“I don’t take the vaccination only to protect me, I take the vaccination to protect all the people around me,” the coach added. “I don’t understand why that is a limitation of freedom because, if it is, then not being allowed to drink and drive is a limitation of freedom as well.”
Qatar World Cup ‘not right’
Shortly before the start of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Klopp criticized the conditions in which the small Gulf state was granted the right to host the biggest football competition in the world — and called out journalists for failing to expose it.
“There are wonderful people there and it is not that everything is bad over there but how it happened was not right in the first place,” Klopp told a press conference two weeks before the start of the World Cup, adding that “the process was not right and a lot of people took money for the wrong reasons.”
“You are all journalists. You should have sent the message but you didn’t write the most critical articles about circumstances that were clear,” he added.
"politic" - Google News
January 26, 2024 at 10:28PM
https://ift.tt/om05EIN
Trump sucks, Brexit is stupid and socialism rules: Jürgen Klopp's political wisdom - POLITICO Europe
"politic" - Google News
https://ift.tt/9JEt8c1
https://ift.tt/KxrhCF1
In the lead-up to upcoming general elections in Pakistan, the country’s Human Rights Commission has voiced significant concerns about “pre-poll rigging” and the “blatant manipulation” of the electoral process.
The Feb. 8 elections are apparently unlikely to be conducted in a fair and free manner.
Pakistan has a history of electoral engineering, with the military often playing a pivotal role as a “kingmaker.” This consistent military interference in Pakistani politics explains current fears about the integrity of the democratic process in the upcoming elections and beyond.
Even during periods when the military was not officially in power, it’s been accused of extensive interference in political affairs. The military seized direct control of the country through coups d'état by Gen. Ayub Khan (1958-1969), Gen. Yahya Khan (1969-1971), Gen. Zia-ul-Haq (1977-1988) and Gen. Pervez Musharraf (1999-2008).
When the military isn’t directly governing, it exerts influence on the political landscape by engaging in political engineering, shaping the selection and rise to power of specific political parties. In his farewell address in November 2022, the former army chief, Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, openly acknowledged the military’s pivotal role in facilitating the ascent of former prime minister Imran Khan to power following the removal of Nawaz Sharif.
The military’s influence is at play in all facets of politics and security matters in Pakistan. It actively restricts the powers of politicians, preferring puppet-like figures who refrain from challenging its prevailing interests.
Nawaz Sharif
This pattern became evident in 2013 when Sharif won the election and subsequently fell out of favour with the military. His attempt to pursue foreign and security policies independent of the army’s influence ultimately ended his years in office a few years later.
Sharif’s experiences illustrate the military’s firm grip on decision-making processes and its resistance to allowing politicians to shape policies that might deviate from its established interests.
The military opposedSharif’s efforts to build ties with India due to its apparent need to maintain simmering tensions with New Delhi to hold onto its domestic dominance. Ongoing conflict with India serves as justification for the military’s indispensable role in the nation.
Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, right, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands during a summit of South Asian leaders in Katmandu, Nepal, in November 2014.(AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)
In 2014, Sharif extended a significant olive branch to India by accepting its invitation to attend the swearing-in ceremony of the newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi returned the favour in 2015 with a brief stopover in Lahore, raising hopes for improved relations. However, this thaw was short-lived primarily due to the influence of the military.
In 2017, Sharif was removed from office on corruption charges after serving three terms. The military then supported Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party during the 2018 elections.
Imran Khan
This support proved instrumental in propelling Khan to victory. The formidable military and the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) meticulously crafted Khan’s public image as an upright individual untainted by financial scandals while concurrently portraying his opponents as corrupt politicians.
This deliberate effort instilled hope among the people for a transformative change in the country.
But soon after Khan’s ascension to power, he and the military began to butt heads, in part due to differences over the selection of the head of the ISI.
Tensions escalated, ultimately resulting in Khan’s orchestrated removal from office on a vote of non-confidence in April 2022.
In the aftermath of his ouster, Khan openly criticized the military. In response, the army took a series of measures to disqualify him from running in the upcoming elections. Khan was arrested on multiple corruption charges and has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
Former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan is escorted by security officials as he arrives to appear in court on corruption charges in Islamabad, Pakistan, in May 2023.(AP Photo/Anjum Naveed)
Khan and his party’s candidates continue to encounter obstacles, including being denied nominations to run in the election and being blocked from holding online rallies and fundraisers.
