Day: September 2, 2024

RIO DE JANEIRO — A Brazilian Supreme Court panel on Monday unanimously upheld the decision of one of its justices to block billionaire Elon Musk’s social media platform X nationwide, according to the court’s website.

The broader support among justices undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian renegade intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.

The panel that voted in a virtual session was made up of five of the full bench’s 11 justices, including de Moraes, who last Friday ordered the platform blocked for refusing to name a local legal representative, as required by law. It will stay suspended until it complies with his orders and pays outstanding fines that as of last week exceeded $3 million, according to his decision.

The platform has clashed with de Moraes over its reluctance to block users and has alleged that de Moraes wants an in-country legal representative so that Brazilian authorities can exert leverage over the company by having someone to arrest.

De Moraes also set a daily fine of $8,900 for people or companies using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access X. Some legal experts questioned the grounds for that decision and how it would be enforced, including Brazil’s bar association, which said it would request that the Supreme Court review that provision.

But the majority of the panel upheld the VPN fine — with one justice opposing unless users are shown to be using X to commit crimes.

Judge feuding with Musk

Brazil is one of the biggest markets for X, with tens of millions of users. Its block marked a dramatic escalation in a monthslong feud between Musk and de Moraes over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation.

Over the weekend, many X users in Brazil said they felt disconnected from the world and began migrating en masse to alternative platforms such as Bluesky and Threads.

The suspension has proceeded to set up a showdown between de Moraes and Musk’s satellite internet provider Starlink, which is refusing to enforce the justice’s decision.

“He violated the constitution of Brazil repeatedly and egregiously, after swearing an oath to protect it,” Musk wrote in the hours before the vote, adding a flurry of insults and accusations in the wake of the panel’s vote. On Sunday, Musk announced the creation of an X account to publish the justice’s decisions that he said would show they violated Brazilian law.

But legal experts have said such claims don’t hold water, noting that de Moraes’ peers have repeatedly endorsed his rulings — as they did Monday. Although his actions are viewed by experts as legal, they have sparked some debate over whether one man has been afforded too much power, or if his rulings should have more transparency.

De Moraes’ decision to quickly refer his order for panel approval served to obtain “collective, more institutional support that attempts to depersonalize the decision,” Conrado Hübner, a constitutional law expert at the University of Sao Paulo, told The Associated Press.

It is standard for a justice to refer such cases to a five-justice panel, Hübner said. In exceptional cases, the justice also could refer the case to the full bench for review. Had de Moraes done the latter, two justices who have questioned his decisions in the past — and were appointed by former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro — would have had the opportunity to object or hinder the vote’s advance.

Starlink shutdown next?

X’s block already led de Moraes last week to freeze the Brazilian financial assets of Starlink to force it to cover X’s fines, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group. The company says it has more than 250,000 clients in Brazil.

Legal experts have questioned the legal basis of that move, and Starlink’s law firm Veirano has told the AP it has appealed the freeze. It declined to comment further.

In a show of defiance, Starlink told the telecommunications regulator Anatel that it would not block X access until its financial accounts were unfrozen, Anatel’s press office said in an email to the AP. Starlink didn’t respond to a request for comment.

That means a shutdown of Starlink is likely, although enforcement will be difficult given the company’s satellites aren’t inside national territory, said Luca Belli, coordinator of the Technology and Society Center at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. It is popular in Brazil’s expansive rural and forested areas.

Anatel’s President Carlos Baigorri told local media GloboNews late Sunday afternoon that he has relayed Starlink’s decision to Justice de Moraes.

Baigorri told GloboNews that the “maximum sanction” for a telecom company would be revocation of its license. He said if Starlink loses its license and continues providing service, it would be committing a crime. Anatel could seize equipment from Starlink’s 23 ground stations in Brazil that ensure the quality of its internet service, he said.

“It is highly probable there is a political escalation” because Starlink is “explicitly refusing to comply with orders, national laws,” said Belli, who is also a professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s law school.

The arguments from Musk, a self-proclaimed “free-speech absolutist,” have found fertile ground with Brazil’s political right, who view de Moraes’ actions as political persecution against Bolsonaro’s supporters.

On Brazilian orders, X previously has shut down accounts, including those of lawmakers affiliated with Bolsonaro’s right-wing party and far-right activists accused of undermining Brazilian democracy. X’s lawyers in April sent a document to the Supreme Court, saying that it had suspended or blocked 226 users since 2019.

Bolsonaro and his allies have cheered on Musk for defying de Moraes. Supporters rallied in April along Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach with a giant sign reading “Brazil Thanks Elon Musk.”

