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Alex Kliment
US artistic gymnast Simone Biles practices during an official training session at Bercy Arena in Paris on July 25, 2024, ahead of the Paris Olympics.
Every year, they try to tell us the Olympics aren’t political — and every year, we are reminded that’s nonsense. This week, French authorities made arrests to thwart suspected terror attacks linked to the Paris Summer Games, and just hours before the opening ceremony today, France’s high-speed rail network withstood attacks that resulted in multiple fires and delays.
The SNCF rail firm described it as “a massive attack aimed at paralyzing the network,” noting that fires were deliberately set to target TGV installations. At least 800,000 customers were affected as trains were diverted and canceled on Friday, and rail operators warn that needed repairs could mean disruptions extend through the weekend.
These disruptions in the run-up to the start of the Games are stark reminders that the Olympics have always been intertwined with politics and global tensions – and that there is a long history of them being more than just sporting spectacles.
From its earliest beginnings in ancient Greece, the on-field athletics have been a forum for off-the-rails politics: alliances, conflicts, and intrigues among the city-states. And in its modern incarnation, the Games have been no less political.
How could they not be? They’re a weaponless metaphor for war among nations. Who gets to host, compete, and win is a matter of priceless prestige and, of course, big money. What happens after the torch is lit is often a reflection of political battles that are going on elsewhere around the world.
This year will be no different. Here are three things to watch:
The US-China beef over dope. In 2021, nearly two dozen Chinese athletes tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs before the Tokyo Games.
The World Anti-Doping Agency, aka WADA, declined to investigate further because the samples were collected by Chinese anti-doping officials who said the athletes had been contaminated by hotel food (really, they said this). WADA had no authority to push further, it said. The athletes are now in Paris, ready to compete.
The US government, however, has opened its own probe into WADA’s response. This has greatly annoyed the Olympic bigwigs. On Wednesday, the IOC awarded the 2034 Winter Games to the US on the condition that American leaders fight to scrap the investigation. Fat chance of that happening.
The US and China locked in a dispute about science that a multilateral organization is feebly trying to tamp down? It’s COVID-24!
The long shadow of Gaza: In 2023, Russia — along with its mini-me, Belarus — was banned from Olympic competitions over the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
This year, Israel has been in the spotlight over its invasion of Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks. With the ICC having issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over alleged war crimes, pro-Palestine activist groups have called for Israel’s isolation and exclusion. A far-left French politician caused an uproar by saying Israeli athletes were “not welcome” in Paris. More officially, the Palestinian Olympic Committee has petitioned, in vain, for Israel’s exclusion on the grounds that the invasion has killed hundreds of Palestinian athletes.
Meanwhile, days before the opening ceremony, German sportswear company Adidas was in hot water for selecting Palestinian-American model Gigi Hadid, an outspoken supporter of Palestinian aspirations, to be the face of an ad reintroducing a 1972 model sneaker. Critics immediately pointed out that it was poor judgment: 1972 was the year Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Critics of the critics, meanwhile, said it was unfair to conflate support for Palestine with terrorism.
Whether it’s protests or political statements, expect the war in Gaza to figure prominently in the Games again before long.
The state of the stateless. In a competition among nation states, there is one group of athletes who represent none. This year there are 37 athletes on the IOC’s Refugee Team, the largest contingent of refugee and asylum-seeker athletes since the team was created in 2016.
They hail from 11 countries, including Syria, Sudan, Iran, and Afghanistan, which have seen some of the world’s worst refugee crises in recent memory. They include female breakdancer Manizha Talash, who fled the Taliban; weightlifter Yekta Jamali Galeh, a refugee from the Iranian theocracy; Syrian-born taekwondo fighter Adnan Khankan, who fled the civil war as a child; and Eritrean runner Tachlowini Gabriyesos.
The team itself has stoked controversy: Havana, for example, has disputed the inclusion of two Cuban athletes who it says are defectors and not victims of persecution or displacement.
But the refugee team’s growing size is a reflection of a broader, grim reality: There are currently 110 million people displaced from their homes around the world – the highest number since the World War II era.
