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  • Carnival-loving, eloquent Soeder wants to be Germany's first Bavarian chancellor

    Dismissed for decades by critics as a country bumpkin who loves silly carnival costumes, Bavarian leader Markus Soeder said on Sunday that he was willing to run as the conservative candidate for German chancellor, provided he had the bloc's full backing. Angela Merkel, who has clocked up four election victories and led Europe's biggest economy for 16 years, is not standing for a fifth term when Germany goes to the polls in September. This means the parliamentary bloc formed by her Christian Democrats (CDU) and their sister party, Bavaria's Christian Social Union (CSU), must decide on a candidate.

  • Brits Get Morning Drunk in the Snow to Celebrate Grand Reopening

    ITV NewsIt’s been a long, cold, lonely winter in England.So, as four months of a nationwide lockdown finally came to an end, nothing was going to stop people from enjoying a refreshing pint of beer at the crack of dawn on a Monday morning—not even driving rain, freezing temperatures, and some pretty unseasonal snowfall.Pubs started serving outdoors again as part of a reopening plan that also covers indoor gym sessions, swimming pools, non-essential shops, beauty salons, and, for those who have been gagging to see some sad animals, zoos. Prime Minister Boris Johnson had urged people to “behave responsibly” with their new freedoms but didn’t explicitly say they shouldn’t get drunk in the snow before having breakfast.One pub in the town of Huddersfield was swamped when it opened at the stroke of midnight. “We didn’t even know if anyone was going to come,” said the pub landlord fittingly named Ian Snowball. “It’s in Huddersfield, it’s midnight, it’s freezing cold—but look, everyone has come.”If you thought you were starting early today… 🍻These drinkers in Huddersfield braved the snow to enjoy a beer garden pint at midnight ❄️https://t.co/UASiR7bXEv pic.twitter.com/i2O79eocSR— BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) April 12, 2021 One drinker commented matter-of-factly: “It was snowing earlier but I was still going to come out, I just put my coat on.” Another, sitting in a thick jacket next to an icy-looking gin and tonic, made the fair point: “After 14 months of not going anywhere, except funerals, it’s a great place.”Sky News reported that 50 pub-goers headed to the Fox On The Hill pub in south London this morning. The most emotional was perhaps Tony Blake, 59, who gushed to the news network: “I am so happy that it’s open again, it’s unbelievable, I’m so happy.” Student Sasha Carrington, 19, said she planned to stay there for the entire freezing cold day, explaining: “We’ve got our layers on, thermals, we’re going to stay outside.”Pippa Ingram, 51, and Sue Bell, 55, celebrated a chilly seaside pint in Kent, with Ingram describing her first sip in detail. “Absolutely delicious,” she said. “It’s not gonna last long at all! That is banging.” Back in Huddersfield, in footage timestamped at 8:17 a.m., a woman identified only as Sandy was seen having pints with her friends, and she told Good Morning Britain: “It’s not that cold after a while when you’ve sat in the sun.”As pub gardens reopen from today, @NickDixonITV talks to some people who have enjoyed a pint since 8am this morning.They discuss how happy they are to be back in pub gardens following the lockdown.Watch GMB 👉 https://t.co/6iQ6ebeOEQ pic.twitter.com/W0yAai1tGD— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) April 12, 2021 One pub in Coventry appears to have taken things slightly too far. Videos posted online showed more than 100 people lining the street outside the Oak Inn after it publicized its grand plans to open a massive outdoor space with heaters, marquees, and blankets. The pub is now under investigation for its “unmanageable amounts of visitors.”But, largely, the grand reopening has been welcomed as a major landmark—particularly following the success of Britain’s vaccine rollout, which has many hoping that there won’t be another lockdown. Nicholas Hair, landlord of the Kentish Belle in southeast London, told BBC News that there was a “sense of celebration” in the country, adding, “I’m hoping this is a sort of rebirth, and that we’re reopen for the foreseeable.”As for Boris himself, government sources confirmed that the prime minister received a long-awaited haircut on Monday—but his planned trip to the pub has been canceled out of respect for the late Prince Philip.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

  • David Cameron Greensill scandal: Why is there an independent investigation?

