Election day: Brazil . October 25. Flavio Bolsonaro ( left ) and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro holds a slight lead in polls with 50.9% of the vote.   It was Flavio's father who was jailed for an attempted coup to hold onto power. Lula represents the left-wing camp, while Bolsonaro the right. The history is too much to totally comprehend, because Jair Bolsonaro (father of Flavio) gained nationwide recognition during the 2016 impeachment proceedings against Lula's protegee, then-President Dilma Rousseff.  Bolsonaro went on to win the 2118 election while Lula was serving a prison sentence on corruption charges.  But Lula's conviction was overturned, and he made this comeback.  In the meantime, Jair Bolsonaro was convicted by Brazil's Supreme Court over a 2022 election conspiracy case.  Following all this? Flavio is a toned-down version of his father Jair. Who should you root for? Well, Donald Trump shares a close personal alliance with Jair Bolsonaro. T...

Yesterday I focused on Woodstock , that generation-defining rock concert held 57 years ago.  I opened with those wildfires in Southern California.  I should have also added another, more serious one, in Indonesia.  From Google AI: Indonesia is currently battling its worst season of toxic forest and peatland wildfires in over a decade , which have scorched nearly two million hectares of land and triggered severe health crises across Southeast Asia. Artificial intelligence is playing a major dual role in this crisis, serving as both a powerful tool for emergency detection and a vehicle for misinformation on social media . [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ] The Scale of the Havoc Unprecedented Destruction: Spurred by a severe, climate-change-fueled El Niño dry season , fires concentrated heavily in Borneo (Kalimantan) and Sumatra have generated massive plumes of dense smoke. Independent monitors like the Nusantara Atlas estimate the burned area at over 1.9 million hecta...