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Suspended Jewish Columbia and Barnard students participate in a press conference outside the president of Columbia University’s house on April 23, 2024, in Manhattan, New York.
Hard Numbers: Columbia punishes deans, Iran boosts missile output, UN accuses Rwanda of fighting in Congo, Colombia protects the forest
3: Columbia University on Monday removed three deans from their positions over antisemitic text messages they exchanged in a group chat during a late-May event about Jewish life on campus in the wake of protests about Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza. The three have been placed on indefinite leave. For our complete on-the-ground coverage of the upheaval at Columbia this spring, led by GZERO’s Riley Callanan, see here.
2: Iran has been ramping up its output of ballistic missiles at two key production facilities, according to satellite imagery. Tehran’s most prominent buyers of the missiles include the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah paramilitaries in Lebanon and, of course, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which signed a missile deal with Iran in 2022.
3,000-4,000: A new UN report alleges that 3,000-4,000 regular Rwandan Army forces are fighting alongside M23 rebels in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a serious allegation that follows years of accusations that Rwanda is deliberately destabilizing its neighbor. Alarmingly, the report also implicates Uganda — which had deployed a force to fight the rebels as part of a regional military intervention to support Congo — in providing support for M23, essentially playing both sides of the conflict.
305: Deforestation in Colombia fell by more than a third last year, to just 305 square miles, the lowest figure on record. The decline comes atop a 20% fall the previous year. About half of the deforestation was in the Colombian Amazon. President Gustavo Petro has sought to rein in corporate access to the rainforest, but orders from local guerilla groups to stop cutting down trees have also helped. Experts warn that despite progress, droughts caused by the hot-weather El Niño weather pattern this year could push up deforestation.
Why Netanyahu relented to protests in Israel, but France's Macron didn't
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Why did Netanyahu end up backing down to protests in Israel, but not Macron in France?
Well, they are two different countries. But really, in Israel, they hadn't yet pushed the reform through. At this point, Netanyahu hasn't said he is given up on it. He said he's waiting for 30 days. Now, he might not be able to get it through, but still, it wasn't like it was passed and then he said, "Too much. Now, I've got to undo it." Where in the case of Macron, he had already gotten the vote in the upper house. He'd already forced it through, avoiding the lower house through a constitutional measure, which meant that essentially he had already gotten the agreement and then he was dealing with massive demonstrations. Which, by the way, the demonstrations themselves not super popular in France, even though the pension reform is strongly opposed, so I'm not surprised by that.
Should the West be worried about North Korea developing tactical nuclear weapons?
We got two of these complicated questions. Well, I think that the fact that North Korea continues to expand its nuclear program is a deep concern, because they are an enormously impoverished rogue state, and there's no information on what really goes on inside that country, and there's no real effective diplomatic relations that any countries and certainly their adversaries have with them. So the increasing tests of ballistic missiles that we see going on is a concern, is a worry. In fact, the only thing that calmed them down recently was when Trump met with Kim Jong-Un, and then they did the freeze-for-freeze informally. So you didn't have US military exercises with South Korea, with Japan, and you didn't have tests of ballistic missiles from North Korea. Of course, that's gone and now the tensions are greater. Frankly, there should be more engagement between the two sides.
China is going to break up Alibaba into six parts. What does this tell us about the state of Xi's tech crackdown?
I think more importantly is the fact that Jack Ma is back in China and was clearly told by the Chinese, "Hey, we're not going to arrest you. This would be a really good time to come back." So too, the fact that someone who had been under arrest, involved in the semiconductor program has now been released to start working again. This is the Chinese government saying, "Yes, there's state control, but we want to focus on growth and we want effective response to US and allied export controls on semiconductors, so we have to really empower the private sector with state restrictions, but also with state investment. Whether that's going to be effective or not, very open question, but the Chinese are clearly trying to pile all in on their own national champions in this advanced technology space.
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