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Brazil’s presidential runoff ended Sunday with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva returned for a fourth term, 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent, and with the losing candidate refusing to accept the count. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the former president imprisoned for attempting a coup after the last election, said it is impossible to recognise the results and that he will request their annulment. The margin was nearly 4.4 million votes. A contested result in Brazil is the day’s central fact. ...

Brazil votes today in a presidential runoff, and it is the only item on the day’s record that is actually moving. Nearly 160 million citizens are eligible to vote for president, with polls open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. local time (11:00 to 20:00 GMT). The runoff sets the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, against Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, and it follows a first round on October 4 that Bolsonaro led 47 percent to 45 with about a fifth of voters abstaining. Final polling described the two as neck and neck, with Lula said to have gained ground over three weeks of campaigning. ...

On Thursday, October 22, Nvidia fell 4.4 percent. By Friday’s close of $210.96 the stock had posted its third consecutive losing week, sat 12 percent below the high it set on October 6, and was down 7.6 percent for the month, its worst month since last November (CNBC, October 24, 2026). Nothing in that week’s news explained the selling. At GTC Berlin the company announced a shipping container holding seven Vera Rubin racks, which cuts the time to bring a data center online from six months to fourteen days, and a supply-chain expansion that includes a $1.1 billion capacity advance to a Taiwanese testing house (CNBC, October 21, 2026; NVIDIA, October 21, 2026). Those are the announcements of a company that expects to sell an enormous amount of hardware. ...

Israel sealed Hebron late Friday and by Saturday had raided at least fifteen towns in the northern West Bank, left at least 200 families outside their homes, and arrested dozens of Palestinians, days before a national election. The operation followed an attack at a checkpoint near Hebron in which two Israeli soldiers and two suspected gunmen were killed. In Washington the day was quiet: every one of the 82 Federal Register documents in the weekend window carries Friday’s date, the Supreme Court filed nothing, and Friday’s close was the week’s last word on the markets. The S&P 500 fell 0.52 percent and the Dow 1.23 percent, the ten-year Treasury yield closed at 5.00 percent, and total public debt passed $40.44 trillion. ...

Thursday’s selling was concentrated where a war premium hurts most. The Nasdaq Composite fell 693.999 points, 2.60 percent, to 26,008.859, and the S&P 500 lost 93.74 points, 1.21 percent, to 7,663.43, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed almost exactly where it opened, up 11.89 points at 52,867.98. The VIX rose 4.36 percent to 19.86. Front-month WTI crude was quoted at $100.95 a barrel, up 1.49 percent, as of 6:50 a.m. ET, and the ten-year Treasury yield stood at 4.99 percent as of 7:00 a.m. ET, three basis points above Thursday’s official close. Overnight the UAE’s environment ministry reported a tanker oil spill off Umm Al Quwain and closed the emirate’s beaches, the latest cost of the attacks on shipping near the Strait of Hormuz. In Washington the day’s regulatory output was heavy: the comptroller of the currency finalized the GENIUS Act’s stablecoin regime, Treasury proposed rules for the housing law’s ban on large institutional buyers of single-family homes, and the Justice and Education departments declared seven joint guidance documents unenforceable. At a rally in Iowa, President Trump said he had the right to seek a third term. ...

Russia released a jailed American schoolteacher and told the president’s envoy that it was willing in principle to restart talks on Ukraine, and then struck Kyiv with missiles that killed at least one person and injured twenty-two, four of them children. Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin at Constantine Palace in St Petersburg on Wednesday, praised him as a humanitarian for the release, and told him Washington was grateful for a separate arrangement under which Russia would sell diesel to the United States. President Trump, who said he had delayed new sanctions to secure the teacher’s freedom, said the war “may be as close as it’s ever been to ending.” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, answered that “appeasement, servility, and flattery will not stop this war.” The same day, AIPAC told its members that it would stop endorsing candidates and making direct PAC contributions, a retreat by the largest pro-Israel lobby in American politics, and the White House published an executive order that rebuilds the federal program of research into women’s health. ...

A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit held on Tuesday that twenty-seven Christian and Jewish organizations are likely to have standing to challenge the rescission of the policy that kept immigration enforcement away from houses of worship. The court reversed the district judge, 2–1, and sent the case back for a fresh look at a preliminary injunction. That same day, the Democratic campaign committees and the two Democratic congressional leaders filed a new complaint against the administration over what it describes as a pattern of intimidation aimed at state election officials. The financial backdrop moved the other way from Monday’s fear: front-month WTI crude was $99.92 a barrel at 6:50 a.m. ET, after trading at $110.00 yesterday morning, and the ten-year Treasury held at 5.125 percent. ...

President Trump said, in remarks reported overnight, that it might be time for Ukraine to find someone else to negotiate, and he defended a sanctions waiver that will send more than 300,000 metric tonnes of Russian diesel into world markets. Ukrainian and American officials were due to meet in Oslo the same day. The morning’s crude print is the other half of the story: front-month WTI at $110.00 a barrel, up $6.34, or 6.12 percent, as of 6:47 a.m. ET, on supply risk from the war with Iran rather than from Russia. The ten-year Treasury stood at 5.119 percent, and September’s consumer prices were 0.9 percent higher than July’s. Energy is the hinge on which the rest of the day turns. ...

Russia struck Kyiv’s power grid overnight with ballistic missiles and drones, damaged more than ten energy facilities, and left roughly 550,000 families without electricity by morning, according to Ukrainian officials. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attack came with “no early warning from our partners.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking to reporters in Uzbekistan, answered that there had been no pause in intelligence sharing. The exchange puts the two governments’ accounts of the war at odds in public, on a morning when the ten-year Treasury yields 5.08 percent, oil trades above $100 a barrel, and Friday’s equity close was down across all three indexes. ...

The order the President signed on Friday night did more than pause a diesel arrangement with Moscow. It set aside, for sixty days, sanctions that Congress had passed and he had signed into law in September, and it did so two days before they were due to take effect. The measures suspended include tariffs of up to 100 percent on imports from the five largest purchasers of Russian oil and gas, most significantly China and India, along with sanctions on senior Russian figures including Vladimir Putin, on Russian financial institutions, and on the shadow fleet. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, described the suspension as a pause to analyse the effect on the American and global economies. The order drew objections from senators of the President’s own party: Ted Cruz called it a mistake, John Cornyn called it “reckless,” and Thom Tillis called it “beyond irresponsible.” In the same forty-eight hours, Ukrainian drones struck the St Petersburg oil terminal, killing at least one person, and Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces had attacked Ukraine’s energy sector 76 times since the “energy ceasefire” was announced a week ago. Equity markets had closed Friday with the Nasdaq down 2.15 percent and the volatility index up 21.45 percent. ...