs to make this cycle permanent. I propose a model called Adaptive Defence Industrial Ecosystem Management, or ADIEM. The principle is for governments to move from being regulators and buyers to orchestrators of a defence ecosystem that links governments, armed forces, defence and tech companies, start-ups, universities and investors in a continuous loop. The real measure of defence-industrial success should not be how many platforms roll off the line, but how fast capability can be imagined, built, tested, industrialised, fielded and adapted again.
Industrial resilience and human capital are central to this model. Ukraine has shown that sustained operations depend on raw materials, reliable energy, resilient logistics and skilled labour quite as much as on the platforms themselves. And because digital capability now depends as much on software and data engineering as on heavy manufacturing, Europe’s defence sector competes directly with the commercial tech industry for the same scarce talent. This makes the appeal of a defence career a strategic question.
Reform defence governance. Create permanent structures that bring together military planning, industrial policy, innovation and procurement around shared capability goals. Give them room to depart from standard rules where those rules are the obstacle.
Start with battlefield problems. Build capabilities around what armed forces need to achieve. It works in reverse too: a new system needs a concept of operations written for it before it is bought at scale. Treat these as living documents that evolve with experimentation and real-world lessons.
Make procurement faster and more flexible. Use a hybrid procurement method. While central procurement agencies buy major systems, individual units are allowed to meet certain urgent combat needs. Alongside that, break large procurements into smaller contracts with incremental delivery, allow continuous software updates, use open architecture and speed up certification.
Build a genuine innovation ecosystem. Give start-ups, universities and public labs clear routes to deployment. Reward experimentation and operational relevance over novelty for its own sake.
Achieve affordable mass. Create dedicated programmes for weapon systems that are effective enough, cheap enough to buy in large numbers and simple enough to replace quickly. These include drones, autonomous vehicles, loitering munitions, low-cost intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems and electronic warfare.
Invest in human capital. Build a long-term pipeline of software engineers, AI specialists, systems engineers and skilled production workers, and change how the sector is perceived—presenting it as a high-technology field, not just a traditional military one.
Institutionalise experimentation. Set up permanent centres where soldiers, engineers, researchers and industry jointly evaluate new operational concepts and technologies. Test continuously rather than only in the run-up to a procurement decision.
Develop digital defence infrastructure. Invest in a sovereign defence cloud, secure data architecture, digital twins and common digital standards.
Governments also need to reform the institutions through which capability is developed, not just the funding lines that feed them. And while Europe has much of what it needs—sophisticated armed forces, world-class manufacturers, strong universities and a growing defence-tech sector—it still lacks a system capable of connecting them quickly enough. That is the purpose of ADIEM: to connect these actors in a continuously adapting ecosystem, with governments acting as orchestrators rather than simply regulators and buyers.
It took Europe’s far-right leaders no time at all to work out what Icelanders meant on August 29th, when they voted 52.8% to 47.2% against resuming negotiations to join the EU: a prosperous democracy had looked hard at Brussels and said no. Britain’s Nigel Farage congratulated them on “voting to keep their independence”. France’s Marine Le Pen went further, calling the result a reminder that “another Europe is possible”.
But Iceland did not vote against Europe—it voted to keep the Europe it already has.The country sits inside the single market through the European Economic Area (EEA) agreement, is part of the Schengen area, and adopts swathes of EU legislation to stay compliant with standards set in Brussels. Short of membership, there is no closer relationship with the EU on offer.
Opposition to tight integration with Europe remains at the fringes of Icelandic politics and does not appear in any party’s manifesto. The foreign ministry’s latest annual survey showed that only 6% of Icelanders believe that international co-operation diminishes our sovereignty, against 69% who think it strengthens it. On the EEA agreement, 58% take a positive view and only 19% a negative one.
The Icelandic electorate has never shown much enthusiasm for politics built on distrust of institutions, conspiracy theories or the dissolution of the post-1945 international system. A country whose biggest annual festival is the Pride parade, and where women hold the offices of president, prime minister, foreign minister, bishop of the national church, mayor of the capital, chief of police and deans of both main universities is not a promising beacon for movements in the West that are uncomfortable with the inclusive nature of liberal democracy.
That being said, there is no denying that there was more than a whiff of culture wars in the no campaign. The masculine energy was palpable, and much effort went into far-fetched notions of an EU plot to expropriate Icelandic wealth. Young people were, by all accounts, targeted on social media and inundated with phone calls; one of the most potent messages was that EU accession could see them drafted into a European army. The yes side also played loose with the facts, not least in assertions that lower euro interest rates would automatically ease young people’s access to the housing market. Highly nationalistic messaging left some voters in a charged emotional state—and those voices were the loudest online, both during the campaign and in celebrating the outcome.
Still, the result was not a victory for the reactionary fringe. The fringe just happened to be on the winning side. The reasons Icelanders voted no are deep, domestic and largely unglamorous: fish, the currency, a comfortable arrangement with the world and a belief that the international order will remain relatively unchanged, despite temporary turbulence.
Through the EEA and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), Icelanders and Icelandic businesses already enjoy the free movement of goods, services, capital and people. Every knowledgeable Icelander understands that without the market access, Iceland would not have prospered as it has. No serious politician dares to entertain abandoning the EEA. In fact, the no side ran on defending the agreement as the better alternative to full membership.
On defence and security, Iceland is a founding member of NATO and has a bilateral defence agreement with the US. For a country of 400,000 people that has never in its history had a military, these two pillars seem more than adequate, untested as they may be.
Full membership in the EU would require amending the constitution, which currently does not permit the transfer of sovereign powers that accession involves. This is sensitive in any debate about independence and sovereignty. As things stand, obligations arising from the EEA agreement only reach Icelandic law when the Icelandic parliament, the Althingi, legislates for them.
Iceland owes its rise from poverty to prosperity in the 20th century to controlling the rich maritime resources that surround it. For centuries, foreign fleets exploited those grounds while Icelanders were kept out of large-scale fishing by both restrictions imposed by Denmark (which ruled Iceland from 1380 to 1918) and a lack of financial infrastructure.
At the start of the last century, new technology and financing opportunities unleashed an explosion of entrepreneurial activity in the sector. Iceland then pushed its fisheries zone outwards until it reached its present limit in 1975, over fierce British opposition in stand-offs known as the “cod wars”. It was the closest the country has ever come to a military confrontation. Legal victory in that dispute is a tremendous source of national pride and a standing reminder of the importance of natural resources to our economy. Furthermore, Iceland’s track record in managing this resource compares very favourably with efforts elsewhere.
Accepting the EU’s common fisheries policy is, on the face of it, a requirement for full membership. For most Icelanders, this is where the conversation stops.
It follows that a crucial question is whether Iceland could join the EU and keep control of its fisheries. Accepting the EU’s common fisheries policy is, on the face of it, a requirement for full membership. For most Icelanders, this is where the conversation stops. It is out of the question. Therefore, much of the historical debate about EU membership has revolved around whether a permanent carve-out is possible, and much energy has gone into reading cryptic remarks on the matter from EU representatives. The application launched in 2009 produced no answer. Talks were shelved before this vital question was seriously engaged.
For the yes camp, applying again was the only way to find out the real answer. The no side held that a satisfactory answer was simply not on the table—a belief that makes a no vote logical even for people who do not object to membership in principle. Why board a train if you do not believe it will reach its destination?
Since its adoption in 1918, the króna has been one of the most consistent sources of frustration in Icelandic public life. It started out at par with the Danish krone and, by that benchmark, has since lost 99.9% of its value. Long protected by import, export and currency controls, and propped up by punishing interest rates, it has now been largely abandoned by the big Icelandic businesses that operate internationally. They have mostly chosen the euro as their operating currency.
Despite its drawbacks, the flexibility that a national currency provides a small economy reliant on natural resources is not to be discounted. Some economists claim that the currency is a valuable tool to smooth out external shocks and protect Icelanders from economic setbacks turning into societal hardships such as mass unemployment. For many, the costs of maintaining a tiny currency that is attuned to our specific economic conditions are well worth the benefits of keeping unemployment at a minimum. For others, these benefits are overstated, and the costs in perennially high interest rates and market risk do not make economic sense.
Iceland’s business and finance community is very focused on topline economic figures that show European growth lagging behind America’s. The prevailing narrative is that Europe buries its entrepreneurial talent under the weight of regulation while the US offers a superior environment for economic activity and technical innovation. Iceland’s business and financial community sees the country’s relative economic success as too valuable to risk with full EU membership.
Counter-narratives that build on broader measures of well-being do not seem to gain traction. Even extensive first-hand experience of European quality of life stands little chance when pitted against economic metrics.
Icelanders often cite Mario Draghi’s bleak assessment of the EU’s competitiveness as evidence that even consummate EU insiders have lost faith. The claim of the EU’s supposed economic feebleness does more than feed the economic debate; it has also become a thinly veiled contribution to the culture-war caricature of a weak Europe in contrast to a muscular America.
The biggest disconnect between international affairs experts and the general Icelandic population lies in how each reads the way geopolitics is evolving. Contrary to much international reporting, the volatile state of the world barely featured in the campaign, which was mostly fought on domestic issues. Even threats from the American president, Donald Trump, against our Greenlandic neighbours have not moved the needle. Perhaps most Icelanders viewed the episode as too outlandish to be taken seriously, or too uncomfortable to contemplate.
Icelanders are very supportive of Ukraine and disdainful of Russia’s aggression, but they seem to judge the war far enough away not to affect them. Many are perplexed by America’s current foreign policy yet treat it as a deviation from a norm that will eventually re-establish itself. Bogi Ágústsson, a respected Icelandic journalist, recently told The Economist that Icelanders are in denial about how serious some recent international developments are. I believe most close observers of US politics would tend to agree with him.
During the campaign, warnings about an impending rupture in the world order that underwrites Iceland’s peaceful existence found few takers. The government had brought the referendum forward from a planned 2027 precisely because of these international developments, but worries about Europe’s security and NATO—that now dominate international policy discussions—were simply not top of mind.
In this context, it bears mention that Iceland has never suffered a violent invasion or a hostile occupation, which leaves matters of security and defence largely a theoretical exercise.
While the referendum’s result does not represent what some far-right European leaders wish it did, some elements of the campaign should give cause for concern. The intensity of the rhetoric was excessive considering the low stakes of the vote. Any accession treaty would itself have gone to a second referendum.
The international reaction to the result also suggested that some elements within Icelandic politics are embedded within the international anti-globalist movement. Micro-targeting, emotional pressure and unsupported claims proved effective. A sense of crisis or impending disaster was invoked, inviting a mindset that loosens the scruples that normally keep political discourse civil and constructive. The success of this approach could provide a campaign blueprint that all parties might find hard to resist in future elections, to the detriment of Iceland’s hitherto relatively civil political culture.
As any fisherman knows, illegal bait might get you an easier catch a few times, but eventually will ruin the fishing for all. Trust in elections is a common stock too, and it does not tend to replenish on demand.
While the country queues for petrol, import licences are being given to the network behind Mongolia’s largest corporate fraud. Mongolia spent August rationing petrol, as the country faces an ‘unprecedented’ fuel crisis. In response, the Government has made importing fuel more profitable, and has sped up the process for issuing new licences.[1]
By opening the gates, the government has allowed existing networks to exploit the crisis, including the one connected to Jononbayar Erdenesuren, the disgraced Mongolian businessman reportedly as being allegedly responsible for the $1.1 bn fraud scheme operated through Lex Oil, the fuel importer that was run by his aunt.[2]
Mongolia is heavily reliant on foreign oil, primarily from Russia. To import it, businesses need an ‘all-types fuel import licence’, issued by the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources, which decides through paperwork checks.[3] Foreign businesses cannot import directly — they must sell through a Mongolian-licensed entity.[4]
Some 164 companies hold an import licence. Of these, 34 have been granted since 2025.[5] The number of companies licensed to import fuel has more than doubled in under five years.[6]
They have also become considerably more valuable. Duty and excise on fuel have been zeroed, importers offered preferential loans and subsidised storage for reserves, and the customs service has been told to expedite clearance of petrol consignments.[7]
A number of companies granted all-types fuel import licences in 2025 and 2026 are connected to Jononbayar Erdenesuren and the Lex Oil network behind his $1.1bn scheme. That scheme was executed through the very exploitation of import licences.
