irannews.ru - news №-5700908

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. Former chancellor George Osborne has joined the list of Tories urging Penny Mordaunt to drop out of the contest today. irannews.ru The challenge at home The villages here are mostly destroyed from both their occupation and recent liberation. Despite the eerie quiet and visible destruction, there is movement. Moscow-installed politicians have recently been "evacuating" people. Ukraine has accused Russian troops of preparing to blow up the nearby Kakhovka dam. Russia denies this but if it happened Kyiv says it would lead to 80 settlements being flooded. Then Covid threw a spanner in the works. The graft ran deep. In Beijing, I remember going to a nightclub whose owner was reputed to have a ready supply of illicit drugs and attractive young women for those with enough money. His business partner was the public security bureau - the police. The video clips were quickly removed. The internet is instantly scrubbed of any signs of dissent or criticism, but the ire over zero-Covid has been palpable - even rare signs of protest have emerged, if only for moments, before they are silenced. It's hard to deny that millions of Chinese hold Xi personally responsible for the cruelty of China's grim lockdowns. 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 handling the pandemic so much better than the West. "That's no longer the case," he says.