Ethiopia, Brazil, Iran-Israel.

Today's three stories you should know.

Ethiopia

Ethiopians vote in parliamentary elections tomorrow as a bitter civil conflict grinds on and an alarm over looming famine is sounded by the UN. The polls are the first electoral test for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who rose to power in 2018 when he became leader of the then ruling party. Analysts fully expect his Prosperity Party to win, cementing his position as prime minister. There are question marks, though, over whether the election will be free and fair. There will be no voting in the Tigray region, where a war between the government and the region’s former local administration continues, and several other constituencies around the country have had voting postponed for reasons ranging from insecurity to misprinted ballot papers.

More from the Guardian here. And Reuters here (paywall).

Brazil

"People in Brazil are tired and they normalize death now so I think we still have a long way to go." 

Brazil continues to struggle with the coronavirus as deaths pass 500,000 — the second-highest in the world after the US. Experts are now warning that things may get worse as winter draws in with only about 11 percent of the country vaccinated. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, has been heavily criticized for a lax response to the virus.

More from BBC here.

Iran-Israel

Naftali Bennett, Israel’s new prime minister, today reacted to the victory of Ebrahim Raisi in Iran’s presidential election, calling the judiciary chief “the hangman of Tehran”. Bennett will see Raisi’s victory as an opportunity to throw a spanner in the works of talks between Iran and Western powers on Tehran and Washington re-entering a 2015 nuclear deal. Former US president Donald Trump unilaterally pulled the US out of the accord in 2018 before Iran followed.

More from Al Jazeera here. And an explainer on the talks from AP here.