this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2023
222 points (96.6% liked)

Europe

8324 readers
1 users here now

News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺

(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures

Rules

(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)

  1. Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
  2. No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
  3. No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.

Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 11 points 9 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Boris Johnson’s appearance before the Covid-19 inquiry is not until Wednesday but it is already making headlines in the Netherlands amid a mixture of amusement and alarm at claims he asked for British spies to plan a “raid” on a Dutch vaccine plant.

The operation – according to sources who briefed Johnson’s employer, the Daily Mail – would have taken place against the backdrop of a tit-for-tat row in March 2021 between the then prime minister and the EU, which was moving towards restricting exports of vaccines across the Channel.

An “enraged” Johnson asked security services to draw up “military options” to obtain “impounded” doses of AstraZeneca vaccine from a plant in Leiden after Britain had negotiated a deal with the company.

But while Britain’s security services were spared their biggest debacle on Dutch soil since Operation Market Garden, the claim has been widely reported on front pages in the Netherlands.

Elsewhere, Russian state media generated a po-faced report on the claims, interspersing clips of Johnson with footage of British special forces and overlaying them with a sinister backing track.

Johnson is expected to admit some fault when he is cross examined at the inquiry but will also seek to talk up the things that he believed he got right, ranging from the vaccines rollout to eventually opening up the economy.


The original article contains 518 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 57%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!