None of these importers are required to disclose the amount of oil they import. Only 11 of the 164 licence holders imported fuel in the first days of August. When asked which 11, and how much each imported, the Customs General Administration refused to answer, citing customs law.
Lex Oil’s network is growing
Since 2025, two former Lex Oil CEOs have taken positions in dormant companies that then received fuel licences. In one case, the licence was obtained the same day the shareholding was registered.
Following five years of inactivity,[8] Standard Oil Gas appointed a new Director, Erdenebat Indra, in December 2025. Indra ran Lex Oil from January 2019 until February 2024 – nearly the whole period in which the losses accrued.[9] Six weeks later, Standard Oil was granted an import licence. Indra became a shareholder that same day.[10]
The pattern was replicated by Indra’s successor at Lex Oil, Banzragch Batdavaa.[11] Batdavaa bought into Best Dragon, a company with no prior fuel operations, in July 2025. It was granted import permits just two months later.[12] Batdavaa remains in business with both Mongolian and offshore entities linked to the scheme,[13] amongst them two Dubai entities – Peak Solutions (co-managed with Jononbayar’s mother)[14], and his own APEXPP commodities.[15]
Two other companies, granted licences in the spring of 2025, were already owned by individuals in the network. Tod Oil received its first licence in April 2025, although the company was incorporated six years earlier by entities closely tied to Jononbayar.[16] Its founder, Tod Petroleum, was co-founded by Lex Oil and former VS Oil CEO Bataa Anarchuluu.[17] Bataa continues to operate within the network, serving as the Executive Director of the helicopter business linked to both the scheme and the son of former Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene.[18]
Another, Apex Petroleum, was incorporated in October 2024 – the month the $1.1bn provision was made public.[19] Three of the five founding shareholders had previously founded businesses with Jononbayar himself.[20] These three include Mönkhjargal Javkhlan (son of a licensed importer linked to the Government)[21] and Jononbayar’s rumoured mistress, Yalaltbayar Khongorzul.[22]
Three further entities — ABR Eco Trans, Petro Spark and Standard Energy and Oil — have links to Jononbayar’s network. ABR was incorporated in October 2024 and licensed to import fuel in April 2025.[23] It has since taken on the founder of BID Energy, Bold Luvsandagva, as its shareholder and executive director.[24] In February 2026, ABR moved into the same unit BID Energy had occupied until that December.[25] BID Energy is Indra's other licensed importer. It was granted import licences in 2024, 11 weeks after Indra left Lex Oil.[26] Indra bought into the company and is now its ultimate beneficial owner.[27]
Another, Petro Spark, was licensed on the same day as Apex Petroleum.[28] Its owner, Yadamsüren Dorjchanga, holds a network of businesses with Yondon Uuganbayar.[29] Uuganbayar bought shares in Jononbayar’s family’s meat business, Erdenet Makh Market, two weeks after the Lex Oil scheme was disclosed in October 2024.[30]
The seventh company, Standard Energy and Oil, was licensed in 2025.[31] In May 2026, it was taken over by N. Monsor.[32] Monsor is a reported close contact of Jononbayar.[33] He was director of a Mongolian company, Sky Professional Logistics,[34] when it received over $7.5 million from an offshore entity called Class Trading Limited,[35] and distributed it the same day among nine recipients. These included Jocondy, a company owned by Jononbayar’s aunt, the founder of Lex Oil.[36] Jocondy was reportedly directed by Jononbayar at the time.[37] It is reported that Jononbayar had previously made transfers into Class Trading.[38]
These are not the network's first import licences. Nine companies linked to Jononbayar, the first being Lex Oil itself in 2019, were granted import licences before 2025,[39] meaning at least 16 of the 164 importers are connected to his network.
New Licences, Existing Networks
Even outside that seven, what distinguishes a successful candidate is often the individual owner, as opposed to the company profile. One grantee, TES Petroleum Trade,[40] is owned by the reported son of Baagaa Battömör,[41] a sitting MP who had previously run both Mongolia’s tax and customs administrations.[42] Two licences went to companies owned separately by partners in an existing fuel business.[43] Four more went to Chinese-controlled businesses, two of them on the same day. None was set up as a fuel business, and three were still unregistered for fuel activity when they were licensed.[44]
Of the 34 companies granted import licences by the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources in 2025 and 2026, 14 had been incorporated less than two years before the award.[45] Eight more of the organisations granted licences changed hands shortly before they were licensed.[46]
The Government’s Response
On 17 August, the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources warned that importers who failed to keep filling stations supplied could lose their licences. The Minister admitted that some importers were holding stock and not selling it.
Revoking a licence removes a registration but has no bearing on the individuals behind the businesses. With fewer regulatory checks, and more demand than ever, the doors are being left open to actors who previously exploited Mongolia’s fuel import regulations.
Mongolia scored 31 out of 100 on Transparency International's 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index, ranking 124th of 182 countries, its worst score on record. In September 2025 the US State Department reported that businesses in Mongolia face "substantial and unpredictable regulatory burdens at every level", with officials across ministries and agencies routinely contravening existing law and regulation. Unless the country creates laws transparently and implements them predictably, it warned, "investors may find Mongolia too risky and opt for more competitive countries."[47]
The victim of Jononbayar’s fraud scheme, Trafigura, used to be one of the most important importers of oil into Mongolia.[48] The fraud orchestrated by the playboy,[49] which personally enriched both himself and his family,[50] put that to an end. Now, the individuals involved are being allowed back in to exploit the crisis at the expense of ordinary Mongolians.
The crisis was a chance to show that direction had changed. Instead, the Government zeroed duty, offered importers preferential loans and subsidised storage, and issued 34 new licences — leaving at least 16 of the 164 with one network. Now agents known to have exploited the same system previously, are being allowed in again.
Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash
[1] Government’s announcement that fuel import licence applications should be processed quickly and the licences granted, reported: https://ikon.mn/n/3pep and https://sonin.mn/newsDetail/18284
[2] Lex-Oil LLC granted fuel import licence in 2019: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5623979. Owned through his aunt, Dorjgochoo Erdenetul.
[3] In order to gain these, an applicant must produce its registration documents, prove membership of the relevant professional association, and file its contract with the fuel supplier in original: https://legalinfo.mn/mn/detail?lawId=208190
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-02/trafigura-mongolia-oil-fraud-how-trader-faces-1-billion-loss
[5] Data as of 20 August, taken from https://license.mn/ (official electronic licence system)
[6] 80 companies Eighty companies held a licence to import fuel into Mongolia on 1 January 2022, recorded in the Ministry of Mining and Heavy Industry's register of petroleum products special licences, 22 March 2022: https://mmhi.gov.mn/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/ГТБ-тусгай-зөвшөөрлийн-жагсаалт-2022.03.22.pdf. 164 currently hold licences, per license.mn, the Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources official register, as of September 2026: https://license.mn/.
[7] Tax and lending measures: https://mmhi.gov.mn/2026/08/06/. Expedited customs clearance: E. Oyun-Erdene, GoGo.mn, 17 August 2026, https://cmsm.mongolcontent.mn/r/6k9g8
[8] Standard Oil Gas LLC’s fuel import licence expired in 2020, and it recorded no other activity in the intervening period: https://opendatalab.mn/search/6120954
[9] CEO of Lex Oil 2019-224: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5623979
[10] 6 February 2026: https://opendatalab.mn/search/6120954
[11] Batdavaa sat as Executive Director of Lex Oil from Feb-April 2014: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5623979
[12] Best Dragon, incorporated 2020, dormant until 2025 when ownership was transferred to Batdavaa. Fuel import licence granted 26 September 2025: https://opendatalab.mn/search/6574246
[13] B.Batdavaa is currently a shareholder of Diamond Oil and Energy alongside Oyunbileg Sainbileg https://opendatalab.mn/search/6552544. Sainbeleg is known to a key actor alongside Jononbayer, and remains director of one of the family’s companies, Zuunnaim Oil: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5272378
[14] Cedar Rose UAE corporate data accessed via Sayari, 21 August 2026: PEAK SOLUTION DMCC, commercial register DMCC194234, licence DMCC-855346, incorporated 5 August 2022;
[15] Offshore link reported in https://www.eureporter.co/world/mongolia/2026/08/13/the-helicopter-that-helped-topple-mongolias-prime-minister-linked-to-lex-oil-scheme/, Batdaava’s Linkedin states him as CEO of APEXPP Commodities: www.linkedin.com/in/batdavaa-banzragch-46120115a
[16] Tod Oil, incorporated 2019 by Tod Petroleum, granted licence 23 April 2025: https://opendatalab.mn/search/6415636
[17] Tod Petroleum, founded Lex Oil and Bataa Anarchuluu https://opendatalab.mn/search/6104894. Bataa served as VS Oil CEO https://www.opendatalab.mn/search/6225578.
[18] Listed as UBO of Alpha Aurora Aviation: https://www.opendatalab.mn/search/8376344
[19] Apex Petroleum was incorporated 17 October 2024 (https://opendatalab.mn/search/7078633). Trafigura’s statement on losses 30 October 2024: https://www.trafigura.com/news-and-insights/press-releases/2024/statement-re-trafiguras-petroleum-products-business-in-mongolia/
[20] Three founders: Bayardalai Erdenezaya (founded Kem Tek with Jononbayar in 2016, and Commodity Trans with his mother in 2019); Mönkhjargal Javkhlan (registered at the same two businesses, alongside Diamond Oil and Energy), Yalaltbayar Khongorzul (co-founded Khongorfinance with Jononbayar in 2015),
[21] Reported to be the brother in-law and former campaign manager for the Minister of Economic Development: https://ergelt.mn/news/22/singile/40012
[22] Archived article: https://web.archive.org/web/20241113103634/https://www.reelnews.mn/a/1225 and X: https://x.com/miigaasbntv/status/1852208500715459004
[23] ABR Eco Trans LLC, incorporated 15 October 2024; wholesale permit 0016 from 20 March 2025 and all-types fuel import licence 0015 from 25 April 2025; https://opendatalab.mn/search/7077609
[24] Luvsandagva registered as ABR shareholder and joint beneficial owner on 24 November 2025 and as executive director on 29 January 2026; he founded BID Energy on 13 December 2023 with Baterdene Lkhagvadulam and was its first executive director: https://opendatalab.mn/search/7077609 and https://opendatalab.mn/search/8454485
[25] BID Energy moved from Bayanzürkh, 3rd khoroo, 12th microdistrict, Tsendgüni 30b, unit 53 on 1 December 2025; ABR moved into that unit on 2 February 2026, from Tokio 24a, unit 134 in the same microdistrict: https://opendatalab.mn/search/8454485 and https://opendatalab.mn/search/7077609
[26] BID Energy LLC, import licence 0015 granted 24 April 2024; https://opendatalab.mn/search/8454485. Indra was executive director of Lex Oil from January 2019 to February 2024: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5623979.
[27] Indra registered as BID Energy shareholder and executive director on 16 August 2024 and as sole ultimate beneficial owner on 1 December 2025: https://opendatalab.mn/search/8454485
[28] Petro Spark LLC, incorporated 8 May 2024, sole shareholder and beneficial owner Yadamsüren Dorjchanga; import licence 19 May 2025, the same date as Apex Petroleum: https://opendatalab.mn/search/7025169
[29] Joint holdings with Yondon Uuganbayar: Mongolian Truck Union Group LLC, https://opendatalab.mn/search/6840175; Novel Development Union LLC: https://opendatalab.mn/search/6894402; and the Gobi Genetics, https://opendatalab.mn/search/3646203
[30] Uuganbayar owns Mon Beef Cattle: https://opendatalab.mn/search/8324328 . Mon Beef Cattle acquired Erdenet Makh Market LLC, from Dorjgochoo Erdenetuyaa 24 October 2024, days before the scheme was disclosed.
[31] Standard Energy and Oil, received wholesale permit in June, the import licence that September: https://opendatalab.mn/search/6754244
[32] Monsor became the director of Standard Energy and Oil on 5 May 2026. It was acquired the same day by an investment fund, then owned by Dorj Enkhtuya (renamed KK Real Estate private fund two days later): https://opendatalab.mn/search/6607829. Mansor was the previous manager of that fund, and founded it himself through another vehicle he still owns and manages, Ulaanbaatar Asset Management: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5493498 . He became the CEO of Standard Energy and Oil on the day it was taken over by KK Real Estate.
