Patrice de Bergeracpas

JONATHAN COOK—Why was Extinction Rebellion, a non-violent, civil disobedience group, included alongside neo-Nazis and Islamic jihadists? A whole page is dedicated to the threat posed by Extinction Rebellion. The guide explains that the organisation’s activism is rooted in an “anti-establishment philosophy that seeks system change”. That is, environmental activism risks making apparent – especially to the young – the causal connection between the economic system and damage to the environment. Once the story broke, the police hastily rowed back, claiming that Extinction Rebellion’s inclusion was a mistake. But more recently establishment efforts to decouple capitalism from its catastrophic externalities have grown more explicit.

JONATHAN COOK—Of course, much of Trump’s appeal was that he is not Biden. The Democratic party decided to run pretty much the worst candidate imaginable: an old-school machine politician, one emphatically beholden to the corporate donor class and unsuited to the new, more populist political climate. His campaigning – on the rare occasions he appeared – suggested significant cognitive decline. Biden often looked more suited to a luxury retirement home than heading the most powerful nation on earth. But then again, if Trump could lead the world’s only superpower for four years, how hard can it really be? He showed that those tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorists might be right after all: maybe the president is largely a figurehead, while a permanent bureaucracy runs much of the show from behind the curtain. Were Ronald Reagan and George W Bush not enough to persuade us that any halfwit who can string together a few cliches from a teleprompter will suffice?

THE ISTER—In 2003, Khodorkovsky was criminally prosecuted by Putin for tax evasion and fraud for which he ended up serving 10 years in prison. His protege Leonid Nevzlin was convicted of ordering multiple contract murders on Khodorkovsky’s behalf, and sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia. Associate Platon Lebedev was also convicted and imprisoned. This wave of prosecution sent a message and gave Putin a strong position, which was used to negotiate a “grand bargain” with the remaining oligarchs: they retained most of their existing assets in return for alignment with Putin’s vertical rule of Russia. The era of financial gangsterism from the 1990s was over.

A group of Venezuelan scientists began a chemical study of a medicinal plant that contains the DR-10 molecule, which was monitored through biological activity in virus-infected cells isolated from positive patients with the sequenced virus in the country. According to the WHO, the molecule was used successfully in the treatment of hepatitis C, human papillomavirus (HPV), Ebola, and other diseases.

DAMIAN WILSON—Post-pandemic, the return of the gilets jaunes protests is a certainty – there have already been signs of an encore – and, having spent most of 2020 living under draconian restrictions, when the protesters do re-emerge in force, they will be re-invigorated and more determined than ever to show l’Empereur Macron how damned furious they are with him, his government, the handling of the pandemic, and the direction the Republic is heading. But if the president thinks the best way to deal with that pent-up fury is to have police operating in the shadows, locking up anyone who dares to try to film or photograph them, then no one should be surprised when it turns into an uncontrollable volcano of social media videos and citizen journalism that portrays the excesses of the law in a particularly unflattering light.