Our daily adventure around the world

🇨🇿 Retired NATO general Petr Pavel was elected as the Czech Republic’s newest president on Saturday. Pavel’s margin of victory over former PM Andrej Babis – 58.3% to 41.7% – marks the largest ever recorded in a Czech presidential election. The 61-year-old ran on a pro-Western platform, which included advocating for the legalization of same-sex marriage nationwide (same-sex civil partnerships are currently legal in the country, though they carry less rights). And his campaign seems to have caught the attention of Russia: Pavel earlier this week denied rumors of his own death, which were circulated by a fake campaign website and emails hosted by Russia's Yandex server.

🇨🇳 China’s top nuclear-weapons research institute has been buying American chips for decades, even though they’ve been banned from doing so since 1997, per a new WSJ report. The Journal analyzed procurement documents and research papers, published by a Chinese nuclear institute known as CAEP, and discovered the academy – through resellers in China – bought sophisticated computer chips made by US companies like Intel and Nvidia at least a dozen times over the past two-and-a-half decades. America’s 1997 ban on chip exports was intended to prevent foreign entities from using US-made products in nuclear-weapons research.

🇧🇷 Americanas, one of Brazil’s largest retailers, filed for bankruptcy last week after uncovering ~$4 billion in previously-undisclosed debt. The company’s stock has fallen nearly 90% so far this month – including 77% in a single day – after Americanas reported “accounting inconsistencies” totaling $3.9 billion, an amount that represented nearly twice the company’s market cap at the time of its disclosure. Americanas CEO Sergio Rial resigned last week nine days after taking the job, citing the undisclosed debt.