While You Were Sleeping: 5 stories you might have missed, Oct 29, 2026
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Flavio Bolsonaro arriving in the US on Oct 28, with his family, after fleeing Brazil.
PHOTO: AFP
Bolsonaro, in US, says he’s Brazil’s rightful president-elect
Brazilian Senator Flavio Bolsonaro, who arrived in the United States on Oct 28, has declared himself the rightful president-elect of Brazil, alleging his victory had been denied by an electoral coup d’etat by President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and the country’s Supreme Court.
Bolsonaro, who lost the Oct 25 presidential election and left Brazil for Miami, where he and his family received US visas, thanked US President Donald Trump and Argentine leader Javier Milei for helping him leave his country and for welcoming him.
“I want to say, not only to my 60 million voters but to the Brazilian people, that I am the elected president and that the criminals who stole Brazil’s election are part of a criminal organisation that has established a tyranny,” he said, in an open letter shared with journalists by his allies.
There was no immediate response from the White House or US State Department. Bolsonaro did not provide evidence for the alleged electoral fraud.
Spain rail crash came after train ordered to go in error: Minister
PHOTO: AFP
A rail collision in Spain that claimed at least 68 lives on Oct 28 came after a train was ordered to go in “error” despite a technical failure that halted all services, the transport minister said.
Transport Minister Oscar Puente said 69km of track were affected by an outage of the automatic control system, which “caused all the trains that were running at that time to stop automatically”.
“The decision to resume traffic, while that system had not been restored, belongs to the control centre, and the control centre... took the decision to resume traffic in circumstances that, from our point of view, are inexplicable,” Puente said.
92-year-old US judge handling Nicolas Maduro case dies
PHOTO: REUTERS
Alvin Hellerstein, the US judge overseeing the case against deposed Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, has died aged 92, an official confirmed on Oct 28.
As one of the oldest US federal judges, questions had been raised about whether he was the right justice to preside over what could be a prolonged trial for Maduro on drug trafficking charges.
Hellerstein’s lengthy career included overseeing the civil cases arising from Al-Qaeda’s Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, often rejecting deals he saw as unfair to complainants.
Apple shows pricey touchscreen laptops
PHOTO: AFP
Apple chief executive officer John Ternus unveiled the company’s first touchscreen MacBooks on Oct 28, abandoning a long-held aversion to the technology as it caps a burst of product launches ahead of the holiday shopping season.
Ternus took the stage at an Apple event in Los Angeles and showed a MacBook Pro model with an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display, playing up the display’s contrast, sharpness and brightness in front of an audience of content creators and creative professionals.
He also said the company would return to a glowing logo on the back of the laptops.
Bayern boss Vincent Kompany out of hospital
PHOTO: EPA
Bayern Munich sporting director Max Eberl said on Oct 28 that coach Vincent Kompany had been discharged from hospital, revealing the Belgian had been suffering from meningeal irritation.
Kompany was rushed to hospital after collapsing on the training pitch in Munich on Oct 23, with Bayern saying the coach was suffering from a virus.
Speaking minutes before Bayern’s last-32 German Cup tie with Magdeburg, Eberl told ARD the doctors had determined the cause of the illness and had discharged the 40-year-old Kompany.