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Oct 28, 2026 - World

Vice President JD Vance has been pulled into a Brazilian police investigation of whether a donor network he co-founded illegally aided Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro’s losing presidential bid.Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Flávio Dino ordered the investigation Tuesday in a 38-page decision, two days after Bolsonaro lost a runoff election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.The order focuses on the Rockbridge Network, a donor group Vance co-founded in 2019, The Washington Post reported. Vance spoke at the network’s donor gatherings as recently as a year ago, and his office declined to comment Tuesday.Dino’s order lists five questions for federal police, and two of them name Rockbridge directly.The order says police must examine talks between Rockbridge representatives and Brazilian businessmen Tallis Gomes and Pedro Sang. A petition filed in the case named the two men, described as allegedly tied to Rockbridge, as possible go-betweens for financial support to Bolsonaro’s campaign, Dino wrote.“[It is] necessary to verify if there was the effective furnishment of resources — including human resources — services, or other measurable economic advantages, identifying its origin, its destination and its eventual use in the campaign,” Dino added, according to the Post’s translation.Brazil law makes it a crime for a candidate to accept money or other campaign help from a foreign source, the Post reported.Dino also ordered police to determine whether those funding talks were tied to foreign interest in Brazil’s rare earths and critical minerals, according to the order.Police must find out who made any proposal, who received it and what was offered in return, Dino wrote. He added that those minerals belong to the federal government and can be mined only with its permission.Dino placed the investigation under the Supreme Court’s direct supervision because members of Congress may have taken part, the order says. Bolsonaro is a sitting senator.Bolsonaro's opponents filed complaints that reached Brazil’s courts before the Oct. 25 runoff, including Lula’s Workers’ Party, the Post reported.Renan Santos, a presidential candidate eliminated in the first round, alleged that Brazilians claiming to represent Rockbridge discussed U.S. support with Bolsonaro campaign officials, the Post reported. A person with direct knowledge told the Post that the same representatives also helped the Santos campaign.“The Brazilians made false representations about their relationship with Rockbridge and created documents representing or referencing Rockbridge without Rockbridge’s knowledge or consent,” the network said in a statement Tuesday.Still, Dino’s order directs police to identify who took part in contacts between Rockbridge representatives and Brazilian businessmen, and what those contacts were for.The order also covers paid posts by foreign accounts that promoted Bolsonaro using odds from Polymarket, a prediction market banned in Brazil, and any deliberate manipulation of algorithms by internet companies to favor or hurt candidates.Bolsonaro fled Brazil for the United States on Tuesday, the day of Dino’s ruling, in defiance of a separate Supreme Court order, three people with knowledge of the matter told the Post. A senior State Department official told the newspaper that he and his family will be issued visas to stay.Dino also sent his decision to 10 federal agencies, including Brazil’s intelligence agency and its central bank, and told the federal police director to report the new case number back to the court, according to the order.

Oct 28, 2026 - World

Warnings of escalating clampdown on press freedom come after Cairo court convicts Attalah of managing an unlicensed websiteLina Attalah, a prominent Egyptian journalist and the editor-in-chief of the news outlet Mada Masr, has been released from detention by Egypt’s authorities and had her website ordered to be shut down by a court amid an intensifying crackdown on independent media in the country.Attalah was taken briefly into custody after a Cairo court convicted her of managing an unlicensed website, prompting fresh international concerns over press freedom in Egypt. Continue reading...

