| | | | | | | Presented By OurCrowd | | | | Axios World | | By Dave Lawler ·Sep 09, 2021 | | Welcome back to Axios World. - Tonight (1,936 words, 7 minutes) we're visiting Brazil, Guinea, the Balkans and more.
Please subscribe if you haven't, and help spread the word. | | | | | | 1 big thing: Bolsonaro's Supreme Court showdown |  | | | Bolsonaro rallies supporters in Brasilia. Photo: Andressa Anholete/Getty Images | | | | Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro seemed to take a step back from the ledge tonight, releasing a conciliatory statement two days after pledging to ignore Supreme Court rulings and declaring that only God could remove him from office. State of play: Bolsonaro addressed rallies of around 100,000 supporters in Brasilia and São Paulo on Tuesday, Brazil's independence day. They were intended as a show of force, with his approval ratings sliding and investigations against him stacking up. - "A lot of people were ready to commit violence for Bolsonaro," said Gustavo Ribeiro, the editor-in-chief of the Brazilian Report, who covered the rallies. He spoke to Brazilians who had hoped to storm the Supreme Court building in a Jan. 6-style insurrection.
- Bolsonaro's feud with the court started in 2019 with an investigation into social media troll armies, and multiple subsequent probes have targeted Bolsonaro and his associates.
- After Bolsonaro started launching attacks earlier this year on the electoral system — threatening to reject any election that wasn't held with paper ballots — the high court opened further investigations that could potentially render him ineligible to run, Ribeiro tells Axios. "That's when it turned into an MMA fight."
The latest: Bolsonaro said in the statement that he'd spoken in "the heat of the moment" and had no intention of attacking the Supreme Court. Brazil's currency rose after it seemed that Bolsonaro wouldn't deepen the crisis. - "[I] would guess the explicitly impeachable nature of Bolsonaro's threat this week to disobey Supreme Court rulings, & [the growing] support in Congress and political elite in favor of impeachment, contributed to this decision," America's Quarterly editor Brian Winter tweeted.
What to watch: Ribeiro says that Bolsonaro has committed multiple impeachable offenses, but "has kind of snookered the political establishment." - "Do you do nothing and just let him move the goalposts further and further? Or do you go for the full-scale confrontation and then you increase exponentially the risks of an abrupt rupture?"
- "It's a lose-lose situation right now," he says.
Even if Bolsonaro is willing to take a step back, his supporters may not be. - Bolsonaro met tonight with the leaders of pro-Bolsonaro trucker protests that have blockaded highways around the country, Reuters reports.
- Bolsonaro was initially reluctant to disavow the blockades despite the economic implications, but he eventually did so in an audio message last night.
- Some of the truckers didn't believe the message was really from Bolsonaro. And one of the leaders who met with Bolsonaro told Reuters he didn't tell them to stop.
Meanwhile on Monday, Bolsonaro issued a decree temporarily banning social media companies from removing most content without a court order — the first time such a policy has been attempted at a national level, per the NYT. - The social media giants haven't said whether they'll comply, and the move could be blocked in the courts.
- The backstory: YouTube has removed several of Bolsonaro's videos for including misinformation about COVID-19. He and his supporters have also spread messages warning that the 2022 election will be rigged.
|     | | | | | | 2. Quiet suspense after Guinea's coup |  | | | Coup leader Mamady Doumbouya (waving) in Conakry. Photo: Cellou Binani/AFP via Getty | | | | Four days after a military coup in Guinea, the plotters seem to be firmly in charge, a well-connected source in the capital Conakry tells Axios. - "My Sunday morning wake-up call was heavy gunfire," says the source, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation. But since then, it's been "one of the most sedate coups I've ever witnessed."
Driving the news: Soldiers led by special forces commander Mamady Doumbouya took President Alpha Condé prisoner and declared a national curfew. - Cabinet ministers were hauled into the parliament building, had their passports and government cars confiscated, and were sent home. "I've talked to several of them and they're fine," the source says. "They're keeping their heads down, as you would imagine."
