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Alex Kliment
Alex Kliment is Creative Director at GZERO Media and a Senior Editor of GZERO Daily. He also writes and directs Puppet Regime, GZERO's political satire puppet series. Alex first joined Eurasia Group in 2006 as a Russia analyst, after which he co-founded the firm's first Emerging Markets practice and later led a research team serving the firm's corporate clients. He's also worked previously as a journalist for the Financial Times in Washington, DC, and São Paulo, Brazil. Alex holds degrees from Columbia University and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Alex speaks a few languages and is the only person you will ever meet who has impersonated a New York City phone booth, killed Alexander Hamilton in a suburban commuter parking lot, and done a better Trump voice than Alec Baldwin (bring it on, Alec.)
Women and children wait for food distribution from the United Nations World Food Programme in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan, back in 2017.
Even as three-quarters of South Sudan’s people face starvation, a squabble between the government and the UN over import taxes is leaving vital aid trucks stuck at the border.
The background: South Sudan’s trade ministry ordered this week that all goods trucks entering the East African country must pay a $300 tax. The measure was meant to ensure that the government got its share of revenue from imports that are often underbilled or misrepresented. There was supposed to be a carveout for UN aid vehicles, but if so, officials at the Ugandan border didn’t get the memo – at least not yet.
The bigger background: South Sudan is one of the world’s newest countries – and one of its poorest. After coming into existence in 2011 following years of war with the Sudanese government, it fell into its own civil war, which killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
The legacy of that conflict – along with frequent natural disasters – persists: Seven million of the country’s 12 million people are facing hunger in the coming months. The harrowing civil war in Sudan, which just entered its second year, has exacerbated things, driving an estimated 500,000 people across the border into South Sudan, straining the country’s resources further.
Russian Deputy Defence Minister Timur Ivanov inspects the construction of apartment blocks in Mariupol, Russian-controlled Ukraine, in this October 2022 image.
Russian authorities this week detained a prominent deputy defense minister on corruption charges. Timur Ivanov, a long-standing close ally of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, oversaw a wide variety of construction and logistics projects for the Russian armed forces, including in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
Anti-corruption activists, including the outfit of late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, had long focused on Ivanov’s lavish lifestyle. This is the highest-profile corruption takedown since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Now, if you are shocked – shocked! – that there’s corruption in Russian military contracting, we’ve got news for you: Corruption is rife in the Russian government. Getting busted is usually less about a sudden universal respect for transparency, and more about turf battles within the Russian elite.
Is Shoigu in trouble? Not yet, but note two things. One, he’s heard lots of criticism from pro-war hawks who accuse him of corruption and incompetence in his military strategy. The most prominent of them, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is no longer among the living, but the grumblings continue. Second, in just a few weeks, Vladimir Putin will be reinaugurated and will have to name a new cabinet. If Shoigu really is in any trouble, that’s when it will become clear.
The Federal Trade Commission building is seen in Washington on March 4, 2012.
Looking for another job at a firm that does something similar to what you do now? Now could be your chance to jump ship.
The US Federal Trade Commission, the country’s top competition regulator, voted Tuesday to ban noncompete clauses.
What are those? They’re small-print stipulations in employment contracts that forbid you from working for a competitor or starting your own business, typically for a certain period of time after you leave your current job.
Supporters of noncompete clauses say they prevent intellectual property theft and bolster employers’ incentives to invest in their workforces.
But opponents say they stifle new business formation and suppress innovation, trapping employees in jobs regulated by clauses that they are rarely given a chance to negotiate directly.
Several US states, including California (AKA the world’s fifth-largest economy), have all-but-banned noncompetes for years. The FTC ruling brings that nationwide.
Competition could bring benefits. The FTC says banning noncompetes will create more than 8,000 new businesses annually, boost average wages by more than $500 per year, and lower health care costs by nearly $200 billion over the next decade. It’s hard to compete with that!
Re-elected head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov attends an inauguration ceremony in Grozny, Russia October 5, 2021.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed dictator of Chechnya, is reportedly dying inside – literally.
The Russian indy publication “Novaya Gazeta Europe” says the 47-year-old strongman is suffering from a terminal pancreatic condition, and that the Kremlin is scrambling to work out succession plans.
The background, briefly: After crushing a Chechen separatist uprising in the 1990s, the Kremlin installed Kadyrov’s father Akhmat – a moderate Imam and former separatist commander himself – as boss. He was assassinated in 2004, and Ramzan took over.
Backed by a quasi-private army of Islamist paramilitaries, and lots of Kremlin money, the eccentric, pugilistic, large-living Kadyrov has ruled with an iron fist, delivering stability at the cost of ferocious repression.
