Flávio Bolsonaro finished first in Brazil's presidential election with 47 percent of the valid vote, two points and about 2.2 million ballots ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, according to the electoral court. Neither cleared 50 percent, so they meet in a runoff on October 25. Lula called the result unexpected and said, "we are in extra time." Every final poll had Lula ahead. Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio's father, is serving 27 years for plotting a coup. If Brazil's pollsters all missed in the same direction, November's polls deserve the same caution.
At a Saturday-night rally in Vandalia, Trump told the crowd, "They're in for a big surprise." He asked supporters to "pretend that I'm running," because "when I don't run, they draw 44% less people." Ohio's Republican senator Jon Husted "always wants money," he said, and if Democrat Amy Acton wins the governor's race, "I'm not going to help her, probably." Dean heard a threat to punish every Ohio voter who picks the wrong candidate. Every major poll points to a Democratic win, and a president this sure of a result the numbers do not show is worth watching.
A 28-year-old technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute, Siberia's state laboratory, went into hospital on September 29 and died days later. The governor of neighboring Buryatia wrote that she died of plague. Russia's health watchdog says pneumonia of unknown cause. Nearly 200 people are under medical observation. Marco Rubio has asked his Russian counterparts for information. Dean set it beside Chernobyl, when Moscow stayed silent for days. Zev set it beside Wuhan. He wants flights out of Russia stopped, Vladimir Putin's December trip to the G20 in Miami included.
Dean's reporting at deanblundell.substack.com traced about $20 million of government money into a dozen "Love Trump" ads that ran this week on Fox, CBS, ABC and NBC, NFL games among them. The networks took the money. Government-paid ads do not belong on air a month before an election, and the voters who funded them are the audience.
Simon Andriesz, the British banker who gave Congress the 2018 emails tying Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Jeffrey Epstein's Adfin investment, is dead at 57, a reported suicide. He worked at BGC, Lutnick's brokerage, and went to the FBI in 2020. They interviewed him in 2021 and nothing happened. The commodities regulator fined BGC $3 million in November 2019 on his reporting and paid him a $420,000 whistleblower award. Lutnick has said nothing since. Zev does not claim to know it was not a suicide, but the sequence looks wrong, and Dean counted nine deaths around the Epstein files.
The Greatest Heist now runs 22 chapters at thegreatestheist.com, with a new one next week.
