The elections are approaching and the polls show that the conservative are trailing. Is it a surprise? The leader makes image of the party, how much can a rich guy of Indian origin connect with the British public? Not at all. There could still be the appeal to the other British indian, after all the statistics say that British of Asian descent make a big minority, but a big chunk of them originates from Pakistan and on them Sunak is likely to have the opposite effect. There is also the big share of British Indians who are concentrated in Urban areas where the rest of the population overwhemingly votes for labour, they won't bring any support. For what matters all the other voters Sunak is definitely not a popular character as was Boris Johnson when the Tories won the election.

What I say is quite obvious to the experts and the Tories have a team of very good analysts. Why are they sticking with Sunak? Because they want to lose, they could not carry out the work that must be done now. The privatisations of the Thatcher era have exhausted their purpose. Big finance extracted all the value they could squeeze from the privatised services and they now they hold big piles of debts. it's time to nationalise the losses.

It's not just Thames Water. The railways have been asking for money for quite some time. Wales and Scotland already nationalised the local networks. The rest of the work already started, now it's time to complete it.

WASHINGTON, June 11 (Reuters) - A U.S. review found no evidence of human rights violations by Ukraine's Azov Brigade, paving the way for it to use American training and weapons, the State Department said on Tuesday, citing Russian disinformation aimed at discrediting the unit. U.S. law bars foreign security forces from U.S. military assistance if they have committed gross violations of human rights, but a review of the National Guard of Ukraine's 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade cleared them for U.S. funds, the department said in a statement.

"After thorough review, Ukraine’s 12th Special Forces Azov Brigade passed Leahy vetting as carried out by the U.S. Department of State," the department wrote, referring to the Leahy Law. The move allows the Biden administration to reverse a decade-old ban on allowing the Ukrainian military unit to use U.S. weapons, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the decision.

The U.S. has added three more companies to an entity list that bars imports from firms allegedly involved with Uyghur forced labor in China, according to a U.S. government notice posted online on Tuesday. The latest targets include shoe manufacturer Dongguan Oasis Shoes Co, electrolytic aluminum maker Xinjiang Shenhuo Coal and Electricity Co and food processor Shandong Meijia Group Co, also known as Rizhao Meijia Group, the notice from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said.

The announcement by the head of the Republicans was a historic break with his party’s policy. Top politicians on the right have called for him to step down, bringing the party to the brink of implosion.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16202904

The longstanding effort to keep extremist forces out of government in Europe is officially over.

For decades, political parties of all kinds joined forces to keep the hard-right far from the levers of power. Today, this strategy — known in France as a cordon sanitaire(or firewall) — is falling apart, as populist and nationalist parties grow in strength across the Continent.

Six EU countries — Italy, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and the Czech Republic — have hard-right parties in government. In Sweden, the survival of the executive relies on a confidence and supply agreement with the nationalist Sweden Democrats, the second-largest force in parliament. In the Netherlands, the anti-Islamic firebrand Geert Wilders is on the verge of power, having sealed a historic dealto form the most right-wing government in recent Dutch history.

Meanwhile, hard-right parties are dominating the polls across much of Europe. In France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is cruising at over 30 percent, far ahead of President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Across the Rhine, Alternative for Germany, a party under police surveillance for its extremist views, is polling second, head-to-head with the Social Democrats.