World
Brazilians voted on Sunday in a presidential election that pits incumbent Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva against right-wing Senator Flavio Bolsonaro. Pre-election polls showed the two candidates only about two points apart, with all other candidates sharing roughly ten percent. Because no candidate is expected to clear fifty percent of valid votes, the race is likely to go to a runoff on October 25. More than 158 million people were eligible to vote, including about one million Brazilians living abroad. Electronic voting means official results are usually released within hours of polls closing.
BBC News
Politics
President Donald Trump said on Sunday that Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton will serve as the new White House AI czar. Clayton will also lead a new federal task force on artificial intelligence, according to the White House. Other members include Federal Trade Commission chairman Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon chief technology officer Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management director Scott Kupor. The group reports to Trump and chief of staff Susie Wiles. Clayton was confirmed as director of national intelligence in July by a 51-47 Senate vote, and he was previously chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
NPR
Business
The US economy added only 29,000 jobs in September, well below the 84,000 that economists expected, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported. The unemployment rate rose to 4.2% from 4.1%. Average hourly earnings climbed just 0.1% from the month before and 3.0% from a year earlier, down from 3.8% a year ago. The report was the last monthly jobs reading before the midterm elections. Hiring was much weaker than the 162,000 jobs added in August, and the three-month average of payroll gains fell to 51,000.
Bureau of Labor Statistics / CNBC
Technology
Aleph Alpha, the German AI company based in Heidelberg, released a new large language model called Kolibri. The model supports German and English and uses a mixture-of-experts design, which runs only part of the network for each request. Weights were published on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 licence, so companies and public bodies can download and run it on their own servers. Aleph Alpha markets the model for government, industry and defence work, where data must stay inside Europe. The release adds to a push for sovereign AI, in which governments train and host models on domestic hardware rather than relying on US cloud providers.
Aleph Alpha
Science
Biologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst measured the calls of 123 bird species and found two that break 120 peak decibels. The bare-throated bellbird, which lives in the Amazon, reached about 131 decibels. The red-legged seriema, found across eastern South America, exceeded 120 decibels. Both are louder than a chainsaw or a jackhammer. The study, published in the journal Evolution, found that louder songs came from bigger birds with wider beaks, but found no clear link between volume and habitat or mating system. The results help explain why some birds call so much louder than others.
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Sports
Both National League Division Series continue on Sunday with Game 2 at each site. The Milwaukee Brewers host the San Diego Padres after a chaotic 3-2 win in Game 1, led by home runs from William Contreras and Jackson Chourio. In Los Angeles, the Dodgers face the Atlanta Braves after winning Game 1 behind Tarik Skubal, who threw six innings of one-run ball in 100-degree heat and retired 15 batters in a row. Kyle Tucker also starred in his Dodgers playoff debut. Atlanta is trying to even the series before it moves back east to Truist Park for Game 3.
The Athletic / ESPN
Health
The US Food and Drug Administration said it found two samples of the cyclospora parasite during an inspection of Taylor Farms operations in central Mexico. One sample came from the lettuce processing facility, and the other from a drainage ditch at a farm run by an independent contract grower. The agency closed its probe and said the evidence supports a link between the outbreak and recalled shredded iceberg lettuce. The CDC has received more than 15,000 laboratory-confirmed US cases of cyclosporiasis since May 1, compared with about 1,180 cases in the same period in 2025.
US Food and Drug Administration
Environment
Switzerland's glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice volume in 2026, the second-biggest yearly drop on record, according to the GLAMOS monitoring network. A winter with too little snow and record summer temperatures drove the melt. Average ice thickness fell by 2.5 to 4 metres, and some glacier tongues shrank by up to 10 metres. The Allalin, Clariden, Rhone and Aletsch glaciers recorded their biggest melts ever. Over the past five years, Swiss glaciers have lost almost a fifth of their ice. Switzerland feeds the Rhine, Rhone, Po and Danube rivers, so the losses affect water supplies, farming and hydropower.
GLAMOS / Reuters