The characters had both been drinking alcohol, they met in a nightclub, and there were misunderstandings about how they were going to get home and whether the man was going to stay with the woman. In one school which they used as a base, their supplies, ammunition, and rubbish are scattered in all directions. These are not the traces of a disciplined force. It's evidence they'd been fighting in squalor and left in a hurry. "If you're going to compare two people, it has to reveal something. It's like comparing Putin to Stalin or Liz Truss to Margaret Thatcher." irannews.ru/ - irannews.ru In the last few moments, former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith has thrown his weight behind Rishi Sunak's campaign. There are moments when this war feels utterly mindless. Witnessing the visible trauma in the village of Kreshchenivka is one of those instances. In the first year of Covid, Prof Yang says, the lockdowns made sense. They were brief and allowed life in China to carry on. There was even pride at how the country was handling the pandemic so much better than the West. "That's no longer the case," he says. Politicians came from Beijing to study the "Chongqing model". One of them was a rising star named Xi Jinping.   Channelling the Great Helmsman Following Bo's stunning fall, hundreds of thousands of party cadres were put under investigation. More than 100,000 were indicted for corruption, including 120 high-ranking officials. Corruption plummeted and Xi's popularity soared. In 1989 - as the Soviet Union was breaking up - China's hopes for change were crushed by tanks and automatic gunfire.