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GZERO Reports
Since 2022, New York City has absorbed more than 170,000 migrants, mostly sent on buses by Texas officials from the US-Mexico border. Many of them are asylum-seekers who hail from South American countries facing political and economic upheaval, like Venezuela and El Salvador. But increasingly, people from Asia, western Africa, and the Caribbean have been making the difficult journey to the US via the southern border as well.
Unlike other so-called “sanctuary cities,” New York has a legal mandate, known as a consent decree, that requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who asks for it. But the already under-funded, under-resourced system is struggling to deal with the influx of so many people. Adding to the chaos, in October, the city changed its policy to require everyone in the shelter system to reapply for a bed every 30-60 days. For asylum seekers already trying to navigate byzantine legal and healthcare systems, the instability can have devastating consequences.
That’s why grassroots organizers like Power Malu of Artists Athletes Activists, Adama Bah of Afrikana, and Ilze Thielmann of TeamTLC have been stepping up to fill a major gap in the city’s immigration system: greeting arrivals, pointing them towards resources, providing food and clothing. Most crucially, they're help people understand their rights and apply for asylum, so they can get work permits and find permanent housing.
Speaking from the front lines of this crisis, the organizers say the city isn't fully meeting the needs of the migrants coming here, despite spending $1.45 billion on migrant costs alone in 2023. "The illusion is that they're in these beautiful hotels and they're getting all of these services and it's not true," Malu says, "That's why you have organizations like ours that have stepped up and had to change from welcoming to now doing case management, social services, helping them with mental health therapy."
GZERO’s Alex Kliment spent time on the ground with newly-arrived asylum-seekers and the volunteers to better understand the reality on the ground, how this current crisis getting so much national attention is functioning day to day, and if the city could be doing more to help.
GZERO has reached out to City Hall for comment and will update with any response.
Learn more about the organizations mentioned in this report:
Catch this full episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on public television beginning this Friday, March 15. Check local listings.
First-person view (FPV) drones are cheap and effective on the battlefield in Ukraine, but the army urgently needs to train pilots how to fly them.
Over two years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with ammo running low and ongoing military aid from the West at risk of drying up completely, the Ukrainian army is turning to a small piece of technology that’s having a surprisingly big impact on the battlefield: first person view (FPV drones), Alex Kliment reports for GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.
Originally invented for drone racing, FPVs have cameras that transmit what they “see” in real time to a pilot wearing goggles on the ground. FPVs are fast, hard to track and target, fit into spaces traditional artillery can’t, and can be fitted with explosives to use in kamaze-style attacks. Most importantly, they only cost around $500.
The biggest hurdle to scaling up Ukraine’s use of FPV drones is that they’re really hard to fly. So schools are opening nationwide to teach soldiers how to fly and incorporate them into battlefield tactics. Last fall, Adnan “Audi” Rana, a former marine who runs a non-profit called Aerial Relief Group, visited a drone school on the outskirts of Kyiv to check out the training program and see first-hand how well Ukraine’s efforts to incorporate the technology into its military is going. He found a DIY, ad-hoc effort run entirely by volunteers representing Ukraine’s best chance of holding back Russian troops until fresh military aid arrives from the West.
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Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was a uniquely charismatic, fearless, and media-savvy critic of Putin’s regime who will be extremely hard to replace, says GZERO’s Alex Kliment. But as beloved as he was internationally for his fearless stance against the country’s strongman leader within Russia, his appeal was somewhat limited to educated elites.
“There was a poll last year that only about 10% of Russians saw Navalny as someone whose activities they approved of about 40 or 50% said they disapproved him Navalny” Kliment says. “And a quarter of Russians had never even heard of him.”In 2020, recall, he was poisoned with a nerve agent in an attack that he blamed on the Kremlin. He later, on camera, tricked a Russian security official into appearing to admit responsibility for the hit.
That may be hard to believe for Western observers who have grown accustomed to grainy videos of Navalny defiantly smiling from behind bars. But it’s a function, Kliment says, of the fact that the Kremlin controls the media. The Kremlin has cracked down on opposition movements like Navalny’s, and many Russians who would be most likely to support him have left Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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“A film is a weapon on time delay” — an interview with “Navalny” director Daniel Roher
BREAKING: Jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has died, according to the prison service.
Vladimir Putin may be busy waging war on Ukraine and threatening NATO with nuclear strikes, but back home in Russia what scares him most is a man languishing in a tiny jail cell five hours east of Moscow.
Opposition leader Alexei Navalny is Russia’s most prominent dissident. In August 2020, someone tried to poison him to death. He was flown abroad to Germany for treatment and then, unfathomably, returned to Russia, where he was promptly arrested and sentenced to a lengthy prison term.
