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Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa speaks to the media in Harare, on Aug. 27, 2023.
Hard Numbers: Zimbabwe election results, deadly attack in Haiti, British Museum recovery, valuable mug shot, chasing reindeer
52.6: President Emmerson “Crocodile” Mnangagwa claimed victory in Zimbabwe’s recent election with 52.6% of the vote, beating his main rival, Nelson Chamisa, according to official results announced late Saturday. The opposition is refusing to accept the results, claiming widespread voting irregularities.
7: At least seven people were killed in a gang attack on a Christian protest in Haiti. Gang violence has increased dramatically since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse, and criminals now control up to 80% of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince.
2,000: The British Museum says it has recovered some of the 2,000 items believed to have been stolen by an insider over a long period of time. The thefts – which led to the recent resignation of the museum’s director – included 3,500-year-old gold jewelry, gemstones, and antiquities, some of which were found for sale on eBay.
7,000,000: Say cheese. The campaign of Donald Trump says it has raised over $7 million since he was booked in Georgia on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election and became the first-ever former US president to have a mug shot.
500,000: Norway is building a fence at a cost of €500,000 to stop its Sámi reindeer herds from crossing into Russia. Sounds costly, but this should save Oslo money, as Russia has demanded compensation of €6,700 per reindeer plus a lump sum of nearly €6.3 million for the days the animals have grazed on the Russian side of the border.
The Graphic Truth: How much it costs to supply Ukraine
As the war in Ukraine enters its second year, proponents of continued military aid to Kyiv say it’s a cut-rate investment for security while others wonder whether the cost is worth it. We look at how much the biggest suppliers spent on military aid to Ukraine as a percentage of their defense budgets last year.
Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines?
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here. Quick Take to kick off your week, and I want to talk about Nord Stream one and two. These are the pipelines, the gas pipelines that the Germans had wanted and the Russians had built, multi-billion dollar pipelines to bring gas from Russia into Germany and Europe. The United States had been very critical of these pipelines for years. The Trump administration particularly vocal about it, and only shut down after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and then sabotaged, blown up.
So who did it? It's a big question. And the presumption immediately after the explosions back in September that came from the West and Ukraine was that it was the Russians. And there was no evidence, but you're blaming the Russians for everything since they invaded Ukraine and they're committing all these war crimes. But this one always struck me, Nord Stream, as not having enormous credibility, trying to figure out why would the Russians blow up their own multi-billion-dollar pipelines?
Especially because, when you talk to Russian advisors, the presumption was that, over time, over years, Russia's focused on Ukraine. The Europeans perhaps not so much. The expense for the Europeans and providing support goes up. The costs, as they get colder over time, goes up and they get weary. And so having an option of getting Russian gas turned back on could be attractive for a potential peace movement. Not saying it's going to happen, but certainly was seen as an option by the Russians that they wouldn't want to suddenly take off the table by blowing up their own pipeline. So then after the pipelines were blown up, there have been a couple of investigations that the Europeans have conducted for months now. And there has been not a shred of evidence that has pointed to the Russians being responsible for this sabotage. And you'd know that if they found anything that pointed to Russia, because they'd want the world to know, they would tell us.
And especially after the extraordinary intelligence from the United States on Russia's plans to invade Ukraine, as well as various faults, flag efforts that the Russians were scheming up as the drumbeat of war was increasing, that the Americans made known to allies and some of which they made public. The fact that the United States has come up with nothing, I mean, I'm not just talking about fingerprints or signature on the explosions, I'm also talking about any communications, signals intelligence and email, anything from anyone involved in this effort. We have no idea who's behind this. So it doesn't smell right to me that the Russians are responsible. So then who is?
And, well, enter Seymour Hersh, a very well-known journalist. He got a Pulitzer Prize for his work uncovering the Mỹ Lai massacre by the United States in Vietnam. And he writes this extraordinary piece independently published on his Substack newsletter that fingers the United States and Norway in a covert operation blowing up these pipelines. It got huge attention, especially and predictably with Russian state media and the Russian government now saying that they're planning on taking steps to retaliate. The question is, does the story hold up? If it does, it's an extraordinary story. It would risk driving a wedge in the NATO coalition. It's worth taking a look at. And I've done that now, and I will say that, as skeptical as I am that the Russians are behind Nord Stream one and two exploding, the Hersh story doesn't hold up at all.
