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Portugal's Prime Minister Luis Montenegro looks on during the confidence motion at the parliament in Lisbon, Portugal, on March 11, 2025.
Hard Numbers: Portugal will likely vote (again), US markets swoon, A breath of fresh air, Baloch militants seize train, Trump trumpets Tesla
3/4: Portugal’s parliament has voted no-confidence in Prime Minister Luis Montenegro over a planned parliamentary inquiry into his business dealings. The result: Portugal will probably hold its third election in less than four years. A poll published this week found the opposition Socialists with a small lead over the governing center-right party.
214: On Tuesday, armed insurgents, acting on behalf of a separatist group in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, attacked and boarded a packed passenger train near Quetta. The militants claimed they were holding 214 passengers hostage. But local police said the majority of the passengers were believed to be safe and that 35 had been taken hostage.
4 trillion: From its peak in February, a US stock market sell-off has wiped out $4 trillion from the S&P 500. Many economists blame the meltdown on the potential inflationary impact of President Donald Trump’s growing number of tariff threat
7: Only seven countries – Australia, New Zealand, the Bahamas, Barbados, Grenada, Estonia, and Iceland – met World Health Organization air quality standards last year, data showed on Tuesday. The smoggiest five were the Democratic Republic of Congo, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Chad, and India.
50: On Monday, shares in the Elon Musk-owned electric vehicle maker Tesla were down more than 15% for the day and more than 50% from their peak three months ago. Shares recovered a bit on Tuesday, closing up 3.8%. Analysts place much of the blame for the losses on investors spooked by anti-Musk Tesla boycotts. In response, President Donald Trump pledged on Monday that he would buy a “brand new Tesla,” despite his past criticism of electric vehicles.
Tourists visit the Torre de Belem (Belem Tower) in Lisbon, Portugal on October 19, 2021.
Hard Numbers: No tax for young Portuguese, Milton's death toll, Saudis fail at UN Human Rights Council, Nobel winners, UN wants its money back, US inflation cools
0: Portugal's government has proposed a novel plan to stem the flow of talented young people exiting the country for brighter job prospects in other countries. Beginning in 2025, young people earning up to €28,000 ($30,600) a year would pay zero income tax for their first year of work. They’d then get a 75% tax exemption from the second to the fifth year, 50% between the sixth and ninth years, and 25% in the 10th year.
12: More than 2 million Floridians still have no power as a result of Hurricane Milton, and the storm has been linked to at least 12 deaths, mostly on the eastern side of the Sunshine State.
7: On Wednesday,Saudi Arabia came up short in its bid to win a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council, a setback for the kingdom’s bid to remake its image. The Asia-Pacific group of candidates, which included Saudi Arabia, had six candidates vying for five seats. The Saudis won 117 votes, seven fewer than the fifth-place Marshall Islands.
121: Novelist Han Kang is the 121st winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature — and the first South Korean author to win the award. Kang was lauded for “her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
105: The Japanese anti-nuclear weapons organization Nihon Hidankyo, a group of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, has been awarded the 105th Nobel Peace Prize. The group received the honor early Friday “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again," said the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which has been issuing the prize since 1901.
58.8: A United Nations tribunal has ordered a former high-ranking official to repay the UN $58.8 million of the organization’s money which he steered towards a British businessman in crooked deals. Vitaly Vanshelboim, a 20-year veteran of the UN who is from Ukraine, is accused of receiving interest-free loans and a Mercedes, among other gifts.
2.4: US inflation fell to 2.4% in September. That’s an improvement from 2.5% in August but fell short of the 2.3% analysts expected. The drop in inflation may not be enough to justify a 50 basis point rate cut when the Federal Reserve meets in November.
Europe needs to strengthen its defenses, says President Macron
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, shares his perspective on European politics from Etterbeek, Brussels.
Does President Macron in France, thinks that Europe can't rely on the United States for its defense no longer?
That's not really the gist of what he’s saying. What he's saying, and I think he's entirely right, is that Europe must do more on its own for its defense. The United States remains a partner of immense value. No question about that. But he points out that the United States is a country with global responsibilities and pressures for an increased engagement elsewhere as well. So the call for Europe to do more, to coordinate, to integrate, to strengthen its own defenses from President Macron. I think that reflects a sentiment that you find all over Europe these days.
Does the resurgence of the radical right in any way impair the celebration in Portugal that is 50 years since the coup, the revolution that overturned the dictatorship?