The Oscar-nominated documentary “Navalny” follows him and his team during those crucial months in Germany, as they uncover details of the assassination plot, pulling strings that reach into the highest levels of the Kremlin. It plays, remarkably, as a thriller, a black comedy, and an intimate family portrait.
I recently sat down with “Navalny” director Daniel Roher to learn how the documentary got made, the geopolitical power of cinema, and what he hopes Putin will do if he ever sees the film.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Alex Kliment: Let's start with the ending. You’re about to go to Los Angeles for the Oscars, but where is Alexei Navalny right now?
Daniel Roher: Right now, he’s in solitary confinement. They have him in torturous conditions. It's clear they are trying to destroy his body, his spirit, his mind, and his emotional and physical health. So, Navalny is not doing well, and it's really our principal responsibility to use the film as a vehicle to keep him in the world’s eye.
Tell me a bit about how the film came to be – how does a talented young filmmaker from Canada end up making a documentary about the most prominent dissident in the world?
Making documentaries is the art of being in the right place at the right time, and I think this film really embodies that. I was working on a film project in Ukraine, and I was with [investigative journalist] Christo Grozev. That film wasn't going well, and it was around that time that Christo started working on the Navalny case, digging around for who tried to poison him.
He started uncovering information pretty quickly, and after a few days, he was ready to approach Navalny [in Germany] and say, "I have some information I'd like to share with you. What do you think about doing a film project?"
Alexei Navalny, in the film “Navalny.” Courtesy: CNN Films
So how did you pitch a guy like Navalny? I mean, he’s already got millions of followers on YouTube, why does he need a film to be made about him?
Well, he'd already announced that he was going back to Russia. So what I told him was "look, you will likely be arrested, and in a year's time, you need a vehicle that will keep your name in the global consciousness.”
A YouTube video is made and released and it exists and is gone and forgotten in two or three weeks. But a film can be a weapon that's on a time delay. People will watch this film and think about Navalny and his family not for the next day or week, but for the rest of their lives.
He understood the value of that, and we started shooting the next day.
As a filmmaker, were you ever worried that maybe you were getting spun or used by Navalny's team?
It wasn't that I was worried about it. I was aware of it every single moment. Here I am making a film about a politician whose great gift is his mastery of the media. And it's actually an element that's woven into the fabric of the film. Who's directing whom?
Right, in the opening scene, Navalny tells you what kind of film he wants you to make!
Right. At the beginning of the film I ask him, "if you're killed, what message do you have for the Russian people?" And he dismisses the question in a very sarcastic Navalny way, and he says, "Daniel, we're not gonna make that boring memorial movie. We're gonna make a thriller. This has gotta be a thriller!"
But then at the end of the film I come back to that question and I say, "Alexei, seriously, answer the question: If you are killed, what message do you have for the Russian people?" And this time he answers the question very thoughtfully. He says, "Evil is only able to proliferate if good people do nothing, so don't be inactive."
For me, this was playing with the tension of who's directing whom. And it was my way of signifying, no, I’m at the helm here, because we made very clear from the very beginning that Navalny’s team would have no editorial control over the film.
For the viewer, the film plays like a real cloak-and-dagger thriller. You’ve said elsewhere that the experience of watching the film is a lot like the experience of making it. What did you mean by that?
Well, often people describe to me what it's like to see the phone call sequence, for example, for the first time …
The scene where Navalny tricks one of the assassins into essentially admitting that they tried to kill him ...
Precisely. And to be in the room for that moment was just jaw-dropping. Even though I don't speak a word of Russian, I was on one of the cameras, and I understood immediately that what we were filming was the most important thing I would ever film. You could read the expressions and emotions on people's faces and just intuit that this was crazy.
And Navalny immediately was like, "We have to put this on YouTube." And I understood right then, from a directorial perspective, that the weaponization of what we just shot would now be a plot point in the film.
Navalny and his team react as he tricks one of the assassins into revealing the plot. Courtesy: CNN Films
Let me ask you about how Navalny is viewed abroad. The West has a tendency sometimes to deify dissident figures in authoritarian regimes, and often we find out later that they're imperfect heroes. How well do you think we know Alexei Navalny and what he really thinks?
I think Navalny is a very decent guy, but at the same time, he wants to be president of the biggest country in the world – he wants power, and I'm not going to put him on a pedestal, he's certainly an imperfect human.
It's very well documented – and we see it in the film – that in the late aughts and in early 2010s Navalny went to the Russian March, a rally for Russian nationalists and other unsavory characters, Nazi sympathizers, and people like this. And I asked him about this and he said, basically, "I'm trying to build a broad-based coalition. I'm trying to take the liberals in Moscow and whoever else opposes the regime. If these nationalist guys oppose Putin, then we're on the same team right now. When it comes to figuring out the public policy of how to govern a free Russia, that's a different discussion. And I would never associate with these guys."
