Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good Seeing this newsletter as a forward? Sign up here. June 23, 2024 | |
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On GPS, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET:
What can Britain's looming July 4 elections teach us about politics on this side of the Atlantic?
The main lesson is for Democrats, Fareed suggests. While the UK's Conservatives are expected to suffer historic losses, Labour appears to have benefited from tacking to the center under party leader Keir Starmer. To Fareed, that suggests the modern left's path to success lies in avoiding whiffs of a "woke" agenda and courting voters in the middle.
After that: If Labour indeed rises to power, MP David Lammy is almost a shoo-in to be Britain's next foreign secretary. (Lammy currently serves as the opposition's shadow foreign secretary.) In London, Fareed asks Lammy how Britain would do things differently in Ukraine and the Middle East—and how it would deal with a potential US President Donald Trump.
Across the Channel, France will hold elections even sooner. Many are calling President Emmanuel Macron's decision to call them a dangerous gamble. Fareed asks The Economist's Paris bureau chief, Sophie Pedder, what to expect as France's far right surged unexpectedly in European Parliament elections earlier this month.
When macroeconomist Andrew Scott was born in 1965, the most common age of death in the UK was under one year. Today, it's 87. For years, Scott has been studying this seismic shift in life expectancy, focusing on what will change about people's lives and the global economy as the trend continues. Fareed talks with Scott about his new book, "The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives."
Finally: Earlier this month, Mexico elected its first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, in a landslide vote. The country's economy could boom amid a US–China trade war. And yet, Mexican democracy looks shaky, US authorities intercept millions of people crossing the border from Mexico each year, and fentanyl from Mexico is causing a US health crisis. Tonight at 8 p.m. ET and PT, CNN will premiere Fareed's latest special report, "America's Mess with Mexico." In it, Fareed examines the politics, security, and economics of a country with huge and growing importance to the US. Fareed gives a preview on today's GPS. |
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Solar power has grown exponentially since its advent 70 years ago, The Economist writes in its essay of the week. Just as extreme heat puts global warming back in the Northern Hemisphere's headlines, the magazine writes that solar power offers great promise in the climate-change era.
"Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade," The Economist writes. "Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. … Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. …The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. … But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities." |
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Once an oasis of calm and safety in a region troubled by cocaine trafficking and narco-violence, Ecuador is now beset by those same problems. The assassination of an anti-corruption, anti-narco presidential candidate outside a campaign event in the capital Quito last August raised alarms. In January, the 'surreal' takeover of a live-broadcasting TV studio by masked gunmen made world news.
In the current issue of The New Yorker, Jon Lee Anderson spends time with Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa, whose emergency powers—and large-scale arrests—have drawn comparisons to the authoritarian, anti-gang crackdown in El Salvador, comparisons Noboa rejects. Posing for cameras while inspecting the results of police raids, complete with drugs and detained suspects, Noboa seems to be waging a public-relations campaign as well as a security initiative.
After Noboa won a nine-question referendum on his emergency powers and security measures on April 21, Anderson writes: "A week later, when I saw [Noboa] in his office, he was still in an upbeat mood. He was wearing a tailored gray suit with a yellow-and-blue silk tie; an emissary of the Pope was waiting in a nearby room to see him. Since our last meeting, however, there had been an uptick in violence in several provinces. Two mayors had been murdered, and the warden of a prison in Manabí had been killed. Noboa said that he had mounted a response: 'Like they've done in Donetsk and Luhansk, we're moving the whole Army to those five provinces.' He laughed at the ungainly comparison to the war in Ukraine, but he was serious about further militarizing the conflict. He had extended the state of emergency, and it seemed possible that it would go on for the foreseeable future." |
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Following up on anecdotal reports of North African countries apprehending would-be migrants to Europe then leaving them stranded at the edge of the Sahara, a Der Spiegel investigative feature by nine coauthors concludes: "More than 50 migrants told reporters that they have been abandoned in remote areas by security personnel. Together, these stories in combination with additional reporting have produced a clear picture: These actions are far from isolated incidents. Indeed, they are systematic. In Tunisia, Morocco and Mauretania, thousands of Black people are arrested, taken to remote desert areas and abandoned." (Der Spiegel's coauthors note that Tunisian and Moroccan authorities denied having committed abuses.)
The feature continues: "The reporting shows that EU member states and the European Commission don't just know about the abandonments, but they also equip the security forces that commit them." (The EU's home affairs commissioner has expressed concern and insisted the EU doesn't support any such activities, the Der Spiegel coauthors note.) |
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