[33] Reported in https://www.livetv.mn/p/11193/ and in https://www.polit.mn/a/69636
[34] Monsor is reported to have run Sky Professional Logistics: https://www.livetv.mn/p/11193. Court records state the executive director of Sky Professional Logistics concluded a wagon-transport agreement with the head of Ulaanbaatar Railway on 28 July 2017, naming him as Н.Монсов: https://shuukh.mn/single_case/19024
[35] Reporting states that US$7,545,900 was transferred from Class Trading Limited to Sky Professional Logistics on 8 August 2017 https://gogo.mn/r/5292y. Class Trading Limited was incorporated in the Turks and Caicos Islands and registered a Hong Kong place of business on 13 May 2015: Hong Kong Companies Registry, Company Particulars, BRN 64752427.
[36] Jocondy was founded by Dorjgochoo Erdenetuul, https://opendatalab.mn/search/5247632. She is Jononbayar's maternal aunt and the owner of Lex Oil LLC: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5623979 and https://zuv.mn/n/16a3.
[37] Reporting records US$612,400 paid to Jocondy and describes Jononbayar as its director at the time: https://gogo.mn/r/5292y and https://dardas.mn/news/view/2970
[38] Reported that Jononbayar sent $500,000 to Class Trading in 2014: https://dardas.mn/news/view/2970
[39] 2019: Lex Oil, 2019 https://opendatalab.mn/search/5623979,Tod Petroleum, https://opendatalab.mn/search/6104894. 2020: ICIC, https://opendatalab.mn/search/5288193 VS Oil, https://opendatalab.mn/search/6225578, Zuunnaim Oil https://opendatalab.mn/search/5272378. 2022: Argal Oil https://opendatalab.mn/search/6309011. 2023: Alpha Aviation Fuel https://opendatalab.mn/search/8403473. 2024: BID Energy https://opendatalab.mn/search/8454485 · Interasia Energy Mongolia, 2024 https://opendatalab.mn/search/6902987. Register of all 164 holders: https://opendatalab.mn/licences/15
[40] Tes Petroleum Trade, licenced 21 February 2025: https://opendatalab.mn/search/6373135
[41] Paternity reported in: https://ergelt.mn/news/22/single/40012
[42] Battömör has sat in the State great Khural since 2016, he was deputy head, then head of the State Customs General Administration from 2008-11 and Head of the Tax General Administration from 2011-13: https://www.24tsag.mn/a/227052
[43] Greenjob, owned by Batsukh Baigalmaa, granted licence in October 2025: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5645867; and Gobi Petroleum GPT, owned by Onurbat Ragchaa, granted a licence September 2025: https://opendatalab.mn/search/7121913. Together they are exclusive owners and directors of Green Oil Trade since incorporation in 2020: https://opendatalab.mn/search/6528716
[44] Tana Khiimori Oil - received import licence 11 August 2025, First registered for fuel-related activities 15 August 2025
: https://opendatalab.mn/search/7080033; Talnutgiin Ayalal - received import licence 11 August 2025, First registered for fuel-related activities 15 August 2025: https://opendatalab.mn/search/5887488;
Achit Güür MS - received import licence 14 Jan 2026, Remains unregistered for any kind of fuel-related activity (registration codes are for freight, agriculture, tourism and motor vehicle sales): https://opendatalab.mn/search/6891802; Söüd Mont Forest - received import licence 11 December 2025, Registered for fuel wholesaling 6 December 2025, (previous registration codes are for motor vehicles, freight, automotive sales and machinery), https://opendatalab.mn/search/7058649.
[45] Data as of 20 August, taken from https://licence.mn/ (official electronic licence system)
[46] Data as of https://licence.mn/ checked against https://opendatalab.mn/search/[registration number]. “Changed hands” to mean change of shareholder, director or beneficial owner within twelve months on either side of grant.
[47] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/638719_2025-Mongolia-Investment-Climate-Statement.pdf
[48] Trafigura supplied around a third of the region’s oil products, particularly diesel: https://eulerpool.com/news/markets/trafigura-in-crisis-mongolian-oil-credit-causes-million-loss; deals undertaken through the scheme said to account for around 80% of Mongolia's imported oil products: https://eguur.mn/556936/
[49] Jononbayar known for “parties he threw for friends and contacts” per Bloomberg: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-02/trafigura-mongolia-oil-fraud-how-trader-faces-1-billion-loss; reported to have thrown some of the “most expensive parties in Mongolia” https://eguur.mn/556936/
[50] https://zuv.mn/n/16a3; https://itoim.mn/a/2024/07/22/news-break/ugg
The European Commission has appointed Mihail Dumitru (pictured) as new chair of the Mission Board EU Mission “A Soil Deal for Europe”. M. Dumitru is a former Minister of agriculture and rural development of Romania and former Deputy Director-General in the Commission’s Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development. He will bring his extensive experience on agricultural and soil issues, the Common Agriculture Policy (CAP), rural development and research and innovation to provide advice and help achieve the Mission’s objectives.
M. Dumitru is starting in his new role on 1 September 2026 and will take part in the conference 'Mission forward: Shaping the future through mission-oriented policy' organized by the OECD on 24-25 September in Paris, and in the European Mission Soil Week to be held on 17-18 November in Dublin.
The Mission Soil Board is composed of the following members:
The role of the Mission Soil Board is to provide strategic advice for the Mission Soil implementation and to promote its activities.
This is really a tale of two countries: the United States and Brazil. In both countries, far-right presidents come to power — Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. In both those countries, the presidents spent several years unraveling democratic institutions and public policy. Both presidents then ran for reelection. Both presidents lied about their country’s voting systems in order to undermine the elections and whip up their base.
Both those presidents lost their reelections — Trump in 2020. Bolsonaro in 2022. They both claimed fraud and tried to carry out a coup to stay in power.
But that is where these two paths diverged. In the United States, President Donald Trump continued to peddle his lies about the elections. He created his own social media platform and he used it to push his agenda. He was reelected in 2024 and returned to power. In Brazil, however, the country’s Supreme Electoral Court blocked former President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years, because of the lies he told about the country’s electoral system.
It wasn’t censorship. it was a different interpretation of free speech. One that said the right to free expression must be balanced with the other rights in the country and the country’s democratic system. The United States doesn’t agree. And the Trump administration has been pushing to bend Brazil toward its definition of “free speech.”
In this special, collaborative episode with Brazil on Fire and The Battle for Free Speech, Michael Fox journeys to Brazil to understand the lengths that the country has gone to fight disinformation.
Michael is joined in the episode by Maximillian Alvarez, editor-in-chief and co-executive director of The Real News Network and the host of the Working People Podcast.
Under the Shadow is a production of The Real News Network.
Hosted by Michael Fox and Marc Steiner. Theme music by Michael Fox, Jordan Klein and Daniel Nuñez. Other music from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Production and Sound Design by Michael Fox and Stephen Frank. Editorial support by Kayla Rivara. Research by Ben Schweiger.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. An updated version will be made available as soon as possible.
Michael Fox: Okay. Max, can you hear me?
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, brother, you’re coming in loud and clear on this.
Michael Fox: All right, fantastic. Max, I want to tell you a story. It’s a tale of two countries, the United States and Brazil. They are the two countries with the largest populations and the largest economies in the Western hemisphere. Brazil is about the size of the lower 48 of the United States. And politically in both countries, something very similar has happened in recent years. In both countries, far right presidents come to power. In both those countries, the president spends several years unraveling democratic institutions and public policy. Then both those presidents run for reelection. Both the presidents lie about their country’s voting systems in order to undermine the elections and whip up their base. Both those presidents lose their reelections. They both claim fraud and then they both try to carry out a coup to stay in power. But that is where these two paths diverge. In the United States, President Donald Trump continues to peddle his lies about the election.
He creates his own social media platform and uses it to push his agenda. He returns to power in 2025. You know the story. In Brazil, however, the country’s supreme electoral court blocks former President Jair Bolsonaro from running for office for eight years because of the lies he told about the country’s electoral system. It is not censorship. It’s a different interpretation of free speech, one that says the right to free expression must be balanced within the other rights in the country and the country’s democratic system. To quote Robert Frost, that has made all the difference.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: Bolsonaro is basically being punished by something that he said about the electoral system.
Michael Fox: I’ve been speaking lately with Fabio de Sae Silva. He’s a Brazilian legal expert and an associate professor of international studies at the University of Oklahoma.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: And in the United States saying things, propagating lies and misinformation about the electoral system, I don’t think it would be punishable at all under any circumstance because of how strong the protection to free speech rights is in the United States. And in the past, I think a lot of people though of this as an advantage of the United States in comparison to other societies. But I think more recently there has been a rethinking of this and there has been an understanding that it’s not that other countries lack free speech rights. It’s just that they have other rights that they balance free speech rights against. And in the case of Brazil, because we all understood in the 2018 election that misinformation was a serious threat to democracy, the legal system began to offer a response.
Michael Fox: In 2023, Bolsonado was banned from running again. And if you’ve been following news on Brazil, you know that he was later sentenced to 27 years in jail. He’s currently under house arrest because of health issues. He was sentenced for his participation in a plot to carry out a coup and overturn his 2022 electoral loss and to even assassinate leftist President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In other words, in the United States, Trump is allowed to say what he wants, disparage the electoral system, create his own social media platform, spread as many lies as he likes, and he is awarded for it by being allowed to run again and win reelection where he is now presiding over an assault on free speech rights, the likes of which we have not seen in modern day history in the United States. Meanwhile, in Brazil, Bolsonado is banned from running and he is in jail.
And here’s the point. The roots of all of this, the roots of this difference are the two countries’ vision and interpretation of free speech.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: All these things that Bolsonado has been accused of at the center of them was speech because what the federal police points to in their investigation is that the attempted coup involved promoting publicly and even internationally this idea that the Brazilian elections had been defrauded. They associated with the attempt to co-ops the military to take over and nullify the elections basically. And also including maybe some more unorthodox activities such as assassinating the elected president and some judges. But just to stay in the first component of this criminal enterprise, it is something that involves limitations to speech in Brazilian law.
Michael Fox: In past episodes, we’ve been looking at the attacks on free speech in the United States. Today we look at how another country, Brazil, has pushed back on the fascist and far right wave with its own interpretation of free speech. And here’s the thing, Brazil’s understanding of free speech, as we will look at throughout this episode, is pretty similar to most of the rest of the world. The United States is the outlier, but Trump far right activists and owners of big tech platforms are trying to change that in order to push their absolutest interpretation of free speech abroad and undermine Brazilian democracy in the process. All of that in a minute. This is the Battle for Free Speech, a multi-part narrative podcast brought to you by The Real News. In this series, we take you on a journey to understand the important role free speech has played in US history and the fight being waged over it today.
I’m your co-host, Michael Fox, and I’m so excited to be joined today by Max Alvarez. He’s the editor-in-chief and co-executive director of The Real News and the host of the Working People Podcast. Max, seriously, thank you so much for joining me.
Maximillian Alvarez: So grateful to be here, brother, and grateful for all the incredible work that you and Marc and the whole team have been doing on this very, very necessary podcast. And also I’m just like a massive fan as you know of Under the Shadow and everything else that you do. So I’m very excited to finally be on one of the podcasts I’m going to be listening to from you.
Michael Fox: Aw, thanks Max. And in particular, I’m really excited to speak with you today because you are on the front lines of standing up for free speech, but also the working class and also covering the rise of the right. So you kind of straddle all of these things at the same time, which we’re going to be digging into today. All right. We are going to begin on our journey here. Let me just say this before we get started. So far in this podcast, we’ve looked back on the attacks on free speech and press freedoms today. Under the Trump administration, we’ve looked at movements using free speech to stand up for their rights. Today we’re going to look at how Trump and the far right are trying to push a US definition of free speech abroad in order to lift their agenda internationally and so much more.
I got into this a little bit in the beginning. Today’s episode is going to focus completely on Brazil and the role the United States is playing in the country. And today’s episode is a joint collaboration together with my podcasts, Under the Shadow and Brazil on Fire. Because as you will see, there are connections throughout. If you haven’t heard those, I suggest you go check them out.
Maximillian Alvarez: Oh my God. If you haven’t heard those, I envy you because you have a feast in front of you. Under the shadow, Brazil on Fire. They are so good and so essential. And they’re award winning contributions that I guarantee if you’re listening to this, you are going to love them. So go check them out. And I don’t say that just as a collaborator with Mike on producing these series, but as a devoted listener who always learns a lot from them.