I don't think it does. That was a joyous celebration across Lisbon and across Portugal on that day, celebrating that is 50 years, the return of democracy or the coming of democracy, to be precise. The only thing that was perhaps, discordant note was, some difficult in handling the legacy of the old colonial wars. Portugal did try to cling on the colonial empire in Africa for a very long time, and that was one of the reasons, by the way, for the revolution 50 years ago.
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Andre Ventura, the leader of the party, is casting his vote to elect the new Prime Minister of Portugal at the Parque das Nacoes school in Lisbon, Portugal, on March 10, 2024. Pre-election polls are indicating that the Democratic Alliance (AD) is the likely winner of the legislative elections.
Winning isn’t everything in Lisbon
Portugal’s election over the weekend had two winners.
The mathematical winner: the center-right Democratic Alliance, which took 79 seats in the 230-seat Parliament, eking out a narrow victory over the left-leaning incumbents of the Socialist Party, with 77.
The zeitgeist winner: the far-right Chega party, which quadrupled its seats to 48. Chega, which means “Enough!” is fiercely anti-immigration and has adopted the “God, Country, Family, and Work” slogan of Portugal’s former dictatorship.
The trouble is that those two winners can’t work together. DA leader Luis Montenegro has ruled out a coalition with Chega which, despite its strong performance, carries the stigma of the country’s fascist past.
That leaves Portugal in its most fragmented and uncertain political state since the end of the dictatorship.
But this isn’t the first time in recent months that a European far-right party has found itself unable to use its kingmaker’s powers. Precisely the same thing happened in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’ far-right PVV party was popular enough to sing at the polls, but too toxic to enter government.
As the EU heads towards European Parliamentary elections, bear this in mind – the recent “resurgence of the right” in Europe is more nuanced than it looks.
People wait for Socialist Party (PS) Secretary General Pedro Nuno Santos to arrive for a campaign rally ahead of the snap elections in Afurada, Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal, March 4, 2024.
Portugal election after corruption scandal fuels far-right
“A good place to stash books. Or to stash 75,800 euros." So reads a bold IKEA bookcase ad with a wink to the scandal of that amount of cash being discovered in books in Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa's office. That tells you everything you need to know about the country’s election this Sunday.
Portugal’s vote is all about corruption, and we think IKEA’s marketing team deserves a raise.
The discovery brought down the center-left government and fueled the hard-right populist party, Chega, which is expected to double its seats thanks to voters disenchanted with mainstream political parties. One of Western Europe’s poorest countries, Portugal has shifted right due to economic malaise over stagnated wages and inflation.
The center-right Democratic Alliance is expected to win the most votes but fall short of a parliamentary majority, positioning Chega as the kingmaker of the right-wing coalition.
The historical irony: The election takes place on the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that swept away the right-wing dictatorship that had kept the country in shackles for four decades.
Chega’s rising popularity is a sign that Portugal may not be immune to rising populism across Europe, which is expected to result in major gains for the far-right in European elections in June.
A harvester carries coca leaves on his back in a coca plantation. He has put in half a day for this. For each 12-kilo sack, he receives the equivalent of about $1.50. A worker can harvest about 20 bags of coca leaves a day.
Hard Numbers: Colombia sees coca boom, Denmark sends museum pieces to Ukraine, World Food Program warns of “doom loop”, a river of wine flows in Portugal
6: In order to fulfill its promises to send Leopard 1 tanks to Ukraine, Denmark had to pull half a dozen of the Cold War-era classics from local military history museums. The tanks in museum collections were found to be in better condition than those in Danish army storage.
24 million: The United Nations World Food Program has warned of a “doom loop” of global hunger as it faces a 60% budget shortfall this year. Unless the WFP can make up the deficit, some 24 million people around the world could fall into emergency hunger situations as the program can no longer provide for them.
600,000: Two wine tanks at the Levira Distillery in São Lourenço do Bairro, Portugal burst open, flooding the village with enough red wine to fill a 600,000 gallon Olympic-sized swimming pool. Local authorities managed to divert the torrent into an empty field before it reached the nearby Certima River - no word yet from local field mice on how they like the vintage.
10 billion: As part of its landmark antitrust case against Google, the US Justice Department says Google spends $10 billion every year to unfairly maintain its status as the internet’s most widely used search engine. The trial opened in Washington, DC on Tuesday and is expected to go on through the winter.
Israeli protesters demonstrate against the right-wing government outside the Knesset in Jerusalem.
Hard Numbers: “Anarchy” in Israel, Michigan State University shooting, the plight of Black mothers and babies, alleged abuses in Portuguese Catholic Church, the new promised land for Scotch
90,000: As Israel’s Knesset began a contentious debate over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms on Monday, a whopping 90,000 people hit the streets of Jerusalem to protest against the measures, with another 100,000 joining demonstrations nationwide. Netanyahu accused his opponents of “pushing the country to anarchy.” Here’s more from GZERO on the back story.
