Welcome to Thursday, where Kim Jong-un offers to reopen hotline with Seoul, a 96-year-old Nazi war crime suspect flees and a Turkish man gets so drunk he joins a search party for himself. From France, we also take a look, and listen, to the surprisingly loud noises of the countryside.
Welcome to Thursday, where Kim Jong-un offers to reopen hotline with Seoul, a 96-year-old Nazi war crime suspect flees and a Turkish man gets so drunk he joins a search party for himself. From France, we also take a look, and listen, to the surprisingly loud noises of the countryside.
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Electoral calendar. In 2020, Putin used his political supremacy to win a referendum that extended his legal tenure as president. This year, by contrast, brings parliamentary elections in which Putin will not be on the ballot. His party, United Russia (famously renamed by Navalny as “the party of crooks and thieves” and much less popular than the president), has had less success at the polls than Putin himself. Moscow’s 2019 city council elections, in which Navalny allies gained ground by adopting what the opposition leader called a “smart voting” strategy, add to the Kremlin’s worries. They showed that uniting around whichever opposition figure has the best chance of defeating United Russia’s contender can get their candidate elected.
America Enters the Weimar Era The unravelling of American politics
By mid-February 2021, American deaths from COVID-19 may well surpass the country’s 405,400 deaths during the Second World War. By around mid-May, more Americans will have died from COVID-19 than during the Civil War, which killed 655,000, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when 675,000 are estimated to have perished.
Yet America’s largely self-inflicted COVID-19 disaster may be eclipsed by the US’s political unravelling, which has proceeded with warp speed in the last few weeks, with the once celebrated American way of succession in power via the ballot box dealt a body blow by a large sector of the electorate that has marched in lock step with their leader in refusing to accept the results of the presidential elections.