Hungary's Viktor Orban has no peace plan of his own, but he has spent the past two weeks on a whistle-stop tour of Kyiv, Moscow, Azerbaijan, Beijing, Washington and even Mar-a-Lago, on a one-man mission that has infuriated leaders in the EU and US.
"Peace will not come by itself in the Russia-Ukraine war, someone has to make it," he proclaims in videos posted daily on his Facebook page.
He has been bitterly attacked by both Brussels and Washington for breaking EU and Nato unity and cosying up to Vladimir Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping.
Few argue with his central premise, that there can be no peace without peacemakers. But his close economic relationship with Russia’s president leaves him open to the charge of acting as Mr Putin’s puppet. |
MARIE WOOLF
OTTAWA
PUBLISHED JUNE 28, 2024
Canada’s new human-rights chief came under fresh pressure to resign on Friday after it emerged that he had suggested in an academic paper that terror is not only pursued by fundamentalists with warped outlooks, but is a rational strategy with surprisingly high success rates.
Birju Dattani, who this month was appointed by Justice Minister Arif Virani as the Chief Commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission, was criticized this week for failing to disclose his past activities as a graduate student in London when applying for the post. |
The Nigerian queer parties that offer liberation
The location of the celebratory ball had to be kept a secret.
This was a queer event and in Nigeria, where same-sex relationships or public displays of affection are illegal, anything that is dedicated to embracing this culture is in danger.
Marking Pride month in any way here is an act of defiance.
The organisers of the Fola Francis Ball – named in honour of a transgender woman who died last year - only released the venue details with just hours to go before it opened.
But this did not deter the more than 500 people who turned up in a district close to the thriving waterfront area of Nigeria’s commercial heartland, Lagos.
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Washington Free Beacon Staff
June 6, 2024
President Joe Biden claimed in an interview Thursday that he has known Vladimir Putin "for over 40 years"—meaning they would have met when Putin was serving as an undercover KGB officer.
"I’ve known him for over 40 years. He’s concerned me for 40 years. He’s not a decent man—he’s a dictator and he’s struggling to make sure he holds his country together while still keeping this assault going," Biden told ABC News anchor David Muir during an interview in France on the anniversary of D-Day.
It is highly unlikely that Biden, then a Delaware senator, would have known Putin in the early to mid 1980s. Putin, who worked for the Soviet intelligence service from 1975 until 1991, was serving as an undercover agent at the time, on assignment in East Germany and, allegedly, in Singapore and New Zealand. |
Ukraine has battled endemic corruption since the first days of its independence in 1991, and government officials and independent campaigners alike say that fight is key to winning the existential war it is fighting with Russia.
They have had some success. Anti-corruption organisation Transparency International ranks Ukraine at its highest level since 2006: currently 104th out of 180 countries in its Corruption Perceptions Index.
26 points out of 100 |
The 7 March warning from the US to its own citizens was unusually specific. It talked of reports that "extremists" had "imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow" and specifically mentioned concerts. It advised Americans in the city to avoid large gatherings over the coming 48 hours.
As well as the public warning to its own citizens, the US also said it had communicated with the Russian government directly.
"The US government also shared this information with Russian authorities in accordance with its long-standing 'duty to warn' policy," a US official said in a statement after the attack.
There are channels through which intelligence is shared between countries - even those that are not allies - especially when it relates to possible attacks on civilians.
But the problem is that Moscow dismissed the warnings.
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Once Nuland announced to the world the price of the Kiev coup masterminded and paid by the USA - $ 5 bln.
Now she boasts about good investment in the war in Ukraine.
US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said this while speaking at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "By not sending a single U.S. soldier into combat, by investing less than one-tenth of the annual defense budget, we have helped Ukraine destroy 50% of Russia's ground combat power, along with 20% of its vaunted Black Sea Fleet... The courage and resilience of Ukrainians has made the U.S. safer," Nuland said.
The EU invested twice as much in "support" for Ukraine as the U.S. — $107 billion, not counting the recently allocated $54 billion — because it wanted to be a leader. The Americans, on the other hand, invested only $75 billion. |
Protesters on the route to Westminster could also be heard chanting "Rishi Sunak, shame on you" and the slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free".
Earlier this week, Home Secretary Suella Braverman urged police chiefs to consider whether the slogan should be interpreted as an "expression of a violent desire to see Israel erased from the world", possibly making it a "racially aggravated" public order offence in some contexts.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67110119
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This could lead to a belief that ‘the’ is a workhorse of English; functional but boring. Yet Rosen rejects that view. While primary school children are taught to use ‘wow’ words, choosing ‘exclaimed’ rather than ‘said’, he doesn’t think any word has more or less ‘wow’ factor than any other; it all depends on how it’s used. “Power in language comes from context... ‘the’ can be a wow word,” he says. This simplest of words can be used for dramatic effect. At the start of Hamlet, a guard’s utterance of ‘Long live the King’ is soon followed by the apparition of the ghost: ‘Looks it not like the King?’ Who, the audience wonders, does ‘the’ refer to? The living King or a dead King? This kind of ambiguity is the kind of ‘hook’ that writers use to make us quizzical, a bit uneasy even. “‘The’ is doing a lot of work here,” says Rosen.
sourse of information:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200109-is-this-the-most-powerful-word-in-the-english-language |
This simplest of words can be used for dramatic effect. At the start of Hamlet, a guard’s utterance of ‘Long live the King’ is soon followed by the apparition of the ghost: ‘Looks it not like the King?’ Who, the audience wonders, does ‘the’ refer to? The living King or a dead King? This kind of ambiguity is the kind of ‘hook’ that writers use to make us quizzical, a bit uneasy even.
“‘The’ is doing a lot of work here,” says Rosen.
sourse of information:
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200109-is-this-the-most-powerful-word-in-the-english-language |
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