The latest: ECOWAS, the West African regional body, suspended Guinea's membership on Wednesday and sent a delegation to Conakry, but it hasn't announced sanctions. - Flashback: ECOWAS stayed mum last year as Condé, 83, changed the constitution to seek a third term and then cracked down on protests after a deeply flawed vote.
The big picture: Condé was Guinea's first democratically elected president and once said he aimed to be "Guinea's Mandela." But even some loyalists felt he should have stepped down last year, the source says, and many in the capital are celebrating his ouster. - Government officials have been told to keep working, and the crucial mining industry hasn't been significantly disrupted.
- Doumbouya has promised a more inclusive government that will better address the needs of the people. But he hasn't said when power will return to civilian control, or whether elections will be held.
What to watch: "These guys are saying all the right things, but everybody says all the right things at the beginning," the source says. "So I think we're going to look for the next two to three weeks to see if we can smell out what actually is likely to happen." | | | | | | | | 3. Vaccine projections for lower-income countries cut by 25% |  Data: Our World in Data; Map: Danielle Alberti/Axios COVAX, the UN-backed program aimed at addressing COVID vaccine inequality, cut its forecast for doses available in 2021 by roughly a quarter to 1.4 billion, Axios' Shawna Chen writes. State of play: With the supply to poorer countries lagging even further behind than expected, the WHO is calling on wealthy countries to wait at least until the end of the year to roll out boosters. They're not listening. - Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO's regional director for Africa, criticized developed countries for wasting vaccine doses and specifically referenced the more than 15 million doses that have been discarded in the U.S. since March.
- "This is enough vaccines to cover everyone over 18 years in Liberia, Mauritania and the Gambia," Moeti said at a news conference Thursday. "Every dose is precious and has the potential to save a life."
- Just over 3% of the continent's population has been fully vaccinated against the virus.
View the interactive map. | | | | | | | | A message from OurCrowd | | Safe, simple renting reshapes $50B boat rental market | | |  | | | | On average, the 12 million boat owners in the U.S. only use their boat two weeks a year. Boatsetter seamlessly connects owners, licensed captains and screened renters, becoming the largest peer-to-peer renter in the $50B market. Explore Boatsetter's investment potential at OurCrowd. | | | | | | Bonus: Where in the world? |  | | | Screengrab via Apple News | | | | We're visiting four countries, marked here with pins and X/Y, that all have something in common. Hint: They all might bring to mind a household pet... that is actually from South America. Scroll to the bottom for the answer. | | | | | | | | 4. Global news roundup |  | | | Two old friends, together again. Photo: Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty | | | | 1. Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko visited Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin today to discuss the "union state" — a proposal to more closely integrate Russia and Belarus that was agreed to in 1999 but has remained frozen since. - Why it matters: Lukashenko is an international pariah, more reliant than ever on his patron in Moscow. After spending two decades resisting a concrete agreement that could undermine his country's sovereignty, Lukashenko now seems close to signing off. It could even include a joint currency.
2. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party now trails the Conservatives in the polls ahead of the Sept. 20 election, though the Liberals are still projected to win more seats (but fall well short of a majority). - State of play: Trudeau has been unable to shake off the question of why this election, called less than two years after the last one, is really necessary. He has also faced angry protesters on the campaign trail.
3. The first civilian flight to leave Afghanistan since the U.S. withdrawal arrived in Doha, Qatar, today carrying around 113 people — mostly foreign nationals, some of them Americans. 4. Bitcoin is now an official currency in El Salvador. | | | | | | | | 5. Last war crime trials over Yugoslavia breakup come to an end |  | | | Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović at The Hague in June. Photo: Piroschka Van De Wouw/ANP/AFP via Getty Images | | | | Appeals filed this week by two former Serbian State Security officials convicted of aiding and abetting war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina will mark the final stage of 18 years of international efforts to adjudicate crimes committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia, Axios' Ivana Saric reports. Why it matters: "The closure and ending of trials signifies an end of an era — one that was a turning point for international law and goes far beyond the former Yugoslavia," Iva Vukušić, a historian and genocide scholar at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, told Axios. Driving the news: Jovica Stanišić, the former head of Serbian State Security, and Franko Simatović, his former deputy, were the last of more than 160 defendants tried in The Hague as part of the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). - The case marked the first time that high-ranking wartime Serbian government officials had been convicted for crimes committed in Bosnia. Both were sentenced to 12 years and are appealing.
