Hard Numbers: Bloomberg helps felons vote, China goes net zero, Russian dissident discharged, Facebook fake accounts
16 million: US billionaire (and failed 2020 presidential candidate) Mike Bloomberg has helped raise $16 million to help former felons in Florida pay their outstanding court debts so they can vote in the November election. Florida, a traditional swing state in the US electoral college system, is a must-win for President Trump to get reelected.
2060: China, the world's top producer of greenhouse gas emissions, has pledged to become carbon-neutral by 2060. It's the first time that Beijing has made a concrete "net zero" carbon commitment, which will entail scaling up its (voluntary) national emissions cuts under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.
32: Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was released from a German hospital 32 days after being taken there following his poisoning in Russia. Germany and most other Western governments — although not US President Donald Trump — have concluded that Navalny was deliberately poisoned with Novochik, a Soviet-era nerve agent normally restricted to the Russian military and intelligence services.
212: Facebook removed 212 fake accounts, most of them linked to China, for violating its policy against "coordinated inauthentic behavior on behalf of a foreign or government entity" in the Philippines and the US. The vast majority of the activity reached the accounts of hundreds of thousands of Filipino Facebook users, and regularly tagged critics of President Rodrigo Duterte (who is often, but not always, pro-China).
