And as I mentioned before, Kabila has been sentenced to death in absentia by the Congolese government.

Yeah, thanks.

So there's two things in terms of military policy here that I'm really curious about.

The first is what type of international support is the FRN getting, if any? What is kind of the broader geopolitical concerns? Does this have the potential to turn into a proxy conflict? And the second thing is, in terms of their current military standing, what type of actual capabilities does the FRN and Kabila have to meaningfully attack the state? And is there any type of possibility that it looks like they might actually be able to make significant inroads?

So what can you tell us on that front?

Yeah, thanks, Milos.

So this week, the U.S. trended, the U.S. America's trended toward political destabilization slightly.

The story began this week, very interestingly, as the Pentagon announced that former U.S. Army Major Nadal Hassan, who killed 13 U.S. soldiers at a mass shooting in 2009 on a U.S. Army base, is to be publicly executed by a firing squad.

If you could just give us a brief explainer on what's happened in Brazil and what your immediate thoughts on the result.

Yeah.

So for anyone who doesn't know, the Brazilian election system operates very similar to the French one, where it has two different rounds of elections.

If all the parties run together and nobody gets more than a 50% outright majority, then they eliminate all but the most two popular candidates and then run a second round with just those two most popular.

In the first round, Flavio Bolsonaro overperformed polls and secured not an outright majority, but about 47% of the vote, which was significantly better than he was expected to do in his first round.

As a result, they're going to be going to a second round.

However, given that most of the third, fourth, and fifth biggest parties are predominantly Bolsonaro-leaning, it means that in this upcoming second round, Flavio Bolsonaro is largely expected to be able to pull out a clean victory against Lula.

So potentially we could see a situation where if Bolsonaro wins and becomes the president on October 25th, that he will have a very strong grip on the legislature and that he will then be able to push through, you know, key government appointments and provide a check on the judiciary, which is something that Bolsonaro has vowed to rein in.

And if you could just give us a brief recap of some of the stuff that you've been looking at from this past quarter and maybe start the conversation about where you think we're going to be heading in Q4.

Yeah, thanks, Milos.

So obviously, the main center stage issue throughout Q3 was the ongoing trilateral economic crisis.

competition and tension between the United States and its neighboring countries, particularly its largest trading partners in the Americas, Canada and Mexico.

The tariffs implemented by the Trump administration and the increasing list of demands that was made, particularly of Canada, have severely escalated both the diplomatic and the economic landscape of In North America, so far, Canada and Mexico have not really made any significant economic concessions.

They are both holding their ground, especially for Canada.

This is a really big issue and a matter of sovereignty and political legitimacy, not just economic importance because places like the Carney administration.

However, going forward, as these projects get built out, investments flow in, this might be a longer year-on-year development rather than something we'd see in the next few months, making much of a difference in terms of oil prices and stabilization on energy.

There's been escalatory tensions in Somalia too, bordering the Red Sea, in which you had security forces from Ethiopia pulling out of Somalia, peacekeeping forces, and this has led to an uptick in maritime piracy, deterioration of the security on the seas, as well as lapse in counter-terrorism, especially regarding al-Shabaab, in which they have pushed and gained territory over the last two months.

Yeah.

One thing I'm really curious about is if you take a look at most civil wars that are going on around the world at the moment or in the recent past, most of the casualties and the escalation of the war can often be attributed to foreign interference or support for either side as it slowly evolves into a never-ending proxy conflict.

What I'm curious about is have we seen any direct support or any perhaps impending support from any foreign states, either to the Ethiopian government or toward the rebel groups?

And over to you, Jared, for the Americas.

Yeah, thanks, Milos.

So the U.S. Americas trended towards slight destabilization this last week.

Vice President Vance announced that approximately 760,000 enrollees of the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, are going to be losing their subsidies and removed from the program amid accusations of fraud.

And as of yet, there hasn't been any real... unpacking of what that of what that term means at the moment

yeah i think there's really kind of like two major parts to this the first is like you know the european union itself it's very unlikely that canada would become like a full membered state of the european union but the european union has a lot like andrew mentioned has a lot of various levels of association kind of like a expanding orbit and And it's definitely possible that Canada could join one of those more integrated trade blocs.

However, as far as the big question is not only what is an associate member, but why is this happening? What is the actual end goal? Because pretty much everyone involved, both in Ottawa and in Brussels, knows that they're not going to join the European Union.

So the question is, what are they really trying to do? My first main thought is...

In response to increasingly hostile American trade export restrictions, I'm assuming what's going on here is they're attempting to kind of diversify away from an American-dependent economic and security relationship, trying to pull Canada into more of a European kind of a joint economy.

almost NATO within a NATO economic and security block, trying to keep both of these areas less fully dependent on the US economically and in terms of military.

We saw this recently with Canada beginning to explore purchasing Gripen fighter jets from Sweden as opposed to purchasing more American fighter jets and trying to make sure that these states don't drift too far away from the US.

Jared, over to you.