BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party clinched a runoff for the mayorship of the country’s biggest city on Sunday in municipal elections marked by fraying relationships with coalition parties crucial to its grip on federal power since 2003.

Fernando Haddad, the left-leaning party’s candidate, dodged defeat in Sao Paulo after trailing a popular evangelical candidate and a veteran centrist in most of the polls before the vote.

BRASILIA, Oct 5 (Reuters) – President Dilma Rousseff wants
to regulate strikes by public workers after a series of walkouts
by civil servants in recent months paralyzed public services
across Brazil.

But the plans, in proposals that could soon be presented to
Congress, are drawing fire from unions and labor activists – a
constituency that helped put Rousseff into office and that long
has formed the bedrock of the ruling Workers’ Party.

CARACAS (Reuters) – A healthy sounding President Hugo Chavez called Venezuelan state television from Cuba on Monday to dispel rumors fanned by a nine-day silence that he had died undergoing cancer treatment at a hospital in Havana.

“It seems we will have to become accustomed to live with these rumors, because it is part of the laboratories of psychological war, of dirty war,” the 57-year-old socialist leader said in the telephone call.

CARACAS (Reuters) – Officials in President Hugo Chavez’s government denied rumors that the leftist leader may have died while undergoing cancer treatment in Cuba six months ahead of an election in South America’s top oil exporter.

In the nine days since he left for Havana to have two final radiation sessions for an undisclosed cancer, Chavez has only addressed Venezuelans by short messages on Twitter to cheer supporters and hail the advances of his socialist “revolution.”

CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez will not attend this weekend’s hemispheric summit in Colombia and will instead fly straight to Cuba to continue radiation treatment for cancer, his foreign minister said on Saturday.

The 57-year-old socialist leader said on Friday the radiation therapy was physically tiring and that his doctors were evaluating whether he should go to the “Summit of the Americas” en route to Havana for a fourth session.

CARACAS (Reuters) – Feisty Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez acknowledged on Friday that radiation treatment for cancer was wearing him down, but he vowed to squash his opponents in October’s presidential election.

Ramping up the political rhetoric at a huge rally to mark the 10th anniversary of his return to power after a brief coup, Chavez said three sessions of radiation therapy in Cuba had taken their toll.

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Some forty years ago, Dilma Rousseff was a guerrilla fighter working clandestinely to bring a version of Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s communist revolution to Brazil.

How times change. When Rousseff makes her first visit to Cuba next week as Brazil’s president, she’ll have capitalism on her mind, specifically the building of a container terminal at the port of Mariel aimed at future trade with the United States when Washington one day lifts its 50-year-old embargo on Cuba.

BRASILIA (Reuters) – At first blush, it might seem like the clock is ticking on Fernando Bezerra’s days as a Brazilian Cabinet minister.

Bezerra has been fighting sensational charges of nepotism and other ethics breaches in the Brazilian press. The most egregious accusation: that he used his power to direct a disproportionate share of funds for natural disaster prevention to his home state, instead of states where dozens of people have died in recent weeks from predictable seasonal floods.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – British-born journalist and atheist intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who made the United States his home and backed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, died on Thursday at the age of 62.

Hitchens died in Houston of pneumonia, a complication of cancer of the esophagus, Vanity Fair magazine said.

BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombia’s ex-president Alvaro Uribe is fuming about the direction his successor is taking.

And he’s letting everyone know tweet-by-tweet.

Snide messages to his 470,000-plus Twitter followers are keeping Uribe in the limelight to the discomfort of current President Juan Manuel Santos, Uribe’s former defense minister.