Issued on: 05/02/2021 – 20:22
Alexei Navalny in a Moscow court twice inside the same week. Thousands arrested over the charges filed against the first-poisoned, then-imprisoned anti-corruption crusader. The 44-year old Navalny once again relaxed and straight-shooting as this Friday he faced charges of insulting a World War II war hero veteran. And unbeknownst to Josep Borrell, the Kremlin chooses the day to announce the expulsion of diplomats from Poland, Germany and Sweden who’d covered the Navalny demonstrations.
The optics are not great when the conversation shifts to talking about the promising prognosis for Russia’s Sputnik V Covid vaccine.
Can you put it back in the bottle? Routed in legislative elections, Myanmar’s military calling time on a brittle five-year democratic transition. Cue the arrests and the blowback. For now it seems like a leaderless movement. That is after the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s civilian president Win Myint and now, the Nobel peace laureate’s right hand man Win Htein.
Will it be Mario Draghi to the rescue? The former president of the European Central Bank tasked with cobbling together a coalition after former P-M Matteo Renzi pulled the rug out from under the outgoing government. The country’s president Sergio Matterella calling on a political superstar who has never before held political office in his home country.
Washington witnessed the prologue Thursday to Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial next week. The House of representatives voting to strip Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments, this despite the first-term Republican renouncing the QAnon conspiracy, as well as the doubts she cast on the Parkland high school mass shooting and the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Democratic House majority leader Steny Hoyer dismissed a repentance that included no formal apology and displayed a Tweet of Greene with an assault rifle pointed at prominent left-wing members of Congress when she was a candidate.
Produced by Charles Wente, Juliette Laurain and Laura Burloux.
