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Hard Numbers: Ukraine wins Eurovision, Somalia’s new prez, Venezuela woos investors, CDU victory

May 15, 2022
Carlos Santamaria
Hard Numbers: Ukraine wins Eurovision, Somalia’s new prez, Venezuela woos investors, CDU victory
Kalush Orchestra from Ukraine appear on stage after winning the 2022 Eurovision Song Contest in Turin, Italy.
REUTERS/Yara Nardi

439: Ukraine won the popular Eurovision Song Contest in Italy thanks to a late surge of 439 fan votes from across the continent early Sunday. President Volodymyr Zelensky congratulated the winner, vowing to hold next year's edition in the besieged city of Mariupol.

3: Somali lawmakers (finally!) elected Sunday a new president after three rounds of indirect voting, conducted in a Mogadishu airport hangar. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, a former president who lost re-election in 2017, will get his old job back.

10: Venezuela plans to offer private investors stakes of up to 10% in multiple state-run companies that Caracas nationalized years ago in the name of socialism. With its economy still a shambles and under crippling US sanctions, the Maduro regime is desperate to attract foreign investment.

35.7: In a major upset for the ruling SPD party, the opposition CDU won 35.7% of the vote in Sunday's election in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's most populous state. Good news for the CDU, which governed the country for 16 years under former Chancellor Angela Merkel until it lost the 2021 federal election.
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