Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has described the approval of the Proposed Constitutional Amendment (PEC 221/2019) as a historic achievement. The amendment puts an end to the 44-hour workweek, establishing a new maximum of 40 hours per week, distributed over five working days and two paid rest days.
RELATED:
Brazilian Senate Ends 6×1 Schedule, Approves 40-Hour Workweek
The constitutional reform—a key commitment of the Brazilian government—will directly benefit approximately 22 million workers who were previously employed under a “6×1” schedule, consisting of six days of work followed by one day of rest.
Brazil’s Senate ratified the amendment in two rounds of voting, with 75 votes in favor and one against—the latter cast by Senator Hamilton Mourão. This decision comes five months after the Chamber of Deputies initially approved the proposal, and 11 days ahead of the presidential runoff, scheduled for October 25.
Far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, who had initially opposed the measure, shifted his position and voted in favor remotely from Porto Alegre. Progressive senators, including Teresa Leitão, labeled this move as opportunistic and warned of the need to remain vigilant against any potential attempts to overturn the new regulation.
A escala 6×1 acabou! ❤️🇧🇷
— Lula (@LulaOficial) October 15, 2026
Uma conquista histórica para milhões de trabalhadores e trabalhadoras, que agora terão mais tempo para descansar, estar com a família, cuidar de si e viver.
Quem constrói o Brasil todos os dias também merece tempo para viver.
É o Brasil pronto para… pic.twitter.com/5Nq7a9xKZk
The text reads, “The 6×1 schedule is over! A historic achievement for millions of workers, who will now have more time to rest, be with their family, take care of themselves, and live. Those who build Brazil every day also deserve time to live. It’s Brazil ready for more!”
Timeline and safeguards
The transition to the “5×2” model will not be immediate. According to the established timeline, 60 days after the official publication of the amendment—expected in February 2027—the maximum weekly working hours will be reduced from 44 to 42.
Subsequently, 14 months after the amendment is enacted—in December 2027—the limit will be set at 40 hours per week. The regulation also establishes a maximum daily limit of eight working hours. The constitutional text expressly prohibits any reduction in wages—whether proportional or affecting the minimum wage—across professional categories.
Furthermore, it delegates the organization of rest periods to collective bargaining agreements, prioritizing Sundays, while allowing for flexibility in sectors such as healthcare, security, and public transport.
While labor unions supported the measure, business sectors expressed their opposition, arguing that it could lead to higher costs per hour worked and the risk of a contraction in employment. The right-wing opposition also signaled its intention to revise the legislation should it gain control of the executive branch.
For individual micro-entrepreneurs and small business units, the reform provides for a supplementary law that includes state support mechanisms designed to cushion the impact of the transition and sustain formal employment targets.
Within the public administration, existing service contracts will have a period of up to 12 months to adjust their operational and financial frameworks to the new limits on working hours.
With the approval of PEC 221/2019, Brazil has begun a restructuring of its labor market aimed at reducing precarious working-hour arrangements in Latin America’s largest economy.
This year, Alaska held its primary elections on August 18.
As per a 2020 ballot measure, Alaska primary voters pick among all qualified candidates for a single office, regardless of party affiliation, and the top four then advance to the general election.
In the U.S. Senate primary, Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan won 41 percent of the vote, while former Rep. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, captured nearly 50 percent.
Dan Sullivan was also the distant third-place finisher—but in this case, it was Daniel J. Sullivan Jr., a retired schoolteacher who is also running as a Republican but is not the same person as Daniel S. Sullivan, the junior U.S. senator for the 49th state.
The presence of dual Dan Sullivans is a headache for Republicans, who have fought to keep Daniel J. off the ballot, concerned he would split their votes and cost their candidate his seat.
"Mary Peltola and Chuck Schumer know they can't beat Senator Sullivan on his record, so they're resorting to deceitful political maneuvers that attempt to trick Alaskans and buy a seat," a Republican spokesman told Fox News.
"We are looking into it," President Donald Trump said this week. "It's a disgrace." In fact, NBC News reported in July that the FBI and Department of Justice had launched an investigation "looking for possible wire fraud or a conspiracy to deprive Alaskan voters of a free and fair elections process, which could be a civil rights violation."
