President Lula & Flávio Bolsonaro Trade Punches in First Runoff Debate, One Week Before Brazil Votes
SÃO PAULO — Lula and Flávio Bolsonaro met face to face for the first time in the campaign on Sunday night at Band’s São Paulo studios. The roughly two-and-a-half-hour runoff debate, one week before the October 25 vote, was dominated by shouting and by each candidate’s scandals more than by policy.
Flávio pushed a hardline security plan that would label the PCC, Comando Vermelho and militias “narco-terrorist” groups, while Lula blamed the states for security failures and defended releases for well-behaved prisoners, and the two also clashed over health care, the economy and foreign policy, including Trump’s tariffs and ties to Ortega and Maduro.
After the debate, a suspected explosive in a vehicle from a candidate’s fleet prompted a police response, but the bomb squad found nothing, saying a component in the car misled the sniffer dogs, and no one was hurt or arrested.
Venezuela’s Opposition Rallies Behind Machado as She Says Washington Left Her Out of the Talks
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Venezuela’s largest opposition coalition, the Democratic Unitary Platform, on Sunday presented a 14-point roadmap that reaffirms Nobel laureate María Corina Machado and candidate Edmundo González Urrutia as its leaders.
It calls for a negotiated transition toward free elections, the release of political prisoners and the safe return of exiles, and it came days after Machado told The New York Times that Washington had excluded her from the U.S.-backed talks in Caracas.
The State Department says her party was invited, and Machado’s complaints focus on the process and on a US-backed oil deal, not on Trump himself. She says she will return “sooner than you imagine.”
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