Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, was facing a fight for his political future on Tuesday after exit polls showed him losing support in the country’s first election since the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza.

First indications were that the opposition bloc headed by Gadi Eisenkot, 66, a former army chief of staff, won more seats than Netanyahu’s governing coalition by 52 seats to 50.

Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party did better than many expected and is set to remain the largest party in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, with about 24 seats. Eisenkot’s party, Yashar!, seems to have won 22 seats.

But in Israel’s electoral system, which is run by proportional representation, there is no immediate path to either side forming a majority government, which would require at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

Polling stations reported a high turnout and a record in Arab-Israeli areas. Arab parties were set to raise their number of seats considerably, to about 18, putting them in a position to hold the balance of power.

The close result will now mean weeks or even months of horse-trading. Izaac Herzog, the country’s president, will face the immediate challenge of deciding who first to ask to try to form a government — Netanyahu, as leader of the largest single party, or Eisenkot, as leader of the largest bloc.

If neither succeed, the stage could be set for a second election, probably in the early weeks of next year.

Netanyahu’s personal standing was rocked before the election by allegations about the security failures that led to Hamas’s attack in 2023, in which Israel suffered its greatest loss of life on a single day since its founding.

Brazilian Senator Flávio Bolsonaro and his family will receive U.S. visas after Bolsonaro lost Brazil's presidential election over the weekend, a senior State Department official told CBS News on Tuesday.

Bolsonaro, an ally of President Trump, and his family will be allowed entry into the U.S., the official said.

Bolsonaro departed Brazil for the U.S. following his loss to incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Sunday's election, according to multiple Brazilian media reports.

A spokesperson for Bolsonaro did not respond to a request for comment. His campaign manager Rogério Marinho also refused to comment.

Bolsonaro's brother, Eduardo Bolsonaro, who lives in Texas, had publicly encouraged him to leave Brazil if he lost the election.

Bolsonaro has touted his relationship with Mr. Trump and visited the White House in May. The family connections go deeper: Brother Eduardo Bolsonaro was convicted in absentia in June of illegally lobbying the Trump administration and sentenced to four years in prison. A warrant was recently issued for his arrest.

Mr. Trump did not offer a full-throated endorsement of Bolsonaro in the runoff against Lula, as he has with some other right-of-center candidates in Latin America. But he suggested on Monday, without providing evidence, that Brazil's election was "rigged."

Bolsonaro's decision to leave Brazil came as a deadline for him to surrender his regular and diplomatic passports expired at noon Tuesday. It remained unclear whether he had complied.

Bolsonaro was served with the order to surrender his passports Monday, a day after his stunning loss. Bolsonaro said he received it outside the home where his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence under house arrest for attempting a coup following his 2022 election loss to Lula. After his 2022 defeat, Jair Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Florida. He returned three months later.

The sealed Supreme Court order, viewed by The Associated Press, was issued Sunday. Bolsonaro has refused to concede defeat and has made unsubstantiated allegations of election fraud.

Lula, who turned 81 on Tuesday, received more than 64 million votes, compared with fewer than 60 million for Bolsonaro, a margin of nearly 4%.

The Trump administration is exploring a new concession to Russia: lifting sanctions on the country’s flagship government investment fund, long viewed by U.S. officials as one of the Kremlin’s most powerful tools of international influence.

Russian officials have pushed for the move as part of broader talks about the fund’s involvement in shipping Russian diesel fuel to the United States, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

A U.S. official confirmed that the administration was assessing the fund’s application for sanctions to be removed through established procedures as part of an effort to “improve U.S.-Russia relations and help end the war.” The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the talks, praised the fund’s chief, Kirill Dmitriev, as “a helpful envoy” to U.S. negotiators in discussions to end the conflict.

The consideration of more sanctions relief for Russia, which has not been previously reported, shows how the Kremlin is using a recent flurry of diplomacy over the war in Ukraine to advance an agenda that appears to have little to do with securing peace.

In recent weeks, Mr. Trump’s envoys and Mr. Putin have discussed the sale of part of a Russian oil giant to a well-connected investor group; an effort to produce natural gas in Alaska, from which several executives resigned amid concerns about hidden Russian financing; and a proposal to increase Russian gas exports to Europe that has stunned European governments.

Removing sanctions on the multibillion-dollar fund, called the Russian Direct Investment Fund, would be a significant unwinding of the yearslong U.S. effort to use economic pressure to get Russia to change its behavior. The fund has invested billions of dollars in Russian companies, often alongside investors from the Middle East and elsewhere, pushing to expand Russia’s global influence.

The Biden administration imposed sanctions on the fund days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, calling it “a slush fund” for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that was “emblematic of Russia’s broader kleptocracy.”

Eric Green, who oversaw Russia policy as part of the White House’s National Security Council at the time, said targeting the fund was an early priority because its access to the Western financial system could help Russia finance the war and because of its “association with projects closely identified with Putin.”

Now the fund has taken a lead role in implementing Mr. Trump’s diesel deal, helping to arrange the first shipments of Russian diesel to the United States after Mr. Trump suspended sanctions on it on Oct. 9, a key Russian official has said. The fund’s head, Mr. Dmitriev, has acted as Mr. Putin’s economic envoy to the Trump administration, leading the Kremlin’s effort to convince U.S. officials of the great potential of business deals with Russia.

“It’s been really, really good dealing with Kirill,” Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, told Mr. Putin at the negotiating table in St. Petersburg, Russia, last week.

In the Trump team’s view, negotiating business deals with Mr. Putin now can help end the war in Ukraine by showing the Russian president that the United States is serious about building a new and prosperous relationship with Moscow. To the many critics of that approach, including some Republican lawmakers, Mr. Trump is simply ceding economic benefits to Mr. Putin without pressuring him to end the war.

