Brazil held the first round of its presidential election on Sunday, October 4. Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of imprisoned former president Jair Bolsonaro, received 47.03 percent of the vote. Incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva received 45.16 percent. Because neither candidate crossed fifty percent, the two will meet in a runoff on October 25. Al Jazeera reported the first-round results Monday.
Flávio Bolsonaro is a federal senator from Rio de Janeiro who entered the race after his father was barred from seeking office through 2030. Jair Bolsonaro was convicted in 2025 on charges related to his involvement in the post-election unrest that followed his 2022 defeat to Lula. He is currently imprisoned. He endorsed his son and campaigned on his behalf. CNN covered the runoff implications Monday.
The result isn’t yet a Bolsonaro victory, but the math isn’t comfortable for Lula. Fifty-three million Brazilians voted for the eighty-year-old incumbent. Fifty-six million voted for the senator whose name is on the ballot partly because his father’s isn’t. The runoff on October 25 will turn on how the smaller parties’ supporters divide, on whether Lula’s coalition can consolidate, and on whether the organized energy behind Flávio Bolsonaro translates into a majority. Three weeks isn’t much time.
Brazil’s last transition of power was disrupted on January 8, 2023, when Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters occupied the presidential palace, the Supreme Court building, and the Congress in Brasília. More than a thousand people were arrested. The incoming Lula government treated it as an attempted coup. The constitutional order held. Whether a second Bolsonaro administration would produce stability or a second round of institutional strain is the question Brazil’s democratic institutions are watching, and watching carefully. Americas Quarterly published its full reaction to the first round Sunday.
President Trump announced Monday that MAGA Inc., his super PAC, will pay going forward for the television advertisements depicting the president, after an estimated $10.1 million in taxpayer money had been spent on them. The ads ran during high-profile programming, including NFL games. The ad tracking firm AdImpact estimated the spending total. CNN reported the reversal Monday.
The reversal followed criticism from both Democratic and Republican leaders. Legal experts cited two federal statutes as potentially implicated: one that bars the use of appropriated funds for “publicity or propaganda,” and a second that limits partisan political activities by government employees. The Associated Press reported the bipartisan criticism and the super PAC’s commitment to pay.
In 2004, the Government Accountability Office found that the George W. Bush administration had violated the federal anti-propaganda statute by distributing video news releases promoting the Medicare prescription drug benefit without disclosing that the government had produced them (GAO ruling). The Bush administration disputed the GAO’s conclusion. The Trump administration’s response this week was different: it shifted future costs to the super PAC. That’s a different kind of acknowledgment, and the question of whether the original expenditure was lawful doesn’t go away because the super PAC has agreed to cover the ads going forward.
Pennsylvania health officials confirmed the fifth measles-associated death in the state’s ongoing outbreak last Wednesday. The latest death occurred in Lancaster County. Al Jazeera reported the death September 30.
Lancaster County has a large Amish and plain Mennonite population. These are communities that have historically maintained lower vaccination rates than the surrounding region. Measles spreads efficiently in populations where vaccination coverage falls below the threshold required for herd immunity, which for measles is among the highest of any vaccine-preventable disease, roughly 95 percent. Once that threshold drops in a concentrated community, the virus finds what it needs. Public health officials in Pennsylvania had been watching for this. Watching is different from stopping it.
Measles was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, meaning continuous transmission had been interrupted. Imported cases have occurred since. What has changed in recent years is the size of the unvaccinated pockets and their concentration. The virus doesn’t make distinctions about why a person wasn’t vaccinated. It moves through whatever space the immune gap creates. Five deaths in a single state outbreak is a number that records itself.
The United States Air Force withdrew approximately a dozen B-1 Lancer strategic bombers from bases in the United Kingdom over the weekend, citing security concerns. Specific details weren’t disclosed publicly. Al Jazeera reported the withdrawal Sunday.
The movement comes as the Trump administration continues repositioning major military assets in the Middle East. A third aircraft carrier strike group is en route to the Persian Gulf as the administration weighs military options in its confrontation with Iran. The Pentagon said the B-1s returned to their home stations in the United States. The B-1 Lancer is a long-range conventional strike aircraft, not a nuclear platform, and has been used in strikes in Syria and against targets in the Middle East over the past two decades. Repositioning a dozen of them is a significant logistical event, and the security rationale that prompted it hasn’t been fully explained. The American Legion’s weekly security briefing covered the full context Monday.
The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel. The prize citation: “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” STAT News reported the prize announcement Monday.
Optogenetics is a technique that uses light to activate or silence individual neurons in a living brain. It works by introducing light-sensitive proteins called opsins into specific nerve cells. When a precisely targeted beam of light reaches those cells, they switch on or off on command. Georg Nagel characterized channelrhodopsin-2, the protein at the center of the technique, in 2003. Karl Deisseroth demonstrated in 2005 that these light-sensitive proteins could be expressed in mammalian neurons and controlled with pulses of light (Nature Neuroscience). The result is a tool that lets researchers turn a single component of a living brain circuit on or off and observe exactly what changes.
Before optogenetics, studying the function of individual neuron types required either lesion experiments, which destroy tissue permanently, or pharmaceutical interventions, which are imprecise and slow. Optogenetics made it possible to ask narrow, precise questions about what a specific cell type does in a circuit and get a narrow, precise answer. The technique has produced insights into how fear memory forms and consolidates, how addiction rewires reward circuitry, how Parkinson’s symptoms arise from specific misfiring patterns. The first clinical trial using an optogenetic approach to restore partial vision in people with inherited retinal disease produced results in 2021. That work is now in broader trials. The Nobel committee doesn’t give this prize for promise. It gives it for demonstrated results. The demonstrated results here have been accumulating for twenty years.
Two pharmaceutical companies announced in August that their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, combined with an immunotherapy drug, substantially reduced the risk of melanoma returning in patients who had already undergone surgery to remove the tumor. STAT News recapped the data Monday morning.
The vaccine is personalized to each patient’s individual tumor mutations, which means no two courses of treatment are identical. The mRNA platform, developed and proved at scale during the COVID pandemic, instructs the immune system to recognize and attack the specific molecular signature of a given patient’s cancer cells. Moderna and Merck had reported early encouraging results for this approach in 2023. The August announcement reported topline results from a larger Phase 3 trial (Merck press release). The results are for melanoma, which isn’t the most common cancer but spreads lethally once it does. Researchers said the data raises the possibility of developing vaccines against many cancer types. They described it as a direction the evidence is pointing, not a promise. That’s the right way to describe it, and it’s still a good thing to hear on a Tuesday morning.
Gary Kowalski writes today about fifty years of October mornings in a deer stand, and what the season still asks. October Stand.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