    The Government has launched an independent review into Greensill Capital, the collapsed financial firm for which David Cameron lobbied ministers. Questions had been mounting over the former prime minister's efforts to secure access for the finance company, which collapsed in March, putting thousands of UK steelmaking jobs at risk. Here's how the controversy unfolded and what happens next. What is the Greensill row about? Labour has led calls for an inquiry after it emerged that Mr Cameron had privately lobbied ministers, including Chancellor Rishi Sunak, to win access to an emergency coronavirus loan scheme for his employer, Lex Greensill. Allegations also surfaced that Mr Greensill, an Australian financier, was given privileged access to Whitehall departments when Mr Cameron was in No 10. What was David Cameron's involvement? Mr Cameron sent a number of texts to Mr Sunak's private phone asking for support for Greensill, which later collapsed into administration, through the Government's Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF). It was later reported that Mr Cameron had arranged a "private drink" between Health Secretary Matt Hancock and Mr Greensill to discuss a payment scheme later rolled out in the NHS. The former Conservative leader also emailed a senior Downing Street adviser, pressing for a rethink on Mr Greensill's application for access to emergency funding. Read more: James Kirkup: David Cameron's anti-cronyism rings hollow now

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  • Levin: Biden is a 'chameleon' who doesn't have a 'principle bone in his body'

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  • Anthony Fauci Has Worn Out His Welcome

    More than a year ago, Americans welcomed Anthony Fauci into their homes as a sober scientist who was helping them make sense of a deadly new virus. But he has worn out that welcome. It’s true that Fauci has enjoyed an illustrious career, advising every president since Ronald Reagan and winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2008. There’s much to admire in his overall leadership since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, as director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he has a serious job that’s not supposed to involve being a media spokesman so ubiquitous that it’s hard to believe he ever turns down any media requests. As he’s maintained a media schedule worthy of a serious presidential candidate or an actor in a new major studio release, Fauci has gradually stopped standing apart from the contentious debate about the pandemic, lockdowns, restrictions, precautions, and what is safe and what is risky. Instead, he has become part of the acrimony, offering murky and sometimes contradictory recommendations. This goes well beyond his initially discouraging the use of masks in January and February 2020, like most U.S. public health officials, or his mid-March 2020 reassurance: “The guidelines are a 15-day trial guideline to be reconsidering. It isn’t that these guidelines are now going to be in effect until July.” Fauci doesn’t write or establish the quarantine policies being enforced by cities and states; he can only advise other people in and out of government. But his voice carries a lot of weight, and, more or less willingly, he has become the face of America’s quarantine policies. Frustratingly, his perspective always seem to be that the right time to open up is another six weeks from now, no matter how low caseloads get or how much the national vaccination program accelerates. And it’s hard to shake the sense that Fauci makes recommendations based on how he thinks people will react. Fauci admitted in December that he had changed his assessments about herd immunity, based on what he thought the public could handle hearing. In the pandemic’s early days, Fauci tended to cite the same 60 to 70 percent estimate that most experts did, but Fauci gradually boosted it to 85 percent. In an interview with the New York Times’ Donald McNeil Jr., Fauci “acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts. He is doing so, he said, partly based on new science, and partly on his gut feeling that the country is finally ready to hear what he really thinks.” At the beginning of March, Fauci forcefully criticized the state of Texas for ending its statewide mask mandate, declaring, “It’s risky and could set us back to a place that’s even worse than where we are now . . . and lead to additional surges.” And yet, Texas has seen its caseload continue to decline. When asked about the lack of an increase in that state, he answered, “You know, there are a lot of things that go into that. I mean, when you say that they’ve had a lot of the activity on the outside like ball games, I’m not really quite sure. It could be they’re doing things outdoors.” Earlier this month, after GOP lawmakers asked Fauci about the risk of outbreaks in migrant detention facilities, he said, “I have nothing to do with the border. . . . Having me down at the border, that’s really not what I do.” Except Fauci has weighed in on travel restrictions and border closures plenty of times in the past year. It’s self-evidently obvious that having lots of migrants of all ages cramped into detention facilities is a formula for a rapid spread of the virus. Fauci just didn’t want to criticize the Biden administration, so he dodged the question. But perhaps most frustrating is Fauci’s recent comments suggesting that getting vaccinated doesn’t alter the risk of catching COVID-19 much and can’t justify changes in behavior. Fauci said that even though he’s vaccinated, he still won’t eat indoors at a restaurant, go to a movie theater, or “go into an indoor, crowded place where people are not wearing masks.” He said he still won’t be traveling, either. Vaccinated people are protected against serious health problems from COVID-19 and we’ve known for a month that vaccinated people, if infected, shed dramatically less virus — perhaps 75 percent to 90 percent. If results like that don’t make going to a restaurant or movie theater safe, what will? If getting vaccinated doesn’t allow you to return to something like normality, what’s the point? We can overlook the Hollywood-style poolside photo shoot, or his unmasking while watching a baseball game. But Fauci has turned into the perpetually pessimistic, overcautious, position-shifting, administration-pleasing face of the pandemic recovery. At this point, he’d do himself a favor by sitting out the next opportunity to appear on a TV show or podcast and focus on his day job.