Michael Fox: Thanks, Max. Three things to say before we get started. If you have been listening to this podcast series, The Battle for Free Speech, you know how this works. I go out, I do a ton of reporting. I bring that back to discuss it here. Two, I love time travel. I often say that podcasting for me is the closest thing we have to actually traveling in time. So my goal here is to take you to another time and place and I’m glad you’re along for the ride, Max. And three, I know Brazil well. My wife is Brazilian. I’ve lived here for years. I’m here now. And I say this so that you know that everything that we’re digging into today isn’t just based on my interviews for this podcast, but on my on the ground reporting on this over the last decade. And I seriously have been wanting to do an episode like this for a very long time, so I’m super excited.
Okay. Max, are you ready?
Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s do it, baby.
Michael Fox: Okay, here we go. I want to begin exactly one year ago today, July 9th, 2025. US President Donald Trump writes a letter to Brazilian President Luis Idnacio Lula de Silva. In the letter, he announces that he’s levying a 50% tariff on all Brazilian goods. Among the reasons for this new tariff is the country’s legal case against Trump ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, for attempting to carry out a coup amid the 2022 elections. He also chastises Brazil for allegedly violating free speech rights. In the letter, Trump denounces Brazil’s insidious attacks on free elections and the fundamental free speech rights of Americans. He also criticizes the Brazilian Supreme Court’s secret and unlawful censorship orders to US social media platforms. It’s incredible to see the Trump administration lecturing anyone on free speech, but that is how our most basic right is being weaponized today. Anyway, moving on. A few weeks after that letter, the US Embassy in Brazil releases a fact sheet explaining Trump’s new tariffs.
Artur Romeu: It was like a one and a half page document.
Michael Fox: And I spoke with Arturo Romeo about this. He’s a Brazilian journalist and the director of Reporters Without Borders for Latin America. And he says he’s reading this and they mention free speech, free expression or censorship like 10 times. It’s only a page and a half, but the entire thing, it gets into just repeating this line basically saying that the United States is tariffing Brazil because it was promoting censorship.
Artur Romeu: Free speech is being weaponized against freedom off expression.
Michael Fox: He describes this as the United States trying to make it look like a free speech champion.
Artur Romeu: But actually what your distorted vision of free speech is doing is fragmenting the diferent ideas behind what freedom of expression really is and mostly the social and collective dimension of freedom of expression. You are only saying that people should say whatever they want without any kind of interference. You are basically ignoring completely the fact that people live in a society and part of the freedom of expression right is related to receive pluralistic, diverse, reliable information.
Michael Fox: And I should just pause here to say that internationally, and this is really important, especially for our US audience. Internationally, many definitions of free speech include the right to receive reliable or truthful information. And that’s key because in the United States, that clearly is not part of the equation. Anyway, this is a really important distinction between how free speech is generally understood in the United States and elsewhere around the world. I got into this a bunch in the last episode. If you haven’t heard that, you can go back and check it out now, but the idea is this. In the US, your right to free speech is generally seen as absolute. In other words, you can pretty much say what you want without repercussions regardless of how bad it is or racist or homophobic or discriminatory. In every other country in the world, every one, your free speech rights are seen as balanced with other rights.
So your right to free speech isn’t more important than my right not to be harmed. For instance –
Brian Mier: The view followed in Germany, France, and especially for the case of this conversation, Brazil said according to the Constitution, all human rights are equally important.
Michael Fox: Brian Mier is a correspondent for a Telesur who’s lived in Brazil for more than 30 years. And I spoke with him about this. You
Brian Mier: Can’t say that one human right is more important than another human right. So you can’t have one human right that’s absolutist in its nature, free speech, that would enable someone to limit or deny other people’s human rights.
Michael Fox: For instance, in Brazil or in Germany, Nazism is a crime. It’s illegal to be a Nazi or to spread Nazi propaganda.
Brian Mier: Because it damages the peace of mind, the freedom to come and go as they please, the freedom to interact with the public of certain minority groups in Brazil, mainly Afro-Brazilians, Northeasterners, but also Jewish people as well. So in Brazil, this is called the harmony of rights according to the Brazilian Constitution. All rights are equally important. Freedom of a speech is a very important right, but it can’t be used to trample over some other group of people’s rights.
Michael Fox: That’s the idea and this distinction is really important. And let me just say that as I touched on last time, in the United States, we also had this kind of balancing definition of free speech until roughly the Cold War in the 1960s. And that’s when our current day libertarian absolutist view of free speech really took hold. What’s interesting is that we don’t even really realize this. We don’t know this past, right? And yet our definition now of free speech, absolutist definition within the United States is now being weaponized by Trump and his far right supporters and far right allies abroad to push their agenda as we will look into throughout this podcast. Before we move on, Max, do you see this? Have you been seeing this battle over free speech? And do you think that people understand this within the United States, understand how free speech kind of is being weaponized and this interpretation of free speech is being weaponized?
Maximillian Alvarez: Yes. And I would say that we are not only aware of the hypocrisy of these people using free speech to take our free speech away or to impose their will on Brazil or other countries because that’s what we’ve come to realize our country does. That’s as American as apple pie. That’s in fact what most of the world knows America to be. They don’t know it anymore as the America my parents knew it to be. And my dad came to this country for, his family came to this country for. So the world today does not know us as that. They know us as the place that the most powerful country and military empire in the world that has been going around the world undemocratically overthrowing democratically elected leaders, undemocratically invading other countries and bombing other countries and torturing people in the name of democracy and saying like, we’re spreading democracy to you, you’re welcome.
And now smash cut to 2026 these sort of fascist posters of Donald Trump are draping Washington DC and everything that we’re talking about on this series unfolding before our eyes. And I don’t think a lot of us know what free speech means in this context. And I think that is why the takeaway for this discussion and any discussion that we have about it is like, well, what are we going to fight for it to be?
Michael Fox: Yeah. Max, I really appreciate you wrapping in this question of how the United States has justified interventions abroad in the name of democracy and how what we’re seeing now is the justification for the tariffs in the name of free speech, which I think is a great connection. In order to understand all of this, Trump’s letter in particular, his pushback on Brazil and Trump’s rationale for imposing these tariffs, we need to back up a little bit. So we’re going to go back in time. We’re jumping in the time machine, Max. Here we go.
Maximillian Alvarez: Let’s go.
Michael Fox: The year is 2018. It’s the lead up to Brazil’s huge presidential elections. Former President Lula was the front runner, but he was jailed on trumped up charges of corruption. Bolsonaro is the Trump outsider candidate, longtime congressman, former captain under the Brazilian military dictatorship, something he is still vocally proud of. And he’s surging in the polls because of a slew of fake news and disinformation, the likes of which the country has never seen. Just one example. I was covering the election for numerous outlets and I went to this press conference for the then leftist candidate, Fernando Adaji. And in this press conference, it was just a couple of days before the first round vote and he had called it because his workers’ party had created a WhatsApp hotline to receive complaints of false or misleading news and memes being spread. They said that within 24 hours they’d received 15,000 messages.
24 hours, 15,000 messages. The day before I spoke with this street artist who told me, “Our election will not be decided by the candidate’s proposals or their speeches. It’ll be decided by the lies spread online. The Brazilian elections will be decided by the ability of some groups to push fake news and the ability of us, the voters, to discern what is and what is not real.” And that is exactly what happened. The voters could not discern. Most but not all of the fake news or misleading news were being pushed by Bolsonaro’s allies and supporters. The country was overwhelmed and unprepared for the disinformation campaign and so was the Supreme Electoral Court, which oversees the elections.
They were able to request that dozens of posts be taken down, but they just didn’t have the breadth of being able to handle a barrage of posts like this. In the end, the result. This is Bolsonaro’s, Brazil. The world’s fourth largest democracy has voted on a new president. Bolsonaro won the election with roughly 55% of the vote. I was covering the election outside of his home that night in Rio de Janeiro. And then Bolsonaro came into power and proceeded to run the country into the ground like I detailed in depth in Brazil on Fire, my podcast. He guided social programs, privatized state businesses, denied the COVID pandemic, pushed unproven drugs, attacked universities, much of which we saw under Trump in the United States as well. But in Brazil, and this is the reason why I’m bringing all this up now, the courts learned their lesson.
Fernando Paulino: Joseph’s system learned to create and to stimulate some vaccines for this information and misinformation during the electoral periods.
Michael Fox: Fernando Paulino is a communications professor at the University of Brazilia. He’s also the president of the Latin American Communication Researchers Association and a fan of heavy metal rock music, Max. In particular, he likes stuff from Rage Against the Machine, Metallica and Sipultra, who he said stand for free speech. And I think that’s like, I’m sorry for the aside, but I think it’s really cool because in our conversation we got into some of these questions about how this heavy metal music has stood up for free speech in time. Anyway, he says that the
Fernando Paulino: Judicial system using the constitutional principles established some procedures to avoid misinformation information during the campaign and also before the campaign because Jaibosonaro tried to disseminate misinformations information or in other words, fake news against the political and electoral system.
Michael Fox: The other thing that came out of the 2018 election was they created Brazil, the Brazilian courts created a precedent for making it illegal to promote conspiracy theories about the safety of the electoral system. And this is key. I spoke with Professor Fabio de Saisilva.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: Because there was one candidate who started spreading videos, fake videos of Bambagi trying to vote for Bosona and the vote going for Adat at the time. And there was a case that was filed against him by the public prosecutor’s office for violating electoral laws. And that case got up to the Superior Electoral Court where the justices on that court ruled that if you spread conspiracy theories about the safety of our electoral mechanisms, you’re violating the law and you can even lose your seat if you have been elected.
Michael Fox: Let me just pause here to explain why this is so important for Brazil because I think a lot of people in the United States might not get this. Brazil, if you remember, is a country that returned to democracy again in just 1985. For the 21 years prior to this, from 1964 until 1985, it was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship that censored speech disappeared and killed hundreds and imprisoned and tortured thousands. That was not long ago. My wife was born under the dictatorship. For Brazilians, the right to free speech and every other right for that matter fall under the umbrella of their democracy. The democracy is most important. That’s what comes first. And that’s codified into their laws. It’s codified into their constitution. As Brian Meir mentioned earlier, their right to free speech doesn’t trump their right to free and fair elections. Okay, just want to say that fast-forward to the 2022 vote.
Speaker: Their politics couldn’t be more different, but both of Brazil’s main presidential candidates have gone into overdrive online.
Michael Fox: Campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation. You’ve got Bolsonado running for reelection against President Luis Ignacio Lula de Silva, who is now out of jail clearly. And so campaigns try to push the same fake news and disinformation in particular on behalf of Bolsonado, but the Supreme Electoral Council’s ready. They demand flag posts must be taken down within two hours and then just one hour when it got close to the election. Bolsonado tries to raise doubts about the country’s electoral system. Fabio de Saisilva says that the discourse was central to Bolsonado’s attempt to cause disruption in the country and to maybe open the space for military intervention.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: So it was very central to Bolsonago’s speech as well as to the activity of his supporters on social media. And what the Lula candidacy did and the public prosecutor’s office sometimes did was to take those cases to court saying, “We have a law that says that you can’t say those things and these people are saying those things.” And so what Mogayas did, he was presiding over the Superior Electoral Court, was to just try those cases and enforce the decisions sending communications to social media platforms, ordering the social media platforms to remove those forms of content. And so there were some profiles that were taken down during the elections for spreading that conspiracy theory all based on Brazilian law, just as he took down some posts against Bosonago by the Lula campaign that violated other aspects of Brazilian law. So that was happening on both sides.
The only difference was that the Bosonago campaign was using this to victimize itself and to say that it was being persecuted by this censorship judge.
Michael Fox: So later on when you hear that, and we’re going to be talking about it in this episode, but from the United States and from elsewhere, you hear people talking about this censorship judge or censorship that’s been happening.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: That accounts for a large number of the cases involving guys and this accusation of censorship.
Michael Fox: Because there are measures in place to stop fake news and disinformation from being spread and trying to roll that back amid this electoral moment. Max, let’s stop your pause really quick. I mean, is this all making sense? Do you have any questions?
Maximillian Alvarez: Sadly, it is making sense. I mean both in terms of why these things happened the way that they did and why they didn’t happen the same way here in the United States. I
Mean, because you talked about where the roads really diverged in the past five to six years especially with how we dealt with these attempted coups. Donald Trump is not in jail. Donald Trump was not barred from running for president. In fact, he used the presidency to outrun the legal system and proving that actually power wins over principle in America and has now thus taken all of our institutions to serve his will. But I think in terms of why we didn’t do that, I mean the answers are very complex, but I think what folks just need to know is that should we have a more stringent, robust kind of understanding of the people’s right to truthful information and the harm, the social harm, the harm to our society and our democracy and not our health and safety by treating lies and truth as having equal standing.
