Hundreds of truckers and their supporters had gathered at a gas station on a highway near São Paulo for a rally in support of a nationwide protest that has brought South America’s biggest economy to its knees.

But among the slogans and Brazilian flags were signs not usually seen at strike demonstrations: slung from a nearby overpass were banners calling for “military intervention”, a sign that this shutdown has taken on a political dimension all of its own. As a nationwide truck strike reaches its 10th day, gas stations have finally begun to receive fuel deliveries and truckers have started drifting back to work – some unwillingly.

But hundreds of demonstrations have continued on highways across Brazil – and many of those still protesting are calling for a return to the rightwing dictatorship that ran Brazil for two sombre decades until 1985. “We need help from the military to resolve our problems in Brasília, to remove the bandits from there and to put the house in order,” said one driver, Gabriel Berestov, 44.(theguardian)…[+]

The head of Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement has rekindled negotiations to form a government, days after a bitter row over the country’s future in the eurozone ended a fledgling deal for populist parties to take power. Luigi Di Maio, the 31-year-old head of M5S, Italy’s largest party, indicated on Wednesday he was prepared to compromise on his controversial choice of a eurosceptic economist, Paolo Savona, for finance minister. But he insisted that his pick for prime minister remained political newcomer Giuseppe Conte.

In the absence of an agreement between Di Maio , the president of Italy, Sergio Mattarella, and the far right leader Matteo Salvini, Di Maio said he favoured snap elections. “There are two paths ahead. Either we launch the Conte government with a reasonable solution or we vote right away,” he said.(theguardian)…[+]

Theresa May’s appeal for a special Brexit deal on science and research collaboration, worth billions to the British economy, is being stonewalled by Brussels as it prepares to offer an arrangement less privileged and more expensive than that given to non-EU states such as Israel.

The European commission’s negotiators refused to discuss the issue in formal talks last week, instead insisting they would present the UK with conditions of entry for a “third country” into its €97.9bn research programme once they had been formally published. A draft copy of the so-called Horizon Europe document, seen by the Guardian, suggests that the UK is set to be offered less generous access than countries with associate status in the current programme, known as Horizon 2020, including Israel, Turkey, Albania and Ukraine.

Those states, along with countries in the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) – Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland – will be “associated to all programme parts” of the new research and science framework, of which details are to be published on 7 June, according to the leaked document. It is understood that wealthy countries with a developed research and development capacity are to be offered a greater opportunity to pay in and collaborate with the EU under a reform of the current programme, which will end in 2020. However, the UK is set to join Canada and South Korea in the category of countries that will have to pay a higher price for the privilege of collaborating, while being barred from a particular raft of programmes designed to encourage innovation.(theguardian)…[+]