The PTI alleges the military is actively working to exclude it from the electoral race, underscoring the profound challenges to uphold democracy and political diversity in Pakistan.
In a significant turn of events, the military has cleared the path for the ousted Sharif to contest the upcoming election by quashing all legal cases against him, positioning him as the favoured candidate against Khan.
The prime objectives are apparently to sideline Khan and to ensure Sharif will refrain from challenging military interests in the future.
Escalating regional tensions
Pakistan is currently facing significant security and economic challenges. Iran recently launched missile and drone attacks on the Pakistani-Iranian border to target terrorist group Jaish-Al-Adl, which the Iranians claim is responsible for terrorist attacks in their country.
Pakistan condemned the attack as a violation of its sovereignty but soon retaliated with its own military strikes in Iran as tensions escalate between the two countries.
Pakistani students rally in Lahore, Pakistan to condemn a terrorist attack on an army-run school in Peshawar in December 2014 that killed 150 people, mostly children.(AP Photo/K.M. Chaudary)
Inflation has also soared to approximately 30 per cent in Pakistan, exacerbating economic challenges that include frequent power shortages and diminishing exports, remittances and foreign direct investment.
Sustained political stability in Pakistan is imperative, and yet remains elusive until the military restrains itself within its constitutional role and refrains from unwarranted interference in politics. The military’s increasing power has seemingly taken precedence over the needs of the Pakistani people.
As the Feb. 8 elections loom, reining in the military is crucial for fostering a political environment that prioritizes stability and democratic principles in South Asia, as well as the overall well-being of Pakistanis.
"politic" - Google News
January 25, 2024 at 02:01AM
https://ift.tt/WSv1sQa
As Pakistani election looms, the military maintains its grip on the country's politics - The Conversation
"politic" - Google News
https://ift.tt/PXiflGp
https://ift.tt/vO1J2IF
CNN projects that Donald Trump will win the New Hampshire Republican primary. Nikki Haley congratulated the former president on his projected win but said she would stay in the race. CNN political commentator Van Jones, former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin, conservative commentator Scott Jennings, and former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod join Anderson Cooper to discuss.
The former president’s brutal, yearlong campaign of humiliation helped torpedo the Florida governor’s White House hopes and left his next moves in politics uncertain.
Donald J. Trump plumbed new depths of degradation in his savage takedown of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a yearlong campaign of emasculation and humiliation that helped force one of the party’s rising stars out of the presidential race after just one contest and left him to pick up the pieces of his political future.
In front of enormous rally audiences, Mr. Trump painted Mr. DeSantis as a submissive sniveler, insisting that he had cried and begged “on his knees” for an endorsement in the 2018 Florida governor’s race.
In a series of sexually charged attacks, Mr. Trump suggested — without a shred of proof — that Mr. DeSantis wore high heels, that he might be gay and that perhaps he was a pedophile.
He promised that intense national scrutiny would leave Mr. DeSantis whining for “mommy.”
Mr. DeSantis shied from fighting back, which only inflicted more pain on his campaign. The governor had portrayed himself as one of the Republican Party’s fiercest political brawlers, but he pulled his punches in the most important race of his life.
Now he is both defeated and debased. His departure from the race on Sunday was a far fall from grace after opening his campaign as the heir apparent in a Trumpified Republican Party. Rehabilitating that reputation as he considers his next political move will require plenty of repair work with donors and Republican voters, thanks to Mr. Trump’s ruthless parade of insults over 242 days on the campaign trail.
“I don’t care if he’s a Republican,” Mr. Trump said of his belittlement of Mr. DeSantis at a November gathering of the Republican Party of Florida — the governor’s home turf. “We hit him hard, and now he’s like a wounded falling bird from the skies.”
But even more crushing was Mr. DeSantis’s response, or lack thereof.
After releasing a campaign video in 2022 that made him out to be a political fighter sent from the heavens, he appeared either unwilling or unable to swing back at Mr. Trump or go on the attack. Even Mr. Trump’s aides were surprised that the DeSantis campaign did not go harder at the former president on issues where he might be vulnerable with conservatives, like abortion.