That problem that really showed the differences in how America and the USA and Brazil have treated this question in much deeper ways.
Michael Fox: Absolutely. Absolutely. Max, I want to bring in an important figure here. His name is Aleshande de Morais.
Fabio de Saisilva just mentioned him. He’s a member of the Brazilian Supreme Court and he presided over the Supreme Electoral Court during the 2022 elections. As you will hear today, he has been a major thorn in the side of Bolshonato and his supporters for years, but he’s not necessarily left wing. He’s a bit of a wild card. He was appointed by Michelle Temmer, who was the right wing president back in 2017. Bolsonado supporters understandably hate him. After President Lula, he’s pretty much public enemy number one for the right and they’ve actually compared him to Superman’s archenemy Lex Luther. I know you like that reference, Max. He kind of does actually look like him, which is the reason why they make this comparison. Mordaise is the top person who they have accused of censorship in recent years. Trump and his supporters have joined the campaign because Aleshander Morais has been the top Supreme Court judge in Brazil to push back on Bolsonaro’s measures during his presidency and the fake news over the last eight years and the power of US social media companies in Brazil, which we’ll get into in a second.
But as Fabio Desai Silva says, he didn’t ever do it alone.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: He was backed, for the most part, he was backed by two courts because he sat on the superior electoral court where he handled some cases that had to do with speech and he sits on the Supreme Court where he handled other of such cases. And like I said, he was for the most part backed by if not all the other justices in those courts by the vast majority of those justices.
Michael Fox: But he was always the most visible figure, Lex Luther, but a good guy if you like democracy. Anyway, he was also the judge charged with investigating what would become known as Bolshonato’s hate cabinet. And this is crazy, Max. I don’t know if you remember hearing about this, but imagine if you will, a troll farm inside the White House with connections to right-wing influencers within the United States who used their power, influence and social media prominence to attack political opponents. This is what you had in Bolshinado’s government.
Maximillian Alvarez: Wait, that’s what we got now, baby.
Michael Fox: That’s what we have now. Okay, true. But this is an actual entity. It’s like its own little office within Brazilia. Fabio de Sali Silva, talk to me about this.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: As far as we know, it was a relatively well organized and hierarchical structure where you had people whose job was to produce content. You had people then outside of the presidency, big influencers whose job was to disseminate the content.
Michael Fox: This is all coordinated so they would target someone and say, “We want to take this person out. ” And it wasn’t always someone on the left. In many cases, it was a bolsonado supporter who split with bolsonado or criticized bolsonado for some reason. And they say, “This is the enemy of the day.” And everyone would just pile on posting whatever they could about that person to intimidate them and make them stop criticizing bolsonada or whatever. And when you say it’s what we have now, in many ways it’s true because there is no doubt in my mind that this tactic is influenced not just by… It didn’t just come out of thin air in Brazil. Clearly the far right is organizing when it has to do with tactics and things like this.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. And Bolsonaro is like government. It was like sort of a department within a government that was still trying to present itself as a government. In the United States, it’s Trump. And so the fish drops from the head down. So it’s just like Trump is the megaphone who owns his own social media platform who is sicking his entire government apparatus and his billionaire oligarch network to gobble up all the legacy media, destroy the ones that he doesn’t like, yada, yada, yada.
Michael Fox: So Ali Shander de Morais is the point person for the investigations. He coordinates this together with the federal police and they work to undo this and they do an incredible job at it. So they issue search and seizure warrants, arrest warrants. Some Bolsonaro influencers went to jail, others had their social media accounts blocked. And this is just another example of why Morais is so hated by Bolsonaro and his people. Anyway, 2022. Lulu wins the elections, but then Bolsonaro supporters hit the streets.
Maximillian Alvarez: The president’s office may have conceded a feat, but many of J. Bolsonaro’s millions of supporters have not
Michael Fox: They’re spurred on by Bolsonaro’s claims of fraud in the elections. They block roads across the country. They set up vigils in front of military barracks all across Brazil demanding that the military rise up to overturn the results and they stay there for more than two months and then on January 8th, 2023. Balsinado supporters invade the Brazilian Congress and Supreme Court. They attacked the buildings causing more than $3 million in damage in a copycat performance of January 6th, 2021, Washington.
I should probably also say that the police response, because we’re talking about free speech right now, but I should probably say that the police response to the Bolsonaro protests before January 8th was initially pretty lenient, like far more lenient than you would see in the United States if thousands of people decided to block roads all across the country and then set up vigils in front of military barracks, you probably wouldn’t see that like, “Okay, you can stay there.” But in Brazil, they basically let him do what they needed to do. But after January 8th, when it was clear that an attempted coup was underway, the response was far quicker than in the wake of January 6th in the United States.
They did away with the encampments. Hundreds were arrested in Brazilia. The Supreme Court would convict more than 1,400 people for their involved in the Capitol invasion in Brazilia. Hundreds are still in jail. I mention this all because like in the United States, many of the claims that Brazil has been imprisoning political opposition come from the legal response to the country’s capital invasion. In other words, some of the people that they call political prisoners are those people who are in jail or who were in jail or who were convicted by the Supreme Court for their role in the Capitol invasion. But again, this comes back to the idea of the importance of democracy in Brazil and particular Brazil’s interpretation of free speech. The point is here, you have a right to protest. You have a right to speak. You even have a right to protest for months.
You just don’t have a right to try to overthrow the country and don’t mess with the country’s democracy. June 30th, 2023, six months after Brazil’s capital invasion. The Supreme Electoral Court bans Bolsonaro from running for political office for eight years for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Five judges agreed that he used government channels and social media to spread misinformation about Brazil’s elections.
The ruling focused on this meeting that Bolsonaro held a few months before the election, where he told foreign ambassadors that the country’s electoral voting system was rigged and the elections could be manipulated. Of course, this was despite the fact that Brazil’s electoral system had long been internationally recognized as safe and secure. Brazilians celebrated the ruling across the country. It was the first time a Brazilian president had been borrowed from holding public office for election violations. Bolsonaro denounced the judgment against him calling it politically motivated. Max, can you ever imagine something like this happening in the United States?
Maximillian Alvarez: Now, no, but I think a lot of us had still had lingering hope that our institutions would hold and that we would prove ourselves capable of this as well, but we didn’t.
Michael Fox: So I just want to focus on this point I made at the very beginning of the episode right now to kind of tie this into where we were at the beginning. Remember how I mentioned that the two paths diverge between the United States and Brazil. Clearly I’m generalizing, but in many ways, this is one of those moments where you can really tell the difference. Bolsonaro is blocked from holding electoral office. Meanwhile, in the United States, Trump continues being Trump. It
Donald Trump [Recording]: Is great to be your president. It is great.
Michael Fox: In Brazil, something else is happening at the same time Bolsonaro is banned from holding office. There is a nationwide debate over a new bill that would regulate social media platforms as if they were television or radio. Tech platforms push back with all of their might. Telegram, for instance, sends millions of Brazilians a message telling them that if Brazil passes the law, it will “end freedom of expression.” Congressional leaders attack the message on the floor of the lower house. The head of the government coalition of the Senate, Randolph Rodriguez, told press, “To the heads of the big tech companies and their shareholders, Brazil will not be no man’s land. It’s a threat against Brazilian democracy. We need regulation. The big tech companies say they are tech companies, but more and more they’re acting like communication companies and our telecommunication sector has been regulated since 1964. Social media is the same.
Brazil had suddenly become the battleground over the power of tech companies to remain unregulated and free to push their agenda. At the time I sat down with David Nemer. He’s a Brazilian University of Virginia communications professor who studied social media platforms for years. And he told me that these platforms, as we’ve looked at in this podcast, they are not neutral.
David Nemer: These platforms are not just publishers. They are part of the message as well in curating the message.
Michael Fox: And this bill is really just about bringing transparency from big techs.
David Nemer: In terms of access to the algorithm, access to reports about the algorithm, understanding how these platforms behave. So we have a more transparent way of understanding how these platforms, like the role of these platforms in everyday life. This is why the big techs are playing hardball in Brazil because they know that if Brazil pisses this bell, then it sets the precedent and the other countries will follow as well.
Michael Fox: Sxzo that was enough for these tech firms to fight tooth and nail and the bill stalled in Congress. Max Brazilian lawmakers, they want to regulate the social media platform, say its censorship. Where do you stand on this? Do we need regulations for tech firms and social media platforms?
Maximillian Alvarez: I mean, absolutely. And when I say yes, we need regulation. I don’t want the current powers that be being the ones who to regulate it, nor do I want the ones who are in power before to be the ones regulating it. So do I think they need to be regulated? Yes. Do I think we need a better system of regulation and a better sort of societal understanding of what the hell regulation is and is for? Yes. But right now that ain’t going to happen in this country where the worst parts of capitalism will kill the best parts of democracy. Any semblance of an understanding of free speech that we have had as Americans that gets that free speech is important for a healthy democratic society has been eroded by this sort of individualistic consumer capitalist model of free speech for me is the only thing that matters.
Like my rights and my ability to say whatever I want whenever I want is the only point of free speech and no one can take that away. But it’s like Margaret Thatcher saying society doesn’t exist. There’s only a collection of individuals in pursuit of their own self-interest.
That’s what they have tried to make true in America. Out of the same country that birthed so many incredible contributions to democratic history, that same country has been overtaken by this democracy killing capitalist serving system.
Michael Fox: Well, no, and it’s interesting that you mentioned Margaret Thatcher because I got into this a little bit several episodes ago. We don’t think that, for instance, a financial system can be completely unregulated. You have to have rules. It can’t just be a free for all. There have to be certain rules or else what happens? You have massive monopolies. You have massive corporations with huge power, which we do right now, but still there needs to be regulations and all these things. And it works the same way with social media platforms and with communications. That’s why we have communications, telecommunications laws. That’s why TV and radio are regulated. Newspapers are regulated. The way that most people get their news nowadays is through social media. There has to be some form of regulation. It can’t just be a free for all, but these companies are using the discourse of free speech in order to push their vision for the world and really sell their agenda, really push their bottom line, their profit margin.
They don’t want to be regulated because they’re a business. And of course, now they’re in cahoots with Trump even more.
Maximillian Alvarez: America is the land of deregulation. And so when we say we need to regulate these companies and that we live in a more deregulated kind of society, I don’t know if people outside of America fully grasp how deregulated we are. I mean, look at the way that big tech has forced AI into our lives with like no regulations whatsoever. And look at the effects that it’s having on our society, on our politics, on our children, on our sense of truth. I mean, it’s such a big world changing technology that has been allowed to just kind of flood every device that we use and change society however it’s going to under a system where the companies that own and invest in these technologies are consolidating power and collaborating with state power to ultimately, like you said, serve their agenda. And their agenda is basically continue to twist and bend and force the world to be something that continuously delivers more and more power and wealth to them at our expense.
Michael Fox: So I want to underline something here that underscores the question at the heart of this debate and I think is really important. All of these tech companies are from abroad. None of them are in Brazil, mostly from the United States, but not all. And they’re all pushing their corporate agenda, wrapped in the discourse of free speech, but they’re companies. They’re concerned with profit like you were just talking about Max and yet they’re actually attacking the sovereignty of foreign countries in the name of free speech. There’s something just so wrong with this, but because of the way that this discourse kind of permeates into the mainstream or the way that it’s covered and the way that they sell it, that’s not the way that people read this. It’s usually seen, oh, well, Brazil is censoring speech, whatever else. But here’s the thing, Max, Brazil’s battle with the tech platforms is just heating up.
Fast forward one year August, 2024. Brazil’s dispute with tech billionaire Elon Musk is heating up. One of Brazil’s. Elon Musk. Richest man on earth, owner of Tesla SpaceX, old buddy of Trump’s, or I guess frenemy now perhaps. Of course, he ran Doge, Department of Government Efficiency in the first 120 days of Trump’s second term. Remember that he bought Twitter in 2022 and transformed it into X. So in August, 2024, he begins to butt heads with our friend, Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Aleshandre Morais, who we introduced earlier. Mordais orders X to take down a number of users on Musk’s platform who are actively sharing fake news online and who in some cases are wanted by the Brazilian judiciary. They are all supporters of far right President Bolsonaro and here’s just one example of someone Morais ordered to be taken offline. Alen Lopez Do Santos. He’s a Brazilian blogger who fled to the United States after being under investigation in two Supreme Court inquiries for threatening justices, spreading false content online and financing anti-Democratic acts.
