Group items tagged

The international verdict on Boris Johnson and his zigzag handling of the pandemic has been damning, with responses ranging from bafflement and disbelief to anger.

“Boris Johnson had gone out publicly and essentially asked Britons ... to accept death,” said the Greek newspaper Ethnos. It declared him “more dangerous than coronavirus”.

The New York Times accused Johnson of sowing confusion. “He has seemed like a leader acting under duress ... playing catch-up to a private sector that had already acted on its own.”

Boris Johnson and health secretary Matt Hancock have both tested positive for coronavirus and will have to work leading the government’s efforts to tackle the pandemic in isolation.

Johnson posted a video on Friday morning on Twitter saying he had a temperature and a persistent cough. “I am working from home, I’m self-isolating, and that’s entirely the right thing to do,” he said.

The World Health Organization has said there is no evidence that pregnant women are at higher risk of severe illness than the general population if they contract Covid-19.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said on Wednesday that the slaying of Boris Y. Nemtsov, a Kremlin critic, had a political subtext, and he called on law enforcement agencies to halt such crimes.

“Headline-making crimes, including politically motivated ones, require our most serious attention,

“We need to rid Russia of the kind of shame and tragedy that we have just witnessed,” he added. “I am referring to the brazen murder of Boris Nemtsov right in the center of Moscow

Some voters, we should admit, enthused about Johnson because he made them laugh. I am haunted by the memory of a woman who told a BBC radio interviewer back in 2018: “I want Boris to become Tory leader because he will make politics fun!” But politics, and especially government, is not meant to be fun.

He is perhaps the most selfish human being I have ever met, indifferent to the welfare of anyone save himself. It is striking that he has few, if any, personal friends. He demands loyalty, but is incapable of giving it to others. He has neither principles nor personal convictions, save about his own ambitions and desires. Far from being the genial Mr Nice Guy he seeks to project, Tony Soprano would find him a tad ruthless.

He is a stranger to truth, a lifelong liar about big things and small.

Thousands of Russians marched through central Moscow on Sunday to honor slain opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in Russia's largest mass political event since the 2011-12 protest campaign. The size of the somber crowd led some to comment that if Nemtsov's brazen murder in view of the Kremlin was meant to intimidate the political opposition, it had failed.

So, could the recent shocking assassination of Boris Nemtsov revive the political opposition in Russia? Two factors suggest that this will not be the case.

First, the motives of Nemtsov's killer, as well as who, if anyone, ordered the hit, remain unclear. And even — especially if — the Kremlin was behind the murder, it is highly unlikely that any proof tying President Vladimir Putin to the murder will ever surface.

Boris Johnson can change from bonhomie to a dark fury in seconds. His normally joky demeanour flashes into a sarcastic snarl, his skin reddens and blotches, his eyes dart into an intense narrow glare and on the worst occasions his lips curl back to reveal wisps of spittle.

The all-out favourite to be our next prime minister has the fiercest and most uncontrollable anger I have seen. A terrifying mood change can be triggered instantly by the slightest challenge to his entitlement or self-worth.

he was temperamentally unsuitable to be entrusted with any position of power, let alone the highest office of all, in charge of the United Kingdom and its nuclear codes.

Donald Trump has been forced to cancel a planned face-to-face summit of G7 leaders in June and now wants to host an expanded meeting in September dedicated to countering China, to which Vladimir Putin would be invited.

Reports suggest the call between Merkel and Trump on Thursday was stormy, ranging over German plans for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, Hong Kong, and the potential health risks of a face-to-face summit.

Merkel and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, will also be reluctant to provide Trump with a prestigious platform to set out his China strategy weeks before the US presidential election. The Republicans see a tough approach towards China as an election-winning formula, even though his likely Democrat challenger, Joe Biden, is also sharply critical of Beijing’s modern direction.

The thousands who marched in Moscow on Sunday in honor of the murdered opposition politician Boris Nemtsov did so because they recognize just how much has been lost with his death. Nemtsov had been brave enough to tell the truth in Russia under President Vladimir Putin.