In August, the government apparently issued subpoenas, though Daniel J. later said he had not received anything.
But is what he is doing actually illegal? For that matter, should it be?
Carol Beecher, director of the Alaska Division of Elections, barred Daniel J. from the ballot in June after concluding that he was running "with the purpose of confusing or misleading the electorate and compromising the fairness of the ballot."
But a state superior court reversed that decision. "Despite the Division's assertion that Mr. Sullivan may be excluded from the ballot because he lacks 'good-faith,' there is no statute which provides such a criterion," wrote Judge Thomas A. Matthews. "The concept of 'good-faith,' or pure motive, or bona fide intent is simply absent." The Alaska Supreme Court agreed, keeping both Sullivans on the November ballot.
Granted, it seems extremely likely that Republicans are right, and Daniel J. is running specifically to hurt Daniel S.'s prospects.
"Campaign material metadata reveals that Amber Lee, a progressive consultant, authored a press release announcing [Daniel J.'s] Senate bid," WFMD reported in May.
Daniel J. told The New York Times that he was running as a moderate Republican in an attempt to steer the party away from its MAGA wing. But he also admitted that he had voted for the Democrat in the last three presidential races and for Peltola in her races for the U.S. House.
In Beecher's original order keeping Daniel J. off the ballot, she wrote that Daniel J. had asked to be identified as "Dan S. Sullivan" on the ballot, the same name as the senator's. (Alaska reporter Dermot Cole wrote in July that this was not true: Daniel J. wrote "Dan S. Sullivan" in an email to Beecher but followed up hours later to correct it to "Dan J. Sullivan.")
If Daniel J.'s goal truly is to mislead voters, then that is indefensible. But it's not clear that it's illegal, or whether it should be.
"I am not sure exploiting voter confusion about names is any worse than exploiting their ignorance about policy issues like crime, immigration, and health care," wrote George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. "Trying to prevent such exploitation through criminal and civil liability is likely to violate the First Amendment. In addition, it would likely end up giving incumbent political leaders broad power to curb speech and control electoral campaigns that they cannot be trusted with."
"This is a case about someone running for office with impure motives who is lucky enough to have a name that could confuse some voters," agreed election law expert Richard Hasen. "I don't see how the government could criminalize his running for office for having impure motives. And if it could do so, then it could be a crime every time that the Republican Party backs a Green Party candidate, or Democrats support a MAGA candidate in a primary in the hopes that the candidate would be weaker against a Democrat in the general election. This stuff happens all the time."
But it's entirely possible that Alaska's ranked choice voting system will solve the problem on Election Day.
After the August open primary, the top four candidates compete on a ranked choice ballot, where voters list the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets an outright majority, then the lowest performer is eliminated, and every ballot that picked them first is retallied and applied to their second choice.
As long as every Alaskan who wants to vote for Dan Sullivan—either one—lists both Dan Sullivans as their first and second choices, then the system will take care of any confusion. In the (highly likely) event that Daniel J. does not capture a majority on the first ballot, his votes will be retallied and applied to their second choices. The only plausible hiccup is if Peltola, the Democratic candidate, wins a majority in the first round—in which case either Sullivan would have lost anyway.
Of course, Republicans have opposed the ranked choice system since Alaska adopted it. Former Gov. Sarah Palin, who ran against Peltola twice unsuccessfully, said ranked choice was "so weird" that "it results in voter suppression."
In a post last week on Truth Social, Trump called ranked choice voting "Corrupt" and said it "shouldn't be allowed in our Country."
"I just left Alaska, where we have a real bad thing," Trump said Wednesday at a campaign rally in Arizona. "They have the ranked choice voting, where you go into I guess some kind of a test tube or something, and they pick whoever the hell they want. That's another disgrace."
As ever, it's not clear what Trump was talking about. And despite Republicans' complaints, ranked choice voting works quite well: According to the American Bar Association, recent research finds that it "is an improvement over plurality voting with clear benefits in terms of representation, campaign quality, mobilization, and turnout." It also "encourages greater consensus building as well as more civil political campaigns," and voters find it easy to understand.