Musk refuses Mordeise’s order. He calls it censorship. His app X still works in the country, but he pulls his team out of Brazil so they can’t face reprisals from the Brazilian judiciary. In response on August 30th
Speaker: A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has ordered the immediate suspension of the social media platform X in Brazil, meaning people there can no longer acces or use it. Ex-owner Elon Musk failed to meet a deadline set by the court to name a new legal representative in the country. The Brazilian court and –
Michael Fox: Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and an unelected pseudo judge in Brazil is destroying it for political purposes. I spoke with Fabio de Saisilv about this.
Fabio de Sa e Silva: Elon Musk is a businessman and like all businessmen, he doesn’t want to see his business regulated and this is what the Brazilian judiciary is doing indirectly to the extent that Mr. Musk’s platform is hosting speech that’s contrary to Brazilian law in different ways and the judiciary is pushing back against that.
Michael Fox: Again, these are corporations pushing their bottom line and Musk is also a free speed absolutist aligned with the far right. Aleshandani Morais pushes back defending his opinion. He says basically. Spread hate, racism, misogyny, and homophobia. David Nemer.
Donald Trump [Recording]: The Brazilian politicians have very specific interest in keeping Twitter the way it is. They prevail because of misinformation. They prevail because of hate speech that they promote and in Brazil, that’s not allowed. So they need a platform to create that sort of engagement and build their base. So it’s like a win-win situation for both of them.
Michael Fox: X was blocked for 40 days until the company finally gave in. Musk paid the fines and began taking down the accounts ordered removed by Morais. So in the end, X did everything that Morais wanted them to, but Musk created this whole problem for himself in the meantime and actually convinced thousands, if not hundreds of thousands or millions of Brazilians that they should move to other platforms because during those 40 days, they couldn’t use Twitter. So a bunch of people started moving to Blue Sky or Mastodon or other places. Max, did you see this unfolding? Do you remember watching this?
Maximillian Alvarez: Not only do I remember watching it, I mean, I’ve lived through it and I’ve tried to navigate a media organization through it. Musk buying Twitter was a seismic change to our industry, the entire kind of way that our public discourse operated and who participated in it, right? I mean, the Twitter of old was in no way perfect. None of these platforms are, but it was a space where politicians, corporations, journalists, artists like public figures of all sorts kind of had access to each other in a way that they never had before and it is not that after Musk bought it. And I would actually just push back when you called Elon Musk a free speech absolutist, he is absolutely not a free speech absolutist. I mean, I think so many people on the right, particularly people in power on the right, like Musk embodies what in the internet age has come to be known as Wilhoit’s law, which boils down to this quote, which was actually left in a comment section on the internet, but it so succinctly articulated this problem that it’s become a meme in and of itself.
But Wilhoit’s law states that conservatism consists of exactly one proposition to which there must be in groups whom the law protects but does not bind alongside outgroups whom the law binds but does not protect. I think this applies not just to kind of like how people like Elon Musk see free speech. It’s always free speech for me and the people who agree with me and not for thee. Musk has censored plenty of people on X. Totally. Musk artificially alters the algorithm so that it’s artificially like visibilizing certain views over others.That’s the way that this stuff operates. And then you add on top of that, like you said, just the bare fact of these people are businessmen and capitalists whose primary goal is to get more money and power for themselves.
Michael Fox: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s so important because what we often see is so – called self-described free speech absolutists use that discourse to say that, “Oh, I believe in free speech for everybody and it’s part of this image,” which is exactly what Musk is. When he bought then Twitter, now X, his whole thing was, “Oh, I believe in free speech and everyone should have it. ” But in the end of the day, what they’re actually doing is canceling and censoring people that don’t believe in their viewpoint.
Maximillian Alvarez: And this is, again, the continuing line of how the sort of media ecosystem in America, it’s not just Musk and X. This is why the freaking Ellison family who just acquired Warner Brothers also has control of CBS and a controlling stake in the American owned TikTok. This is why Silicon Valley oligarch and Trump advisor Mark and Dreesen is the primary backer of Substack. This is why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, right? This is why Mark Zuckerberg controls not just Facebook but Instagram and WhatsApp and threads and so much more. You can subvert the sort of democratic principles of a healthy public sphere in which truth wins out through debate, inquiry and honest, open discussion by buying all of the platforms and networks and artificially imposing your designs and desires on the discourse and subject everyone else who depends on it for their information.That’s kind of how things work in this country.
Michael Fox: And here’s the thing, it’s not just the tech platforms. Far right activists have also been pushing their agenda of free speech absolutism or quote free speech absoluism and using it to cry censorship against Brazil. Here’s an example. The
Speaker: Hearing of the subcommittee will come to order and I want to welcome our very distinguished witnesses and –
Michael Fox: May 7th, 2024. Republican leaders held a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It’s titled Brazil: A Crisis of Democracy Freedom and the Rule of Law. The hearing was chaired by New Jersey Republican Representative Chris Smith. He kicked off the meeting.
US Rep. Chris Smith: Since late 2022, Brazilians have been subject to grave human rights violations committed by Brazilian officials on a vast scale. Documented right violations in Brazil include the political abuse of legal procedures to persecute political opposition, including jailing opposition figures on sparious charges, violations of freedom of speech and media freedom, including persecution of journalists, the silencing of opposition media, banning individuals from social media, thinly veiled censorship laws claiming to fight disinformation and many violations of rule of law and judicial malfeasance.
Michael Fox: If you heard what he was saying, you would imagine that the country had been taken over by a tinpot dictatorship and not just saved from an attempted coup. Among the individuals invited to speak are Paolo Figueredo, the son of the former Brazilian dictator, Christopher Favlotsky, the Canadian founder of the video platform, Rumble, considered the right-wing YouTube. And unsurprisingly, they painted a terribly disturbing vision of Brazil as if the country had fallen into an authoritarian censorship regime.
Donald Trump [Recording]: There’s one single name behind every one of these decisions. That’s Alexander DeMaris. Remember this name. He’s the defacto dictator of Brazil.
Michael Fox: Rumble will never back down from our mission. We are the tip of the spear in this fight and we relish that. We urge everyone, especially the US State Department to join us. The other person invited to speak at the hearing, the only legal expert invited, in fact, Brazilian University of Oklahoma Professor Fabio Desai Silva. Remember, I’ve been speaking with him throughout the episode.
Speaker: In your assessment, how high was the risk of the coup succeeding had then President Bolsonaro managed to gain the support of these branches of the armed forces?
Fabio de Sa e Silva: Thank you, Congresswoman. It was very high. I believe when you draft a decree outlining what’s going to happen once the military take over, which in some versions of this drafting even included the arrest of Justice Mogais. I think you’re trying to anticipate what you’re going to do when push comes to shove.
Michael Fox: And Fabio told me that he was there to basically clarify that in Brazil
Fabio de Sa e Silva: It has been a violation of the law to articulate speech that’s intended to undermine confidence, public confidence in the electoral system if you don’t have any proof of that as well as to, as I was mentioning before, pit the military against civilian power and incentivize the military to take over because of the history of the country. So one of the reasons why I was there was precisely to share my knowledge of Brazilian law and to show to the people in Congress that You cannot say that the Brazilian judiciary is abusing its powers because it’s holding people accountable for committing those violations of the law. And even if in the United States, these things would not be necessarily a crime or could not be criminalized. In Brazil, it’s been well established in Brazilian law that you can’t do those things. You can’t convey those messages, especially if you are in office sitting in the president’s office and therefore having all that attention at your disposal as the chief executive in the country.
Michael Fox: So that was 2024 and that’s happening on Capitol Hill Max. These are the debates that are happening in Washington, which are then pushing this image that there is censorship happening in Brazil. And it’s the same thing we’ve seen from Trump time and time again and his people is that if you repeat a lie long enough, then it becomes truth. But the threats from Washington and Silicon Valley are ongoing.
Speaker: Also developing this morning, the Trump administration placing sanctions on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice over concerns of human rights violations and politicized prosecutions.
Michael Fox: Just last year, alongside the 50% tariff on Brazil that Trump levied that we started this episode, the United States also issued sanctions on Supreme Court Justice Alice Andre Morais and his wife.
Speaker: Well, look, Muris is an activist judge that abused his authority by engaging in a targeted and politically motivated effort designed to silence political critics through the issuance of secret orders, compelling online platforms, including US social media companies, banning the accounts of individuals for posting protected speech. The actions taken by Muris impact US persons and companies and the United States did not tolerate maligned foreign actors who abuse their positions of authority to undermine freedom of expression of American citizens.
Michael Fox: Mordeise called the sanctions illegal and deplorable. He said the court would not quote bow to cowardly and fruitless threats and that he would ignore the sanctions. The sanctions were later dropped in December of last year, shortly after Trump also removed the 50% tariff he levied on Brazil. But the thing is, is here again, it’s the use of this vision of literally fake news and a false narrative to spread these lies in order to undermine a Democratic country, Brian Meir.
Brian Mier: The American far right supported by these crypto fascist libertarians in Silicon Valley like Elon Musk has teamed up through Steve Bannon, the point man between the US far right and the Brazilian far right and the bolsonaros and their allies to try and force a change in Brazilian laws citing free speech absolutism to legalize Nazis in Brazil and other hate groups and to undo the hate speech legislation and things like that. And the reason the Silicon Valley tech fascist social media companies are interested in this is that it’s to eliminate any kind of liability for their platforms being used to disseminate hate speech. And so they’re interested in weakening Brazil’s regulatory atmosphere so that they can’t be held liable for crimes, currently crimes committed on their platforms by Brazilians.
Michael Fox: And the problem, Max, is that this is not the end of what the far right and the US campaign is planning against the government in Brazil. There are high stakes elections happening again this October. President Lula will be running against him is Bolsonaro’s senator son Flavia Bolsonaro.
Speaker: At the end of this last year, my father gave me the greatest mission of my life to run for president in his place in October 2026 elections.
Michael Fox: Flavio recently wrote to Marco Rubio and told him that if he won, he would be willing to place a transition team at the disposal of the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump is considering new tariffs on Brazil over the country’s financial system of payments and the US government has placed Brazil’s two largest gangs on the US foreign terrorist list. So it all is clearly leading up to the October vote. It’s clear that Trump and his people will be pulling out all the stops to influence the elections in the same way they’ve done all across so many other countries in Latin America. Brazil at this point is one of only a handful of countries still on the left in Latin America. All of the others have fallen to Trump’s sphere of influence and many are concerned that the US pressure is going to only get worse in the coming months and it will likely be using free speech as a weapon, using it in absolute free speech terms.
Brian Meir told me that they’ve been successful in Brazil with that language because it’s become a rallying cry for the far right.
Brian Mier: And so free speech is one of those things. It’s on their list of things that weaponizing anti-corruption, rhetoric against leftist politicians. And this take of free speech is definitely a weaponization of the concept of free speech.
Michael Fox: But he says it’s not necessarily an end in itself. It’s just a tactic for the far right to achieve its goals.
Brian Mier: That’s what it really comes down to. I don’t even know how much these tech fascists even believe in their own ideology. It’s just being spread around because the end goal from a business standpoint is to have total regulatory liberty or freedom. I feel bad calling it freedom, but total deregulation so that they can’t have any kind of scrutiny. They can’t be punished in any way for collectively brainwashing large segments of the population to supporting them and their goals.
Michael Fox: This is a really useful tool, this kind of absolutist free speech framework. And we’ve seen over these platforms, speech has become privatized. It’s not about our right to speak freely. What these tech platforms and absolutist free speeches are pushing is the censorship of other viewpoints of free speech in the name of their vision of free speech. It’s again, like I’ve talked about so oftentimes in this podcast, censorship in the name of free speech.
Maximillian Alvarez: So like the very reality of the world that we live in today kind of proves that free speech needs to mean more than just like my ability to say what I want when I want.
It’s much more complicated than that. These big tech oligarchs and the platforms that they own, the oligarchs who own the legacy media that we still have, they are proving that you can accomplish censorship in a number of ways while still sort of ostensibly bearing the flag of freedom of speech.
