November 4, 2022
*The Question Menacing Brazil’s Elections: Coup or No Coup?*
Follow our live coverage of Brazil’s presidential election between Bolsonaro and Lula.
BRASÍLIA — A simple but alarming question is dominating political discourse in Brazil with just six weeks left until national elections: Will President Jair Bolsonaro accept the results?
For months, Mr. Bolsonaro has attacked Brazil’s electronic voting machines as rife with fraud — despite virtually no evidence — and Brazil’s election officials as aligned against him. He has suggested that he would dispute any loss unless changes are made in election procedures. He has enlisted Brazil’s military in his battle. And he has told his tens of millions of supporters to prepare for a fight.
“If need be,” he said in a recent speech, “we will go to war.”
With its vote on Oct. 2, Brazil is now at the forefront of the growing global threats to democracy, fueled by populist leaders, extremism, highly polarized electorates and internet disinformation. The world’s fourth-largest democracy is bracing for the possibility of its president refusing to step down because of fraud allegations that could be difficult to disprove.
Yet, according to interviews with more than 35 Bolsonaro administration officials, military generals, federal judges, election authorities, members of Congress and foreign diplomats, the people in power in Brazil feel confident that while Mr. Bolsonaro could dispute the election’s results, he lacks the institutional support to stage a successful coup.
*North Korea Fires Powerful Missile, Using Old Playbook in a New World*
The last time Pyongyang launched a weapon over Japan was in 2017, when Donald J. Trump was president and Kim Jong-un seemed intent on escalating conflict with Washington.
The alarms began bleating from cellphones, radios and public speakers across northern Japan. It was 7:30 on Tuesday morning as residents were warned that North Korea had fired a missile over the country for the first time in five years, and that they should seek shelter.
“You can’t ever get used to that sound,” said Kazuyuki Tsuchiya, 72, who runs a small village inn on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. “It makes me feel so scared.”
Over the course of the year, North Korea’s missile provocations have become so frequent — 23 weapons tests since January, including four last week — that much of the public had ceased to pay attention. But Tuesday’s flyover, with alarm bells rousing residents from their sleep, reminded them of the rogue nuclear threat in a region already unsettled by China’s recent military drills near Taiwan.
*Russia-Ukraine War Ukraine Presses Forward on Two Fronts as Horrors of War Linger*
The Kremlin said on Monday that it did not know where the borders are for the regions in Ukraine it recently claimed to have annexed, the latest sign of the political disarray and improvisation that has accompanied Moscow’s setbacks on the battlefield.
The lower house of the Russian Parliament, the State Duma, on Monday ratified President Vladimir V. Putin’s attempted annexation of four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine — part of an official choreography meant to add a sheen of legitimacy to a move that no other nation has recognized as legal.
But frontline reality has intruded on the festivities. Since Mr. Putin delivered a major speech on Friday outlining his claims to the four Ukrainian regions, he has suffered military setbacks in at least three of them. Russian forces withdrew from the key railroad hub of Lyman in the Donetsk region on Saturday, while Russian proxy officials in the Luhansk and Kherson regions said on Monday that Ukrainian forces had made advances there.
The annexation claims were so muddled that Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, found himself forced to acknowledge on Monday that Russia’s borders — as the Russian government newly defines them — remained in flux.
He said that the state would consider all of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions — which make up the Donbas area of eastern Ukraine — to be part of Russia, even though Russian troops did not control them in full. But in the other two annexed regions — Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which Russia also does not fully control — Mr. Peskov said that it was too soon to tell.
“Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, in terms of the borders, we’re going to continue to consult with the population of these regions,” Mr. Peskov said in his regular conference call with reporters. “We’re going to continue to consult with the people who live in these regions.”
Mr. Peskov’s comments showed that as Ukrainian forces continue to push back Russian troops, the Kremlin is increasingly struggling to explain those setbacks at home. He was also on the defensive on Monday when asked about the searing criticism of Russia’s military command by Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the southern Russian republic of Chechnya and a close Putin ally. Mr. Kadyrov said Saturday that the top brass had “covered for” an “incompetent” general, a remarkable instance of public infighting within Russia’s ruling elite.
*Nobel Prize in Physics Is Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work in Quantum Technology*
Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger were recognized for their experiments in an area that has broad implications for secure information transfer and quantum computing.
