Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist.

In New York, I'm John Fassman.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Germany's economy rests on two pillars.

Cheap energy from Russia, and voracious consumers in China.

But with Russian gas not flowing and the Chinese not buying, German industry may be

in for a rough spell.

And many visitors to Vietnam get an unwelcome wake-up call, a loudspeaker blaring out public service

announcements at an unreasonably early hour.

Long gone from Hanoi, these speakers are Alas, staging a comeback.

First, this Sunday people in Brazil will cast their votes for president.

It's a stark choice.

The incumbent Far-right Populist Jair Bolsonaro is standing against the leftist former president

Luiz Ignacio Lula de Silva, Lula for short, and Lula is running ahead in the polls.

He was a founding member of Brazil's Workers Party, or PT.

He served two terms as president between 2003 and 2010, before PT was implicated in a series

of corruption charges.

Lula himself spent more than a year and a half in prison, before being released in 2019

following a Supreme Court ruling.

Now his political comeback seems almost complete.

Our Brazil correspondent, Sarah Maslin, has been to speak with Lula.

I interviewed Lula on a Sunday morning in São Paulo.

...