Michael Fox: Yes, absolutely. Max, I want to close on a couple of thoughts here that I think are really important for this discussion and also that shine a little bit of positive light on things that were where they are right now despite everything. First, in Brazil, according to recent surveys, roughly 60% of Brazilians are in favor of some form of social media regulation. According to a Nexus poll from this time last year, 80% of Brazilians believe social media companies should take more responsibility for the content they publish online. 60% of those surveys say they believed digital platforms should remove more posts than they do and 60% of Brazilians said that regulating these platforms is essential to tackling anti-democratic content and hate speech. There is a 2014 Brazilian law titled the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which was really important when it came out and it can be used to hold companies accountable in some cases, in particular when they don’t apply with court orders to remove content, but that doesn’t specifically regulate tech companies or apply in other cases, but that’s one thing that can be used and is used.
The other thing that people are thinking about is how to democratize this space in particularly around what we want, public policy. So I spoke with Fernando Paulino. He’s a communications professor from the University of Brazilia. He’s the guy we heard up from up top and I love how he says this, Max. He said we should be thinking in terms not of freedom but of fairness.
Fernando Paulino: It’s important to establish these parameters, especially during electoral periods to organize fair competition. I think maybe we need to use this word as well, maybe the society needs more fair, more accountable, more equal principles to defend and promote democracy
Michael Fox: We talk about free and fair elections, but oftentimes there’s so many barriers to actually holding those elections, but the same thing works within the communication sphere in which in social media. How do we create equal principles to defend and promote democracy and to replace the authoritarian push that we’ve seen recently? And I think what’s important about this is also to look at something that Brazil’s been really successful at over the last 30, 40 years since democratization. Like I’ve mentioned in this episode, Brazilians really care about their democracy. And so one of the things that they’ve done really well since the end of the dictatorship is pushed to try and incorporate all sectors of society in the decision making of public policies
Fernando Paulino: To involve social organizations, universities, researchers, to expand the debate about communication and democracy. And I think especially in terms of the social media regulation and the internet context right now, this debate expanded a lot with more people involved in this discussion.
Michael Fox: And I think this is really, really important because what Trump and Silicon Valley tech moguls are largely demanding is corporate free speech, not free speech for everybody. They want speech that can be decided behind closed doors. They want speech where there’s hidden algorithms in which nobody knows what they are and they’re decided by Musk or some high end people within these social media firms. That is not free. That does not create a free media. That doesn’t create free speech. It’s the exact opposite. And so what Fernando talks about is the need for diversity when we build public policies around things like social media, online speech and regulations.
We need to think about how do we make these decisions in which more people are included, other voices are included, and not just rich powerful men from Silicon Valley. I think this is really important as we’re looking forward and trying to grapple with these questions, free speech, the whole idea of free speech is it has to be at the root of our democracy. And if it is leading us in the direction of less speech, if it is leading us in the direction not of democracy, but of authoritarianism, if it’s leading us in the direction of a space where less people have a voice and less people have the ability for their speech to be heard, then something is drastically wrong. And this goes back a little bit, Max, to what I was talking about in the last episode with Maryanne Franks.
Speaker: The First Amendment’s one job is to keep us from becoming a totalitarian society. That’s its primary job. Everything else is secondary. And if your free speech doctrine, if your free speech law isn’t keeping us from sliding into fascism, but is instead accelerating our path to fascism, then it’s not working.
Michael Fox: And I think we need to look at what do we want from our free speech? What do we want of our media sphere? And this is something that people in Brazil are trying to grapple with. When they weren’t able to pass the social media regulation law, then they started to piecemeal things. And so they started to look at, okay, well, let’s pass a law having to do with children and social media. Let’s look at this other case. And so they’re looking at how to break this apart and pass these smaller laws in order to still get in the direction they want to get into. We need to understand speech within democracy. And if that is being undermined as it clearly is right now and when countries like the United States are using the discourse of free speech to attack and undermine the Democratic principles of a foreign sovereign nation, we absolutely have a problem and we need to understand it like that.
Maximillian Alvarez: Mike, you said earlier that Brazilians are very proud of their democracy. I don’t think a lot of Americans are anymore. I think that we grew up to feel proud about it, but like right now there’s so little to be proud about. But also like I remember growing up again in the ’90s and early aughts and sort of being berated by older generations of how we didn’t know what these freedoms meant. We didn’t know what it meant to sacrifice and die for our country and the freedom of speech and freedom of religion and yada, yada, yada. And that was the sort of message that we got, but simultaneous with you should be grateful for all the rights that you have and go live the best life that you can with them. And like now is the moment where we got to fight for something and it’s not just something we got to fight for everything.
Everything that we hold dear is at risk of going away. Democracy and all the people who fought for that idea over the centuries is at risk and we are now the ones who have to pick up that fight. And I don’t know about you, brother, but like I’m ready to rumble. Like I said, I ain’t going down without a fight and I’m not giving up on these principles. This is too beautiful of a country. This is too important of an idea and people’s lives are worth too much to just give up on so that Jeff Bezos can have three more yachts and Elon Musk can have another trillion dollars and a space rocket to Mars. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That is unacceptable and I will not accept it. Neither will you and neither should anyone listening to this.
Michael Fox: Max, thank you so much for joining me, man. I really appreciate it. It’s been fantastic.
Maximillian Alvarez: Thanks for having me, brother. Sorry I talked so much.
Michael Fox: Folks, that is all for now. Thanks for listening. Next time we hop across the pond to Europe to take a deep look at their definition of free speech, how countries there are fighting disinformation and also grappling with these same questions of social media. That’s next time on The Battle for Free Speech. If you enjoyed today’s podcast and you like this series, please do us a favor. Go to your podcasting app and give us a like, a follow, a subscribe, or tell a friend about it and leave us a comment or a review. It really helps to spread the word about the show and the state of free speech in the United States today. This podcast is now on Blue Sky, not X. Just search for the Battle for Free Speech. If you’d like to find out more about the Battle for Free Speech and my work on other podcasts, you can find me at patreon.com/mfox, or you can follow the link in the show notes.
There you can also support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of all the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work. I’m adding links to all the people who I spoke with today in the show notes. A huge thanks and shout out to Max Alvarez. You can find his Working People Podcast wherever you listen. Also, please make sure to sign up for the Real News Network’s newsletter so you never miss an episode. You can find that at therealnews.com. The Battle for Free Speech is a production of the Real News. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
NEW YORK: Oil prices climbed in early trading Wednesday, building on the previous session’s sharp gains, as overnight military exchanges between the United States and Iran escalated tensions in the Middle East and revived fears of supply disruptions through a critical global shipping chokepoint. Brent crude futures rose $1.03, or 1.1%, to $95.68 a barrel ... Read more
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ISLAMABAD: Pakistan is set to sign long-delayed agreements with five oil refineries, unlocking more than $6 billion in planned upgrades to modernize aging plants and cut reliance on fuel imports, officials said. But industry warnings that changes to the financial framework could derail the projects overshadowed the announcement. The agreements with Pak-Arab Refinery Ltd., Pakistan ... Read more
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"Any citizen can get shot. This is not going to calm down," warned Julien Moinil, (pictured) the King's Prosecutor of Brussels, during a press conference on Friday, dedicated to the recent wave of violence linked to drug trafficking. Approximately 150 shootings have been recorded since the firearm attack on 5 February 2025 at Metro station Clémenceau. Accompanied by the head of the Brussels-Midi police zone, Jurgen De Landsheer, and the director of the Federal Judicial Police of Brussels, Eric Jacobs, the prosecutor outlined recent events, the judicial response, and several points of concern.
The current wave began on 20 August. It is believed to be related to a conflict between two groups involved in drug sales. Three individuals have been arrested in connection with the shootings over the past few weeks. Around a hundred shooters have also been detained since the violence started. No link has currently been established between this conflict and the shootings targeting the police station last weekend in Anderlecht. "They have touched a sensitive point: a police station," emphasized Julien Moinil. No one has been injured, but the prosecutor reminded everyone of the daily risks police officers face and assured them of the prosecution's support. He praised the work of both local and federal police but called for structural investment.
The current prosecutor's office staff includes 49 magistrates out of the 63 planned. He reiterated his requests for more investigators in the federal judicial police and the installation of jamming devices at Haren prison, noting that at least one mastermind operating from a cell has been definitively identified. "The solution must not only come from the Justice Department," insisted Julien Moinil, calling for mobilization of the social and health sectors as well. He advocates activating a task force led by the prime minister.
15-year-old girl allegedly stabbed by her 18-year-old sister in Gujranwala, police say.
The post Sister allegedly kills younger sister over TikTok followers appeared first on BOL News.
Oil prices rose more than 2% Monday after the United States attacked an Iranian island in the Strait of Hormuz and drew retaliation from Tehran, as the six-month-old conflict between the two countries showed no signs of easing. Brent crude futures climbed $2.21, or 2.51%, to $90.31 a barrel as of 0436 GMT. U.S. West ... Read more
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Inquiry report identifies shortcomings in hospital facilities, emergency response and staff presence.
The post PIMS inquiry finds major gaps in hospital safety appeared first on BOL News.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva launched his campaign for a fourth and final term before thousands of supporters in São Bernardo do Campo, promising to keep fighting poverty and investing in Brazil’s future. His challenger: Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, running in place of his father, former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest after being convicted of attempting a coup. US President Donald Trump has backed the Bolsonaros with tariffs, visa revocations, and open pressure — what experts call a new era of US dominance over Latin America.
Michael Fox reports from São Paulo, with voices from Lula’s campaign launch, evangelical Bolsonaro supporters on the streets of São Paulo, and foreign relations professor Igor Fuser.
Credits:
The campaigns are underway ahead of Brazil’s October elections
And U.S. President Donald Trump is doing his best to sway the vote…
“Lula, Lula!”
Thousands of supporters of leftist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva attended his campaign launch in mid August.
Karen Silva
“We came to support Lula, especially in his last election. And we believe that we are going to win. This is a fact.”
They filled May 1st Stadium in Sao Bernardo do Campo….
A place, where Lula led an iconic metal workers strike and rally in 1979.
They say Lula has changed their lives.
Raimunda Silva Santos
“Yeah, he changed my life. He changed the life of my whole family.”
During his years in office, he promoted education, health and social programs. He helped to lift millions from poverty. They have not forgotten.
Raimunda Silva Santos
“Wow, this is the greatest joy of my life. I’m 76 years old. I’m so happy. Lula is coming to stay. He’s an incredible person. He’s helped a lot of people there in the northeast. We owe a lot to Lula.”
They want him back for a fourth and final term.
Valmir Lima, Movement of People Affected by Dams
“Lula will win with the strength of social movements, of the movements of people affected by dams, all the social movements that are helping on his campaign. And all of civil society.”
Applause
Lula has promised to continue to fight poverty, promote industry, create jobs and invest in Brazil’s future.
Lula
“What kind of a future do you want for the Brazilian people if you don’t invest in education? What future do you want for the Brazilian people if you don’t invest in health? What future do you want if you don’t invest in jobs?”
Lula
“We need to win these elections. To elect our people to congress so we can do everything we need to do for this country.”
Lula’s challenger is the son of the former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.
His name is Flavio Bolsonaro. He’s a Senator and he launched his campaign in his hometown of Rio de Janeiro.
Flavio Bolsonaro
“Come with me and rescue our nation. Brazil above all. God above everyone. Brazil above all. God above everyone!”
Flavio is in the race, because his father is under house arrest.
Former president Jair Bolsonaro was first barred from running for spreading lies about the country’s electoral system. Last year, he was convicted of attempting to carry out a coup to return to power.
His son, Flavio, has attacked the left, and promised to fight crime and insecurity, cut bureaucracy, promote private business and privatizations, and develop close ties with the United States
He spoke at the US Conservative Political Action Conference in March.
Flavio
“Let me look you in the eyes and tell you,“we will win.”
Much of his discourse, and that of his supporters, is wrapped in a religious language of good versus evil.
“You are the son of hope. You are the first born. You received the legacy of representing your father. And now, for everything that is more sacred on the face of the earth, honor your father. Honor his days on earth.”
That goes over well with his evangelical supporters, an important base for Bolsonaro and far-right politicians in Brazil.
Glayson Araujo is a youth pastor at an evangelical church in a working class neighborhood of São Paulo. He joined others on the streets in mid August to promote Bolsonaro and other far-right candidates running for local office.