There is no evidence the Kremlin ordered Nemtsov's killing, and it would have as much to lose as to gain from such a public execution on one of the most closely surveilled sidewalks in Russia.

Nemtsov’s death may not change things in Russia; much of the population appears to be caught up in a nationalist fervor.

On the day that article 50 was triggered, Nigel Farage was filmed with a pint of beer thanking them both. “Well done Bannon. Well done Breitbart. You helped with this. Hugely

Alison Klayman, the film-maker, said that Bannon had been “unequivocal” about his communications with Johnson. She also said that Bannon had met Farage, a close associate, several times during the same visit.

Klayman asks him if they’ve been speaking on the phone and he says: “Talked to him initially over the phone then it’s just easier to go back and forth on text. It’s just easier. I’ve been telling him one of my recommendations is that he gave one of the most important political speeches of 2016. Was his closing speech, a three-to-five-minute speech in June 2016, his closing argument on national TV for the Leave campaign ... And it was magnificent. “And all I was telling him all weekend was just to incorporate those themes. Those same themes. Basically, he was saying that June 23 was independence day for Great Britain. Their independence day being like our July 4.” Bannon adds: “This is the tee up, right. He’s back.” He then describes Johnson’s career, saying: “He wrote a really great book on Churchill. That’s one of the things I told him over the weekend.” Bannon says he got to know Johnson after the US presidential election when he was working as Donald Trump’s chief strategist. “Right after we won, Boris flew over. Because their victory was as unexpected as ours. I got to know him quite well in the transition period,” he said.

Nicholas Stern, one of the most prominent global experts on the climate crisis, has urged Boris Johnson to resist calls to postpone vital UN climate talks this year, despite the coronavirus outbreak.

Lord Stern believes any move to postpone the talks would put paid to any hope of making real progress. “At the moment we must just get on with the preparation,” he said. “This is such an urgent challenge and there is so much to do, and so much valuable work that is being done, that we can’t afford to lose the momentum.”

Stern said work had become more difficult because of the virus, but not impossible. Postponing the summit now would effectively put the brakes on at a time when acceleration is needed, he said, and if needs be then a postponement could be discussed after the summer, depending on the situation then.

hat great line from last year’s Chernobyl drama series. “When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”

His other area of expertise is disguising rather basic points with needlessly obscure language. Once this made him a highly overrated prose stylist; now it could make him accomplice to the death of your relatives and friends. “The key message,” Johnson key-messaged on Tuesday, is that people follow the advice “sedulously”. Ah, sedulously. Sedulously. The signal for 10 million hardworking families to draw down the leather-bound thesaurus from their shelves and browse synonyms for the word “twat”.

Unfortunately, as indicated, Johnson is basically just a columnist. I don’t want to spaff what we might euphemise as my own area of expertise too early, but trust me on this: he is hardwired to spin that shit out for 1150 words. How to put this in terms that even a wildly overeducated prime minister can understand? JUST TELL US THE INFORMATION. It’s a public safety briefing, not a fricking ring quest.

The model the government was using was to do nothing and just wait until everyone introduced sensible panic measures of their own. Then once the public had done its job for it it, the government would then be nudged into turning it into official policy. Ideal for the Boris with No Clothes, who couldn’t face the responsibility of decision making.

Anger at restrictions imposed to contain the coronavirus pandemic swept into the streets of Europe on Saturday.German police used water cannons, pepper spray and clubs on protesters rallying over the coronavirus lockdown in the town of Kassel in central Germany where demonstrators numbered some 20,000. Protests against government measures to rein in the pandemic were also reported in Austria, Britain, Finland, Romania and Switzerland.

Germany faces a surge of COVID-19 infections as a more contagious variant of the virus has spread. Experts say it highlights the need to accelerate vaccinations.But a botched vaccine rollout appears to have deepened distrust against the German government. The suspension of AstraZeneca vaccine was the latest hurdle in Germany's efforts to vaccinate its population of 83 million.