Should smartphones be banned in schools? Three-quarters of US schools already restrict the use of cellphones during lesson hours, but only a handful of state governments have imposed blanket restrictions. Florida became the first one last year, followed by Illinois and Virginia, where bans will take effect this school year. In Canada, half a dozen provincial governments have passed restrictions.
The measures come amid growing scrutiny of the harmful effects of smartphone use in general – and social media in particular – on teen mental health. US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in May called for cigarette-style health warnings on social media. A recent bestseller traces the rise of the current “Anxious generation” to the emergence of smartphones in the early 2010s. And as any schoolteacher can tell you, smartphones are generally not great for the classroom learning experience.
But on the other side of it, parents have raised safety concerns. Cellphones are often the only way for caregivers to locate or contact children during emergencies. As the number of US school shootings has soared over the past 10 years, some parents are particularly reluctant to cut that tie – especially during school hours. Alongside these worries, many parents and lawmakers simply think the decision should be left to local school boards rather than faraway state legislators.
Here is a look at the current state of cellphone bans in the US and Canada. By the way, where do you stand on this issue? Let us know here, along with your name and location, and we may publish your response in an upcoming edition of GZERO North.
Billionaire's Row, a collection of super-tall residences for the uber-rich mostly on West 57th Street in New York City.
9 million: Canada’s consul general in New York is in the hot seat amid an inquiry into the government’s recent purchase of the $9 million dollar Manhattan condo where he lives. Tom Clark, who has served in the post since last February, is one of several witnesses who will be called before parliament in a scandal that could also involve Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly. The pricy three-bedroom apartment is located on the stretch of West 57th Street known as “Billionaire’s Row.”
500 million: Food retail giant Loblaw Cos. Ltd. and its parent company George Weston Ltd. have reportedly agreed to pay $500 million over allegations of bread price fixing. A class-action suit was brought against the two companies and several other retailers, alleging that the firms were part of a 14-year price-fixing conspiracy that artificially hiked bread prices.
8: The global power of the US is clearly in decline … at least when it comes to the country’s passport. The little blue book has slid to eighth place in the annual Henley Passport Index, which counts the visa-free travel destinations open to citizens of every country. A US passport holder can currently show up without a visa in 186 of the world’s 225 countries. In first place is Singapore with 195. It wasn’t always this way: A decade ago, the US shared the top spot with the UK.
0: Despite a deluge of internet memes claiming the contrary, there is zero evidence that Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance ever had sex with a couch. A fake scan of several pages from the Ohio Senator’s 2016 bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir about his Appalachian upbringing, seemed to show he’d confessed to having had the curious congress with his cushions as an adolescent. But the entire thing was fake. That didn’t stop it from being shared hundreds of thousands of times. Whatever your politics, be careful out there on the internet: Hilarious hoaxes abound.
President Joe Biden addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on July 24, 2024, about his decision to drop his Democratic presidential reelection bid.
In his first address to the nation since ending his reelection bid last weekend, President Joe Biden framed his decision to bow out of the race as a sacrifice for the sake of American democracy.
“I revere this office but I love my country more,” he said in a historically minded address from the Oval Office on Wednesday night. “This task of perfecting our union is not about me … it’s about ‘we the people.’”
While calling for unity, he framed the November election as a pivotal choice for American voters between “hope or hate” and said that while he felt his experience and record justified another term, it was time to pass the torch to “a new generation of leaders.” Vice President Kamala Harris, he said, is “experienced, tough, and capable.”
To help shape her campaign, he pledged to focus his remaining months in office on key Democratic themes: protecting the right to abortion, reducing gun violence, accelerating the fight against climate change, brokering a cease-fire in Gaza, and reducing prescription drug prices.
He also reiterated his intention to reform the Supreme Court – with term limits for justices and an ethics code likely to be on the agenda.
Russian-American journalist for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) Alsu Kurmasheva, who is in custody after she was accused of violating Russia's law on foreign agents, attends a court hearing in Kazan, Russia May 31, 2024.
6.5: A Russian court revealed on Monday that Russian-American journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was sentenced on Friday to 6.5 years in prison for “spreading false information” about the Russian army. Kurmasheva, a dual citizen who works for the US-funded Radio Free Liberty/Radio Europe service in Prague, was arrested while visiting her family in Russia in October. Her husband says the charges relate to a book of profiles of anti-war Russians that Kurmasheva edited. She is the second American journalist that Russia has sentenced to a lengthy prison term in the past four days alone.