3: At least three people were killed, and five injured, when a gunman opened fire at Michigan State University on Monday night. The assailant then turned the gun on himself. It is the latest in a string of mass shootings on college campuses and schools across the country in recent years.
87: New data on US childbirths shows that, even when correcting for income, Black mothers and their babies fare worse than white ones. The infant mortality rate for rich Black mothers is 87 points higher than that for poor White mothers, according to a decade-long study, which was conducted in California.
4,815: A new report commissioned by the Portuguese Catholic Church alleges that its priests and other authority figures sexually abused at least 4,815 children over the past seven decades. The investigating commission says this number is merely the “tip of the iceberg.” But under Portuguese law, only 25 of those cases are recent enough to be prosecuted.
219 million: India is now the world’s leading importer of Scotch by volume, taking in 219 million bottles of the stuff last year. An increase of some 60% over 2021 helped to push India past France for the top spot. Still, billion-strong India remains a tiny part of the global scotch market — the industry hopes that a long-awaited UK-India trade deal could help to crack things open more.With electric bills soaring, should the EU cap natural gas prices?
Energy prices in the EU have skyrocketed since Russia invaded Ukraine. This week, the cost of electricity across the bloc reached 10 times the decade-long average — mainly due to surging gas prices as a result of Moscow cutting natural gas supplies as payback for sanctions.
As consumers feel the pinch, EU leaders are now under intense pressure to do something to tame runaway energy costs. One way is putting a cap on gas prices for electricity.
How would that work? One proposal, floated by Italian PM Mario Draghi, is a bloc-wide ceiling on the price of Russian gas bought by EU energy companies.
That would wipe out Vladimir Putin's main leverage over Europe in one fell swoop, but also risks the Kremlin turning off the tap completely. (Russian energy giant Gazprom shut down Wednesday the Nord Stream 1 pipeline serving Germany for three days, citing highly suspicious maintenance work.)
The more popular — and populist — option is capping the price of gas from any country used to generate electricity, which is getting a lot of buzz in Brussels these days. EU governments would pay energy firms the difference between that cieling and the higher market price of gas, so companies don't have to pass on the cost to consumers.
Whatever Putin does, price-capping fans argue, come winter ordinary Europeans would be able to keep the lights on and their homes warm.
The price cap is a short-term political gambit that gives EU leaders some breathing room to diversify away from Russian gas without the political backlash from Europeans struggling to pay their electric bills, says Raad Alkadiri, managing director for energy at Eurasia Group.
Brussels, he adds, is desperate to kick its Russian gas habit, but EU member states need more time to import and store enough LNG from alternative sources like Algeria or Qatar. And in the future, the bloc hopes that more renewables in the energy mix should reduce the EU's overall reliance on gas for electricity.
A gas price cap targeting consumers is already in place since June in Spain and Portugal, which got the green light from Brussels to pilot the system. So far so good, but the Iberian Peninsula doesn't buy much Russian gas and is somewhat disconnected from the broader EU wholesale market (although this would change if France agrees to build a pipeline to Germany under the Pyrenees).
Still, it's unclear if an EU-wide cap would need sign-off from all member states, and in any case, extending the Iberian scheme to the entire bloc might have some unintended consequences.
For one thing, artificially “cheap” gas could actually encourage Europeans to consume more gas barely a month after EU member states painstakingly agreed to “voluntarily” cut gas consumption by 15% until April 2023 to avoid winter rationing. More demand will push prices up, and over time make the subsidy unsustainable for cash-strapped governments.
What's more, two of the governments pushing the hardest for an EU-wide cap — Italy and Spain — are already highly indebted, and would get even deeper into the red if they borrow more money to shield their citizens from sky-high electric bills if the war drags on.
For another, this could all throw a wrench into EU plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. For those against the price cap, it’s as much a subsidy for consumers as it is for fossil fuels, and public funds would be better spent on accelerating the renewables transition.
"The cost of diversifying away from Russian gas is really expensive," Alkadiri says. But if you're an EU government, he adds, you must choose between making consumers pay or picking up the tab yourself. And while you might style yourself as fiscally responsible, the last thing you want is to face angry voters who feel they’ve become poorer — and might force you to let Putin get away with murder in Ukraine.
"Russia is sitting there, saying: you want cheap gas? We have it in droves. And you have all the infrastructure you need to get it. Europe is saying: yes, but that gives you political power over us. So we don't want your gas. We don't want to be dependent on you.”
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