lmao the press release even said the quiet part out loud, that this is her reward for bringing Finland into NATO
Ms Marin has a record of accomplishment, from setting one of the world’s most ambitious climate targets – enabled by a full programme of digitalisation and deployment of technology – to shepherding her country’s accession to NATO following Russia’s aggression in Ukraine (the swiftest accession in the alliance’s history).
I completely agree with you, and on a related note the almost uniformly higher rates of transit usage in Canada compared to the US (with the exception of the massive anomaly that is NYC) is an interesting source for discussion, and one which cannot be explained by disparities in urban transit infrastructure alone.
That almost all Canadian cities have a rapid transit system of some kind certainly helps their numbers, but even cities in the US with considerably better systems, by most metrics, tend to underperform their Canadian peers. For instance, in 2016 the Canadian capital of Ottawa (a massive city filled with suburbs and rural towns, which then had no rail system whatsoever, and whose slow, unreliable, and infrequent buses are a constant source of complaint) had a higher transit modal share than Washington DC or Chicago, both mostly dense urban cores with extensive heavy rail metros.
I was about to type up an entire essay on the topic, but to be brief I see the cause of Canada’s relatively more transit oriented populace to come down to the fact that White flight/suburbanization didn’t happen to quite the same extent there (the reasons for which you could write a book on). Something which ensured that downtowns remained hubs of jobs and people, rather than wastelands of parking lots. Simultaneously, because urban centres weren’t imagined as places of a terrifying racialized other, to quite the same extent as in the US, transit was not demonized as much and middle-class Canadians were consequently more willing to allow themselves (and their children) to use it.
If I’m remembering right that commentor went on to give a very optimistic prognosis for the counteroffensive. Arguing that because the first line of Russian defences near Robotyne had breached: Tokmak will be captured imminently, putting the entire Russian logistical network under threat and severing the land bridge to Crimea, which will then lead to the total collapse of Russian military power in southern Ukraine. It’s a nice story but one completely divorced from the actual reality of the counteroffensive.
Worth noting that this alleged coup is occuring in the “Republic of Congo” (aka: Congo-Brazzaville) and not its neighbour, the far more populous and significantly poorer per capita, “Democratic Republic of Congo”.
Some very brief context is that while the DRC (a former Belgian colony) under Mobutu was firmly on the side of the United States during the Cold War in Africa,the then People’s Republic of the Congo (a former French colony) was a Communist state with deep relations to the Soviet Union. However, following the fall of the USSR, the PRC dissolved, the Republic of the Congo was coerced into joining the CFA zone, and France has exerted a great degree amount of influence over the economy and politics of the ROC ever since. Though its worth noting that relations between Congo and Russian are increasingly solid, with a growing number of military, economic, and other billateral cooperation agreements being made between the two countries.
Its impossible to make conclusions at the moment, but this seems to be yet another blow to Françafrique by another military government that wishes to follow the example of others on the continent in unshackling their country from French Neocolonialism.