24: ¿Latinos por Roberto? A new poll shows 24% of US Hispanic voters support third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. That’s nearly 10 points above the national average. Respondents were split 36 to 36 on Biden vs. Trump. The poll was taken before Biden dropped out of the race, but it illustrates the increasingly uphill battle that Democrats face in keeping the support of a traditionally blue voting group. Read our in-depth look at the “Latino vote” here.
30,000: France is not messing around when it comes to security for the Paris Olympics, which begin later this week. Authorities will deploy 30,000 police throughout the event, rising to 45,000 during peak times. Alongside them will be 15,000 French military personnel and nearly 2,000 foreign police. Security officials have already conducted hundreds of raids, arresting members of far-right, far-left, and jihadist groups suspected of planning attacks. At least two plots have reportedly been broken up already.
4: India wants to get into the deep-sea mining game as it tries to secure supplies of rare minerals critical for its economy and energy transition. New Delhi has already won several licenses for the Indian Ocean, but it’s eyeing a bigger prize: a vast swathe of the Pacific between Mexico and Hawaii. Experts say it will take India at least four years to develop the required skills and technology to compete with Asian rival China. In the meantime, international authorities are still working out rules for deep-sea mining.
56: For the first time ever, a majority of new HIV infections occurred outside of sub-Saharan Africa, a UN report says. The milestone, based on numbers from 2023, reflects sustained progress against the disease by governments in Africa – where new infections have fallen 56% since 2010. Globally, new infections have fallen 39% during that time. But experts warn that case numbers are currently rising elsewhere in the world, particularly in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East and north Africa.
In a small town out in coal country, a lone assassin shoots a controversial populous leader. The leader miraculously survives, and his supporters blame the press and his political opponents for fomenting violence. Does that sound familiar? Months before Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania in the first assassination attempt of its kind in America in 40 years, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico took a bullet to the stomach during a visit to Central Slovakia. But Fico is just one of many leaders or high-level candidates who have been attacked in democracies around the world in recent years.
Across the democratic world, political violence and violent political language are becoming more common again as polarization deepens, viewpoints harden, and political differences start to feel like existential battles. Here in the US last year, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers alone, a tenfold increase since 2016. And as we head into the most contentious and high-stakes election in America's modern history, people are bracing for more. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump's life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely. Who is responsible for stopping this slide into violence? Is it our leaders, our media outlets, or our social media platforms? Is it ourselves? Unless things change, we will be lucky if it's another 40 years before this happens again in the US.
Watch full episode: Trump, Biden & the US election: What could be next?
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Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has been sentenced to 16 years on espionage charges. He is seen here in court on July 19.
A Russian court on Friday sentenced Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to 16 years in prison on espionage charges that the US government and his newspaper maintain are fabricated. The US State Department says Gershkovich was “wrongfully detained.”
The 32-year-old journalist was arrested last year while on assignment in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg shortly after he published a story focused on Russia's economic downturn amid the war. His trial was conducted behind closed doors, and no evidence to support the Russian government’s allegations has been made public.
Fast trial leads to hope for a swap deal. The trial was conducted with considerable speed, lasting just three weeks from first hearing to sentencing. That has raised hopes that Gershkovich could soon figure into a high-profile prisoner swap deal between the Kremlin and the West. A swap deal requires a pardon from President Vladimir Putin, which can not happen until after a guilty verdict and sentencing.
Talks to that effect have reportedly been ongoing between Moscow and Washington. But the main prize Russia seems to be seeking is Vadim Krasikov, a Russian spy serving a life sentence in Germany for the murder of a Kremlin opponent in Berlin in 2019.
So far, Germany has been reluctant to release him, but with Gershkovich’s sentencing complete, US pressure to reach a deal could now rise as the Biden administration seeks a high-profile diplomatic success as part of its reelection campaign.
Illustration shows several congressmen engaged in a brawl on the floor of the House of Representatives.
How does this all end? Does it? It’s a question a lot of Americans have been asking themselves in the week since an assassin’s bullet missed Donald Trump’s skull by less than a quarter of an inch.
