BRUSSELS (AP) — Thousands of disgruntled workers demonstrated in the Belgian capital on Monday to protest the threat of massive layoffs in a state-of-the-art Brussels car factory that stands as a symbol for key industries across the European Union that clamor for more government support in the face of global competition.
The trigger for Monday's protest, estimated by police at 5,500 people, was the announcement that German automaker Audi would phase out production at its Forest plant in southern Brussels, threatening the jobs of 3,000 staffers, many of whom are experts in electronic vehicle production which the EU seeks to promote as a breakthrough sector as it struggles to compete with China and the United States.
“What is happening at Audi can also happen at other factories too. So we have to act to make sure that industries remain,” said Salvatore Tabone , who said he has worked for 27 years at Audi and now faces the prospect of being laid off. “After all the efforts we made, this is the reward we get,” he said.
“This is not an isolated case, unfortunately. There was a tide over the past year” affecting major industries all over Belgium, said ACV union representative Lieve De Preter.
A major EU-requested report said the economies across the 27-nation EU would need a boost of up to 800 billion euros (almost $900 billion) to lead the bloc through a clean energy transition and prepare for effective competition with its global trading partners. The EU has often shown weak growth compared to the United States, increasing the industrial trans-Atlantic gap.
The European Trade Union Confederation said the Audi decision to phase out production in Brussels was “part of a wider trend which saw Europe lose 850,000 jobs across the industry between 2019 and 2023.”
ETUC General Secretary Esther Lynch said “the imminent threat to thousands of jobs on the doorstep of the European institutions should bring home to EU leaders that they are simply not doing enough to support our industries."
The EU's executive office of Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is currently in transition following the June 9 EU elections, but has made a revamp of the bloc's industrial policy a key issue to tackle during its next 5-year tenure.
Workers of the German automaker Audi protest the threat of massive layoffs in downtown Brussels, Belgium, Monday Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Sylvain Plazy)
Workers of the German automaker Audi protest the threat of massive layoffs in downtown Brussels, Belgium, Monday Sept. 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Sylvain Plazy)
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Some Brazilian users regained access to X on Wednesday despite a nationwide ban put in place by the country's Supreme Court, a reunion apparently resulting from the social network changing the way its servers are accessed.
But the renewed access may be short-lived.
Late last month, Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered X blocked nationwide after months of tension with the site's billionaire owner Elon Musk over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. De Moraes also set fines for anyone using virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access the platform.
That rendered X effectively inaccessible in the country until Wednesday, when an Associated Press journalist was among those who regained access. The number of X posts made in Brazil rose from 939,000 Tuesday to more than 2 million by late afternoon Wednesday, data analysis company Bites said.
Experts examining X's IP addresses — numeric designations that identifies sites' location on the internet — said there are indications the company has begun routing users through the servers of Cloudflare, a content delivery network, en route to its own.
“The service that Elon Musk’s social network has started using works like a ‘digital shield’ that protects the company’s servers,” Pedro Diogenes, Latin America’s technical director for CLM, a distributor that focuses on cybersecurity. It acts as a proxy between users and X's servers, filtering traffic and preventing the original IP address from being recognized, Diogenes told the AP.
Brazil’s telecommunications regulator Anatel said it is looking into the situation and will report its findings to the Supreme Court, noting that there has been no change to de Moraes' ruling. A panel of fellow justices later upheld his decision, though it hasn’t yet gone before the court’s full bench. His fine for VPN users in particular has faced blowback, including from the nation’s bar association.
The Supreme Court declined to comment on possible actions it could take. Musk, who often uses his platform to disparage de Moraes, hadn't commented on X by late afternoon.
Former President Jair Bolsonaro celebrated the return of the social network. He has sided with Musk in the feud with de Moraes and sought to portray the ban as censorship from an overzealous judge.
“I congratulate you all for the pressure that makes the wheels turn in defense of democracy in Brazil,” Bolsonaro posted Wednesday on X.
Some Brazilian X users trumpeted the platform's return — with several addressing de Moraes directly, vowing that they weren't using a VPN. There have been no reports of fines being levied against people using VPNs.
Cloudflare, a security company that prides itself on providing services to websites regardless of their content, has a history of protecting sites other companies won’t touch. But only to a point. In 2017, for instance, it dropped the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer as a customer following a deadly clash at a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. And in 2022, it dropped the notorious stalking and harassment site Kiwi Farms citing an “immediate threat to human life.”
But X is a mainstream social media platform — even if it may be home to some extremist content — and it is not yet clear whether Brazil’s ban would be enough for San Francisco-based Cloudflare to abandon it.
Cloudflare has a reputation for cooperating with governments, however, and so may comply with an order from the Supreme Court to cease serving as X's proxy, David Nemer, who specializes in the anthropology of technology at the University of Virginia, told the AP.
Ordering internet service providers to block Cloudflare would be impossible, since thousands of Brazilian companies depend on it, Nemer previously wrote on Bluesky, another social media platform.
A person close to Cloudflare, who was not authorized to speak publicly about a business relationship, said the network services provider did not do anything specifically to help X get around Brazil’s ban. Rather, X recently switched to Cloudflare from another provider, which could be a reason the block is not working. This person added that the workaround likely won't last long.
De Moraes could also attempt to force Musk’s hand by going after his satellite-based internet service provider Starlink, as he has done since the ban, said Rafael Mafei, a law professor at the University of Sao Paulo.
On Friday, de Moraes seized about $3 million from bank accounts belonging to X and Starlink to collect what X owed in fines.
Legal analysts have questioned de Moraes’ prior decision to freeze Starlink’s bank account until it paid for X's fines. While Musk owns both X and SpaceX, which operates Starlink, the two companies are separate entities. But de Moraes has shown that he considers the two companies to belong to the same economic group, Mafei said.
“Under normal circumstances, anyone else who openly took active steps to obstruct judicial measures and investigations, as Musk is doing, would possibly have already had their arrest decreed in Brazil,” Mafei said.
Ortutay reported from San Francisco.
FILE - A view of a laptop shows the Twitter sign-in page with their logo, in Belgrade, Serbia, Monday, July 24, 2023. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic, File)
