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Left-Wing Lula Narrowly Wins Brazilian Presidency, Biden Quickly Praises "Free, Fair, & Credible Elections"

The tight result tops off a dramatic comeback for the 77 year-old opposition leader, who served two terms as president between 2003 and 2010 but subsequently was accused of corruption and served time in prison for graft before his convictions were annulled.

This result is historic as it marks the first time a sitting president in Brazil has lost a re-election bid.

Echoing the Biden administration's narratives, Lula focused on the risks to democracy from Bolsonaro’s far-right movement, framing the election as a choice between “democracy and fascism, democracy and barbarism.”

Additionally, the far-left leader pledged to reduce inequality and protect the environment while preserving the country's fiscal health (but caused consternation among some by offering few details on his broader economic agenda and refusing to nominate a finance minister).

“Lula’s challenge of governing is bigger than that of winning the election. Brazilian society needs to be rebuilt in its institutional and fiscal basis,” said Carolina Botelho, a political scientist with the Institute of Advanced Studies at Sao Paulo University.

“Lula will need to recover the internal and external trust of financial agents and civil society.”

Amid extremely high interest rates and inflation, his plan to move away from the free market vision of the Bolsonaro administration to a model that puts the state at the heart of the economy will be a key focus for investors globally.

Crucially, as The FT reports, Lula remains a deeply polarising figure and is also likely to face obstacles in Congress, which is broadly right-leaning.

Lula’s bench of leftwing allies will occupy less than about a quarter of seats in the lower house, meaning he will need to make concessions to pursue his agenda.

Bolsonaro allies will also occupy key governorships, including São Paulo - Brazil’s wealthiest and most populous state - which was won on Sunday by Tarcísio de Freitas of the rightwing Republican party.

Finally, it took just minutes for President Biden to send his congratulations to the Workers' Party leader on his success in "free, fair, and credible elections." We wonder if the US president would have been so fast to congratulate Bolsonaro if the vote count was so close but the other way? (In the run-up to the election, Bolsonaro had persistently claimed Brazil’s electronic ballot machines were vulnerable to fraud, leading opponents to fear he was preparing a justification to reject a losing result.)

Lula’s victory continues a trend of wins by left-wing candidates in Latin America over the past 18 months, most prominently in Chile, Colombia and Peru, as voters punished incumbents that were in charge during the Covid-19 outbreak.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/left-wing-lula-narrowly-wins-brazilian-presidency-biden-quickly-praises-free-fair

Elon Musk Tweets that Twitter Board and Law Firm Deliberately Hid Evidence from the Court

It looks like Twitter’s Board and Law firm may be in very big trouble.

Elon Musk tweeted that the Twitter Board and the law firm that worked for Twitter, Wachtell, may have withheld information from him and the court.

Not only might the Twitter Board and Attorney be in trouble for lying with the court, but the these entities would be in trouble with the SEC as well for filing false statements as we reported earlier as well.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/breaking-elon-musk-tweets-twitter-board-law-firm-deliberately-hid-evidence-court/

COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab

The Wuhan lab at the center of suspicions about the pandemic’s onset was far more troubled than known, documents unearthed by a Senate team reveal. Tracing the evidence, Vanity Fair and ProPublica give the clearest view yet of a biocomplex in crisis

“A Secret Language of Chinese Officialdom”

Toy Reid has always had a gift for languages — one that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he became the first person in his family to attend college, he studied Japanese. Then, “clueless but curious,” as he puts it, he channeled his fascination with the Dalai Lama into a master’s degree in East Asian philosophy and religion at Harvard. Along the way, he picked up Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, and achieved fluency in Chinese.

But it was his career as a China specialist for the Rand Corporation and as a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department that taught him how to interpret a notoriously opaque language: the “party speak” practiced by Chinese Communist officials.

Party speak is “its own lexicon,” explains Reid, now 44 years old. Even a native Mandarin speaker “can’t really follow it,” he says. “It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”

For 15 months, Reid loaned this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of COVID-19’s origins. Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight.

On Nov. 12, 2019, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach: "These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace."

Ever since the Chinese city of Wuhan was identified as ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic, a contingent of scientists have suspected that the virus could have leaked from one of the WIV’s complex of laboratories. The WIV is, after all, the venue for some of China’s riskiest coronavirus research. Scientists there have mixed components of different coronaviruses and created new strains, in an effort to predict the risks of human infection and to develop vaccines and treatments. Critics argue that creating viruses that don’t exist in nature runs the risk of unleashing them.

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-origin-wuhan-lab