Briefly

BRAZIL

Congress elects Bolsonaro's allies

Brazil's Congress on Monday elected two allies of President Jair Bolsonaro to head the Senate and lower house, an important victory for the far-right leader as he seeks to re-galvanize his reelection efforts for 2022. Arthur Lira of the Progressives won in the first round of votes for speaker of the Chamber of Deputies by 302 votes out of 513. Earlier, the Democrats' Rodrigo Pacheco was elected Senate speaker with 57 out of 81 votes. The speakers of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, who are elected for two-year terms by their colleagues, are key gatekeepers in Brazilian politics, with the power to decide which legislation comes up for a vote.

RUSSIA

Kremlin hopes Navalny case won't affect EU ties

The Kremlin said on Tuesday that it hopes the fate of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whose arrest sparked Western condemnation, would not affect Russia's ties with Europe. A judge in Moscow was expected on Tuesday to decide whether the 44-year-old should be imprisoned for violating the terms of a suspended sentence he was given on embezzlement charges in 2014. "We hope that such nonsense as linking the prospects of Russia-EU relations with the resident of a detention center will not happen," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

MIDDLE EAST

PA and Washington resume contacts

The Palestinian Authority, or PA, had resumed contacts with the new US administration of Joe Biden after a three-year hiatus, Hussein al-Sheikh, the Palestinian minister of civil affairs, said in a statement on Monday. "Today, I had a telephone conversation with Hadya Amr, a US official who is in charge of Palestinian and Israeli affairs in the American State Department," Sheikh said. The PA had severed its ties with the former administration of former US president Donald Trump after he declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

Agencies - Xinhua