We've been hearing that Conservative MP
and Penny Mordaunt supporter George Freeman has urged Mordaunt to step aside as a leadership contender,
and make a deal
with Rishi Sunak. "I think the party elders must have had a touch of buyer's remorse," Mr McGregor says. In the first year of Covid, Prof Yang says, the lockdowns made sense.
They were brief
and allowed life in China to carry on.
There was even pride at how the country was h
andling the p
andemic so much better than the West. "That's no longer the case," he says.
irannews.ru He got caught in China's biggest and longest Covid lockdown. It was supposed to last four days, then another four, then another. Soon, the hotel staff stopped telling him. She says she has seen other videos on TikTok that have been swamped with abusive comments where the creator is appealing for likes and positivity to help "pull them back from the wrong side of TikTok". Bo launched a ruthless anti-corruption campaign, netting hundreds of criminals, businessmen, politicians and police. He built lavish infrastructure, including public housing. Strangely he also revived "red culture", requiring everyone to learn Mao-era songs praising the Communist Party. Many were terrorised by Bo's rule, but he was wildly popular with the working class. And it appears to have paid off. Li Qiang, the Shanghai party chief who oversaw the city's controversial shut down, has been elevated to premier, Xi's second in command. Over the next six months I pedalled across the mountains of Yunnan, wandered the imperial palace in Beijing, and rode a train hauled by two soot-blackened steam engines far west into the deserts of Xinjiang. The landscapes were sublime but the poverty grinding. Everywhere I went people told me how "backward" China was compared to the West. But there were hints of change. Do relations with Saudi Arabia still serve US interests? “The Saudis have emphasised in recent years that they seek to avoid entanglement in what is referred to in the US as ‘great power competition’,” Gerald Feierstein, a former US ambassador to Yemen and the Middle East
Institute’s senior vice president, told Al Jazeera. “Their interests, the Saudis have made clear, have focused on maintaining strong relations with their main security partner, the US; their number one economic partner, China; and their key partner in OPEC+, Russia.”