The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger on Tuesday for work that has “laid the foundation for a new era of quantum technology,” the Nobel Committee for Physics said.
The scientists have each conducted “groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated,” the committee said in a briefing. Their results, it said, cleared the way for “new technology based upon quantum information.”
The laureates’ research builds on the work of John Stewart Bell, a physicist who strove in the 1960s to understand whether particles, having flown too far apart for there to be normal communication between them, can still function in concert, also known as quantum entanglement.
According to quantum mechanics, particles can exist simultaneously in two or more places. They do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. By taking measurements of one particle, like its position or “spin,” a change is observed in its partner, no matter how far away it has traveled from its pair.
*‘Where Am I Going to Go?’ Floridians Hit by a Hurricane and a Housing Crunch.*
Losses from the storm are just coming into focus. But what is clear is that recovery will be hardest on people already struggling to make ends meet.
Days after Hurricane Ian buffeted the state with a trifecta of wind, rain and storm surge, many Floridians are emerging from the wreckage uncertain of their next chapter — and fearing they may become homeless.
The extent of the damage and the number of people who lost their lives or homes is only beginning to come into focus. Much clearer is the storm’s likely broad and lasting impact on the recovery of those least able to afford it.
“I don’t have enough money to replace my car and my house. I got enough money to replace one or the other,” said Llewellyn Davenport, 50. The storm surge swallowed his car, and engulfed the 28-foot-trailer he lived in near Fort Myers.
Now Mr. Davenport, a sanitation worker, must make a tough decision: get another home or another car. “My entire life changed in a matter of hours.”
*In Retreat on Ukrainian Fronts, Russia Shows Signs of Disarray*
Confusion and recriminations marked the Russian efforts to call up draftees and claim sovereignty over Ukrainian territory, as well as the Russian response to battlefield setbacks.
Russian forces in Ukraine were on the run Monday across a broad swath of the front line, as the Ukrainian military pressed its blitz offensive in the east and made gains in the south, belying President Vladimir V. Putin’s claims to have absorbed into Russia territories that his armies are steadily losing.
Following the capture over the weekend of Lyman, a strategic rail hub and gateway to the eastern Donbas region, Ukrainian forces showed no sign of stopping, pushing eastward toward the city of Lysychansk, which Russia seized three months ago after bloody fighting. Any loss of territory in the Donbas undermines Mr. Putin’s objectives for the war he launched in February, which has focused on seizing and incorporating the region.
The Kremlin reflected the disarray of its forces on the ground, where territory was rapidly changing hands, acknowledging that it did not yet know what new borders Russia would claim in southern Ukraine. “In terms of the borders, we’re going to continue to consult with the population of these regions,” Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, told reporters on Monday.
The military conscription Mr. Putin ordered on Sept. 21 to bolster his battered forces has set off nationwide turmoil and protest, bringing the war home to many Russians who had felt untouched by it. Many men have been drafted who were supposed to be ineligible based on factors like age or disability.
On Monday, the governor of the Khabarovsk region in the Far East said that half of the men called up there, numbering in the thousands, should not have been drafted and had been sent home and that the region’s military commissar had been dismissed.
*Donald Trump’s Methods*
He often utters falsehoods, but his speaking style is more strategic than it sometimes seems. Listen for the first time to audio clips from interviews with Maggie Haberman.
Donald Trump is the leading candidate to be the Republican nominee for president — for the third straight election — and he’s also a subject of multiple criminal investigations. My colleague Maggie Haberman has been covering him the entire time and has written a book about him, “Confidence Man,” being published tomorrow. She often broke stories in The Times that she uncovered while reporting for the book.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke with Maggie about what she’s learned, about how much the media should cover Trump and about what’s likely next for him.
David: You’ve spent more time covering and interviewing Trump than almost anybody, back to your days observing him when you were a New York Post reporter in the 1990s. You’ve also pointed out that he lies a lot. Given that, I’m curious: How does interviewing him help you better capture reality when he is not confined by reality?
Maggie: He’s a former president and a potential future candidate, with huge influence over the party. Among other things, interviewing him helps illuminate how he keeps that influence: his obsession with us-versus-them politics, with salesmanship and with presenting a version of himself that is often very different from who he actually is.
*ATENTAMENTE*
*MAESTRO FEDERICO LA MONT*
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