Does this mean that Francisco’s gonna stomp on abusers or does it mean that he’s gonna squirrel ‘em away until the shit dies down? There’s no way of knowing… we’ll have to see what happens. Frankly, what Catholics (and others… including Orthodox) do in the USA doesn’t give me optimism… but we’ll have to see. You can’t attack someone until they fuck up… and Francisco hasn’t slammed it in the door, yet. On the one hand, he’s sincerely embraced evangelical poverty (and its espousal of the “preferential option for the poor”)… on the other, he has a blind spot in being so anti-abortion that it may blind him to rightwing shenanigans. We’ll have to see…
After the burial of Russian oligarchBoris Berezovsky, found dead at his house near London, was over, the mourners began leaving Brookwood Cemetery. One of the witnesses said, “The guests are leaving, no one’s talking to reporters”. According to sources, a memorial service preceded the burial. On 8 May, Berezovsky’s funeral, took place at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. However, his will, drawn up just nine days before his death, left more questions than answers.
Berezovsky always intended his funeral to be a private affair, closed to the media. Very few of his friends attended the service. Surrey Police confirmed to VOR that they’d be attending a funeral at Brookwood (near Guildford) to prevent any hindrance to the proceedings, although they refused to say if it was for Berezovsky. However, they denied reports that armed police were in the area. Thames Valley Police, which is leading the investigation into his death, wouldn’t confirm funeral arrangements, saying it was a private affair. The few mourners included his friend Akhmed Zakayev and members of his legal team. According to a tweet from journalist Luke Harding of The Guardian, there were fewer than 30 people at the cemetery in Surrey. He also reported that a Ukrainian TV crew hid in the bushes.
The self-made billionaire… said to be worth 3 billion USD (93.5 billion Roubles. 2.28 billion Euros. 1.93 billion UK Pounds)… was a former academic who built his fortune with investments in oil, cars, aluminium, and the media. He played an integral part in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000. However, they fell out when Putin began charging many oligarchs with tax evasion. Berezovsky fled to England in 2000, where he lived until his death. The Times reported that although he’d recently changed his will, his executors refused to carry it out and a court appointed an accountancy firm to deal with his finances, said to be in some disarray.
Friends of Boris Berezovsky claimed that someone strangled him to death, despite a post-mortem examination that showed no sign of a struggle, and that he died with a ligature around his neck consistent with hanging. He was found dead in his bathroom at his mansion in Mill Lane, Ascot, west of London on Saturday 23 March. Nevertheless, friends say that he wasn’t suicidal; they believe that someone strangled him. Reports circulated that he was due to be cremated at Gunnersbury Cemetery on 6 May. However, being a municipal cemetery, that seemed unlikely as it was a bank holiday in the UK. The inquest opened and adjourned on 28 March 28, after which the police released a brief statement in which a spokesman confirmed, “The results of the post-mortem examination, carried out by a Home Officepathologist, found the cause of death is consistent with hanging. The pathologist found nothing to indicate a violent struggle”.
On Wednesday, Russian-born oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who died at his home near London in March, was laid to rest at the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey in the UK. An eyewitness told RIA-Novosti, “The guests are leaving; they’re reluctant to talk to journalists”. About 60 people were present, including Berezovsky’s close friend Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev, along with the deceased oligarch’s three ex-wives and his daughter Yelizaveta. Journalists weren’t allowed at the funeral, the date and location of which were kept secret to keep the media away. According to eyewitnesses, the casket remained closed during the ceremony. The 67-year-old self-exiled tycoon was found dead in the bathroom of his home in Ascot in southern England on March 23. The official cause of death hasn’t yet been announced, but a post-mortem examination found that the death was consistent with hanging.
Following the death of Margaret Thatcher… Britain’s first and, so far, only female Prime Minister… many in Russia are still struggling to understand the polarised reaction to her death back home. On Facebook, Russian playwright Yuri Klavdiyev praised Thatcher’s achievements, writing, “Rest in peace, Comrade Thatcher. You did for your country a thousand times more than [members of the Russian Occupy movement] have done for theirs”. Yet, whilst tributes poured in from landmark figures across the world, in Britain, the song Ding, Dong! The Witch Is Dead from The Wizard of Oz controversially reached no. 2 on this week’s BBC Radio 1 music chart. On the day of Thatcher’s passing, the Daily Telegraph announced that, given the volume of abusive messages it had received, it was blocking all comments on any Thatcher-related article. That was besides the street parties and other impromptu celebrations.
