Hard Numbers: Chinese jabs for Mexico, EU drops fugitive Catalans’ immunity, US protects Venezuelans, Philippine red-tagging

Hard Numbers: Chinese jabs for Mexico, EU drops fugitive Catalans’ immunity, US protects Venezuelans, Philippine red-tagging
Gabriella Turrisi

36 million: Mexico, with the world's third highest COVID death toll, has ordered a total of 36 million doses of Chinese-made vaccines — a third of which are from the still-unapproved Sinopharm shot — amid growing uncertainty over the efficacy of all jabs from China. The country's lackluster vaccine rollout has been heavily criticized, and the US recently turned down a request from the Mexican president to send vaccines to its southern neighbor for the time being.

400: The European Parliament has voted to lift the immunity of Carles Puigdemont, the former president of the Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia, and two other former Catalan MEPs accused by Spain of sedition for unilaterally declaring Catalan independence in October 2017. The move to strip Puigdemont's immunity, which strengthens Spain's legal case to extradite all three fugitive Catalan politicians from Belgium, was supported by EU 400 lawmakers and rejected by 248, with 45 abstentions.

320,000: The Biden administration has granted temporary protected status to around 320,000 undocumented Venezuelans in the US. It's yet another reversal of former president Trump's immigration policies, and follows Colombia's recent decision to regularize a whopping 1.7 million Venezuelan migrants that fled the country's political, economic and humanitarian crisis.

9: Philippine police killed nine suspected communist insurgents over the weekend as part of hardline President Rodrigo Duterte's fresh crackdown on the rebel New People's Army. Duterte — who recently encouraged cops to shoot to kill armed guerrillas — has denied claims by human rights groups that he is "red-tagging" political opponents as terrorists to justify extrajudicial executions.

More from GZERO Media

Listen: In 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at a summit and described their “friendship without limits.” But how close is that friendship, really? Should the US be worried about their growing military and economic cooperation? On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Pulitzer prize-winning national security correspondent for The New York Times David Sanger to talk about China, Russia, the US, and the 21st century struggle for global dominance.

Members of the armed wing of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress line up waiting to vote in a military base north of Pretoria, on April 26, 1994.
REUTERS/Corinne Dufka

On April 27, 1994, Black South Africans went to the polls, marking an end to years of white minority rule and the institutionalized racial segregation known as apartheid. But the “rainbow nation” still faces many challenges, with racial equality and economic development remaining out of reach.

"Patriots" on Broadway: The story of Putin's rise to power | GZERO Reports

Putin was my mistake. Getting rid of him is my responsibility.” It’s clear by the time the character Boris Berezovsky utters that chilling line in the new Broadway play “Patriots” that any attempt to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise would be futile, perhaps even fatal. The show opened for a limited run in New York on April 22.

TITLE PLACEHOLDER | GZERO US Politics

Campus protests are a major story this week over the Israeli operation in Gaza and the Biden administration's support for it. These are leading to accusations of anti-Semitism on college campuses, and things like canceling college graduation ceremonies at several schools. Will this be an issue of the November elections?

The view Thursday night from inside the Columbia University campus gate at 116th Street and Amsterdam in New York City.
Alex Kliment

An agreement late Thursday night to continue talking, disagreeing, and protesting – without divesting or policing – came in stark contrast to the images of hundreds of students and professors being arrested on several other US college campuses on Thursday.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks with Judge Amy Coney Barrett after she was sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, U.S. October 26, 2020.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Some of the conservative justices (three of whom were appointed by Trump) expressed concern that allowing former presidents to be criminally prosecuted could present a burden to future commanders-in-chief.

A Palestinian woman inspects a house that was destroyed after an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, April 24, 2024.
Abed Rahim Khatib/Reuters

“We are afraid of what will happen in Rafah. The level of alert is very high,” Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, said Thursday.

Haiti's new interim Prime Minister Michel Patrick Boisvert holds a glass with a drink after a transitional council took power with the aim of returning stability to the country, where gang violence has caused chaos and misery, on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti April 25, 2024.
REUTERS/Pedro Valtierra

Haiti’s Prime Minister Ariel Henry formally resigned on Thursday as a new transitional body charged with forming the country’s next government was sworn in.