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A bird flu warning sign and quarantine zone in Switzerland.
Hard Numbers: Bird flu spreads, Modi joins Truth Social, Trans-Niger Pipeline explodes, JFK files released, Majority of Americans oppose tariffs, Who thinks Trump is a dictator?
166 million: The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is concerned over the spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus to mammal species, including zoo animals, pets, and cattle, which is causing havoc in agriculture and increasing the likelihood it could jump to humans. The spread among birds has already caused the culling of at least 166 million chickens in the United States, sending egg prices soaring.
31,600: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modijoined Truth Social, the social media platform owned by US President Donald Trump. In his inaugural post on Monday, Modi shared a photo with Trump taken in 2019 in Houston, Texas, and as of Wednesday morning, he had 31,600 followers.
450,000: An explosion occurred Monday night on the Trans-Niger Pipeline in Rivers State's Bodo community, threatening over 450,000 barrels of daily crude oil production and causing a fire to rage through a local mangrove. Two individuals have been arrested in connection with the incident, and an investigation is underway. The pipeline has been the subject of terror attacks before, but no such link has yet been established.
80,000: Conspiracy theorists, start your engines. President Donald Trump on Tuesday released approximately 80,000 pages of unredacted documents related to President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination. While White House Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields claimed that Americans “are truly going to be shocked,” historians do not expect significant new revelations.
38: The latest exclusive GZERO-Echelon poll shows that 54% of American voters oppose US President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, while 38% support them. Republicans favor them by a 47-point margin, but Independents and Democrats oppose them by margins of 30 and 76, respectively.
36: The same poll asked respondents which of a list of world leaders they would consider to be a dictator. North Korean President Kim Jong Un topped the list at 77%, followed by Russian President Vladimir Putin at 75%, and then by US President Donald Trump, at 36%.
Ian Explains: The media's trust problem
It’s getting harder and harder to tell fact from fiction. Trust in media is at an all-time low. At the same time, partisanship is skyrocketing, and generative AI is challenging the very idea of truth.
This week on Ian Explains, Ian Bremmer breaks down how the media landscape has changed since the early days of live TV and why the 2024 US presidential election will be a major test of our ability to detect and prevent misinformation from spreading online.
Cable news has come a long way from the 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, where Nixon famously showed up sweaty and pale, while John F. Kennedy showed up tanned and camera-ready. People who listened on the radio thought Nixon won the debate. But on TV, the advantage went to Kennedy and the polls quickly turned in his favor. It was the first-ever live TV debate and forever changed how media and politics interact with each other.
In the 60-plus years since, it’s only gotten harder to separate the message from the medium. A 24/7 cable cycle has turned the idea of news into mass entertainment. And hyper-partisan talk radio shows, thousands of political podcasts, and social media’s endless doom-scroll have created a perfect incubator for information––and disinformation––overload.
2024 will be the first US presidential election in the age of generative AI. The risk of spreading false or misleading information to voters is enormous. Despite calls from industry watchdogs and tech experts, US lawmakers have yet to pass any real guardrails for AI technology. And given the rapid pace of development, by the time the election rolls around next year, it will be even harder to tell an AI-generated video or image from the real thing.
Whether regulators and lawmakers can come up with an effective way to identify and combat AI misinformation is anyone’s guess, but one thing is clear: the stakes are incredibly high. And the future of US democracy may depend on it.
Watch Ian Explains for the full breakdown, and for more on the US, watch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on US public television and at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld.
Cuban Missile Crisis turns 60
Sixty years ago, the world got as close it's ever been to nuclear war.
For 13 days, the US and the USSR played a dangerous cat-and-mouse game over Soviet nuclear missiles parked in Cuba. The Cold War nearly got hot.
In the end, a shared sense of humanity allowed a diplomatic solution. The world breathed a sigh of relief.
Would Moscow and Washington do the same if Vladimir Putin uses nukes in Ukraine?
Watch the GZERO World episode: Chinese Power
- Will Putin drop a nuke on Ukraine? - GZERO Media ›
- Nuclear weapons: more dangerous than ever? - GZERO Media ›
- Nuclear weapons could be used; Russia's war gets more dangerous ... ›
- Another nuclear showdown? - GZERO Media ›
- How close are we to a second Cuban Missile Crisis? - GZERO Media ›
- Odds of US-NATO war rising - GZERO Media ›
Another nuclear showdown?
Sixty years ago on Friday, Maj. Richard Heyser took hundreds of photos of suspicious installations in the Cuban countryside from a US spy plane. Close inspection of the photos back in Washington revealed that the Soviet government, then led by Nikita Khrushchev, had secretly installed missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads over 90 miles of ocean to hit targets across much of the United States. You can hear audio recordings of the initial White House discussion of this threat here.
Over the following days, the White House and Kremlin found themselves looking for ways to avoid nuclear war. The crisis was resolved when a deal was reached that pulled the Soviet missiles from Cuba and later withdrew US missiles from Turkey.
Today, a Kremlin leader has created a new crisis. A Russian invasion has produced a military stalemate in the south and east of Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin has warned that nuclear weapons remain an option for Russia if he believes his country’s national security is threatened. Other Russian officials and allies have issued more explicit threats. President Joe Biden has invoked “the prospect of Armageddon” and spoken about lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis that might help avert catastrophe today.
In some ways, the 1962 nuclear face-off was more dangerous than the current standoff. Sixty years ago, the threat of nuclear attack was made against the territory of the United States, a nuclear-armed superpower that would have retaliated instantly against attack. Millions of Americans and Soviets would have been killed within minutes. Today, most of the specific Russian threats center on so-called tactical nuclear weapons for use on the battlefield in Ukraine. Their effect would be horrific, but the scale of destruction would be much smaller than an attack on the US in 1962 – unless retaliation against a Russian strike provoked escalation.
In addition, communication between Washington and Moscow, crucial in any potential military confrontation, was more complex in 1962. Then, it took hours for secure communications to reach the other side, increasing the risk of miscalculation and deadly accidents while leaders waited for responses. And President John Kennedy faced an especially dangerous problem 60 years ago: It was not clear who was in charge in the Kremlin. Contradictory messages from Moscow led some in Washington to fear that Khrushchev had been removed from power and that the US faced an unknown adversary in a potentially unstable situation.
But in other ways, it’s the current standoff that’s more dangerous. The Cuban missile crisis took place just 17 years after the end of World War II. The devastating consequences of war were lived experience for leaders on both sides. Today, 77 years after the end of the last global war, the destructive potential is more abstract. It’s possible to be complacent about a threat no one has faced in decades.
Second, the crisis over Cuba occurred in peacetime, while today’s Russia finds itself in a shooting war in which the United States is very much involved. As a result, there are other players in today’s drama. The risk that an action taken inside Ukraine could send nuclear forces onto high alert adds a layer of complexity that didn’t exist in 1962.
Finally, we now know that Kennedy and Khrushchev were able to communicate through a back channel that even senior US and Soviet officials didn’t know about. Secret negotiations between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin were crucial for averting catastrophe and building a deal. Today’s White House and Kremlin may have their own backchannel to avoid nuclear war, but it may be years before details emerge on the quality of that communication.
US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” But for now, Russian leaders are determined to project strength and confidence at the expense of any hope of reconciliation. Ukraine’s government refuses to compromise on control of its territory, and Ukraine’s backers in Europe and the United States know that surrender to nuclear blackmail sets a dangerous precedent that makes the world less, not more, secure.
US and Soviet leaders resolved the Cuban missile crisis through flexibility and creativity on both sides. Today, there’s no sign of any such solution.
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