Lula pulls off a shocking comeback in Brazil, a leaderless student movement topples Serbia’s autocrat, and Israeli voters go to the polls for the first time since the October 7th attacks.

Tommy and Ben break down Brazilian President Lula da Silva’s stunning runoff victory over Flávio Bolsonaro, including a 10-million-person WhatsApp army and 3 million new second-round voters, and look ahead to what a final Lula term will mean for the Brazilian left, the Amazon, and foreign policy. Then an even more extraordinary story from Serbia, where the end of President Aleksandar Vučić’’s 12-year grip on power proves that a protest movement can force change. Israeli voters just finished casting ballots in record numbers, and the guys explain the process ahead, the stakes, and why Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly tried to provoke Iran into striking Israel in the final days of the campaign. Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado returns from exile, and it might have something to do with the midterm elections in the US. And the UAE nominates a Palestinian diplomat to be the next UN Secretary-General, which sounds like good news until you look at the UAE’s human rights record. At the end of the show, Ben talks to Pedro Telles, a program director at D-Hub, about the view from the ground in São, Brazil, and the tactics Lula’s campaign used that progressive campaigns around the world can learn from.

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Trump rigs the war in Russia’s favor, France descends into chaos, and we witness another episode of the Trump administration soap opera drama, As the World Burns.

Tommy and Ben walk through Trump and Zelensky’s most recent war of words, the devastating consequences of the US holding back interceptor missile shipments and satellite access, and the ridiculous possibility of a summit to conclude the war with China, Russia, and the US...but not Ukraine. French protests get bigger and more lawless as frustrations with spending on education and the high cost of living get co-opted by violent looters, and French politicians point fingers at the left. An OpenAI employee gets caught allegedly spying for Saudi Arabia. Exclusive polling from the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project shows that voters in swing states are tougher on Israel than Washington seems to think. And in this week’s latest example of infighting and corruption within the Trump administration, Alina Habba and Richard Grenell battle over a story involving millions of dollars, a Turkish billionaire, and the Kennedy Center. At the end of the show, Ben speaks to independent journalist Jasper Nathaniel, who describes the brutal attack he witnessed on an American photographer in the West Bank, and how violent gangs of Israeli settlers no longer hold back on either journalists or diplomats.

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Trump cuts a diesel deal with Putin, the Houthis hit Saudi Arabia’s main airport, and Kimberly Guilfoyle resigns after demanding ice at 4am in Mykonos.

Tommy and Ben dig into Trump’s announcement of a diesel fuel deal and “energy ceasefire” with Russia that caught Ukraine and the Europeans completely off guard, and will pump $4 billion into Vladimir Putin’s war machine. The Houthis launch a deadly strike on Saudi Arabia’s international airport in Riyadh that leads the CEOs of major oil companies to cancel their trips to “Davos in the Desert”. Ship attacks in the Strait of Hormuz have nearly doubled in the past two weeks, Iran is reportedly reading war stories to kindergartners and training civilians to fire anti-aircraft missiles, and the guys explain why none of this looks like a country preparing to make a deal. In India, the Cockroach movement is back in the streets after 130 million names were purged from the voter rolls. New reporting exposes details about Erik Prince’s mercenaries conducting drone strikes in Congo and collecting mining taxes. And finally, Kimberly Guilfoyle resigns as ambassador to Greece after a State Department investigation, a $100,000 Amex bill, and an incident involving a 4am demand for ice while drunk in Mykonos. At the end of the show, Tommy speaks to Dr. Lesley Anne Warner, a visiting scholar with the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to get more context on why the current fighting in Ethiopia and conflicts in Sudan and Yemen could all spill over into each other.

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