Putin’s problem: keeping things cool in the North Caucasus – a restive region of widespread poverty and kaleidoscopic ethnic, sectarian, and political rivalries – is essential for the Kremlin. A power vacuum there could quickly spiral.
Novaya Gazeta says the Kremlin is grooming Kadyrov’s top military commander, Apti Alaudinov, to succeed him. But any transition would be an opportunity ripe for destabilizing power grabs.
In all, Kadyrov’s untimely demise poses an age-old problem for Putin: When you make a Faustian bargain, what do you do when the devil dies?
Flags of Israel and Iran on broken ground.
Well, now we know the answer to the question of how Israel planned to respond to Iran’s recent attack. Explosions were reported early on Friday near the northwestern Iranian city of Isfahan, in what several major outlets reported, citing US officials and local sources, as an apparent Israeli strike.
The blasts come just days after Iran launched its first-ever direct attacks on Israel, launching hundreds of missiles and drones, almost all of which were shot down by Israeli and US missile defenses. That salvo was itself seen as a response to Israel’s strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus early this month.
Syria and Iraq blasts reported as well. Blasts possibly related to the strikes on Iran were also reported around the same time at sites in Iraq and Syria. Both countries are home to sizable Iranian proxy forces and intelligence units.
So much for the Passover head fake. Earlier on Thursday, US officials had suggested anonymously that Israel would wait until after the Jewish holiday of Passover, which begins Monday, to retaliate.
No nuclear sites in the crosshairs, it seems. The full extent of the Israeli attack is not yet precisely clear, but the strike doesn't appear to have targeted the Natanz nuclear facility, a major component of Iran’s controversial nuclear program, which is located about 100 miles north of Isfahan. Israel has long made clear its desire to destroy Iran’s nuclear research. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, on Friday said there was "no damage" to Iran's nuclear sites.
Isfahan, meanwhile, is home to several military bases and airfields, which may have been the targets. Iranian officials told the New York Times that a strike hit a military air base near the city. Outside Iran, Isfahan is known chiefly for its rich history of Islamic architecture, which includes several UNESCO heritage sites.
Was this an escalation by Israel? “On the surface, it appears rather limited,” said Gregory Brew, lead Iran analyst at Eurasia Group, “beyond the symbolic significance of Israel hitting Iranian territory.”
Iran isn't blaming Israel. Tehran is claiming to have shot down several drones in the Isfahan area but is downplaying the significance of the incident and hasn't blamed Israel — instead pointing the finger at "infiltrators." Iran has not indicated any plans for retaliation, in a potential sign that it doesn't want to escalate the situation.
“It’s early,” Brew noted, “but the official regime line may be that this is not an action that requires immediate and public retaliation.”
That’s good news even in a bad situation, he says. “It would suggest that the Israeli effort to hit back without triggering further escalation has been successful.”
Saturday marks 25 years since the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The attack in which two students used high-powered rifles to murder 12 of their classmates and a teacher before killing themselves was the largest school shooting in US history at the time.
It was also the first to be covered extensively in real-time by cable news, and it set off a national debate about gun violence, as well as the impact of bullying, video games, and prescription drugs on teen mental health.
A quarter of a century later, those debates continue — what’s different is that the frequency of school shootings has surged, increasing nearly sevenfold over the past decade alone.
Although deaths from these kinds of attacks account for only about 1% of total firearm fatalities, their rise tracks a broader increase in gun homicides and suicides that began during the pandemic in 2020.
Here is a look at the rise of school shootings in America beginning in the early 1990s.
On the first day of the first criminal trial of a former US president, I couldn’t resist. The courthouse is 15 minutes from my desk here in New York, so I jumped on the 6 Train and headed out to the scrum of protesters, counterprotesters, journalists, police, and other gawkers in Lafayette Park outside the courthouse.
There was lots – lots – of yelling. Just as I arrived, a guy in a “Gays for Trump, You got a problem with that, Bitch!” T-shirt was at the center of a smartphone scrum screaming at a woman holding a “Trump is the Definition of Depravity” sign that she was a “pedophile.”
Before long, content creators from both sides of the national divide were on the scene, livestreaming and shouting at each other about Hunter Biden, about inflation, about child labor, about immigration. Even Triumph the Comic Insult Dog barked into the mix, asking one of several Proud Boys stalking the scene in wraparound shades: “If Trump is convicted, do you think he’ll be sentenced to four years … in the White House?”
The only people not screaming, as I recall, were four elderly Chinese-American ladies in huge sunglasses, sitting on a bench under a leafless sweetgum tree, holding hand-painted signs that read: “Kangaroo Court, Banana Republic.”
It was, in all, the usual performative mayhem about the usual subjects. But the one thing that almost no one was actually yelling about was the thing that was going on inside the building 100 feet away: the trial itself.
