Venezuela

• Venezuela's opposition combined two of my favorite things - geopolitics and math - to support its claim that Edmundo González trounced Pres. Maduro in Sunday's election - despite official results confirming Maduro as the winner.
  • While election officials declined to release the paper tallies from a large number of polling stations, the opposition claims it is in possession of tallies representing 73.2% of votes.
  • It further claims those tallies include 6.27 million votes for González and only 2.75 million for Maduro, for a total of 9.02 million votes tallied.
  • Ignoring votes for other candidates - which both sides agree were negligible - that implies a grand total of 9.02 million / 73.2% = 12.3 million votes.
  • So even if every single untallied vote goes to Maduro, the 6.27 million votes the opposition says it can prove went to González would thus be 50.9% of the grand total - enough for González to win.
  • It's more likely that the untallied votes are split between González and Maduro and the full results - if untainted - would look more like exit polls, which have González winning with 65%.
• Wikipedia has an excellent timeline of independent polling results that show polls converging on this 65% figure as the election drew closer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Venezuelan_presidential_election.
• Maduro's officials are refusing to release full results, leading to a small but growing wave of protests.
• The U.S. and several other countries criticized the widespread irregularities reported during the poll, and Maduro's government reacted to the criticism by evicting seven Latin American diplomatic missions from countries that questioned election methods.

• Israel's PM Netanyahu promised a "severe" response to the suspected Hezbollah strike that killed 12 Druze children playing soccer in the Golan Heights over the weekend.
• Many in the media are now concerned that Hezbollah's strike broke the unwritten rules of restraint and could lead to "all-out war" between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. is urging restraint.
• Several major airlines - including Lufthansa and Air France - worried that the U.S. wouldn't be able to talk Israel into restraint and cancelled their flights to and from Beirut this week out of concern that Israel would target Hezbollah in Beirut (which had also been off-limits under the unwritten rules).
• Unusually - and implausibly - Hezbollah denied responsibility for the Golan Heights strike. Analysts believe Hezbollah was responsible but think its militants were aiming (poorly) at a nearby army base - not at kids playing soccer.

• A Ukrainian fencer dedicated her Olympic bronze to Ukrainian athletes "who couldn’t come here because they were killed by Russia." [Meanwhile, Russian athletes aren't allowed to compete under their flag because of the war their president started. And before that, it was because of the doping scandal their government sponsored.]

• The African National Congress expelled mutinous ex-president Jacob Zuma after he founded a rival party to challenge his longtime political foe, Pres. Ramaphosa. I'm surprised Zuma was still technically an ANC member, given his leadership of the opposition MK party.

• Italy's PM Meloni met with Pres. Xi on a trip to Beijing. After the meeting, she vowed to "relaunch" ties with China. Italy left China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) late last year - under Meloni's leadership - so this visit and "relaunch" suggest she's reconsidering the decision.
• Chinese state media sought to downplay Italy's withdrawal from BRI and blame it on "the huge pressure from the US and other major Western powers at the time."

• Mexico's lame duck president, AMLO, kindly asked drug cartels not to fight each other for power in the wake of the arrest of two big Sinaloa cartel leaders: "I trust that there will be no confrontations."
• Amazingly, there haven't been any immediate reports of an escalation in gang violence since the arrests - but probably not because of AMLO's pleas.