Mr. Green, the former Biden administration official, said lifting sanctions on the fund would be a “real strong message that we are relaxing the previous position that we weren’t going to relax the economic sanctions and other costs until there was a settlement in Ukraine.”

Speaking at a conference in Moscow on Oct. 16, Mr. Dmitriev boasted that the diesel deal was among the “concrete examples” starting to convince Americans that “sanctions are, in principle, philosophically wrong.” He said that his fund was prepared to handle U.S. payments for the Russian diesel, despite “a sea of sanctions restrictions.”

Mr. Dmitriev left unmentioned that he was trying to get sanctions removed on his own fund amid the talks over the diesel deal, according to the people familiar with the negotiations. Mr. Dmitriev’s fund offered to serve as the go-between for Russian diesel being sold to the United States, while also asking for American sanctions on the fund to be relaxed, the people said.

The talks played out as Mr. Dmitriev helped put in motion an effort to hand Mr. Trump a visible win at a time of record high diesel prices.

Three tankers carrying Russian diesel have set sail for the United States this month, according to Russian officials. The shipments were made “with the significant support” of Mr. Dmitriev’s fund, a Russian vice prime minister, Aleksandr Novak, said on Friday.

The diesel was shipped without any U.S. buyers having paid for it, according to some of the people familiar with the negotiations. One of the tankers, the Agioi Fanendes, was scheduled to arrive in the United States on Nov. 7, after leaving Primorsk, Russia, on Oct. 23, according to Kpler and TankerTrackers.com, two ship tracking firms. The ship recently changed its destination from New York to “for orders,” meaning it had not yet received instructions on where to discharge.

As Mr. Dmitriev’s fund sought sanctions relief amid the diesel talks, the Treasury Department took the position that the fund already had all the permission it needed to handle diesel transactions thanks to the Treasury’s Oct. 9 announcement suspending sanctions on Russian diesel.

Instead, the Treasury is going through its normal process in assessing the fund’s applications for getting sanctions removed, meaning that it would need to prove that the reasons for which it was originally sanctioned are no longer in effect, people familiar with the process said.

Despite Mr. Trump’s friendly rhetoric toward Mr. Putin, he has until now left almost all of the Biden-era sanctions on Russia in place.

But Mr. Dmitriev, a financier fluent in English who studied at Harvard and Stanford, has shown significant clout with the Trump administration. He has spearheaded the Kremlin’s effort to float potential economic deals to Washington, a strategy apparently aimed at getting Mr. Trump to focus more on doing business with Russia and less on pressuring it to stop its invasion of Ukraine.

“The ice has finally broken,” Mr. Dmitriev said at the Oct. 16 conference, emphasizing that he was discussing deals to be done with the United States “right now” rather than only after the end of the war.

Mr. Dmitriev’s wife is close with a daughter of Mr. Putin, people who know them say, and he has done business with Gulf leaders like Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who also have the ear of Mr. Trump.

During the pandemic, Mr. Dmitriev and his fund financed the development of Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine, spearheaded its distribution around the world and often criticized Western vaccines. Since Mr. Trump’s re-election two years ago, Mr. Dmitriev has taken to X almost daily, in English, and echoed White House talking points.

“Ideological warmongering Biden-think is being rejected as destructive and inefficient,” he wrote about Mr. Trump’s diesel deal last week.

Mr. Dmitriev’s primary U.S. interlocutors have been Mr. Witkoff, who is also a real-estate developer and friend of Mr. Trump, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law. In St. Petersburg last week, Mr. Witkoff approvingly told Mr. Dmitriev that “our Treasury Department is working with you now independently.”

“I think that’s leading to a sense of what the possibilities are between our two nations,” Mr. Witkoff went on. “We even talk about it now openly with the Ukrainians, to give them some sort of sense about what the possibilities will be when this whole conflict is ended.”

Putin is losing hope in Trump’s ability to end the war with Ukraine and is talking directly with the leaders of European countries.

It turns out that it’s not only the U.S. with influence over the almost five-year-long war, but Europe also has its own cards to play. What’s more, it’s willing to play them.

In his latest analysis, Stuart Dowell writes about the cards held by each side, the peace terms Putin expects, and China’s role the geopolitical puzzle.

The Telegraph article describes the radical program of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to dismantle the current architecture of the European Union. AfD proposes stripping Brussels of real power and turning the EU into a “free federation of sovereign nations.”According to AfD, Germany should no longer be the “cashier of Europe.”

Israelis entered the final 24 hours of an intense election season on Monday, as reports circulated that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have clashed with the Israeli military over initiating a possible escalation with Iran immediately before the vote.

Tensions flared over reports that Netanyahu and his military chief of staff disagreed over an instruction by the prime minister to carry out an “action” that the army worried could reignite the conflict with Iran. Netanyahu’s office denied the report, first published by Israel’s Channel 12, as “fake news.”

Defense Minister Israel Katz also quickly denied the report.

Israel’s opposition candidates accused Netanyahu of endangering regional stability for his political preservation. Netanyahu’s main rival, former military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, warned Netanyahu not to “dare to place your own political interests above the security of the state.” He posted on X, “Netanyahu, my eyes are on you.”

Avigdor Lieberman, head of the hawkish Yisrael Beytenu party which is part of the opposition bloc, sent a letter to Israel’s attorney general demanding a criminal investigation into possible treason by Netanyahu’s “attempts to drag Israel into a war on the eve of elections, including a willingness to sacrifice (Israeli) soldiers out of fear of losing the election.”

The election on Tuesday is the first since the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which sparked the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and conflicts across the Middle East.

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