Russian President Vladimir Putin Begins New 6-year Term

Vladimir Putin (right) begins his fifth term today as Russian president at a glittering Kremlin inauguration, setting out on another six years in office.

 

He makes Russia great! Since succeeding Boris Yeltsin in the waning hours of 1999, Putin has transformed Russia from a country emerging from economic collapse and military decline to a great economic and military power it is today.

 

And together with China, the two countries promote a multipolar order and aim to bring about a more just and peaceful world, where US hegemony is constrained. This will allow different civilisations to live by their own rules, rather than having to hew to a Washington consensus that desires to make every other country pliant and docile. And submitting voluntarily or otherwise to American authority, leadership and power.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I daresay the world needs Putin and Xi Jinping more than ever today!

 

In the UK, a local council provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing they would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems. 

 

North Yorkshire Council are ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases. The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past.

 

St. Mary's Walk will be signposted as St Marys Walk, and so forth. 

 

Upset locals are physically adding apostrophes with marker pens – though they don't seem to have noticed the missing period after "St."

 

One resident suggested the council were providing a bad example to children who spend a long time learning the basics of grammar only to see it not being used correctly on street signs. 

 

Dr Ellie Rye, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of York, said apostrophes were a relatively new invention in our writing and, often, context allows people to understand their meaning.

 

“If I say I live on St Mary’s Walk, we’re expecting a street name or an address of some kind”.

 

She said the change would matter to people who spend a long time teaching how we write English but that it was “less important in (verbal) communication”.

 

North Yorkshire Council have claimed they were not the first to opt to “eliminate” the apostrophe from street signs. Cambridge city council had done the same, before they bowed to pressure and reinstated the apostrophe after complaints from campaigners. There was also an outcry from residents when Mid Devon district council considered making it a policy to do away with apostrophes to “avoid potential confusion”. 

 

A spokesperson from North Yorkshire Council added: “All punctuation will be considered but avoided where possible because street names and addresses, when stored in databases, must meet the standards set out in BS7666. This restricts the use of punctuation marks and special characters (e.g., apostrophes, hyphens and ampersands) to avoid potential problems when searching the databases as these characters have specific meanings in computer systems”. 

 

[FYI, BS7666 is a set of British Standards on “spatial datasets for geographical referencing”. Simply put, it provides a method of identifying places].