It's basically “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That's the political calculus he's making. And I can simultaneously understand it and be deeply uncomfortable with it.
If Vladimir Putin watches this film, what would you want him to take away from it?
You know, it's challenging to imagine him ... Putin just strikes me as a very weird, psychopathic kind of brain, who exists in an alternate reality …
Ok well let’s paint a picture … it's evening in the Kremlin, and after a long day of waging a catastrophic war in Ukraine, Putin shuffles into his lair, pours himself a glass of iguana juice or whatever it is he drinks at night, and sits down to watch your film. What do you want him to take away from it?
Well, I would hope that Putin would relent a little bit and give Navalny a break and give him medical attention and let his family visit him. But that wouldn't be at the top of my wishlist.
The top of my wishlist would be for him to end his brutal genocidal campaign and to take a dose of his own Novichok. Do the world a favor, because the world would be a much better place when Vladimir Putin is relegated to the dustbin of history.
Navalny boards a plane back to Russia in January 2021. He was jailed as soon as he landed, and hasn’t been free since. Courtesy: CNN Films.
Daniel, your film tells an incredible story about Alexei Navalny. How do you think that story ends?
Navalny has a life sentence, it's just a question of whose life it is, his or Putin’s. For millions and millions of Russians, Navalny is a very important figure. But for probably even more Russians, they view him as a bad person, as a criminal, as all of these things that the propaganda shows talk about.
I hope he survives. I hope he's reunited with his family. And one of my personal dreams is to be able to travel to Moscow one day and show him the film, which he has not been able to see.
Congratulations to @DanielRoher and the team behind Best Documentary Feature Film 2023 winner, "Navalny"!
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The official theme of the 2024 World Economic Forum held recently in Davos, Switzerland, was “Rebuilding Trust” in an increasingly fragmented world. But unofficially, the hottest topic on the icy slopes was artificial intelligence.
Hundreds of private sector companies convened to pitch new products and business solutions powered by AI, and nearly two dozen panel discussions featured “AI” in their titles. There was even an “AI House” on the main promenade, just blocks from the Congress Center, where world leaders and CEOs gathered.
So, there were many conversations about the rapidly evolving technology. But were they the right ones?
GZERO’s Tony Maciulis spoke to Marietje Schaake, a former member of the EU parliament who now leads an AI policy program at Stanford. Their conversation focused on the human side of AI and what it could mean for jobs and the workforce.
A recent study from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) revealed that as many as 40% of jobs worldwide could be adversely impacted by AI. Schaake said that kind of upheaval could lead to political unrest and a further rise in populism and encouraged corporations and public sector leaders alike to find solutions now before the equality gap further widens.
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Who gets to claim art as their own? It’s a complicated issue, and elite art institutions are undergoing a reckoning over their Indiana Jones-style acquisition tactics of the past. GZERO’s Alex Kliment explores the complex debate of art repatriation and the controversy surrounding ancient artifacts displayed in Western museums. One of the most infamous cases involves the Parthenon Marbles (sometimes called the Elgin Marbles) at the British Museum, which the British took during Ottoman rule. The Greeks have been demanding the Marbles be returned for almost 200 years.
“I think this is really a moral or ethical case,” says Leila Amineddoleh, an art repatriation expert, “Should museums hold onto objects that were taken under either violent circumstances or were taken during a time of looting, theft or when a country was colonized?”
This question of who owns art has become more intensely political in recent years. On one side are the defenders of the “Universal Museum” idea, who say it’s important to have places where everyone can come see art from all over the world in one place. However, critics argue it’s a form of cultural imperialism that denies rightful ownership to the people who created the artifacts in the first place. Ultimately, the debate raises broader questions about museums' responsibility to address historical injustices, balance cultural preservation with global accessibility, and navigate the complex dynamics of ownership and cultural heritage.
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Armenia’s capital reels from the aftermath of Nagorno-Karabakh & Russia-Ukraine wars
Hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Nagorno-Karabakh and Russia’s Ukraine invasion have come to Armenia, where the future is uncertain.
In September, Azerbaijan launched a military offensive in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region in the South Caucuses at the heart of a decades-long conflict between the two countries. Azerbaijan seized control of the territory in less than 48 hours, forcing hundreds of thousands of ethnic Karabakh Armenians to flee across the border. And they’re not the only ones. Since Russia launches its invasion of Ukraine, around a hundred thousand Russians have also fled into Armenia to escape conscription and sanctions.
But this massive influx has driven up prices and led to job scarcity in the capital, Yerevan, which makes life really difficult for the thousands of people looking to hoping to rebuild their lives there. GZERO World correspondent Fin DePencier tells the story of two people who fled to Armenia to escape war—one from Nagorno-Karabakh, the other from Moscow—to see how conflicts playing out thousands of miles away have a huge impact on the thousands of war refugees looking for a place to call home.
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