Arkiv-Global View

A few days after John F Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon Johnson sat in his kitchen with his key advisers working his first speech to Congress. It was the evening of Kennedy's funeral – Johnson was now president. The nation was still in grief and Johnson, writes Robert Caro in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power, was not yet able to move into the White House because Kennedy's effects were still there.

I’ve just got back from the French Alps and the place is just as beautiful as it was when I first went there 30 years ago: the air like champagne, the sky blue, the snow like gulfs of icing sugar wafting over your skis – and the mind-numbing beauty of those high white landscapes, silent except for the soft clank of the lift.

“Yanukovych kaput! Wow,” Ola, 18, shouted when her friend ran over to show the news on his phone that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had fled Kiev.

She jumped up and down, pumped her fist in the air, and spun around.

It was about 4pm local time on Saturday (22 February) and she was standing in the rain outside a large, burnt out, military building on the outskirts of the city centre in Lviv, western Ukraine.

She had been making soup in a tent for a handful of cadets guarding the compound.

With less than a hundred days to the elections to European Parliament, preparations to select candidates for the next term 2014-2019 are underway in Poland. As one of the few member states, Poland is selecting their Members of the European Parliament not from a national list but within 13 constituencies. The selection of candidates is effectively being made by political parties. Naturally, this fact determines to a large extent the not only the selection of candidates, but also the nature and possible outcome of the elections.

A viale Mazzini, probabilmente, si saranno consolati coi numeri. Con i duetti e l’omaggio ai cantautori il Festival risale leggermente la brutta china degli ascolti in picchiata. Ieri sera la kermesse sanremese ha, infatti, superato la soglia psicologica dei 9 milioni di spettatori con quasi il 37% di share nella prima parte.

THE gruesome sketches need little explanation. They are based on the memories of Kim Gwang-il, a North Korean who spent more than two years in a prison camp before eventually escaping through China and Thailand to South Korea. The pictures show prisoners held in stress positions, skeletal bodies eating snakes and mice, and prisoners pulling a cart laden with rotting bodies. But none of the pictures, he says, was nearly as graphic as the reality of being forced to live in the camp.

Ukraine pulled back from the brink of chaos Friday when President Viktor Yanu­kovych signed a deal with opposition leaders to dilute his powers, form a caretaker government and hold early elections. But the accord appeared likely to be a hard sell among the thousands of demonstrators who vowed that nothing short of his ouster would get them off the streets.

Alla fine, seppure non per la via maestra elettorale, il sindaco d’Italia è davvero arrivato. I due sindaci anzi, visto che a Palazzo Chigi Matteo Renzi avrà al suo fianco Graziano Delrio. Il nuovo governo è una fotografia dell’ansia di novità del premier. Ma è anche la misura dei limiti di un esperimento che risente del mondo antico in cui è nato: un Parlamento privo di una maggioranza elettorale, una coalizione variopinta composta di nove sigle, un’Europa in cui siamo ancora osservati speciali.

Blood and black ash smeared the once-pristine floors of Kiev’s Hotel Ukraine. Dining tables, hastily shoved together, became makeshift hospital beds for the injured; the cold ground was a crude morgue. A priest knelt next to one man, offering what small comfort he could.

On the bloodiest day in modern Ukrainian history, the 12 lifeless, unnamed men who lay on the floor of the hotel lobby on Thursday morning, their bodies loosely covered with sheets, were just a few of the dozens killed in a conflict that has transformed the centre of Ukraine’s capital into a brutal battleground.

Directed by: Akiva Goldsman. Starring: Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Will Smith. 12A cert, 118 min.