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On Sunday, Brazil’s voters chose a new president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known by the name Lula. Lula narrowly beat out Jair Bolsonaro, the incumbent far-right president who has become infamous during four years in office for accelerating the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, as well as for his administration’s handling of the pandemic. Brazil suffered the world’s second-highest death toll from COVID-19, behind the U.S. Although Bolsnaro did not officially concede the election during public remarks Tuesday, and has in the past spread myths questioning the integrity of elections in the country, Lula is expected to be sworn in on January 1st. So who is Brazil’s new president? Lula is a former labor organizer and founding member of the country’s Workers’ Party. He served two term...

BRASILIA, Brazil -- Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday stopped short of conceding the election to leftist rival Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, instead using his first public comments since his defeat two days ago to thank his supporters and encourage their protests, as long as they remain peaceful. Moments after the remarks, which lasted less than two minutes, the outgoing president's chief of staff, Ciro Nogueira, announced that Bolsonaro had authorized him to begin the process of handing over power. The conservative leader, who before the election had repeatedly questioned the reliability of the country’s electoral system, had little room for potentially rejecting the results. U.S. President Joe Biden and other international leaders have publicly recognized da Silva’s victory, a...

BOGOTA, Colombia -- The presidents of Colombia and Venezuela met on Tuesday and said they would improve trade and security cooperation, as both countries seek to normalize relations following the election of Colombia’s first leftist leader. After the meeting in Venezuela’s presidential palace, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said it was “suicidal” for the governments of Venezuela and Colombia to have become estranged from each other recently, adding that the border between the countries had been forgotten and “turned over” to criminal mafias. Colombia’s president said both countries would now look for ways to share intelligence on drug trafficking groups, and added that he would lobby for Venezuela’s re-entry into the Andean Community of Nations, a regional trade and investment group t...

COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- A full preliminary vote count shows a center-left bloc is set to win Denmark’s election with a one-seat majority in Parliament. The result puts Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen in a strong position to stay in power. The result is preliminary and based on the assumption that a vote count in Greenland expected early Wednesday will give the autonomous territory’s two seats to the center-left bloc. Frederiksen was forced to call the election earlier this month amid the fallout from her government’s contentious decision to cull millions of minks as a pandemic response measure. The cull and chilling images of mass graves of minks have haunted Frederiksen since 2020 and eventually led to cracks in the center-left bloc. THIS IS BREAKING NEWS: Previous version of story is b...

TOKYO -- Japan’s Cabinet approved Friday a hefty economic package including 29 trillion yen ($200 billion) in government spending to counter the blow to household budgets from inflation, signaling that the greater concern of its policymakers is that the economy will stall, not overheat. While central banks around the world are raising interest rates aggressively to try to tame decades-high inflation, with its own inflation rate near 3%, Japan has stuck mainly to using fiscal measures, or government spending, to counter that challenge. The Bank of Japan underscored that when, wrapping up a policy meeting Friday, it stuck to its longstanding policy of keeping its benchmark interest rate at minus 0.1%. The Federal Reserve has been aggressively raising borrowing costs to combat chronic infl...