In the event that a political party finds itself, for example, with two Dan Sullivans on the ballot, ranked choice voting is a perfect solution. If only the party weren't so hostile to it.
The post What Happens When 2 Dan Sullivans Run for the Same Senate Seat? appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Zelensky has lost patience; the US is Putin’s ally. Despite problems with Starlink, which Kyiv said cut connections with attack drones when they exceeded a certain speed, major Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory continued in recent hours. Long-range strikes over Russia are carried out by drones without Starlink.
These included an attack on the military airfield in Borisoglebsk, more than 300 km from the border, as well as on a refinery in Ryazan, which the local governor confirmed. The Ryazan refinery belongs to Rosneft and is one of the largest, with a capacity of around 17 million tonnes of oil a year.
This came after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told the Financial Times that he had had enough after Russian attacks during the so-called energy truce, and announced that refineries would once again become Ukrainian targets.
It was precisely a limitation of such Ukrainian strikes that US president Donald Trump had demanded, after last week concluding a controversial agreement with Moscow to buy Russian oil without asking for anything in return from the Russian side.
This was followed by steps that raised serious suspicions that Trump had begun acting in favour of Putin’s war against Ukraine.
The US threatened Ukraine with restricting supplies of weapons or critically important intelligence and, ultimately, as we examined on Wednesday in the Ukraine Battlefield update, Ukrainian soldiers began experiencing a serious problem with the full internet connection provided by the military version of Starlink, which Musk’s SpaceX developed for the Pentagon.
This is crucial to the Ukrainian army not only for attacks on Russian logistics at the front, but also in defending against more dangerous Russian jet-powered drones, which have terrorised Ukrainian cities in recent months.
Russia’s pro-Kremlin scene naturally noticed this as well. The Z-blogger Rybar called for the use of an “opportunity” in which Russian forces could inflict maximum damage on Ukrainian infrastructure.
“I think the crisis is entirely clear and understandable. The crisis lies in Trump’s position, which is trying to help Russia in every possible way,” expert Volodymyr Ohryzko commented on the situation.
We write below about what the company’s owner, Elon Musk, has said about these developments.
How Ukrainians attacked without Starlink. In the first of the Ukrainian attacks mentioned above, on the airfield in Borisoglebsk, Ukrainian Neptune missiles were used, according to the Ukrainian navy. Ukrainians said they destroyed as many as six Su-34M aircraft. They have their own navigation systems and do not need SpaceX services.
⚡️ BREAKING: Ukraine’s Navy claims to have struck SIX Russian Su-34M fighter-bombers in a Neptune missile attack on Borisoglebsk military airbase in Russia’s Voronezh region overnight. https://t.co/kMEuVbmrVX pic.twitter.com/fH8igvygd5
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) October 15, 2026
The attack on the refinery in Ryazan involved drones that are likewise not connected to Starlink, as SpaceX has geographically restricted Ukraine’s access to both Starlink and Starshield services.
“The Ukrainian armed forces therefore rely on alternative means of communication and point-to-point navigation to strike targets in Russia. The speed restrictions under the Starshield service are unrelated to this and will not prevent the Ukrainian armed forces from attacking Russian oil refineries, data centres and other stationary targets in Russia,” the Institute for the Study of War said.
However, Ukrainians felt the problems mainly at the home front.
An unnamed Ukrainian officer compared it to nuclear strikes in comments to Politico. “All operations have been suspended. It will cost many of us our lives,” an experienced soldier commanding a medium-range unmanned aircraft unit in south-eastern Ukraine told the Brussels-based website.
They use Hornet drones to attack targets at distances of up to 150 km.
Ukrainian soldiers contacted by Politico said the restrictions had halted some medium-range drone attacks over Ukraine, disrupting strikes on Russian logistics and reducing support for Ukrainian units at the front.
The scale of the disruption is unclear, however, and it is not known whether the restriction remains in place.
If Musk did not switch off Starlink, who did? The main suspects. Several Ukrainian soldiers reported on Wednesday that they had had to suspend their operations because of restrictions on satellite connections with drones that exceeded 160 km/h.
