24: In less friendly, fuzzy, and frolicsome animal news, it has been revealed that Joe Biden’s famously foul-tempered dog “Commander” bit US Secret Service agents at least 24 times. The incidents all occurred between October 2022 and July 2023. The German shepherd was removed from the White House last fall.
7.8: How much of the world’s population lives in a “full democracy?” Just 7.8%, according to a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Meanwhile, flawed democracies and authoritarian regimes are each home to about 40% of the world’s people. The study finds that overall, the strength of the world’s democratic institutions is at its lowest ebb since the study began in 2006, as a number of partial democracies slide towards authoritarianism.
100,000: More than 100,000 users of major US cell phone service providers were without signal for part of Thursday in a massive outage that has yet to be explained. Subscribers of AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Cricket were affected. Was it a malicious attack? Nobody knows yet, but Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio made a point of warning that a “Chinese Cyberattack” would be “100 times worse” than Thursday’s outages.Why is a man wearing a trash can on his head polling nearly as high as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage? Rory Stewart explains.
Think you know what's going on around the world? Here's your chance to prove it.
For weeks, tens of thousands of people in India – most of them young people – protested outside the Jantar Mantar, a historic observatory in New Delhi, to demand the resignation of the country’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. Five days later, they got what they asked for.
Egypt said two ships were hit with a drone in the port of Damietta on Wednesday, just 40 miles from the exit of the Suez Canal, the first attack in the country since the war began.