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  • One prominent NFL Draft mock has UK’s Kelvin Joseph as a first-rounder

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  • Biden gets positive GOP reviews after infrastructure meeting, a hard no on corporate tax hike

    President Biden hosted a bipartisan group of eight lawmakers in the White House on Monday evening to discuss his $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan, and Republican attendees said afterward the president seemed genuinely interested in their input. "I'm prepared to negotiate as to the extent of my infrastructure project, as well as how we pay for it," Biden said in the two-hour Oval Office meeting. "Everyone acknowledges we need a significant increase in infrastructure." "Those are all the exact words that I wanted to hear going into the meeting," Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told The Associated Press. "And so that was really encouraging." At the very least, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) added, "Nobody stormed out yelling 'no.'" Biden said he is serious about seeking bipartisan support for the bill — "I'm not big on window-dressing, as you've observed," he said — but the Republicans in the meeting repeated objections about the ambitious scope of Biden's proposal, his expansive definition of infrastructure, the price tag, and especially Biden's plan to pay for the bill by raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, from 21 percent. Some Republican participants suggested raising the gas tax. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the top Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, said Biden was "highly engaged" and the meeting went "well," but reversing the GOP's corporate tax cut is a nonstarter. "I view the 2017 tax bill as one of my signature achievements in my entire career," Wicker said. "It would be an almost impossible sell for the president to come to a bipartisan agreement that included the undoing of that signature." Cedric Richmond, the White House director of public engagement, said "no one in business" wanted the corporate rate lowered from 35 percent all the way to 21 percent rate in the GOP's top-heavy tax overhaul, and he's reminding business leaders "we would be bringing the rate back to the neighborhood they wanted in the first place. And at the same time, we could fix infrastructure." Biden and his fellow Democrats have made clear they are willing to try to go it alone if there's no GOP interest in good-faith negotiations, but that would leave no room for error in the ideologically disparate Democratic caucus, with its razor-thin control of Congress. At the same time, Biden's proposal is broadly popular even among Republican voters, as is paying for it by taxing corporations. More stories from theweek.comTrump finally jumps the shark7 brutally funny cartoons about Mitch McConnell's corporate hypocrisyJohn Boehner dubs Mitch McConnell 'Stealth Vader,' still thinks Ted Cruz is 'Lucifer in the flesh'

  • Israeli media suggests country was behind Iranian nuclear facility blackout

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  • Top Kremlin Mouthpiece Warns of ‘Inevitable’ War With U.S. Over Another Ukraine Land Grab