According to former minister Mykhailo Fedorov, this capability was later restored. NV sources, by contrast, said the speed limit remained in place on Wednesday evening. The following day, operation of the system was fully restored, according to Ukraine’s defence ministry, while the circumstances of the outage are being investigated.
Importantly, Zelensky said it was not a technical problem but an apparent deliberate act. It is not yet certain who was behind it, although the main suspect is clear.
Musk claims that, because the military version of the Starshield satellite internet connection is military in nature, it is controlled by the US government, which also owns it.
“Any decisions on speed or usage restrictions are made by the US military and, ultimately, the US president (POTUS),” the world’s richest man wrote on his social network X. However, the White House, according to Axios sources, claims it had nothing to do with the restriction and wants Musk’s company to investigate the circumstances.
Republican senator Tom Tillis is also calling for this in Congress. “I do not expect defence secretary Hegseth to ensure transparency, and therefore we will ask the defence department’s inspector general to launch an investigation and report to Congress and the American people,” he wrote on X.
Starshield differs from the regular network in its greater resistance to jamming and its specialisation for military use.
Oleksandr “Serg Marco” Karpiuk, a well-known Ukrainian specialist in military aerial reconnaissance, wrote on Facebook that standard Starlink terminals currently have a preset speed limit of 22 m/s.
“To be able to fly at speeds above 22 m/s, Ukraine signed contracts for the Starshield system, which is managed by the Pentagon. This is a military system using Starlink terminals that offer greater functionality, although these accounts are substantially more expensive,” he explained. According to him, the Pentagon did two things within a single day: it restricted intelligence-sharing and changed the parameters of Starshield accounts.
“It was a decision by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, evidently on Trump’s orders,” Karpiuk believes, as quoted by Illia Ponomarenko in a post.
Pro-Kremlin propaganda has welcomed the latest developments.
The Russian daily Kommersant quoted a Musk post in which he wrote that it was “time for Zelensky to leave”. His words followed Trump once again pushing Ukraine to hold elections in which it would choose a new president.
Zelensky responded that they would be happy to organise elections if Russia observed a 60-day ceasefire.
Experts agree that it is unrealistic to organise a proper vote under the wartime conditions Ukraine faces.
Ukrainian attacks on data centres hit Russia where it hurts. Although it has not yet been confirmed that pro-Kremlin bots became less active after Ukrainian drones struck Russian servers, ordinary Russians felt the impact. Russia started such attacks in September, amid escalating air raids on Kyiv.
As many as around 100,000 households lost internet access at the time. Now, this tactic has been turned against Moscow.
Researchers studying Russian trolling did not observe any real decline in the activity of pro-Putin bots either, according to a BBC analysis. Far more interesting, however, are the real-world consequences of Ukrainian attacks on the data centres of Yandex, Russia’s Google, which have manifested themselves in a range of ways.
According to Politico sources, Ukrainians wanted to show Russians that it takes two to play this game. According to the Financial Times, they have already managed to seriously damage three of Yandex’s six data centres: in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir.
The consequences of these attacks subsequently showed how vulnerable Russia’s centralised internet ecosystem is.
“Russia has become a victim of its own policies, which has led to the worst possible scenario,” Alena Epifanova, an expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations, told the FT.
The impact of the Ukrainian attack has affected the daily lives of Russians. Here overview of services that were affected to a greater or lesser extent, according to the British daily:
All the affected data centres also have supercomputers used to train AI, which is playing an increasingly important role on the battlefield.
For example, one of Yandex’s three supercomputers — Chervonenkis — in Sasovo had long ranked among the world’s 100 most powerful supercomputers, and only in 2026 fell to 101st place, according to the BBC.
However, it has not been confirmed that Ukrainian attacks damaged any of them. According to the Russians, an attack on a similar Sberbank facility did not cause significant damage.
“If the supercomputers are damaged, replacing the loss will be difficult — they were powered by chips from the US company Nvidia, which Yandex imported through ‘complex and complicated schemes’ because of sanctions,” a former company employee told the BBC.
Given the current shortage of Nvidia chips, Yandex’s data centres may not be restored until 2028, according to the website.
Why this could escalate. Attacks on buildings that provide computing capacity are comparable, according to Politico, to strikes on a power plant supplying electricity, heat and fuel, on which both military and civilian functions depend.