First of all, the core concept that the United States would target infrastructure partially owned by a key ally without telling the Germans about it runs very counter to what the United States has been doing in the war. I mean, at the same time that this occurred, the US was pursuing much deeper ties with Germany on a lot of issues like tech regulation and China decoupling and strengthening transatlantic ties to reverse the pullback and cooperation that you saw in the Trump administration. Blowing up Nord Stream risks all of those initiatives for a very questionable benefit to the United States, which is breaking Russia-Germany ties, while also risking spiking energy prices in the EU.
Partnering with Norway, a chartered NATO member, to sabotage Nord Stream also risks fracturing internal NATO cooperation, which Biden and his entire team have made very clear, both publicly and privately, has been the single most important gain that they have seen since the invasion has started. The fact that NATO, which was fragmenting, now has a reason for being. It's expanding, it's very coordinated, consolidated under US leadership. You risk that. Biden administration strikes me as much more risk averse than that. But okay, that's a practical and theoretical argument. Now, need to talk about some of the things Hersh said in the piece itself. Explanation that he lays out for hiding the operation from Congress isn't actually internally consistent. Hersh's claim that the operation was devised without using special operations personnel in order to avoid notifying Congress is actually incorrect.
A covert action pursued under Title 50 authority, that's the part of US Code that allows the CIA to pursue covert action regardless of what assets are used, would still be briefed to Congress. And that never happened. Specifically, CIA can request DoDEA personnel through the Defense sensitive support system. And those requests are briefed to Congress every month. And in Hersh's telling, the CIA would've asked the US Navy for deep water divers via that system, and Congress would've been notified. Whether those divers were special operations or not actually is immaterial to that process. He then suggests that the operation was downgraded to avoid congressional notification. That's not actually a thing. If it was a covert action, there would've been a finding before DoDEA assets were requested or before operational planning got past the initial stage. So the argument here kind of is nonsensical. Okay.
Also, the publicly verifiable facts, which are critical, don't line up with Hersh. He specifies that a Norwegian Alta-class minesweeper was used to support the divers that were planting explosives during the Baltops exercises. Now, public tracking shows that none of Norway's five Alta-class ships were in the region during the exercise. Further, Hersh claims that a Norwegian P-8, that's an aircraft that does marine tracking, dropped a sonar buoy on the day of the explosion that triggered the explosives. But none of the five P-8s that Norway operates were in the area that day per flight tracking. That these don't show up on public tracking is critical because Hersh's whole claim is that the reason that the Norwegians were used is so that the flights and ship activity wouldn't need to be covert. This doesn't align with the data. The other thing I would say is that Hersh's own anti-establishment and specifically anti-intelligence community bias should draw some skepticism.
As I mentioned, Hersh, the work he's done on Mỹ Lai was extraordinary and a true public service, and he got a Pulitzer for it. But more recently, he's done work claiming that the Osama bin Laden killing was a coverup, that the Syrian government didn't use chemical weapons. And they're both notable for being unbelievable and designed really to rebut specific claims made by the US intelligence community. And unfortunately, this article really lines up with that ideologically, and also without having the information to back it up. So, what then is really going on here? Who was behind it? I mean, the fact that Hersh is wrong doesn't mean that that NATO wasn't in some way behind this. And it's, by the way, not inconceivable that Hersh's anonymous source, gave him details that are disprovable in order to undermine the central argument in the piece. I mean, if you dismiss it as "I'm doing right now" as clearly factually wrong, it colors future claims that the United States was responsible that are potentially more credible.
I personally think that the Ukrainians are the most likely culprit. I mean, in the sense that they're the ones that have the most to gain. And they're also the ones that are the most risk acceptant. I mean, this war is an existential risk to them, and they're willing to do almost anything to ensure that their country still exists. And if the NATO alliance starts to break, that's an utter disaster for them. They need to make sure that that energy can't go to the Germans going forward. They don't want that to be a possibility because it's their future, literally their future as human beings that's on the line. Now, the main problem with the Ukrainian argument is, do they have the capabilities, the technical capabilities? And six months ago, I would've been very skeptical. But I also wouldn't have thought they'd be able to blow up the Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, and they did. And that was pretty sophisticated operationally.
They also, of course, attempted to assassinate Alexander Dugin, ended up killing his daughter just outside Russia. Also pretty sophisticated assassination just outside Moscow. They also have been involved in shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant that was occupied in Ukraine, the largest nuclear plant in Ukraine, but occupied by the Russians. I mean, if those shells had gone awry, you could have had a nuclear accident. So the willingness of the Ukrainians to take big risks is significant. I suspect they're the most likely. Could it have been with some NATO support, for example, Poland? Who knows that, if it wasn't for the Ukrainians fighting, they'd be fighting themselves.
