24: In less friendly, fuzzy, and frolicsome animal news, it has been revealed that Joe Biden’s famously foul-tempered dog “Commander” bit US Secret Service agents at least 24 times. The incidents all occurred between October 2022 and July 2023. The German shepherd was removed from the White House last fall.
7.8: How much of the world’s population lives in a “full democracy?” Just 7.8%, according to a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Meanwhile, flawed democracies and authoritarian regimes are each home to about 40% of the world’s people. The study finds that overall, the strength of the world’s democratic institutions is at its lowest ebb since the study began in 2006, as a number of partial democracies slide towards authoritarianism.
100,000: More than 100,000 users of major US cell phone service providers were without signal for part of Thursday in a massive outage that has yet to be explained. Subscribers of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Cricket were affected. Was it a malicious attack? Nobody knows yet, but Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio made a point of warning that a “Chinese Cyberattack” would be “100 times worse” than Thursday’s outages.In fairness, he did say he'd ask. #PUPPETREGIME
Russia announced on Wednesday it charged the founder of Telegram, Russian-born Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorism for allegedly failing to remove information used to organize attacks inside the country
Just months ago, Nigel Farage looked like Britain's next prime minister. Rory Stewart explains how the Reform UK leader built a powerful populist movement – and why a financial scandal may have finally punctured his anti-establishment image.
In this episode of ask ian, Ian Bremmer explains why Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky enters his latest White House meeting with President Trump in a stronger position than he did just a few months ago.