Dear Lili Von Shtupp...this Is How You Do Sanctions........

[ToraToraTora]

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1474349/Boris-Johnson-news-Joe-Biden-Belarus-UK-US-trade-sanctions-latest-update

[jno]

can we expect similar actions against China or the UAE? Or are they just reserved for small countries without oil?

[ToraToraTora]

surprised you are so supportive of Hijackings etc jno.

[douglas9401]

Not surprised you don't answer, Tora. X

[ToraToraTora]

China and UAE haven't hijacked any planes.

[ichkeria]

It’s good news.
We could do without the silly dig at the EU. I hope that’s not the real reason for the post.
As to China etc : well, sadly it’s the case that you do what you can to who you reasonably can, although we could assuredly do more.

Meanwhile Lukashenko denies having anything to do with the death of Vitaly Shishov, the dissident who apparently beat himself up and hanged himself while out jogging in Kyiv last week.

[jno]

as long as Americans do it and call it "extraordinary rendition" Britain seems to be okay with it.

[ichkeria]

I don’t think the plane “hijacking” is the only reason for the action by any means.
I think the crimes of the Chinese regime far outstrip those of Lukashenko dreadful as he is.
I think that needs to be said, however it shouldn’t stop us applauding the measures taken.

[ichkeria]

I don’t think the case of Edward Snowden compares morally. There are times when you have to make that moral distinction even when the external circumstances look apparently similar.

[Jackdaw33]

Why has Kiev suddenly become Kyiv? It's like when Pekin became Beijing, this dropping of anglicised names in favour of native ones.

[jno]

Pekin? You do go back a long way, Jackdaw.

[ichkeria]

It’s the official spelling derived from the Ukrainian.
Don’t worry about it: it’s still “chicken KIEV”

:-)

[Jackdaw33]

It was Pekin until the late 80s. It changed to Beijing about the time of the Tiananman Square affair.

[jno]

surely it was only Pekin in French? It was Peking in everything I ever read in Britain (and Peiping or similar before that).

[pastafreak]

Is there something wrong with using native pronunciation now...?

[Jackdaw33]

But we don't say Paree, København, Roma or Den Haag, do we?

[jno]

pasta, are you anti-British??

The short answer, I think, is that place names that came into English more than 500+ years ago - Rome, Paris, Copenhagen and so on - will probably not change. More recent ones may change to the local version, like Gdansk or Mumbai. We seem to have gone along with Myanmar instead of Burma, though most Euopeans resisted changing Cambodia to Kampuchea and the Cambodians themselves finally changed back.

[ichkeria]

“Kyiv” isn’t any more native than “Kiev”, just to take the original diversion back to its roots.
It’s simply adopting the Ukrainian spelling rather than the Russian one, for which “Kiev” is an equally faithful transliteration.

[youngmafbog]

Rhodesia will always be Rhodesia to me :-)

And what should we call Bombay Potatoes now?