Oligarchs in London, Pompeo in Taipei, Climate Kerry in Egypt

After the Center for American Progress think tank recently asserted that “uprooting Kremlin-linked oligarchs will be a challenge given the close ties between Russian money and the United Kingdom’s ruling Conservative Party, the press, and its real estate and financial industry,” London’s satirical and frequently prescient Private Eye responded, “Whatever could they mean?”Its unsigned article reads like a laundry list of alleged cozy ties between London’s high-priced legal eagles and many said oligarchs, citing as one example the law firm CMS, which was enlisted by four Russian billionaires and Russian energy company Rosneft last year in a raft of lawsuits brought against a former Financial Times journalist, Catherine Pelton, following her exposé, “Putin’s People.” During a debate in the House of Commons, a Conservative MP, Bob Seely, spoke of such legal efforts as a “corrupting cottage industry,” while according to Private Eye a Labour MP, Liam Byrne, said the U.K. should follow America’s lead and pass laws to stop legal action by oligarchs designed to close down debates that are in the public interest.Le Figaro reports that Air France is canceling its Tuesday flights to Kyiv from Paris, No word yet on whether cancellations will extend to the normally scheduled Sunday flights, too. Last week The Guardian reported that Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmyal, had allocated nearly $600 million to guarantee the continuation of flights to and from the country during this period of geopolitical turbulence. Another major European airline, KLM, suspended all flights to Ukraine on February 12. In an article headlined, “The shadowy messengers delivering threats to Hong Kong civil society,” the Japan Times reports that “middlemen” are now routinely hounding members of Hong Kong citizens’ groups who prior to Beijing’s imposition of a national security law in 2020 were able to more freely advocate for union mobilization and sometimes civil disobedience. More than 50 civic groups dedicated to issues ranging from labor to education have been shuttered since then, with pre-emptive threats often coming in the form of whisper campaigns and mysterious phone calls, the paper reports. A former U.S. secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, will visit a far bigger thorn in China’s side, Taipei — capital of Free China — in the first week of March. Communist China sanctioned the “lying and cheating” Mr. Pompeo along with 27 other Trump-era officials as President Biden took office in January last year, Reuters notes. Egypt’s Al Ahram reports that America’s fearless captain of all things climatic, John Kerry, is in Cairo today to meet with with the Egyptian president, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. The U.N.’s Conference of Parties on Climate Change will be held in November in the Egyptian Red Sea resort city of Sharm El-Sheikh, and Mr. El-Sisi said that Egypt “will take into account the priorities and stances of all parties to ensure that the summit culminates in positive results in line with international efforts to handle climate change.” Although that makes it sound like the conference outcome is already a done deal, Al Ahram notes that Mr. Kerry “voiced his country’s trust in Egypt’s presidency of the COP27 conference as well as its keenness to push forward Egyptian-US efforts to face climate change problems.” One can only guess as to his level of sincerity.French daily Le Monde throws the spotlight on upcoming political stirrings in Budapest with a profile of Péter Ungár, a 30-year-old Green party deputy who in concert with an opposition coalition aims to unseat the nationalist administration of Prime Minister Orbán in Hungary’s legislative elections, slated for April 3. The paper notes that Ungár, “the son and heir of a pro-Orbán intellectual,” is the first openly gay Hungarian parliamentarian. Greek newspaper Protothema reports that one of the issues Vice President Harris discussed with the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, during the Munich Security Conference was the sometimes excruciatingly slow pace with which the wheels of justice can turn in Greece, where despite laudable recent government efforts to digitize many aspects of the state bureaucracy, administrative delays of all stripes are still the norm. Ms. Harris inquired about the status of the protracted criminal trial for the murder of a 22-year-old African-American from Texas, Bacari Henderson, who was beaten to death by a mob on the Greek island of Zakynthos in July 2017. In that case, six of nine attackers (seven of whom were Serbian) were found guilty of assault but none were convicted of murder. Henderson’s parents are currently in Greece to attend the retrial now under way in the western Greek port city of Patras.

Oligarchs in London, Pompeo in Taipei, Climate Kerry in Egypt

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