And the prickly nature of Mr. DeSantis’s personality, which could manifest itself in an awkward mix of detachment, moodiness and facial tics, amounted to an irresistible target for Mr. Trump, who seemed to relish bullying Mr. DeSantis as if he were stuffing a freshman in a high school locker.
Still, Mr. DeSantis remains popular in his home state, and beyond Florida he’s viewed relatively favorably. As a presidential candidate, he needed to succeed where every Republican before him had failed: prying loyal Trump supporters away from the former president without alienating them.
Staff members from Mr. DeSantis’s campaign gathered on Sunday at a restaurant in Manchester, N.H., hours after he suspended his bid for president.Sophie Park for The New York Times
Mr. Trump has long trampled over the boundaries of generally accepted political behavior, relentlessly pushing the racist “birther” lie about President Barack Obama and urging supporters to lock up Hillary Clinton. But his campaign hit new levels of cruelty against a fellow Republican.
The missives were often led by Mr. Trump’s chief spokesman, Steven Cheung, who leaned into his background as a public relations operative for the Ultimate Fighting Championship to deliver brutal slams with the force of the sport’s suffocating guillotine chokehold.
In November, Mr. Cheung told The Wall Street Journal that in Iowa, Mr. DeSantis would face “unimaginable pain that he’s never felt before in his life.”
In a news release, he cast doubt on Mr. DeSantis’s masculinity, saying that he walked like “a 10-year-old girl who had just raided her mom’s closet and discovered heels for the first time.”
Mr. Cheung also referred to the Florida governor as a “desperate eunuch,” questioned why Mr. DeSantis would “cuck himself” in front of the entire country — sexual slang that implies weakness in a man — and accused him of searching for “new sugar daddies” to fund his campaign. He called Mr. DeSantis a “disloyal dog.”
Mr. DeSantis fought back with a more traditional approach.
His campaign rolled out a “Trump Accident Tracker” in a daily email to the news media that highlighted Mr. Trump’s missteps on the trail. He criticized Mr. Trump’s “juvenile insults,” saying voters did not like them. (The eruption of laughter inside Trump rallies suggested otherwise.)
“If Donald Trump can summon the balls to show up to the debate, I’ll wear a boot on my head,” Mr. DeSantis said.
The line did not seem to land. Mr. DeSantis himself has admitted that, unlike Mr. Trump, he is “not an entertainer.”
At the same time, pro-Trump online influencers formed a troll army pumping out content like videos showing a man with Mr. DeSantis’s face being kicked in the groin. In comparison, Mr. DeSantis’s online operation proved haplessly inept.
The differing approaches stemmed, in part, from a fixation on Mr. DeSantis inside Trump headquarters, where animosity for the governor ran high.
Not only was Mr. Trump incensed by what he viewed as a striking lack of loyalty from Mr. DeSantis, but the Trump campaign also includes former DeSantis campaign aides who had been fired or felt otherwise mistreated by the Florida governor, including Susie Wiles, one of the former president’s closest confidantes. Many still had axes to grind.
The quick endorsement from Mr. DeSantis on Sunday may help salve some of those wounds. Hours later, Mr. Trump vowed that he would retire the “DeSanctimonious” nickname, and his allies began posting messages welcoming Mr. DeSantis back into the Trump fold.
But aides said that Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis had still not talked.
Asked about whether the two men could repair their relationship, Mr. Cheung held his fire.
“We’re focused on New Hampshire,” he said.
Ken Bensinger contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
Rahul Gandhi, however, welcomed the decision to confer Bharat Ratna on Karpoori Thakur
New Delhi:
A caste census will be a true tribute to Karpoori Thakur as the country now needs "real justice" and not "politics of symbolism", Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said on Wednesday, even as he welcomed the decision to confer Bharat Ratna on the socialist leader.
Two-time Bihar chief minister Thakur has been named for the country's highest civilian award Bharat Ratna posthumously.
"I pay respectful tribute to Jannayak Karpoori Thakur ji, an incomparable warrior of social justice, on his birth centenary. He is certainly a precious gem of India and the decision to award him Bharat Ratna posthumously is welcome," Mr Gandhi said in a post in Hindi on X.
