The only one I’m really worried about in the list is Bettina Stark-Watzinger for the Education Ministry.
Having a liberal oversee schools and universities is a horrible idea. I can already hear the talking points about “market oriented” education…
Plus someone who has lived that long in the UK can be a danger in politics. I don’t want a UK style university system.
True, but given that schools and universities are mandated/regulated at state level I’m not too worried.
As infuriatingly unwieldy our federal system has shown itself regarding getting to grips with Covid, not having an overpowering central government is, on balance, a good thing.
I’m pretty sure that if they do invade, this is going to become a continent-wide war pretty quickly.
Russia doesn’t take its conscript army to war without a fairly good reason. “Good reason” here is not, of course, necessarily anyone else’s “good reason”. Gwynne Dyer, who is a fairly old hand at analysis and far more often right than not, thinks this is far more about Belarus than the Ukraine.
Ukraine: An Exciting New Crisis
Politics / By Gwynne Dyer
28 November 2021
So why did the 41st Combined Arms Army (around 30,000 soldiers) move almost 4,000 km. west last month? Here’s a clue. It’s now 280 km north of the Ukrainian border, but it’s less than 100 km from the border of Belarus.
Demonstrations lead to arrests
Helsingin Sanomat is among the papers reporting that police detained 21 people in Helsinki on Monday. Of those 19 were taken into custody for violent counter-protests to the “Helsinki without Nazis” march.
According to police, Monday’s demonstrations in the capital were mostly peaceful.
However, a police spokesperson told Helsingin Sanomat that the organiser of the “Helsinki without Nazis” march is now suspected of a breach of laws on public assembly.
Although a route for the march had been agreed upon with police, the march stopped in the early evening on Runeberginkatu to prevent the far-right 612 torch procession from advancing on the same street. Traffic on the street was stopped in both directions.
The “Helsinki without Nazis” march drew approximately 1,500 participants. According to the organisers of the event, the purpose of the procession was to show that “there is no place for the far right on the streets” of the capital.
Finland’s largest circulation daily Helsingin Sanomat describes how a routine drug investigation led to a historic terrorism case with the arrest of the so-called “Kankaanpää Group”.
The five men — aged between 23 and 26 — were remanded into custody last Friday on suspicion of making preparations for a terror attack, the first time ever such charges have been made against a far right group in Finnish legal history.
“It just shows how sharp criminal investigators need to be. Questions can lead to other questions, that then lead on to other things,” Lead Investigator Toni Sjöblom told HS.
The suspects are all from in or around the small town in southwest Finland and formed a faction based around a “radical far-right ideology”, according to HS, and they now face charges including aggravated firearms and explosives offences for terrorist purposes as well as committing an offence with terrorist intent.
In a separate op-ed, HS writes that the Kankaanpää case is exceptional but “not surprising” as intelligence services in Finland have been warning for many years about the growth of the far right.
“The rise of the extreme right is a harsh tale of this nation’s spiritual condition,” HS writes. “There is now a breeding ground for racism and nationalism.”
Someone should put the idea in Trump’s head that he should run for president of Russia.
This is just amazing. I know that it’s a slow change, but it’s still incredible. Wow. What it must be like to live in a normally-functioning democracy.
Hopefully, she’ll make some headway.
Uh oh.
Which becomes a war zone first - Bosnia or Ukraine?
This is real bad.
War is big bucks, and something has got to rescue the covid economy… worked for the great depression, right? /s
The Times They Are a-Changin’, aren’ them?
