A Rare Good Day For Democracy:
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil won re-election on Sunday, according to official preliminary results, punctuating a string of conservative wins across Latin America. His right-wing opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, refused to accept the outcome.
Mr. Lula became the first presidential candidate since 1989 to win after finishing second in the opening round. In just three weeks, he added more than 10 million votes, gaining ground across the country.
Mr. Lula received 51.8 percent of the vote, compared with 48.2 percent for Mr. Bolsonaro, with nearly all ballots counted. Mr. Bolsonaro called for the election to be annulled after a judge extended voting hours by two hours, a change that both campaigns had requested.
The long-serving leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, has conceded defeat, ushering in a seismic political shift after a historic election that saw the increasingly authoritarian leader pitted against a student-led movement that had spent two years protesting against his government.
As news broke that Vučić’s 12 years in power had come to an end, celebrations erupted on the streets of Belgrade and other cities.
At the headquarters of the Student List, supporters chanted “Victory, victory!” as they applauded, cried and traded hugs. “Dear Serbia, tonight the voice of the people is being heard,” said Radomir Saičić, a professor at Belgrade University, speaking on behalf of the students at their headquarters. “Tonight we celebrate victory, tomorrow we build the future.”
The scenes of joy came hours after a record number of voters turned up to cast their ballot on Sunday. Across the country, long lines snaked out of polling stations, with some reporting wait times of up to two hours. By 7pm local time pollsters and monitors CeSID and Ipsos put the turnout at 67.6%, the highest since the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1992.
Let me at least give Vucic some props: He actually acknowledged defeat. Something rare these days.
Hegseth’s Exit Plan? You know, before impeachment?:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is “angling” for Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to appoint him to her Senate seat so he can avoid potential impeachment, Puck reported on Sunday.
Blackburn is likely to win her race for Tennessee governor, opening up the post for the rest of her term ending in January 2031. (Are we certain of that? I thought a temporary appointment was only good until the next General Election in 2028.)
Hegseth and his family set up residence in Tennessee in 2022. Rep. Tim Burchett is also interested in the Senate seat, according to Puck.
The House is expected to vote on an impeachment resolution filed by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie (Ky.) against Hegseth after the elections ― and it is expected to be close. Democrats have been “aligning to call for the defense secretary’s ouster or resignation,” Semafor reported earlier this month.
Cut-and-run. What better exit for the Manly Man who heads the Department Of War? Perhaps, though, he’s just tired of Trump admiring his butt.
Cop Helped Deport 10% Of This Town:
The new patrol officer parked his black Dodge Charger outside a house off Main Street and approached on foot. A Mexican ballad was playing. Someone had called in a noise complaint, claiming it sounded as if people were fighting.
But as the officer, Jaron Alexander, got closer, he found nothing of the sort. A middle-aged woman greeted him as her daughter, Joanna Martinez, petite and visibly pregnant, looked on. “What kind of party are you all having?” she remembers him asking. Behind her were three generations of an extended family. They were celebrating a 3-month-old’s baptism over pozole verde, horchata and beers.
Alexander ran some IDs and found no issues. The music wasn’t even that loud, he thought. He told them to have a good night, and then he left.
That encounter, in early October last year, was the first of many that Alexander and Martinez would have in tiny Ingram, Texas, a 1.5-square-mile town of 1,900 people beside the Guadalupe River. But it was the only one before Ingram signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would roil the town and tear Martinez’s family apart.
Underway in Chicago that fall, and soon in Minneapolis, was one version of how the administration could try to do it: masked agents from across the federal government surging into a liberal city to round up immigrants, beating back — even killing — the citizens who tried to stand in their path.
But a quieter kind of surge was spreading across the country at the same time. In September 2025, ICE announced new incentives for a partnership program known as 287(g). The program’s most aggressive form, the so-called task force model, which Ingram opted in to, enlists local police officers as deputy immigration agents, and the new incentives included a $100,000 vehicle stipend, a $7,500 equipment stipend for every participating officer, quarterly performance bonuses and funding to help cover officer salaries and overtime. “By joining forces with ICE,” the announcement read, “you’re not just gaining access to these unprecedented reimbursement opportunities — you’re becoming part of a national effort to ensure the safety of every American family.”
Alexander completed an online course with ICE a few weeks after the baptism party, qualifying him for time-and-a-half pay whenever he helped the agency pick up immigrants. Here in the Texas Hill Country, he soon became the local face of the national crackdown.
The cop eventually develops a conscience. I say, ‘Fuck him’. Please read this entire piece. Amerika under Trump, Texas-style:
Alexander received his first ICE payments in early December. In January, as the country’s attention turned to the violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, he was often spending three or four hours a day and sometimes entire shifts working on behalf of the federal agency. By the time federal authorities announced a drawdown in Minneapolis on Feb. 12, Alexander had already made $3,264.46 from his task force hours, according to his pay stubs.
Ingram was by then one of more than 750 task force model partners around the country, up from not quite 500 when it signed up in October. At least 43 million U.S. residents, according to an analysis of ICE records by the legal data firm Titus Consulting, already lived in a county with an active task force agreement. Alexander was one of thousands of deputized officers in Texas alone.
Alexander remains only one cog in a deportation machine for which the federal government has now earmarked $240 billion. Today more than 1,900 agencies in at least 30 states have signed up for ICE’s task force model, with more than 29,000 deputized officers. With their help, ICE recently hit a record of immigration arrests, totaling more than 50,000 in August.
This. Must. End.
Netanyahu’s Reign Of Terror Designed To Help His Reelection Prospects:
Hebron, the biggest city in the West Bank, had paid little attention to Israel’s looming elections until it found itself suddenly in the midst of them, a proving ground for Benjamin Netanyahu’s security credentials in the run-up to Tuesday’s vote.
A gun attack on an Israeli military checkpoint on Friday in which two soldiers were killed brought immediate televised visits from Netanyahu and his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, whose ruling coalition is narrowly trailing with two days of campaigning left.
They vowed abrupt and sweeping retribution, and the prime minister warned of imminent military operations on a scale the West Bank has not seen in nearly 60 years of occupation.
Within hours, the whole city of 250,000 people had been sealed off and the neighbourhood of Farsh al-Hawa, closest to the site of Friday’s attack, had been flattened. By Sunday morning, there was nothing left but rubble of an industrial area that had been full of car workshops, a big ceramics plant and other enterprises.
Personal to Melanie Ross Levin: This is the war criminal you admire so much? Are you heading back for another pro-Israeli propaganda exercise? No, I haven’t forgotten.
What do you want to talk about?