That is also why this type of attack sits on the edge of international law.
“It may weaken the enemy’s military effort, but it can also completely paralyse ordinary life,” the Brussels-based website wrote. According to Politico, the cost of restoring data centres in Russia is particularly high because the necessary materials are scarce and their import is restricted by Western sanctions.
“Obtaining a large quantity of equipment to replace what has been destroyed will not be easy,” cyber specialist Oleg Shakirov told Politico.
For now, Ukrainian expert Yevhen Pronin is cautious in assessing the effectiveness of attacks on data centres. “For example, after the attack on Sberbank’s data centre — Russia’s largest bank and one of its key technology companies — its representatives said its systems were operating without disruption, and reports indicated that the centre itself was still under construction,” Pronin told Denník N.
However, a series of such strikes fundamentally changes the scale of the risk, he said. If attacks continue to hit large operational centres on which banks, state services and corporate services depend, the consequences could be far more serious.
“They range from widespread outages to data loss and disruption to critical digital infrastructure. We do not yet see a catastrophe for all of Russia, but rather the vulnerability of a system that is increasingly dependent on a few major technological hubs,” he added.
Attacks on data centres themselves are not a new feature of the Russia-Ukraine war.
At the start of Trump’s war against Iran, Amazon data centres in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were hit. This was followed by an attack on a data centre in Tehran, after which soldiers’ salary payments were interrupted and banks’ online services stopped working.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies examined at the time how data had become a new front line of warfare. Following a trip to Kyiv, its researcher Emily Harding concluded that “state-of-the-art software, flexible operational procedures, and the strategic migration of data to cloud storage both inside and outside the country have given Ukraine the advantage it needs to fight”.
The problems linked to Starlink only confirm this digital vulnerability of modern warfare.
It returned even in critical condition. Ground robots are being deployed increasingly often at the Ukrainian front, saving more and more lives in the deadly zone where drones hunt people. In this case, one such robot returned from a demanding mission even without one wheel.
A Ukrainian logistics UGV returns from a combat mission despite sustaining critical damage pic.twitter.com/d8fT8sh21T
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) October 14, 2026
Attacks on ammunition depots. FPV drone operators from Artan, a special unit of Ukrainian military intelligence — apparently also thanks to Starlink — launched a series of attacks on field ammunition depots. Over several months, they reportedly struck 2,308 enemy targets.
Enemy tanks and self-propelled artillery systems probably accounted for a significant proportion of them.
What are the losses
No update on Thursday.
Note: Neither side regularly reports its dead or destroyed equipment. Ukraine publishes daily figures for Russian casualties and destroyed equipment, which cannot be independently verified. In this overview, we use data from the Oryx project, which has compiled a list of equipment losses documented exclusively by photographs since the beginning of the war.
Krill, writes Gordon Peake, are “the least zeitgeisty creatures imaginable”: small, shrimp-like crustaceans whose total population numbers in the hundreds of trillions. Until recently, krill has mostly served as a snack for whales. Now, however, krill is “the latest iteration of capitalism on the frozen frontier,” a health supplement whose market is valued at roughly a billion dollars. Peake spends weeks aboard the Allankay with a crew of vegan activists devoted to ending the krill trade. His dispatch is a brisk history of extractive capitalism in the Antarctic, a fascinating study of an utterly uncool creature, and an uproarious account of a reluctant sailor earning his sea legs. Take the journey with him.
I contemplated the fillets of pink salmon defrosting on my kitchen counter, not too far from the shelf where I keep my supplements, including krill oil, part of my long-established daily routine of taking elixirs with vague but impressive claims about “improved heart health” and “enhanced brain function.” Labels depicting regal seabirds and majestic trawlers and a barmy sense that the more expensive the supplement, the more potent it must be also guided my “decision-making.” I told Hammarstedt I was the sort of fellow who enabled such an industry to exist. He responded with an offer: I should go down to Antarctica to see the krill business for myself.
Khan is set to replace Smith as the most popular surname for newborns next year following a surge in immigration and a decline in the native birth rate, according to an analysis of official data.
The post Khan to Overtake Smith as Most Common English Surname appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
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