Turkey hints new Syria offensive

ANKARA — Turkey’s president again hinted at a possible new ground offensive in Syria against Kurdish militants on Tuesday, as Syrian forces denounced new airstrikes and Russia urged restraint and called on Ankara to avoid an escalation.

Russian presidential envoy in Syria Alexander Lavrentyev said that Turkey should “show a certain restraint” in order to prevent an escalation in Syria, where tensions heightened over the weekend after Turkish airstrikes killed and wounded a number of Syrian soldiers.

Mr Lavrentyev — whose country is a strong ally of the Syrian government — expressed hope that “it will be possible to convince our Turkish partners to refrain from excessive use of force on Syrian territory.”

Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces later said fresh Turkish airstrikes on Tuesday struck a base the group shares with the USled coalition in the fight against the Islamic State group. The base is just outside the town of Qamishli, 50 kilometres (30 miles) from the Turkish border.

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BRASILIA, Brazil — More than three weeks after losing a reelection bid, President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday blamed a software bug and demanded the electoral authority annul votes cast on most of Brazil’s nation’s electronic voting machines, though independent experts say the bug doesn’t affect the reliability of results.

Such an action would leave Mr Bolsonaro with 51 per cent of the remaining valid votes — and a reelection victory, Marcelo de Bessa, the lawyer who filed the 33-page request on behalf of the president and his Liberal Party, told reporters.

The electoral authority has already declared victory for Mr Bolsonaro’s nemesis, leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and even many of the president’s allies have accepted the results. Protesters in cities across the country have steadfastly refused to do the same, particularly with Mr Bolsonaro declining to concede.

Liberal Party leader Valdemar Costa and an auditor hired by the party told reporters in Brasilia that their evaluation found all machines dating from before 2020 — nearly 280,000 of them, or about 59 per cent of the total used in the October 30 runoff — lacked individual identification numbers in internal logs.

Neither explained how that might have affected election results, but said they were asking the electoral authority to invalidate all votes cast on those machines.

The complaint characterised the bug as “irreparable non-compliance due to malfunction” that called into question the authenticity of the results.

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