The big picture: "The ICTY was the first post-Cold War UN tribunal and without it, we would not have seen efforts which led to the creation of the permanent International Criminal Court," Vukušić says. State of play: The trials were successful insofar as they managed to establish "individual responsibility for some important offenders, and fair trials, and some limited fact-finding," she adds. - Yes, but: "If one has more ambitious goals like reconciliation or a joint narrative, then it has largely failed."
What's next: It will now be up to national courts to pursue the remaining cases, but few governments in the Balkans have the appetite to take them on. In some cases, individuals suspected or even convicted of war crimes have run for public office. - Most of the thousands of remaining suspects will never be tried, as will be the case for any war as long and brutal as the breakup of Yugoslavia, Vukušić says.
- "The Syrians and victims of widespread atrocities across the world will find that out as well in the future."
| | | | | | | | 6. What I'm listening to: How Trump's team handled the Soleimani strike |  | | | Mourning Soleimani in Tehran. Photo: Mazyar Asadi/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty | | | | Before President Donald Trump ordered the attack that killed Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani, CIA director Gina Haspel expressed reservations about the narrow window to conduct the strike without collateral damage, career officials at the State Department pushed back on the plan, and Trump and the White House were "sensitive" to how it would play in the media. - In the end, though, all the principals agreed it was worth the risks.
That's according to former Pentagon spokesperson Alyssa Farah, who was interviewed on the new podcast "One Decision," hosted by former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove and journalist Michelle Kosinski. - Farah was briefed on the Soleimani strike eight hours in advance. From a communications perspective, her main concern was the legal justification, which she says was based on the fact that Soleimani was deemed "a terrorist on the battlefield."
- But after the strike, Pompeo and others kept contending that the decision was based on the fact that Soleimani posed an "imminent threat" to the U.S. — a claim Farah says hinged on "the definition of imminent."
And when Iran struck back and over 100 U.S. troops suffered traumatic brain injuries, Farah faced pressure from the White House to stop giving regular updates on the injuries. - "I think where things got shaky was there was an effort from the White House to want to say, this was not successful — the Iranians were not successful in harming our targets in response. And I think that went too far," she says.
| | | | | | | | 7. Stories we're watching |  | | | An evening stroll in Ilulissat, Greenland. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images | | | - North Korea foregoes saber-rattling in midnight military parade
- Mexico's top court decriminalizes abortion
- Ashraf Ghani apologizes to Afghans
- Israel prison break sparks riots as manhunt continues
- Indonesia prison fire kills at least 41
- Hong Kong police arrest Tiananmen vigil leaders
- U.S., EU slam sentencing of Belarusian opposition leaders
Quoted: "Transmitting dangerous infectious diseases." — That's the crime for which a 28-year-old Vietnamese man received a five-year prison sentence this week. He was convicted of breaking quarantine rules to return to his home province, where he later tested positive for COVID-19 and was found to have infected eight people. | | | | | | | | A message from OurCrowd | | Peer-to-peer rentals upend the $50B boat rental marketplace | | |  | | | | Boatsetter has become the largest peer-to-peer renter in the market by seamlessly connecting owners, licensed captains and renters. Boatsetter's enabled 90,000 rentals across 600 locations. Now, you can invest at OurCrowd. Explore Boatsetter's investment potential. | | | | Answers: Guinea-Bissau (red pin), Guinea (X), Equatorial Guinea (purple pin) and Papua New Guinea. |  | | It'll help you deliver employee communications more effectively. | | | | | | Axios thanks our partners for supporting our newsletters. If you're interested in advertising, learn more here.
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