The former Congress chief alleged that the BJP government's "concealment" of the results of the social and economic caste census conducted in 2011 and their "indifference" towards a nationwide census is an attempt to weaken the movement for social justice.
"'Justice of equal participation', one of the five justices of the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, is at the centre of justice and social equality, which can begin only after the caste census," Mr Gandhi said.
"In the true sense, this step will also be a true tribute to Jannayak Karpoori Thakur ji and his struggles for the rights of the backward and the deprived," he said.
"The country now needs 'real justice' not 'politics of symbolism'," Mr Gandhi asserted.
सामाजिक न्याय के अप्रतिम योद्धा जननायक कर्पूरी ठाकुर जी को उनकी जन्म शताब्दी पर सादर श्रद्धांजलि अर्पित करता हूं। वह निश्चित ही भारत के अनमोल रत्न हैं और उन्हें मरणोपरांत भारत रत्न दिए जाने के फैसले का स्वागत है।
Mr Thakur, who was born on this day in 1924 and passed away in 1988, was the first non-Congress socialist leader who became chief minister twice -- first for seven months in December 1970 and later for two years in 1977.
Mr Thakur, known affectionately as 'Jan Nayak' (people's leader), is the 49th recipient of the country's highest civilian award. The award was last conferred on late president Pranab Mukherjee in 2019.
Born on January 24, 1924 in Nai samaj (barber society), Mr Thakur is credited in Bihar politics for enforcing total prohibition of alcohol in 1970. The village where he was born in Samistupur district was renamed after him as Karpuri Gram.
He was inspired by heavyweights like Ram Manohar Lohia who spearheaded the socialist movement in post-Independent India. He was also close to Jayaprakash Narayan.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
Pak general elections will be held on February 8. (File)
Islamabad:
Ahead of the 2024 general elections, Pakistan People's Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said on Tuesday that he will not seek 'political retribution' from opponents, calling an end to politics marked by animosity and division if elected Prime Minister, according to ARY News.
Addressing a public gathering in Chiniot as part of the PPP's campaign for the 2024 General Elections, the former foreign minister stated that the country could not entrust its future to "traditional and old" politicians while the "country grapples with an ongoing economic crisis, unprecedented poverty, and unemployment."
Bilawal Bhutto, emphasising a departure from "traditional and old" politics, stated that he was running for office solely to "bury politics of revenge and hatred".
"There should be political differences, not political enmity," he maintained, vowing to establish a truth and reconciliation commission. "I respect everyone and believe in consensus," he said, according to ARY News.
Bilawal went on to say that the PPP was the only party that has consistently kept its commitments to the people. "My party never believed in revenge politics," he remarked, using his mother, Benazir Bhutto, as an example, who stated "democracy is the best revenge."
"I have experienced such oppression and I would never wish for any political party worker to endure such hardship," he said.
The general elections will be held on February 8.
In a major 'breakthrough' for the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz ahead of the nationwide polls, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) candidate Mehr Muhammad Waseem announced his withdrawal in favour of PML-N Senior Vice President Maryam Nawaz, according to Geo News.
The election campaigns of all political parties equipped with mollifying manifestos and promises are in full swing across the country ahead of the February 8 vote. PML-N and PPP are eyeing the premier's office and desperately swaying voters to elect them to power.
Moreover, the Pakistan Peoples' Party (PPP) also suffered a blow in Lahore as its local officer bearers including the chairman, vice chairman, and zakat committee's head along with loyalists joined the Nawaz-led party on Monday (January 22).
Formally launching the electioneering, Maryam also addressed the PML-N's election campaigners in the NA-119 constituency on Sunday.
After party supremo and former PM Nawaz Sharif's return to Pakistan, PML-N believes it has gotten a much-needed boost, given the dismal performance during the 16-month tenure of the coalition government, headed by Shehbaz Sharif.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
"politic" - Google News
January 24, 2024 at 12:53AM
https://ift.tt/msNQDjq
"Will Bury Politics Of Revenge, Hatred": Bilawal Bhutto Ahead Of Pak Polls - NDTV
"politic" - Google News
https://ift.tt/yljtMiF
https://ift.tt/iquJokl
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/bostonglobe/VNG7YMZTRWJ5WBFTJ5NVETPCQI.jpg)