Earlier that month, de Moraes ordered an investigation into Musk over the dissemination of defamatory fake news and another probe over possible obstruction, incitement and criminal organization.

Bolsonaro is also the target of a de Moraes probe over whether the former president had a role in inciting an attempted coup to overturn the results of the 2022 election that he lost. 
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LONDON — The growing mpox outbreaks in Africa that triggered the World Health Organization’s emergency declaration are largely the result of decades of neglect and the global community’s inability to stop sporadic epidemics among a population with little immunity against the smallpox-related disease, leading African scientists said Tuesday.

According to Dr. Dimie Ogoina, who chaired WHO’s mpox emergency committee, negligence has led to a new, more transmissible version of the virus emerging in countries with few resources to stop outbreaks.

Mpox, also known as monkeypox, had been spreading mostly undetected for years in Africa before the disease prompted the 2022 outbreak in more than 70 countries, Ogoina said at a virtual news conference.

“What we are witnessing in Africa now is different from the global outbreak in 2022,” he said. While that outbreak was overwhelmingly focused in gay and bisexual men, mpox in Africa is now being spread via sexual transmission as well as through close contact among children, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups.

And while most people over 50 were likely vaccinated against smallpox — which may provide some protection against mpox — that is not the case for Africa’s mostly young population, who Ogoina said were mostly susceptible.

Mpox belongs to the same family of viruses as smallpox but causes milder symptoms like fever and body aches. It mostly spreads through close skin-to-skin contact, including sex. People with more serious cases can develop prominent blisters on the face, hands, chest and genitals.

Earlier this month, WHO declared the surging mpox outbreaks in Congo and 11 other countries in Africa to be a global emergency.

On Tuesday, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there were more than 22,800 mpox cases and 622 deaths on the continent and that infections had jumped 200% in the last week. The majority of cases and deaths are in Congo, where most mpox infections are in children under 15.

Dr. Placide Mbala-Kingebeni, a Congolese scientist who helped identify the newest version of mpox, said diagnostic tests being used in the country did not always pick it up, making it hard to track the variant’s spread.

In May, Mbala-Kingebeni, who heads a lab at Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research, published research showing a new form of mpox that may be less deadly but more transmissible. The noted mutations suggested it was “more adapted to human transmission,” he said, but the lack of tests in Congo and elsewhere complicated efforts to monitor outbreaks.

The new variant has been detected in four other African countries as well as Sweden, where health officials said they have identified the first case of a person this month with the more infectious form of mpox. The person had been infected during a stay in Africa.

WHO said that available data to date does not suggest that the new form of mpox is more dangerous but that research is ongoing.

Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Centre in the Netherlands who has been studying mpox, said scientists were now seeing some significant impacts of the disease, noting that pregnant women were miscarrying or losing their fetuses and that some babies were being born infected with mpox.

Ogoina, a professor of infectious diseases at Niger Delta University in Nigeria, said that in the absence of vaccines and drugs, African health workers should focus on providing supportive care, like ensuring patients have enough to eat and are given mental health support, given the stigma that often comes with mpox.

“It’s very, very unfortunate that we have had mpox for 54 years and we are only now thinking about therapeutics,” he said.

Mbala-Kingebeni said strategies previously used to stop Ebola outbreaks in Africa might help, given the limited numbers of shots expected. He said authorities have estimated Africa needs about 10 million doses but might only receive about 500,000 — and it’s unclear when they might arrive.

“Finding a case and vaccinating around the case, like we did with Ebola, might help us target the hot spots,” he said.

Koopmans said that given the urgent need for vaccines in Africa, waiting for more doses to be produced was unrealistic.

“The short term really is about, who has vaccines and where are they to be best used next?” she said.

Spain’s health ministry announced Tuesday that it would dip into its mpox vaccine stockpile to donate 20% of its supply, about 500,000 doses, to African countries battling mpox.

“We consider it senseless to accumulate vaccines where they are not needed,” Spain’s health ministry said in a statement, adding Spain will recommend to the European Commission to propose that all member states also donate 20% of their vaccine stock.

Spain’s donation alone is more than what the European Union, vaccine Bavarian Nordic and the U.S. have pledged. Last week, Africa CDC said the EU and Bavarian Nordic had promised 215,000 mpox vaccines while the U.S. said it was donating 50,000 doses of the same vaccine to Congo. Japan has also donated some doses to Congo.

Meanwhile, the U.S. on Tuesday donated 10,000 doses of mpox vaccines to Nigeria where mpox has been common, making the vaccines the first to arrive in Africa since the global emergency was declared. The country has had a few dozen cases this year.
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