All that circus, and hardly a word about the elephant in the ring.
But isn’t that how a lot of us talk about Trump’s trials and titillations these days? We argue about the politics rather than look at the merits. And that’s a bad thing.
For Trump, the political cage matches keep the focus right where he wants it: on the narrative that he, as a popular threat to a corrupt establishment, is the victim of a political witch hunt. That the ruling party is using the justice system to silence a political rival. That those ladies with the big sunglasses under the sweetgum tree are right.
On the other side, people talk about the long-coming legal downfall of a demagogue seen as a threat to the Republic itself. The Capone of politics nabbed on his own kind 0f tax rap.
“People know what verdict they want in this case,” says Richard Klein, a professor of law at Touro Law School and a longtime trial criminal defense lawyer. “But few people are focusing on DA Bragg’s case against Trump. They're focusing on all the noise around it.”
To review, briefly. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg alleges that Trump falsified business records to conceal a payment that was made, in the fall of 2016, to a porn star who says she and Trump had a fling.
“Hush money” is bad, but that’s not actually what the trial is about. Paying someone to keep quiet isn’t necessarily a crime, and fiddling with business records in New York isn’t a felony.
Bragg’s case elevates the charges by arguing that this book-cooking was done with the intention of committing other felonious infractions – including, it seems, a conspiracy to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and commit tax fraud.
To prove this intent, Bragg will bring various witnesses, including Trump’s former lawyer and fixer-in-chief Michael Cohen, who made the payments, as well their recipient, the actress known as “Stormy Daniels.”
Legal scholars like Klein say Bragg’s approach is something of a high-wire act. He is linking dozens of lower-level crimes – some of which Trump appears to have admitted publicly – to harder-to-prove felonious ones, and then asking a jury to decide that Trump did all of this to sway an upcoming election rather than, say, simply to save his marriage or protect his kids from scandal.
The key witnesses, moreover, aren’t exactly folks with an unblemished reputation for truthtelling. Cohen has already admitted to lying under oath previously.
How much does this matter? If Bragg fails to convince the jury, Trump will be vindicated – look, he’ll say, these kangaroo court prosecutors came at me and 12 very good people of New York saw through it. This will color the politics of the other three cases he faces.
If Trump is convicted, of course, it may not move the needle for the 35% of “you got a problem with that bitch!”Americans who are unwaveringly fanatically loyal to him.
But about half of Americans say if Trump is convicted he should not be president again. That includes 14% of Republicans and, perhaps more importantly, a third of independents who say a guilty verdict would sway their vote. In a tight election – and this one will be tight – that could certainly be the difference.
As I went to file this, news broke that the jury has been set for the trial. And so we’re off. I may not be able to resist heading down to Lafayette square for some good mayhem again in the coming weeks – but as a society it’s a mistake to let that political circus distract us from the real drama in the courtroom itself.
Hard Numbers: Trump jury formed, A 911 for 911, Croatia’s coalition crunch begins, New nets chop malaria in half, Netflix numbers soar
Former President Donald Trump speaks to reporters with attorney Todd Blanche at the end of the day at Manhattan criminal court as jury selection continues in New York, U.S., April 18, 2024.
12: And then there were twelve. A dozen jurors, plus one alternate, have been selected in Donald Trump’s criminal “hush money” trial in New York. This comes after two jurors were dismissed on Thursday – one of them resigned over fears she had been targeted publicly by a FOX news host, while the other was sent home over prosecutors’ suspicions he had lied on his juror questionnaire. Five more alternates will be selected on Friday.
4: Who do you call when the emergency is that 911 itself is out? People in four US states had to wrestle with that conundrum on Wednesday night after their emergency call systems went down. No cause was given for the outages in Nevada, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Texas, but federal officials have warned that the move to digital systems in recent years has raised the risk of cyberattacks.
60: As expected, Croatia’s governing center-right HDZ party won the most votes in the election, securing 60 seats out of 151, but it will not be able to govern alone, heralding difficult coalition talks ahead. The vote followed a bitter campaign between the HDZ and a center-left coalition led by President Zoran Milanović.
50: New insecticides applied to mosquito nets cut malaria transmissions by up to 50% in trials. Mosquito nets treated with insecticides are the most effective way to stop the spread of malaria, which infects hundreds of millions around the globe and kills some 600,000 people annually. But as mosquitos develop immunity to long-used insecticides, it becomes necessary to develop new ones.
9.3 million: Netflix’s recent un-chill crackdown on password-sharing appears to have worked, as the global streaming behemoth added 9.3 million subscribers worldwide in the first quarter of 2024, and saw its operating income soar by 54%. The company says it still plans to stop reporting subscriber numbers altogether next year, as it focuses more on “engagement” than account numbers.