    John MacDougall/AFP via Getty ImagesAll-out cyberwarfare, nation-wide forced blackouts, and the targeted disruption of internet services—for one of the Kremlin’s top propagandists, all of those tactics are fair game in what she describes as a fated war-to-come against the U.S.“War [with the U.S.] is inevitable,” declared Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the state-funded Russian media outlets RT and Sputnik, who believes the conflict will break out when, not if, Vladimir Putin moves to seize more territory from Ukraine.As Russia’s military buildup on Ukraine’s doorstep mounts, Kremlin loyalists have been urging for even more overt aggression and bloodshed in the campaign to annex Ukraine’s Donbas region. The only thing standing in the way, they say, is U.S. support for their beleaguered neighbor.The club of G-7 nations, which includes the U.S., issued a joint statement on Monday demanding an end to Russia’s troop buildup on the border with the disputed territory of Donbas in eastern Ukraine, reminiscent of the buildup prior to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The U.S. underlined those words by deploying two warships to the Black Sea.On Tuesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov threatened retaliation. “We warn the United States that it will be better for them to stay far away from Crimea and our Black Sea coast. It will be for their own good,” he said.The escalation was foreshadowed on state television’s Sunday Evening With Vladimir Soloviev over the weekend. Simonyan explained that it was time for Russia to gear up for a showdown against the U.S., and prophesized a kind of war driven by hacking, the forced disruption of internet access, the shutting down of power supplies, and an all-out offensive on U.S. infrastructure.“I do not believe that this will be a large-scale hot war, like World War II, and I do not believe that there will be a long Cold War. It will be a war of the third type: the cyberwar,” said Simonyan.She warned that—in this theoretical battle—the U.S. would plot to cut off the electricity of entire Russian cities. In turn, she speculated, Moscow would be able to force a blackout in Florida or New York’s Harlem at the flip of a switch.“In conventional war, we could defeat Ukraine in two days,” Simonyan said, “but it will be another kind of war. We’ll do it, and then [the U.S.] will respond by turning off power to [the Russian city] Voronezh,” she said.The top RT editor asserted that “[Russia] needs to be ready for this war, which is unavoidable, and of course it will start in Ukraine,” arguing that the Kremlin is “invincible where conventional war is concerned, but forget about conventional war... it will be a war of infrastructures, and here we have many vulnerabilities.”Her solution consists of Stalin-type measures to eliminate “vulnerabilities” in the run-up to another escalation, emphasizing the need for a hack-proof, government-controlled internet. “We still don’t have a sovereign internet, but God willing, we will,” she said.She wholeheartedly endorsed a suggestion from Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, who argued that all of Russia’s opposition must be eliminated by May 1, 2021. With imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny on a hunger strike—and suffering from severe health ailments after being denied appropriate medical treatment—the Kremlin seems to be firmly set on that course.Simonyan argued that once Russia minimizes its vulnerabilities and renders Putin’s opposition powerless—which she argued could happen in a matter of months—the Kremlin will finally be ready to annex Ukraine’s eastern region.“I’ve been agitating and even demanding that we take Donbas. We need to patch up our vulnerabilities as fast as we can, and then we can do whatever we want,” she boldly proclaimed. The host, Vladimir Soloviev, wholeheartedly agreed: “We only lose if we do nothing.” He argued that by absorbing parts of Ukraine—or the entire country—Russia would be able to remove the zone of American influence further away from its borders.As one of the Kremlin’s most valued propagandists, Margarita Simonyan is notoriously close to the Russian president and has received multiple awards directly from Putin. After accepting one such award in 2019, Simonyan thanked Putin “for the most important reward in life… this honor to serve one’s Motherland.”Her “service” has involved RT and Sputnik-driven disinformation operations aimed at influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which she often boasts about by pointing to the inclusion of her name in various U.S. intelligence reports.Russia’s recent cyberspace activities seem to serve as good practice for the “inevitable war” foreshadowed by Simonyan.Last year, six Russian intelligence officers were criminally charged by the U.S. for using the world’s most destructive malware to force blackouts in Ukraine and damage the critical infrastructure of multiple countries, which caused nearly $1 billion in losses. On Monday, hackers operating from Russia targeted France’s homeschooling platform.The Kremlin is prepared to intensify its offensive against the West, but fears of the retaliation that would follow. The idea of a bulletproof “sovereign internet”—completely under government control within Russian borders—is already on the books, with Moscow having introduced the idea as a preventative measure against retaliatory hacking attempts from other nations.Simonyan argued that Russia will surely be able to exploit the U.S.’s “catastrophic” educational standards, and referred to American military analysts and specialists as incompetent and stupid. She heartily laughed about news that more than 200,000 U.S. service members experienced hearing loss due to defective earplugs.“We can never come to any agreements with [Americans],” Simonyan said, arguing that instead, Russia can just as easily defeat the U.S. in a cyberspace war.She added, mockingly: “We don’t even need the nukes.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.