By her own admission, Thatcher had inherited a country rendered ungovernable by the influence of the trades union movement. Her solution was stark. Thatcher chose to pick a fight with their most powerful and, in doing so, break the will of the movement as a whole. The resulting 1984-85 conflict between the government and the miners’ unions at times bordered on civil war, with British police forces accused of acting more as militia than as law enforcement. That the government won is a matter of historical record. More subjective is the question of cost. Last week, former miner Darren Vaines told the BBC, “The cut went so deep, people have never been able to forget about it”.
When she came to power in 1979, Thatcher’s monetarist government was on a collision course with a young generation radicalised by the extreme politics of the late 1970s. As the government lurched to the right, the educated liberal opposition would step to the left. Joe Strummer, poster boy of the New Left, wanted to illustrate The Clash’s Cost of LivingEP with a picture of Margaret Thatcher’s face and a swastika. Alexei Sayle, firebrand of the early alternative comedy scene, joked, “In the old days, people used to be named after what they made. Carter if they made carts, Cooper if they made barrels, Thatcher if they made people sick”.
Many seized upon the Falklands War, which almost certainly saved Thatcher from an early resignation as her popularity waned, as an example of her political opportunism. To howls of popular protest, Thatcher also resisted sanctions against South Africa, branding the African National Congress a “typical terrorist organisation” and inviting apartheid-era President P W Botha on a state visit in 1984. Elsewhere, Thatcher proposed that the deposed Khmer Rouge retain their UN seat for Cambodia. Even after her removal from power, she continued to infuriate the left, calling for the release of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.
Last Tuesday, former Irish Republican Army chief of staff Martin McGuinness felt obliged to urge Republican households to stop celebrating the death of the IRA’s former “Number One Target”. Republican resentment of Thatcher grew throughout the 1980s, after her refusal to consider the political status of prisoners at Northern Ireland’s Maze Prison resulted in the deaths, by hunger strike, of Parliament member Bobby Sands and nine other prisoners.
Mass unemployment, climbing since the global recession of the early ’80s, snapped at Thatcher’s heels as she led the way toward her vision of a deregulated economy. Joblessness in Britain reached record highs not seen since the Great Depression. Dramatic cuts in government spending on arts, healthcare, education, and welfare, plus the deliberate sacrifice of many of Britain’s manually-intensive staple industries on the altar of modernity, further alienated an already-disenfranchised poor. All of this, coupled with the internal machinations of Thatcher’s own Conservative Party, would force Thatcher from office in 1990 amidst yet more riots (this time against her government’s poll tax).
For Russians struggling to understand the response to Thatcher at home, it may be useful to recall the polarising reactions to her Cold War contemporary, Mikhail Gorbachyov. Thatcher’s role in the end of the Cold War is debatable. Paul Dukes, professor emeritus at the University of Aberdeen, said, “Her role in bringing the Cold War to an end was probably not as significant as she and her admirers asserted. At least, the individual contributions of Gorbachyov and Reagan were far greater”. Yet, both Gorbachyov and Thatcher, though lauded internationally, engender, at best, mixed reactions on home soil. Gorbachyov, with his surname a global byword for postwar tolerance, only polled 0.5 percent in the first round of the 1996 presidential election. In a 2011 opinion poll, 47 percent of Russians claimed “not to care about him at all”. A significant 20 percent, reported “active hostility” to the former Communist General Secretary. As Gorbachyov leads the eulogies to Thatcher, he may be watching the dramatic reactions to her death unfold in Britain with one eye fixed firmly on his own legacy.