Glayson Araujo
“I believe that Flavio Bolsonaro is the only viable candidate, who can beat Lula and the Workers Party.”
Glayson Araujo
“I am a Christian here, I behave as a Christian, but I am also a political activist. Here on the streets to defend my beliefs.”
Flavio Bolsonaro also has powerful support in high places.
In particular… from Donald Trump.
The U.S. president is a longtime ally of his father, Jair Bolsonaro.
Last year, Trump imposed 50% tariffs on Brazil, in part, because of the country’s trial against the former president. In May, Trump met with Flavio Bolsonaro at the White House. In June, he reposted an article over Truth Social that said Brazil was his next big challenge. He recently imposed new tariffs on the country and revoked the U.S. visa of the Brazilian ambassador.
Igor Fuser is a professor of foreign relations at Brazil’s ABC Federal University.
Igor Fuser
“This is not just about the United States trying to remove the government of a left-wing party, the workers Party or a left-wing leader, which is Lula. It’s about subjecting Brazil to the policies of the United States. And Brazil, being the largest country in Latin America, is precisely the biggest obstacle to the American project of global dominance of the Western Hemisphere.”
Over the last year, Trump has pushed the United States into a new era of dominance over Latin America the likes of which the region has not seen in decades.
Boat strikes in the Caribbean. The U.S. invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of president Nicolas Maduro. The oil blockade on Cuba.
And Trump throwing his weight around… and meddling in elections across Latin America.
It is all justified by a renewed Monroe Doctrine…
Pete Hegseth
”President Trump has established the Trump corollary of the Monroe Doctrine, the Donroe Doctrine. And the War Department is implementing it as fast as we can.”
Brazil is the latest battleground.
Igor Fuser
“So, it is clear that the United States is doing everything, and will do everything possible to prevent the re-election of Lula in the next elections.”
Fuser says that if Flavio Bolsonaro wins, he will bow to Trump and the United States.
Igor Fuser
“Brazil will become a country under the tutelage of the United States, a colony, or almost a colony, of the United States, as it already happens with Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela, and many others. And if Lula is victorious in these elections, we will live a very intense period of confrontation between the two countries.”
Fuser says the U.S. stated dominance over Latin America imposed by Trump is analogous to the control of the Soviet Union over the Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, under a Russian foreign policy imposed by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in 1968.
Igor Fuser
“So, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, all those countries were formally independent countries, with their own government, their own laws, their representation in the United Nations, but these countries were not autonomous, they did not have sovereignty. Any movement that they made that clashed with the interests of the Soviet Union was repressed. Some of them were invaded, etc. So, we are living in Latin America a Brezhnev Doctrine, capitalist, imperialist, dictated by Donald Trump.”
Lula has accused Trump of trying to influence Brazil’s October election. Lula’s allies are taking action ahead of the vote…. to stand up to Trump and to push for Lula’s reelection. Brazil has denied visas to U.S. State Department officials who they feared wanted to travel to Brazil to cast doubt about the country’s electoral system. People are hitting the streets to campaign for Lula, who has long stood against U.S. intervention in Latin America. Over the next two months, Brazil will be a key battleground for Latin American sovereignty against Trump’s attack on the region.
For The Real News, I’m Michael Fox. Sao Paulo, Brazil.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio described NATO’s July gathering in Ankara, two months before it convened, as “one of the more important leaders’ summits in [its] history.” The summit confirmed that Europeans have accepted America’s expectation that they do more for their own security. The Ankara declaration recognised that “European allies and Canada, working together with the United States, are assuming greater responsibility for the alliance’s defence.” Accepting that shift is one thing; paying for it is another. For European policymakers the question is now fiscal. It turns on what Europe is willing to pay for. And for the EU’s frugal members, that means rethinking what they treat as strategic.
According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, replacing US military capabilities in Europe could require around $1tn (about €900bn) in extra investment. NATO’s new target to invest 5% of GDP in defence similarly implies a sustained increase in European defence spending over the coming decade. Together they suggest that defence is no longer crisis spending but a permanent claim on European budgets.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU has found money for defence, but always as extraordinary spending. The European Defence Fund and SAFE (Security Action for Europe, a loan scheme for joint arms purchases), for example, sit outside the ordinary budget. Such instruments expire; the challenge is to embed this spending into the EU’s regular budget. Winning defence a permanent line in it makes negotiations over the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) far more than another exercise in budgetary bargaining.
The MFF is the EU’s seven-year budget—and where any pledge on defence would have to show up in funds. The commission’s proposal for 2028–34 reflects such a commitment. It allocates €131bn to defence and space, roughly five times the current level, and puts security among the EU’s central priorities.
Commission proposals rarely emerge intact from negotiation, and early signs suggest this pattern may repeat itself.
Commission proposals rarely emerge intact from negotiation, however, and early signs suggest this pattern may repeat itself. Cyprus, which held the presidency until the end of June, left a negotiating box on how to structure the next MFF that envisioned reductions in defence and security while protecting cohesion policy and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The box is the presidency’s draft compromise, the text the final deal is built from. The Irish presidency has opened with a strong focus on competitiveness and security, but Ireland leans heavily on farming too.
Budget negotiations are shaped by coalitions that defend long-established spending. The 16 member states of the “Friends of Cohesion” group, Spain, Italy and Poland among them, want robust funding for cohesion policy and agriculture, while frugal member states, such as Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, are reluctant to expand the overall size of the EU budget. Defence enters as a comparative newcomer against policies with decades of institutional backing and organised constituencies behind them.
Germany’s position illustrates this dilemma. In a parliamentary inquiry, Alliance 90/The Greens asked the federal government how the EU can square four things at once: from 2028 it will need to start repaying NextGenerationEU, the €637bn joint borrowing agreed as a one-off in 2020 to fund members’ recovery from covid-19; forgo new revenue of its own (levies it collects directly rather than cheques from national treasuries); hold its budget roughly the same size; and still strengthen competitiveness, security and defence. The chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has repeatedly committed to the last three. The government answered that the EU could meet all three objectives by trimming across the whole budget. Yet such “horizontal cuts” only protect these priorities if all 27 members agree what to spare when deciding the cuts, and they are unlikely to agree. Other member states could favour different areas of the EU budget, cutting competitiveness or security harder than Germany intends.
The scale of investment required to deliver Europe’s defence transformation also exceeds what can realistically be financed through the MFF alone. While the seven-year budget can establish political priorities, provide long-term planning certainty and support common capability development, it cannot generate the sums required to finance Europe’s long-term defence.
Hence the appeal of joint EU borrowing: debt raised by the commission against member-state guarantees, the model already used for NextGenerationEU and SAFE. NextGenerationEU demonstrated that the EU can raise substantial resources when confronted with an existential crisis such as the covid-19 pandemic. Europe’s security has changed just as fundamentally, which makes the case for borrowing together just as strong. If defence is a collective problem, leaving the bill to strained national budgets makes little sense. However, borrowing on that scale is politically out of reach: creditor states intend NextGenerationEU to stay an exception rather than a template. Something narrower—bonds (or comparable fiscal mechanisms) that fund defence alone or the technologies Europe cannot do without may prove necessary if the EU wants to match its strategic ambitions with adequate financial resources.
Europe has accepted that it must carry more of its own defence. The MFF negotiations will show whether its budget can pay for it. With NATO entering a new era of European burden-sharing, the EU cannot afford a budget that reflects the priorities of a different geopolitical age. The world has moved on—it is time that frugal member states like Germany did so, too.
Em Lagoa está a decorrer até domingo, dia 30 de agosto, mais uma edição da FATACIL.
Quem se deslocar ao espaço vai poder encontrar centenas de stands de artesanato, comércio e indústria, muitas opções ao nível da restauração e espetáculos equestres.
Mas, o que leva muita gente à FATACIL é a música.
Grandes figuras do panorama nacional têm passado por lá nos primeiros dias e vão continuar até ao último dia.
Para já, o destaque maior vai para os Vizinhos, que atuaram esta segunda-feira e fizeram a melhor ‘casa’, em termos de visitantes.
O grupo alentejano conseguiu levar a Lagoa mais de 24 mil pessoas, o que é – até agora – o recorde deste ano, acima até do que fez o popular cantor romântico Tony Carreira, que atuou no primeiro dia.
No sábado, o palco principal recebeu uma Festa M80 e, no domingo, atuou o grupo Hybrid Theory.
Esta noite, a música fica por conta do rapper Plutónio; amanhã, quarta-feira, vai fazer-se ouvir a voz potente de Sara Correia e na quinta-feira, o humor e as músicas malandrecas de Quim Barreiros vão animar quem aí se deslocar.
Richie Campbell é o senhor que se segue, na sexta-feira, e no sábado vai, de certeza, registar-se mais uma grande enchente, uma vez que para essa noite está agendado um concerto de Nininho Vaz Maia.
A edição deste ano da FATACIL encerra no domingo, com uma atuação do grupo Os Quatro e Meia.
Uma colisão entre um veículo ligeiro de passageiros e um motociclo provocou, na manhã desta sexta-feira, um ferido grave na Estrada Nacional 2 (EN2), na zona do Cansado, entre Ponte de Sor e Montargil, segundo a Proteção Civil.
A vítima grave é uma mulher de 56 anos, condutora do motociclo, que teve de ser helitransportada para o Hospital de Portalegre.
O alerta para o acidente foi dado às 9h39. Para o local foram mobilizados 22 operacionais, apoiados por nove veículos e um meio aéreo, com elementos dos Bombeiros Voluntários de Ponte de Sor e da Guarda Nacional Republicana (GNR).
Devido à colisão, a circulação na EN2 chegou a estar interrompida na ligação entre Montargil e Ponte de Sor, mantendo-se o trânsito condicionado em ambos os sentidos no local.
21 de agosto de 2026
Por: Dino Frazão
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O conteúdo Condutora do motociclo helitransportada para o Hospital de Portalegre em estado grave aparece primeiro em OS MONHACAS.
When Rhonda MacDonald put out a plea for help on Facebook, the cowboys answered. Wildfires have been ravaging British Columbia, Canada, this summer—and when a ranch is put under evacuation, it is no easy feat to round up 150 free‑roaming cattle. The MacDonald herd was roaming a vast, 100,000‑acre expanse of Crown rangeland above the ranch, and the people of most use were those on horseback. This exhilarating piece documents the people who came to help, and honors the skills and hard‑won knowledge needed to navigate treacherous, fire‑scarred terrain to save the herd and help a neighbour in crisis.
Before the riders headed up Mimenuh Mountain, Wayne MacDonald stood in front of a whiteboard with a red Sharpie and began drawing. Not a map, exactly. More like 50 years of memory. He sketched the ridges, draws and escape routes cattle would choose under pressure. There was one thing he kept returning to: the lack of escape routes. “As far as road, there’s one in and one out.” They knew there might come a moment when staying was no longer brave – it was reckless.
A FATACIL está mesmo quase a chegar e promete voltar a ser um dos principais certames do verão algarvio.
Esta grande feira, que alia as vertentes da gastronomia, do artesanato, do turismo, da agricultura e da música, decorre em Lagoa, entre os dias 21 e 30 de agosto.
Como sempre, pelo palco principal vão passar nomes bem conhecidos dos portugueses.
O popular cantor romântico Tony Carreira será o primeiro a dar música aos muitos milhares de pessoas que ali se desloquem, logo na noite de abertura, na sexta-feira, dia 21 de agosto.
Outros dos principais cabeças de cartaz desta edição são Sara Correia, no dia 26, Quim Barreiros, no dia 27, e Nininho Vaz Maia, que atua no dia 29.
Para além destes grandes concertos no palco principal, o evento vai ter outros espetáculos num palco secundário com artistas do concelho e da região, celebrando o talento local.
Outro dos grandes destaques do cartaz é um programa internacional de equitação.
No que ao palco principal diz respeito, o cartaz musical é o seguinte:
O programa completo é o seguinte:
21 de agosto, sexta: Tony Carreira
22 de agosto, sábado: Festa M80
23 de agosto, domingo: Hybrid Theory
24 de agosto, segunda: Vizinhos
25 de agosto, terça: Plutónio
26 de agosto, quarta: Sara Correia
27 de agosto, quinta: Quim Barreiros
28 de agosto, sexta: Richie Campbell
29 de agosto, sábado: Nininho Vaz Maia
30 de agosto: Os Quatro e Meia
Leia todas as notícias da região em: www.algarvemarafado.com
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