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Paige Fusco

Tucker Carlson, Liberator?

Tucker Carlson visited Canada this week to “liberate” it from … from what exactly?

Well, that’s what thousands of people – including the premier of Alberta – came to Calgary and Edmonton to hear in packed arenas.

Tucker’s two-day liberation tour from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “authoritarian dictatorship” is timed perfectly around two political pieces of populist kindling: Trump’s march to victory in the US presidential primaries and a Canadian judge’s ruling that the Liberal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the Trucker pandemic protest was “unreasonable” and unconstitutional.

It all sent a message: The populist forces are gathering and ready to take down Trudeau (and Biden) and save Canada from “disgusting decline.”

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“Health is a human right”: How the world can make up progress lost to COVID
“Health is a human right”: Can we make up progress lost to COVID? | Global Stage | GZERO Media

“Health is a human right”: How the world can make up progress lost to COVID

The state of public health in the developing world bears some deep scars from the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past three years, immunization rates have dropped to levels not seen in three decades. 2 billion people are facing "catastrophic or impoverishing" health spending worldwide according to the World Health Organization. And governments in the Global South are taking on more and more debt at the expense of investment in health and social services.

Kate Dodson, the Vice President of Global Health Strategy at the UN Foundation, is on the frontlines of the fight to give the most vulnerable people in the world access to proper healthcare. She works to connect experts and innovators with the UN, and find resources to support their work.

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A chart comparing life expectancy in the US with the rest of the G-7 countries.

Luisa Vieira

The Graphic Truth: No country for old men

US life expectancy has declined two years in a row, meaning that babies born today are expected to live about 2.5 years less than those born in 2019, according to the CDC. Americans on average will now kick the bucket at 76, the lowest age in the 21st century — and more than six years earlier than the rest of the G-7.

The biggest contributor to Americans’ shortening life spans is drug overdoses, especially from fentanyl. The pandemic — and the mental health crisis that ran alongside it — is also to blame. The US saw more COVID deaths than other G-7 nations, while fatalities from suicide and alcohol-induced liver failure skyrocketed. Many of these deaths were of young people, which has a compounded effect on the national average.

While COVID took a toll on life expectancy across the G-7, all but the US rebounded after the first year. The US knocked off a whopping 1.3 years in life expectancy between 2019 and 2020 and has continued to slide. The speed of America’s decline marks the biggest two-year drop in life expectancy since 1921.

The common wisdom is that wealthier countries should enjoy higher life expectancies than poorer ones, as they have the resources to invest in healthcare and better standards of living. This rings true for the rest of the G-7, which have a combined average life expectancy of 83 years old. But the US — the only G-7 country without free national healthcare — has lagged behind throughout the 21st century, plateauing at 78 in 2008 while fellow G-7 nations continued to climb.

We compare US life expectancy to the G-7 average (minus America) since 2000.

China-US tensions over COVID origins & Russia's war
China & the origins of COVID-19 | Quick Take | GZERO Media

China-US tensions over COVID origins & Russia's war

Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here. Happy Monday to you. Lots going on, but I want to talk about all things China right now, there is so much at stake and at play. A few different points. First of all, over the weekend you saw that the Wall Street Journal had a report that the Department of Energy has come out, and they have a lot of expertise on this issue, that says that they believe that COVID initially originated from this lab, from this Institute of Virology in Wuhan. They now join along with the FBI in having that view. They've got low confidence in the view. The FBI has moderate confidence. That means the US government really doesn't know. We've had the National Intelligence Council and the three other intelligence agencies saying that they believe it actually came from a market, or it came from, sort of in a sense, natural environment. And the CIA says they still don't have a view.
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"We're in this together" — UN Foundation chief
Let’s Back Spirit of “We’re in This Together” — UN Foundation Chief | GZERO World

"We're in this together" — UN Foundation chief

Global development has been going backwards since even before the pandemic, and there's no end in sight.

Extreme poverty is now rising again, and fraught politics at every level is making it harder to fight inequality around the world.

But it's not an irreversible trend, UN Foundation President Elizabeth Cousens tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.

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Our unsustainably unequal world
Ian Explains: Our Unsustainably Unequal World | GZERO World

Our unsustainably unequal world

The past is still very much with us.

It's almost the first anniversary of Russia's war in Ukraine. On March 11, it'll be three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And 2022 was the sixth warmest year on record since ... 1880.

We are still dealing with the fallout from all three events. But not equally.

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Why China is leading economically: infrastructure, energy, & tech
Why China Is Leading Economically: Infrastructure, Energy, & Tech | GZERO World

Why China is leading economically: infrastructure, energy, & tech

Most of the global economy is more likely than not headed toward a recession in 2023. But don't only blame it on inflation and Russia's war in Ukraine.

The economic slowdown face this year "is an acceleration of already structural problems around growth, that really started before the pandemic," renowned economist Dambisa Moyo tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.

Among the G-20 economies, the only country that has been serious about industrial and strategic policies to address those problems is China. That's why, she says, many Western nations were so shocked by the economic fallout of COVID.

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Kailash Satyarthi: Child labor increased during COVID
Kailash Satyarthi: COVID Boosted Child Labor | Global Stage | GZERO Media

Kailash Satyarthi: Child labor increased during COVID

The pandemic not only took kids out of school. It also pushed many into the workforce.

COVID raised the demand for children as the cheapest source of labor, Nobel laureate and human rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi says during a Global Stage livestream conversation. Indeed, it's the first team we're going back on meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goal No. 8 target on ending child labor.

What's more, Satyarthi explains that 160 million child laborers translate to 160 million empty seats in classrooms — and to 160 million jobs that kids will now perform instead of adults.

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