This image shows beggars outside of an Orthodox church in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Such wasn’t common in Sov times… to be sure, no one lived in the lap of luxury, but what was there, was shared more equally (of course, there were people with blat… that obtains in every society known to mankind). Indeed, before the time of Slobberin’ Ronnie and Haggie Maggie, things were more equitable in the Anglosphere, too. In both Russia and the West, the oligarchs steal the people’s patrimony… and call themselves respectable! If that isn’t EVIL, then, I’ll check myself into Bedlam with Mr Scrooge…
VVP is bringing back the good things of the USSR and of Tsarist Russia… and moving away from the oligarchs. May God preserve him…
Anti-Putin Oligarch Berezovsky Buried in Surrey… He was a Suicide
Tags: Akhmed Zakayev, Boris Berezovsky, Brookwood Cemetery, dissident, England, EU, European Union, Funeral, Gunnersbury Cemetery, Home Office, London, oligarchs, political commentary, politics, Russia, Russian, Russian dissident, Russian history, russian oligarch, Russian oligarchs, Surrey, Surrey Police, Thames Valley Police, UK, United Kingdom, Vladimir Putin
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After the burial of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, found dead at his house near London, was over, the mourners began leaving Brookwood Cemetery. One of the witnesses said, “The guests are leaving, no one’s talking to reporters”. According to sources, a memorial service preceded the burial. On 8 May, Berezovsky’s funeral, took place at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. However, his will, drawn up just nine days before his death, left more questions than answers.
Berezovsky always intended his funeral to be a private affair, closed to the media. Very few of his friends attended the service. Surrey Police confirmed to VOR that they’d be attending a funeral at Brookwood (near Guildford) to prevent any hindrance to the proceedings, although they refused to say if it was for Berezovsky. However, they denied reports that armed police were in the area. Thames Valley Police, which is leading the investigation into his death, wouldn’t confirm funeral arrangements, saying it was a private affair. The few mourners included his friend Akhmed Zakayev and members of his legal team. According to a tweet from journalist Luke Harding of The Guardian, there were fewer than 30 people at the cemetery in Surrey. He also reported that a Ukrainian TV crew hid in the bushes.
The self-made billionaire… said to be worth 3 billion USD (93.5 billion Roubles. 2.28 billion Euros. 1.93 billion UK Pounds)… was a former academic who built his fortune with investments in oil, cars, aluminium, and the media. He played an integral part in Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000. However, they fell out when Putin began charging many oligarchs with tax evasion. Berezovsky fled to England in 2000, where he lived until his death. The Times reported that although he’d recently changed his will, his executors refused to carry it out and a court appointed an accountancy firm to deal with his finances, said to be in some disarray.
Friends of Boris Berezovsky claimed that someone strangled him to death, despite a post-mortem examination that showed no sign of a struggle, and that he died with a ligature around his neck consistent with hanging. He was found dead in his bathroom at his mansion in Mill Lane, Ascot, west of London on Saturday 23 March. Nevertheless, friends say that he wasn’t suicidal; they believe that someone strangled him. Reports circulated that he was due to be cremated at Gunnersbury Cemetery on 6 May. However, being a municipal cemetery, that seemed unlikely as it was a bank holiday in the UK. The inquest opened and adjourned on 28 March 28, after which the police released a brief statement in which a spokesman confirmed, “The results of the post-mortem examination, carried out by a Home Office pathologist, found the cause of death is consistent with hanging. The pathologist found nothing to indicate a violent struggle”.
8 May 2013
Voice of Russia World Service
http://english.ruvr.ru/2013_05_08/Russian-businessman-Boris-Berezovsky-buried-in-Surrey/
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On Wednesday, Russian-born oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who died at his home near London in March, was laid to rest at the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey in the UK. An eyewitness told RIA-Novosti, “The guests are leaving; they’re reluctant to talk to journalists”. About 60 people were present, including Berezovsky’s close friend Chechen separatist leader Akhmed Zakayev, along with the deceased oligarch’s three ex-wives and his daughter Yelizaveta. Journalists weren’t allowed at the funeral, the date and location of which were kept secret to keep the media away. According to eyewitnesses, the casket remained closed during the ceremony. The 67-year-old self-exiled tycoon was found dead in the bathroom of his home in Ascot in southern England on March 23. The official cause of death hasn’t yet been announced, but a post-mortem examination found that the death was consistent with hanging.
8 May 2013
RIA-Novosti
http://en.rian.ru/world/20130508/181038322/Self-Exiled-Russian-Businessman-Berezovsky-Buried-in-UK.html