World Briefing: August 31, 2024

A Brazilian Supreme Court justice has ordered the suspension of Elon Musk's X platform in Brazil. Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes made the order after the site's billionaire owner failed to name a legal representative in Brazil. The threat of a suspension has angered the billionaire, prompting a string of vitriolic language. But could it be the start of the crumbling of Musks’s social media empire? Already US banks are complaining that they are on the hook for loans extended to Musk for the purchase of Twitter/X

Italian deputy minister and Northern League leader Matteo Salvinimi is reportedly stopped from issuing a statement criticizing Ukraine’s cross border incursion into Russia by PM Georgia Meloni and her foreign minister, Antonio Tajani. However the latter still firmly opposes the use of Italian weapons inside Russia

The far right is on the cusp of winning the most votes in German state elections for the first time since the Nazis. For some in Germany, the rise of Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a literal nightmare. But others, particularly in the east, say the AfD is a chance for change. All year, the temperature has been rising in German politics and Sunday’s vote in Thuringia and Saxony may be the boiling point. Chancellor Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, along with his Green and Liberal coalition partners, are doing so badly in Thuringia they may not even get a single seat in the state parliament – while the AfD is polling top. In neighbouring Saxony, the AfD is running neck and neck with the conservative CDU. - BBC

Italy is proposing a sharp increase in tourist taxes to help cash-strapped cities raise revenues and make visitors “more responsible” amid a growing public backlash against over tourism. Hotel and travel industry associations are up in arms over the plan, which envisions a levy of up to €25 a night for the most expensive hotel rooms. “The common objective must be to support growth, not slow it down,” Federalberghi, an association representing small- and medium-sized hotels, said in a statement. The tourism ministry — run by Daniela Santanchè of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party — said it was planning “a dialogue” with relevant industry bodies in September over the “possible proposal to modify the rules of the tourist tax”. “Not all taxes are a tax,” Santanchè wrote in a recent social media post. “In times of overtourism, we are debating this so that it really helps improve services and make tourists who pay it more responsible.” - FT

After spending 12 weeks docked to the International Space Station, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is finally set to return home — empty. The troubled spacecraft will undock from the space station on September 6 at around 6 p.m. ET, and will spend about six hours maneuvering closer to home before landing near midnight in New Mexico’s White Sands Space Harbor. Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who rode the Starliner to the ISS on June 5, will fly home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule no earlier than February. - CNN

Para triathlon events at the Paris Games, where the swimming leg is being held in the Seine river, will take place on Sept. 1 instead of across two days because of the weather forecast, organisers said on Thursday. At the Olympics, triathlon events and training sessions were subjected to some reshuffling as adverse weather conditions led to a spike in bacteria levels in the Seine. “All 11 medal events will now take place on 1 September, instead of across two days, on 1 and 2 September,” Paris 2024 said in a statement. “The decision to hold all medal events on one day was taken in view of the weather forecast and to provide athletes and coaches with as much certainty as possible. The course of the swim remains unchanged.” The French capital has been working on cleaning up the Seine so people can swim in it again, as was the case during the 1900 Paris Olympics. A sewer problem last summer, however, led to the cancellation of a pre-Olympics swimming event. All triathlon events at the Olympics, however, were held with the swimming leg in the Seine. - France 24

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on August 30 that authorities in Venezuela had arrested two Colombian citizens believed to have served as mercenaries with the Ukrainian armed forces. The two men were reportedly heading back to Colombia with a stopover in Caracas. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow has actively sought to detain foreign mercenaries around the world. Alleged mercenaries have been detained in Cuba, India, Syria, and other countries. - RFE/RL

The Romanian government is in talks to buy Moldova’s only port, amid interest from a Bulgarian company. The Port of Giurgiulești, officially the Giurgiulești International Free Port, is a port on the Danube River at its confluence with the Prut. It is Moldova’s only port accessible to seagoing vessels, situated at km 133 of the River Danube in the south of Moldova near the borders of Romania and Ukraine. It handles a wide variety of cargoes and has depths alongside of 7 m. Bucharest is in talks with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which currently holds full ownership of the port through Danube Logistics. Romanian prime minister Marcel Ciolacu has in the past discussed acquiring Giurgiulești as a complementary asset to Constanța, Romania’s top port, which is undergoing significant expansion at present, buoyed in no small part by plenty of new cargo from neighbour, Ukraine.  - Splash247

The son-in-law of Uzbekistan’s president is building a secretive multimillion-dollar residential compound in a pricey district of this Central Asian capital, a project for which some two dozen homes have been razed, an investigation by RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service has found. Multiple sources familiar with the project say Otabek Umarov, who serves as deputy head of security for his father-in-law, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev, pressured residents to move to make way for the development on 1.5 hectares of prime Tashkent real estate with an estimated value of some $20 million. The project is the latest example of Umarov’s access to significant wealth that stands seemingly at odds with the official salary he draws as a public servant. Mirziyoev assumed the presidency pledging greater transparency and reforms in Central Asia’s most populous country following the 2016 death of his dictatorial predecessor, Islam Karimov. But multiple RFE/RL investigations have revealed how political insiders, including Mirziyoev’s own relatives, continue to profit in lucrative and opaque state dealings.

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