They're therefore by far the most hawkish in orientation towards Russia. That is plausible. They're the ones that have been pushing the hardest for getting fighter jets to the Ukrainians to fight the Russians, for example. It's certainly possible. The Americans, of course, would have the most operational capability to pull off such an attack. And that is at face what makes Hersh's article very interesting. But again, at least, as he's argued, it strikes me as completely wrong, and frankly very irresponsible. So that's why I wanted to use my platform to go through the facts as they stand.
I hope everyone finds this useful. I look forward to talking to everybody real soon.
- What a mysterious pipeline attack says about European unity ›
- Who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines? ›
- Russia cutting Nord Stream 1 gas to undermine European leaders ›
- Nord Stream explosion mystery: We need proof, says Estonia's PM Kaja Kallas - GZERO Media ›
- Did Ukraine blow up Nord Stream pipelines? - GZERO Media ›
An illustration picture shows a projection of text on the face of a woman.
Hard Numbers: AI for Ukraine, Norwegian NATO drills, Ethiopian violence, engine-less Chinese sub
2 billion: Ukraine has been given free access to Clearview's AI facial recognition technology in order to track Russian assailants, fight misinformation, and identify the dead. The US startup says it has a database of 2 billion photos culled from Russian social media.
30,000: In Norway, some 30,000 NATO and partner armed forces are testing how the Land of the Midnight Sun would handle NATO reinforcements on its soil. The exercises were, in fact, planned long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
64: Human rights watchdogs say 64 people were killed in an attack in Ethiopia’s Benishangul-Gumuz region earlier this month. It’s unclear what caused the violence this time, but in late 2020 clashes erupted between the local Gumuz people and farmers from neighboring Amhara, whom the Gumuz accuse of trying to steal fertile land.
410 million: This will never float. China is building Thailand a submarine as part of a $410 million defense deal meant to bolster the countries’ ties. But there’s one big problem: Germany refuses to send China the diesel engine to power the sub.Jonas Gahr Støre of the Labour Party (Arbeiderpartiet) during the Norwegian Parliamentary Election on September 13, 2021 in Oslo
What We’re Watching: Left wins Norway’s climate vote, everyone wants India’s jabs, junta denied Myanmar’s UN seat
Norway's climate election result: Most votes have now been counted from Norway's parliamentary election, and the left-leaning Labour party, headed by former FM Jonas Gahr Støre, has reaped 46 out of 168 seats up for grabs, ousting the conservative government led by PM Erna Solberg. Støre will now try to form a coalition government that's expected to include the agrarian Centre Party as well as the Socialist Party. The election was broadly seen as a referendum on climate change policy, given that oil accounts for more than 40 percent of Norway's exports and employs 7 percent of the entire workforce — though Norway itself has rolled out an ambitious green agenda at home. Støre says that he'll limit new oil explorations, but has ruled out getting rid of fossil fuels, saying that oil revenues could help fund the transition away from oil in the long run. Importantly, the Greens, the only political party that called for an end to all oil exploration, reaped only 4 percent of the vote, and is therefore unlikely to yield enough (or any) influence. Regardless, Støre may need to incorporate some smaller left-wing parties in his coalition that could force him to take a more forceful stance on climate change, like raising carbon taxes.
India pushed to vax the world: As the brutal COVID wave that devastated India in the spring now recedes, Delhi is coming under pressure to lift its vaccine export ban and deliver doses to low- and middle-income countries. The COVAX scheme was relying on India's Serum Institute to provide the bulk of its supply by administering 2 billion doses by the end of this year, but will now come up short — in part because when things got bad in India, the government stopped shipping pledged doses of the AstraZeneca shot saying that it needed to prioritize the domestic need. But now that India is recording one-tenth of the daily COVID cases it reported in early May, and at least 40 percent of its 1.4 billion people have gotten one jab, the World Health Organization and the US want India to resume exports. That may be a hard sell for the Biden administration, which enforced its own export ban earlier this year until it had enough supply for all Americans. Before the ban, India had sold or exported 66 million doses, but Biden is now pushing all countries to donate, not sell, any surplus supplies.