After a three-day pause in using AstraZeneca, Germany is now trying to right the course.

Now, Mr. Johnson’s allies hope the stark disparity between Britain’s performance and the European Union’s will do something perhaps even more challenging: vindicate their larger Brexit project.

Pro-Brexit politicians and commentators are casting Britain’s vaccine deployment, which ranks among the fastest in the world, as an example of risk-taking and entrepreneurial pluck that comes from not being shackled to the collective decision-making of the 27 member states of the European Union.

“It is the first serious test that the U.K. state has faced since Brexit,” said Matthew Goodwin, a professor of politics at the University of Kent who studies the British right. “Boris Johnson is going to have a vaccine dividend, and that will give him a who

Brexit watchers are shifting their attention to 11 p.m. local time (6 p.m. ET), the deadline for Boris Johnson to request an extension to Article 50 from the European Union. He is legally obliged to do so and has previously stated that the government would comply with the law. However, today in the House of Commons he caused huge confusion, after saying that the law didn't "compel" him to "negotiate" a delay to Brexit. Government officials elected not to clear up the messy words of the Prime Minister and as things stand, we are in the dark as to exactly what is going to happen, or if we will even hear what Johnson chooses to do. 

They need to not break the law, but they need to not look as though they've gone back on their pledge of not delaying Brexit. 

he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.

This is Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at the heart of it.

Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working poor, not the decadent rich.

The coronavirus crisis could not have been more cunningly engineered to expose Mr Johnson’s flaws. He was made prime minister not because anyone thought that he was a cool and decisive head with the leadership skills and moral seriousness required to handle the gravest public health emergency in a century.

He was put there because he was a successful representative of the entertainer branch of populist leadership that prospered in the pre-virus era. “We elected him to be a ‘good times’ prime minister,” comments one senior Tory. “His curse is to be prime minister in bad times.”

The wrong criticism of his performance is to say that he has made mistakes. Confronted with a novel disease for which the country was unprepared, any prime minister would have made errors. The correct criticism is that he has failed to learn from his mistakes and egregiously repeated them.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday said there was "no alternative" to a new England-wide lockdown amid a spike in coronavirus cases that he warned could be "twice as bad" as anything seen in the spring.

In a statement to the House of Commons, Johnson sought to defend his government from sharp criticisms.

The prospect of a second lockdown has terrified Britons, Farage said.

The world denounces the racism that remains the defining birth defect of the United States, pointing its collective finger at that country to shame it – and yet, by that very act of castigation, it confirms America’s power. The US is still the global arena, the place where issues that vex every nation are played out. It remains the reflecting glass in which so much of the world sees itself.

There is hate in every country, of course, but largely thanks to its colonisation of the global imagination through TV and movies, America’s horrors are endowed with a vivid, even epic quality that somehow renders them uniquely universal

The right loves a culture war, because such a battle changes the subject – almost always shifting from ground on which they would lose to ground on which they can win.

After overthrowing the centuries-old Romanov monarchy, Russia emerged from a civil war in 1921 as the newly formed Soviet Union. The world’s first Marxist-Communist state would become one of the biggest and most powerful nations in the world, occupying nearly one-sixth of Earth’s land surface, before its fall and ultimate dissolution in 1991. The United Socialist Soviet Republic, or U.S.S.R., was made up of 15 soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

A long and bloody civil war followed. The Red Army, backed by the Bolshevik government, defeated the White Army, which represented a large group of loosely allied forces including monarchists, capitalists and supporters of other forms of socialism.

Georgian-born revolutionary Joseph Stalin rose to power upon Lenin’s death in 1924. The dictator ruled by terror with a series of brutal policies, which left millions of his own citizens dead. During his reign—which lasted until his death in 1953—Stalin transformed the Soviet Union from an agrarian society to an industrial and military superpower.