It was, of course, the first time a gunman had put a US president (or former president) in his sights since the 1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan. Most Americans alive today have no memory of that moment.
In some ways, such a long reprieve between assassinations was unusual for the United States.
Despite what President Joe Biden said this week about this kind of violence having “no place” in American society, high-level political killings are deeply woven into US history. At least a quarter of all US presidents have been targeted for death, most of them in the 20th century alone. Four died.
But the atmosphere in America is vastly more polarized and divided than it was even when Reagan was shot, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.
To be clear, some degree of polarization by itself isn’t a bad thing. Disagreement is important. You don’t want a society where everyone believes the same thing privately, much less one in which people only feel comfortable saying the same thing publicly. That’s not a functional democracy – that’s North Korea.
The trouble, though, is what experts call “pernicious polarization.” That’s when political divisions harden into increasingly dissociated tribes, each of which views the other not as fellow citizens with different experiences and ideas, but as mortal enemies.
That’s the America we live in today. It’s an America where liberals and conservatives not only don’t trust each other, marry each other, or vote for each other – they barely even see or interact with each other. “Liberal” and “conservative” have gone from being political labels to tribal affiliations, and the tribes live on different islands.
How bad is it? A sweeping historical study of polarization by the Carnegie Endowment found that since 1950, no advanced democracy has suffered levels of polarization as high, or for as long, as what the US has experienced over the past 10 years.
And, soberingly, it also found that no liberal democracy around the world has been able to retreat from extreme polarization with its democracy intact.
It wasn’t always this way. Even during the 1960s and 1970s, when America was convulsed with political violence over civil rights, the Vietnam War, and counterculture, the two parties had a lot more ideological overlap. You could find Democrats who were pro-life and Republicans who were concerned about access to guns. (One of them was Reagan’s spokesman Jim Brady, who after being severely wounded in the 1981 shooting, dedicated his life to passing sensible gun control laws – the 1993 “Brady Bill” is named after him.)
This sort of thing is what political scientists call “crosscutting polarization” – i.e., divisions that slash through party divisions, preventing partisan groups from becoming warring teams. In short: We need more crosscutting again.
The trouble is that a lot of things work against that: geographical segregation along political lines; social media algorithms that reward extreme viewpoints; a decline of local media reporting on issues close to people’s lives; a two-party political system where districts are often heavily gerrymandered, forcing politicians to pander to the extremes rather than to build bridges.
Conflict is a more rational strategy than compromise in almost all areas of our politics even if it’s leading us all off a cliff into a very dark ravine.
Rising political violence is one result. Last year, for example, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers, a tenfold increase since 2016.
And as we slouch toward the most contentious and high-stakes election in America’s modern history, most people seem resigned to things getting worse. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump’s life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely.
Is there any hope? Yes, says Murat Somer, a political science professor at Ozyegin University in Istanbul, who co-authored the Carnegie report.
“You have to redefine politics in a way that cuts across those cultural divisions,” he says. One way to do that, he says, is to put the focus back on one of the underlying causes of polarization and lack of trust in institutions in the first place: the decline of social mobility.
“What people have in common across party lines,” he says, “is unhappiness about inequality.”
That’s a start. Other theorists see structural changes that could help. Lee Drutman, a scholar at the New America Foundation, and author of the book “The Two Party Doom Loop”,says tweaking the two-party system by introducing multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation would help to smudge the partisan lines in constructive ways again.
But most of all, it may require a change of mindset – to stop believing that every election is possibly the last one for the America we love (whichever one that may be.)
“It’s important not to think ‘well, if we lose this election it’s over,’” says Somer. “No, it’s not over. A new phase or a new period will start, but it’s not over. It’s very important not to give up after elections, because no president, from either party, can very rapidly or fundamentally transform the country.”
Drutman agrees. “Things may be a little ugly for a while,” he says, “but I do think that there are enough people who are engaged in the work of democratic renewal that we will get to the other side of this. I don't know what the cost of getting to the other side of this will be, but I do think eventually we’ll get to a better political environment.”
What do you think? Can we reduce polarization? Should we? What would you like to see happen? Write us here. If you include your name and location, we may run your response in an upcoming edition of the GZERO Daily Newsletter.