No UN seat for Myanmar's junta: The US and China cut a deal to block Myanmar's junta from taking the country's UN seat before the 76th UN General Assembly kicks off on Tuesday. But there's a catch: Myanmar's current UN envoy, appointed by the government the generals ousted in a coup last February, will have to tone down his fiery anti-junta rhetoric. The agreement is a slap in the face for Myanmar's military rulers, who were likely hoping China, one of their few friends, would push harder to give them the UN seat and the international legitimacy that comes with it. More broadly, it's a sign of what might be in store for the Taliban, who are also vying for international recognition and counting on China's support at international forums. However, the Taliban may have a slightly stronger claim because unlike Myanmar, the previous government has absconded and is not contesting their takeover. Still, having a Taliban representative on the Commission on the Status of Women, where Afghanistan won a seat in 2020, will surely be a non-starter for Western member states that have influence at the UN.
Will Norway pull the plug on itself?
What do you do when the thing that has helped to make you a rich, prosperous, and healthy democracy is also destroying the planet that you want to save? That's the choice before the roughly five million people of Norway as they head into a pivotal election on September 13.
No industrialized, competitive democracy is quite as dependent on fossil fuel exports as Norway. The discovery of oil and gas reserves in the North Sea half a century ago catapulted the country from a tidy but small fishing and timber economy to one of the most advanced and prosperous social welfare states on Earth.
Oil accounts for more than 40 percent of Norway's exports. The industry employs some 200,000 people directly, or about 7 percent of the workforce. And of course, Norway's famed, oil-fueled sovereign wealth fund is the world's largest, clocking in at more than a trillion-dollars. While it funds pensions -- rather than the budget, which is financed through typically high Nordic taxes -- the sovereign wealth fund is a nest egg (and crisis cushion) that most countries can only dream of.
At the same time, Norway is a green country that wants to be a leader in global efforts to combat climate change. How is this possible? For all the oil and gas that it ships abroad, Norway uses barely any of the stuff at home. The vast majority of Norway's electricity generation comes from hydropower, not hydrocarbons. Seven in ten new vehicles sold there last month were fully electric. Most of the capital, Oslo, is entirely and pleasantly car-free now.
But activists and upstart political parties are now drawing a closer connection between Norway's economic model and its environmental goals. And this contradiction — fossil-fuel dependency and green ambition — is now on the ballot.
The two establishment parties, the flagging center-right Conservatives who currently hold power, as well as the frontrunner center-left Labour opposition, stand behind the industry. They say that while they favor a gradual transition away from fossil-fuel production, the economic consequences of pulling the plug too quickly would be devastating.
They also point out that even if Norway stopped selling oil, it would have little impact on the climate unless global demand for the stuff goes down more broadly; that is, if we don't sell it to an oil-thirsty world, someone else will simply take our place.
But here's the thing: Labour is currently leading polls, but at just 23 percent it would have to form a coalition to govern. And two of its most natural possible partners, the leftwing Socialist Left Party (10 percent) or potentially the center-left Greens (5 percent), want to halt new exploration licenses. The Greens want to stop production altogether by 2035, and say they won't form a coalition with any party that opposes banning exploration immediately. "Our demand is absolute," party energy spokesman Ask Ibsen Lindal told GZERO Media.
In fact, the traditional parties in Norway are on their back foot generally these days. In midterm municipal elections in 2019, voters "gave the finger" to the establishment, ringing up big boosts not only for the Greens and parties on the hard left, but also to the agrarian Center Party and a pro-motorist group called PNB, which opposes environmental and road taxes.
All of this means that there could be a fragmented and potentially inconclusive election outcome. And the stakes couldn't be higher. Half a century ago Norway pulled off one of the most radical, rapid, and successful economic transformations in modern history. But today climate change is forcing the country to reckon with the idea of giving a lot of that up. Can Norway's fractious politics meet the urgency of the moment?
Viktor Orban's authority in Hungary; uptake of contact-tracing apps
Carl Bildt, former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden, with the view from Europe:
Will Hungary's move to end "rule by decree" minimize Viktor Orban's authority?
Well, the answer to that one is no. They have evidently felt the need for some facelift on the nature of what is going on in Hungary. They've done that. But it doesn't change anything of the substance. He's ruling in an increasingly authoritarian manner in his country.
How is the use of Covid-19 contact tracing apps being received by Europeans?
Very different in different countries. It requires a very substantial uptake of users in order to have any effect. We haven't really seen that in any European country. There have been some problems with privacy and other issues. Notably in Norway, where they had to go back on it. So, the answer to that question, the jury very much out.
Axiata and Telenor in mega Asian telco tie-up
State-controlled telco giant Axiata revealed yesterday it will take a minority stake in a merger of Asian operations with Norwegian counterpart Telenor, in a huge deal expected to unlock the value of the Malaysian firm's extensive holdings in the region.