👋 Salibonani!*
Welcome to Monday, where both sides are claiming victory in Venezuela’s election, Israel retaliates in Lebanon and Joe Biden wants to reform the U.S. Supreme Court. Also, Russia is using a Facebook ban to hunt down government opponents.
[*Ndebele, Zimbabwe]
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Nicolás Maduro claimed victory over opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia after Venezuela's presidential election on Sunday, which observers say was filled with widespread electoral fraud. Argentine daily Clarín echoed these concerns in its edition of the day, titling: “Chavism proclaims itself the winner in an election with a lot of noise of fraud.” Urrutia claims to have received 70% of the popular vote, in line with pre-electoral polls.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Venezuela's Maduro, opposition each claim presidential victory. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his opposition rival Edmundo Gonzalez were each claiming victory in a presidential election on Monday morning, after a vote marked by accusations of underhand tactics and isolated incidents of violence. The country's electoral authority said just after midnight on Monday that Maduro had won a third term with 51% of the vote, despite multiple exit polls that pointed to an opposition win.
• Lebanon braces for Israeli retaliation. An Israeli drone strike killed two people and wounded three more in southern Lebanon on Monday, as Lebanon braced for further Israeli retaliation following a rocket strike that killed 12 teenagers and children over the weekend. International diplomats are urging Israel to limit its response, hoping to avoid an escalation into a wider war as the conflict in Gaza continues.
• Triathlon at risk because of pollution in the Seine, new sabotage attempt targets fiber optic. The men’s triathlon is due to start on Tuesday and if the water quality is not deemed suitable on the next days, the swimming leg of the triathlon will be dropped and it will become a duathlon, with athletes competing over just the bike and running. Meanwhile, a number of fiber optic networks have been “sabotaged” across France, days after arson attacks paralyzed high-speed train services during the Olympics opening ceremony. Cables for several telecom operators were purposely cut in six areas of France earlier Monday, but Paris was not affected by the sabotage.
• North Korea uses military helicopters to rescue thousands from floods. The country said it used military helicopters to evacuate more than 5,000 people from severe flooding in the northwest of the country near the Chinese border. The official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said leader Kim Jong Un supervised the military rescues on Sunday as residents were brought out of Sinuiju city and Uiju town.
• Italy’s Meloni wants to “relaunch” ties with China. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni met Chinese Premier Li Qiang, signing a three-year action plan during her first official visit to Beijing since taking office. It comes after Meloni last year removed her country from President Xi Jinping's signature Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
• Anger after students drown in Delhi building basement. The drowning of three students in the basement of an exam coaching center in India's capital Delhi has sparked protests. The students, all in their 20s, died on Saturday night after getting trapped in the flooded basement where they were studying. Police have arrested seven people, including the owner of the institute, and registered cases against them for causing death by negligence.
• Jordan’s Umm al-Jimal village added to UNESCO heritage list. The village is near the Jordanian-Syrian border, 53 miles (86 km) north of Jordan’s capital Amman, and is known as “the black oasis” due to the prevalence of black volcanic rock in the area. The earliest structures at the site date back to the first century AD, when it formed part of the Nabataean Kingdom.
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
4 minutes, 2.95 seconds
French swimmer Léon Marchard won a gold medal in the men’s 400-meter individual medley on Sunday night at Paris’ La Défense arena, setting a new Olympic record in his category. The 22-year-old took the lead in the early stages of the race and comfortably maintained it, but fell short of setting a new world record, which Marchard already claimed last year from Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time. The young Frenchman is guided by Bob Bowman, who was also the coach of the legendary U.S. swimmer.
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
How Russia uses a Facebook ban to hunt down activists
Alexey Sokolov is being tried for showing the logo of Facebook, which Russia has classified as an extremist organization. But his human rights activism and opposition to the regime show how the social media is used by the regime to persecute opponents, reports Russian independent media outlet Holod.
⚖️ A criminal case has been opened against Alexey Sokolov, a human rights lawyer from the city of Yekaterinburg, for repeatedly displaying the Facebook logo — perhaps the first case of its kind in Russia. Sokolov is suspected of participating in repeated public demonstrations of “symbols of an extremist organization”, specifically, the “trademark of the Facebook social network."
✊ Alongside a team from the Pravovaya Osnova organization, Sokolov has been defending the rights of convicts in Yekaterinburg and Sverdlovsk Oblast for many years. Since 2019, he has been defending the rights of women who are in IK-16 (Correctional Facility 16) Krasnoturyinsk. The creators of the project “Zhenskiy Srok” posted on their Telegram channel that “He was the first person the prisoners trusted and to whom they talked about how women die in the colonies without medical care.”
⚠️ The Meta corporation, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was declared extremist in March 2022. Yet there is no ban on the use of its social networks. Moreover, there are cases – for example, about the discrediting of or fake news about the army — brought against those who have made posts on the blocked social networks. That is what happened to Mikhail Zharikov, a native of Nizhny Novgorod, who posted — among other things — a video to Instagram and was sentenced to six years in prison.
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📣 VERBATIM
“This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one.”
— In an op-ed published in the Washington Post on Monday, U.S. President Joe Biden called for a far-reaching reform of the Supreme Court, the highest judicial body in the country and one of the pillars of democracy. The changes would narrow presidential immunity as well as introduce term limits and a code of ethics for the court’s nine judges who are appointed by the president. Any reform will unlikely be implemented before elections in November, because of a highly divided and Republican-dominated Congress.
✍️ Newsletter by Emma Albright and Fabrizio La Rocca
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