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Graphic Truth: Where does the US get its online news?
The site has a well-documented history of being a breeding ground for misinformation, which continues to be a topic of concern in Washington with the 2024 election on the horizon.
Pew found that half of US adults get their news from social media at least some of the time, while 30% regularly get their news from Facebook. Next up was YouTube, followed by Instagram, TikTok, and X, formerly known as Twitter. Like Facebook, all of these platforms have also faced issues with the spread of disinformation as well as rampant hate speech.
The Graphic Truth: Where do Palestinian refugees live?
There are some 14 million Palestinians worldwide, and more than 6 million of them are refugees living in UN-administered camps scattered throughout Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Who are the refugees? Violence during the founding of modern Israel in 1948 drove 700,000 Arabs from their homes. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza during the Six-Day War in 1967 added as many as 300,000 more. Those people and their descendants live in more than 60 refugee camps which are, today, functional cities with power, running water, and permanent structures.
The country with the largest number of registered Palestinian refugees is Jordan, where some 2 million account for a quarter of the country’s population. But they are present in large numbers in Lebanon and Syria too, as well as in the Palestinian territories.
Refugees make up 80% of the population of Gaza and nearly 40% in the West Bank. Here is a closer look at where the Palestinian refugees live today.The Graphic Truth: Union workers in swing states
President Joe Biden joined striking US auto workers in Michigan this week to lend support to the labor unions that have been on the picket line.
This move – the first time a US president has joined organized labor groups in protest – shows the importance of specific states in the upper Midwest, where unions yield clout, in paving Biden’s path to victory in next year’s presidential election. Former President Donald Trump, for his part, also addressed auto workers in Michigan this week.
But this outreach isn’t just about the Great Lakes State and its important electorate – it’s reflective of both parties’ efforts to win over white working-class voters in a matchup that’s looking increasingly close.
We take a look at union representation across select battleground states and how they’ve voted in the past four presidential elections.
The Graphic Truth: Russian and Chinese oil exports to North Korea
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Russian Pacific port city of Vladivostok is in part meant to highlight that both leaders – though isolated – still have friends in high places. Putin is expected to ask for additional arms from North Korea, while Pyongyang wants economic and material help as it struggles with ongoing food shortages and perennial economic mismanagement.
Here’s a look at recent oil exports to North Korea from Pyongyang’s two closest allies, Russia and China.
The Graphic Truth: Summer inflation – then and now
The summer of 2022 was, broadly speaking, the summer of inflation. An energy crunch caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, coupled with increased post-COVID demand and supply chain kinks sent prices through the roof. Elevated oil and gas, in particular, set records around the globe.
Fast forward a year and inflationary pressures persist in many places, but the trend is mostly headed downward. In some countries – like the US – that’s a good thing, suggesting that the US Fed’s effort to rein in inflation is working (though inflation in the US rose slightly last month for the first time in months). However, in China, for instance, inflation has come down too much and the world’s second-largest country is now grappling with the opposite conundrum: deflation.
Meanwhile, inflation in Russia has plummeted 70% since last August, though current trends suggest it is climbing fast as the value of the Russian ruble nosedives.
India, for its part, is on an anomalous path, with rising food prices as a result of volatile weather conditions having sent inflation soaring last month. We take a look at inflation rates in select economies in Aug. 2022 compared to now.
The Graphic Truth: Canada wildfires scorch records
Canada’s 2023 wildfires are burning at a record pace. Blazes have forced thousands to evacuate, burned hundreds of homes, and resulted in four deaths. Smoke from this intense season has brought haze to North American skylines, worsening air quality for Canadians and Americans.
The season started early due to hot, dry weather conditions across Canada, and the amount of forest and land burned by the 4,765 fires has blown away the damage done over the last two decades.
To demonstrate how unprecedented Canada’s 2023 wildfire season has been, we look at two decades’ worth of data on land burned in wildfires in the US and Canada.
The Graphic Truth: Coups ain't what they used to be
Early on Thursday, rebel soldiers announced that they had taken over in a coup in Niger. President Mohamed Bazoum was reportedly detained by members of the presidential guard, but it's not clear whether the rest of the military is on board, so the situation in the Sahel country remains too messy to know for sure who is really in charge. (Bazoum already survived a botched coup after winning reelection in March 2021.)
Successful or not, this is the first — known — coup of the year (notwithstanding Yevgeny Prigozhin's failed mutiny/freak show in Russia). And rather interestingly, it took place in Niger, the West African country we assessed was most at risk of the next power grab in early 2022.
Despite a recent brief resurgence on the continent, coup attempts around the globe have become both less common and less successful. That's partly because the end of the Cold War diminished the superpowers' interest in backing military takeovers against governments they didn't like. Here's a look at the historical record.
The Graphic Truth: Spanish political gridlock
Spain's snap election on Sunday yielded another hung parliament, which means no party or coalition has a majority of seats to form a government. So, what might happen next?
Here are four scenarios, ordered from most to least likely.
#1 — Election redo. In the coming days, King Felipe VI will ask the leader of the party with the most seats in parliament to try to form a government. That would be Alberto Núñez Feijóo from the center-right People's Party, which came in first with 132 out of 350 MPs.
Unfortunately for Feijóo, the PP and the far-right Vox Party together failed to win an outright majority. The same goes for PM Pedro Sánchez from the left-wing PSOE party, who also doesn't have enough votes along with the far-left Sumar (Add) coalition backed by two Catalan and Basque progressive separatist forces.
If no candidate gets an absolute majority in the first round, the second round only requires a simple majority (more yes than no votes). And if no government is formed two months after the first vote, Spain's constitution mandates going to the polls again, as the country has done twice following similar parliamentary messes in 2015-2016 and 2019.
#2 — Left-wing coalition government. The current left-wing coalition government (PSOE + Podemos, or We Can, now rebranded as Sumar) could stay in power if Junts (Together), a right-of-center Catalan secessionist party, votes for Sánchez in the first round or abstains in the second round. But negotiating with Junts top honcho Carles Puigdemont might prove toxic for the PM.
In case his name doesn’t ring a bell, the shaggy-haired former Catalan president is a fugitive of Spanish justice since Oct. 2017, when he fled to Belgium after unilaterally declaring independence following a sham referendum. You can bet that in exchange for his seven votes, Puigdemont will demand that Sánchez allow the restive region to hold a (legal) plebiscite — a political death sentence for any Spanish prime minister.
Still, the self-proclaimed martyr for Catalan independence might settle for a return home if all charges against him are dropped. This would have been unthinkable for anyone but Sánchez, who already pardoned the Catalan politicians who tried to secede with Puigdemont, and watered down the crime itself.
#3 — Center-right minority government. This one is a bit of a stretch, but the numbers do add up. Feijóo could try to cobble together a razor-thin majority of votes by wooing the moderate Basque Nationalist Party, or PNV, a traditional post-election kingmaker for both the PP and the PSOE.
To do so, though, the PNV will probably ask for the PP to govern alone. In other words, without Vox, a hard-right party that wants to strip not just the Basque Country but all Spanish regions of their autonomy and recentralize power in the national government. It'll also be a tough pill to swallow for Vox, whose voters might prefer to take their chances in an election redo over backing Feijóo pretty much for free.
#4 — Grand coalition. Imagine the PP and the PSOE taking one for Team Spain by setting aside their many differences to form a coalition government that would represent almost two-thirds of Spaniards who voted for either party. It's been done many times in Israel and most recently in Germany.
But alas, not in Spain, where Feijóo and Sánchez would rather keep voting over and over again than work together. As the popular Spanish saying goes, Es lo que hay (It is what is).