Oct 28, 2026 - World

A former Defense Intelligence Agency staffer is warning Americans that time is running out to prepare for a crisis. His post has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.“Your window to prepare, even with the basics, is closing,” wrote Farijah “Doc” St. Clair on X. “For those tracking the indicators that an event is increasingly likely, you know that it is now undeniable that something is brewing.”St. Clair is head of technology and intelligence at Crisis24, a GardaWorld-owned risk firm. There he leads AiiA, an AI-driven intelligence product built with Palantir that gives corporate executives a daily briefing modeled on the President’s Daily Brief. A combat-wounded Army veteran, he says he spent more than a decade in the Army and the “Defense Intelligence Enterprise,” including a stint at DIA around 2015 and 2016. His company bio says he supported efforts to counter Russian influence and deployed to multiple combat theaters.In his post, St. Clair wrote that during his intelligence career he worked on “counterintelligence threats to Continuity of Government (COG) and Continuity of Operations (COOP).”“Something I can say for absolute certain is that once governments signal that their citizens need to prepare, those preparations have already been conducted for national leadership,” he wrote.He pointed to European governments urging citizens to keep supplies on hand. He also cited reports that the Pentagon wants U.S. military bases to be able to sustain themselves for 90 days, which he called “the loudest signal concerning how significant the situation is.”“The gravity of this can’t be understated,” he wrote. “The calls for preparedness will escalate in their time frames. 3 days will turn into a week. A week will turn in to a few weeks. A few weeks into a couple months.”His message to Americans was blunt.“What Americans should know is that you will be on your own,” St. Clair wrote. “FEMA does not have the resources to help people in a time of need during an event at national scale. Your local authorities don’t either.”He described a grim scenario that he said comes from an Army study of how big cities collapse when “just in time” supply chains fail.“In 3 days, a major city is out of food in the major stores. Looting starts,” he wrote. “Suburbia is then the next harvest location. People organize and target food distribution warehouses. Then people head out into the country where people are prepared and things get ugly.”St. Clair’s advice is to prepare, and to do it quietly.“You, at some point, will hear, ‘well if something happens, I’ll just come to your house,’ stated as a joke. But this is not a joke. You have now become someone’s backup plan. Don’t allow this,” he wrote.He urged readers to “randomize when you go to the store,” cut back on visible Amazon deliveries, and “start to think about how to feign poverty.”He recommended stocking “water, rice, protein, canned foods,” along with basic medicines, and told people to watch the 1980s nuclear war films “The Day After” and “Threads.”“We are now at the part of both movies where governments are telling people to prepare and some degree of panic is setting in,” he wrote. “This will get worse.”He signed off with: “For everyone, hang in there. It’s going to get rough.”St. Clair didn’t say what kind of event he believes is coming. He told readers “to not focus on the ‘what.’”Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reportedly ordered U.S. military installations to become more self-sufficient, an effort covered by outlets including Fox News and the Daily Wire.

Oct 28, 2026 - World

Journalist Scott MacFarlane flagged what he called an obvious mistake in a Justice Department announcement about an alleged noncitizen voter, in his “Day Ahead” newsletter on Wednesday.MacFarlane said DOJ has been putting out releases on individual noncitizens accused of voting in 2022, each showing a blurred image of the suspect with an agent’s windbreaker. One of the entries alleges a Greek national voted for President, Vice President, US Senator and Member of the House of Representatives in 2022.”The problem is that “2022 was not a Presidential or Vice Presidential election year,” MacFarlane noted.MacFarlane says the handful of cases couldn’t sway a federal election, and haven’t been proven in court.Separately, he noted, DOJ is also pressing a suit to block certification of Alaska’s Senate race over the fact that two candidates' names on the ballot are similar, and seeking to set aside tens of thousands of California ballots over alleged noncitizen voting that local officials dismiss as “hogwash,” though an appeals court denied DOJ’s request Monday.He adds that DOJ plans to use 1,000 election monitors, with deployments reportedly concentrated in Democratic areas such as Georgia’s Fulton and DeKalb counties and Indiana’s Marion and Lake counties.Just hours prior to the suit being filed in Alaska, Attorney General Todd Blanche had told reporters the DOJ would not intervene against a state certifying its own election unless there was a "doomsday scenario."

Oct 28, 2026 - World

Jean Kaseya, of the Africa CDC, warns of the illness spreading like Covid unless more funding is secured to increase preparedness and possible treatmentThe “unprecedented” spread of the Ebola outbreak means it could reach the UK and other countries, according to one of Africa’s top health officials.As the current outbreak reached 10,000 cases, with almost 5,000 deaths, Dr Jean Kaseya, director general of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), compared the outbreak to the Covid pandemic, which first took hold in China before spreading to countries across the world, claiming millions of lives, and ravaging health systems and economies. Continue reading...