⚡️ Mayor Zohran Mamdani's NYPD is poised to sign a three-year, $750,500 no-bid contract with Israeli surveillance firm Cognyte for FalcoNet, an AI-driven device that mimics a cell tower to track phones and can be mounted on police cars and drones or hidden in a backpack, the New York Daily News reported. Cognyte won a tender to sell intercept spyware to Myanmar's state telecom weeks before the 2021 military coup, Reuters previously reported. Meta banned the firm the same year, saying its customers used fake accounts to target journalists and politicians in Kenya, Mexico and Indonesia. The firm is part of an Israeli surveillance industry that grew big as a result of the military's monitoring of Palestinians, whose phone calls Israel's Unit 8200 has intercepted and stored by the millions, including to carry out genocide in Gaza and enforce a brutal illegal occupation in Jerusalem and the West Bank.

🇧🇷 President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva celebrated with supporters in São Paulo after Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court declared him the winner of Sunday’s presidential runoff against Flávio Bolsonaro, securing a historic fourth term just two days before his 81st birthday. Lula won 51.76% to 48.24%, a margin of about 4.3 million votes. The win makes him Brazil's first four-term president and the oldest person ever elected to lead the country. A former metalworker, Lula rose to national prominence in the late 1970s. As head of the metalworkers' union in São Paulo's industrial suburbs, he led strikes in defiance of the military dictatorship, and he was jailed in 1980, the year he co-founded the Workers' Party.