Foreign News
Britain’s Conservatives trounced in local elections as Labour makes gains
Britain’s ruling Conservative Party has suffered a resounding defeat in local elections, a further sign that it is likely to be removed from power in upcoming general elections.
With nearly all council results in, the Conservatives have lost 473 seats, while the opposition Labour Party has picked up 185, as counting was under way on Saturday for a few more assembly and mayoral polls.
Critically, Labour’s Sadiq Khan won London’s mayoral race, securing a record third term and dealing the Conservatives another damaging defeat.
With the results in from 106 of 107 council elections, the Conservatives lost about half of those it was defending, costing it control of 10 councils.
Its rival Labour Party wrestled control of eight councils, while also winning three newly created mayoral seats, including one in Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s own northern English constituency.
Labour also won a by-election for the Blackpool South parliamentary seat, triggered by the resignation of the scandal-plagued Conservative MP Scott Benton.
Labour leader Keir Starmer said the emphatic victories nationwide sent the prime minister a clear message to hold a nationwide vote.
“Voters in Blackpool South have sent a direct message to Rishi Sunak: Make way, let’s have a general election,” said Starmer.
Sunak, whose Tories are down about 20 points in the polls to Labour must order a general election to be held by January 28 next year at the latest.
Labour performed strongly in areas that voted for Britain’s exit from the European Union, such as Hartlepool in the northeast of England, and Thurrock in southeastern England. Labour also seized control of Rushmoor, a leafy and military-heavy council in the south of England where it had never won.
In addition to its council victories, Labour won mayoral seats in the York and North Yorkshire, North East and East Midlands areas.
“Let’s turn the page on decline,” Starmer told supporters on Saturday in the East Midlands.
Conservative mayor Ben Houchen was re-elected in Tees Valley, a rare success, although with a greatly reduced majority.
A few more mayor races will be called over the weekend.
“We are probably looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years,” John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, told BBC radio.
While Labour had an overall strong showing, its candidates appear to have suffered in some areas with large Muslim populations, such as Blackburn and Oldham in northwest England, due to the party leadership’s stance on Israel’swar on Gaza including an initial refusal to call for a ceasefire.
In areas that have a greater than 10 percent Muslim population, Labour’s vote share dropped by an average of 11 percent, according to the BBC.
The Workers Party of George Galloway, who was re-elected to parliament in March touting a pro-Palestinian message, picked up four seats.
Sunak, while acknowledging the results were “disappointing”, has remained positive about his party’s chances in the general elections. “Come a general election, voters are going to stick with us,” Sunak said on Friday while celebrating the Conservative win in Tees Valley.
Sunak, who has failed to improve the party’s popularity since succeeding Liz Truss in October 2022, previously said he planned to call for a general election in the second half of 2024.
If that contest plays out similarly to the local elections, Labour would be expected to win about 34 percent of the vote, with the Conservatives trailing by nine points, according to the BBC.
Writing in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, Sunak admitted the returns showed “voters are frustrated” but added that “we Conservatives have everything to fight for”.
(Aljazeera)
A court in China has sentenced a man to death for killing 35 people last month by driving into a crowd, in an attack that raised national concern about mass killings.
Fan Weiqiu was venting his anger because he was unhappy with his divorce settlement, the court in the southern city of Zhuhai said in handing down the sentence on Friday.
The victims were exercising at a sports centre. Fan pleaded guilty to endangering public safety by dangerous means, a court statement said.
Fan’s “criminal motive was extremely despicable, the nature of the crime was extremely vile, the means of the crime were particularly cruel, and the consequences of the crime were particularly severe, resulting in great social harm”, the court said.
The attack on November 11 was one of the deadliest attacks in contemporary Chinese history.
It was among a spate of violent attacks that have recently raised questions about public safety in China, where citizens have long been proud of streets safe from violence.
The attacks spurred Chinese leader Xi Jinping to order local governments to take steps to prevent future “extreme cases”.
His order prompted pledges from local leaders to examine personal disputes that could trigger aggression, from marital troubles to disagreements over inheritance.
Some analysts have linked the incidents to growing anger and desperation at the country’s slowing economy and a sense that society is becoming more stratified.
A court earlier this week gave a suspended death sentence with a two-year reprieve to a driver who injured 30 people when he drove into elementary school students and parents in Hunan province. Such sentences are usually commuted to life in prison.
The court in the city of Changde said the driver was taking out his frustration after losing money he had invested.
Chinese authorities keep a tight lid on any reports about the attacks, censoring videos and witness accounts posted on social media and releasing only basic information, often many hours later.
The death toll in Zhuhai was not announced until 24 hours after the attack. In addition to the 35 people killed, 43 were injured, police said.
The 62-year-old driver, Fan, was found in his vehicle trying to stab himself with a knife, a police statement said.
Police set up barricades the day after the attack and barred people from entering the sports complex. Members of the public left bouquets by an adjacent square instead.
[Aljazeera]
More than 1,300 pea-sized, critically endangered snails that were bred in a zoo have been set free to wander (very slowly) on a remote Atlantic island.
The release brings two species of Desertas Grande Island land snails back to the wild. Prior to this they were believed to be extinct – neither species had been spotted for a century.
When a team of conservationists found a small population surviving on the rocky cliffs of Desertas Grande island, close to Madeira, they mounted a rescue effort.
The snails were brought to zoos in the UK and France, including Chester Zoo, where a home was created for them in a converted shipping container.
The tiny molluscs are native to the windswept, mountainous island of Desertas Grande, just south-east of Madeira. Habitat there has been destroyed by rats, mice and goats that were brought to the island by humans.
It was thought that all these invasive predators had eaten the tiny snails to extinction. Then a series of conservation expeditions – between 2012 and 2017 – proved otherwise.
Conservationists discovered just 200 surviving individuals on the island.
Those snails were believed to be the last of their kind, so they were collected and brought into captivity.
At Chester Zoo, the conservation science team made a new home for 60 of the precious snails. The right food, vegetation and conditions were recreated in miniature habitat tanks.
1,329 snail offspring, bred at the zoo, have now been marked with identification dots – using non-toxic pens and nail varnish – and transported back to the wild for release.
“It’s a colour code,” said Dinarte Teixeira, a conservation biologist at Madeira’s Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests. “This will allow us to spot them and track where they disperse to, how much they grow, how many survive and how well they adapt to their new environment.”
A wild refuge has been restored for the snails on Bugio, a smaller neighbouring island in the Ilhas Desertas (Desert Islands) archipelago. Bugio is a nature reserve and invasive species have been eradicated there.
Gerardo Garcia from Chester Zoo said that the reintroduction was “a major step in a species recovery plan”.
“If it goes as well as we hope, more snails will follow them next spring. It’s a huge team effort which shows that it is possible to turn things around for highly threatened species.”
“These snails are such an important part of the natural habitat [on the islands they come from],” explained Heather Prince from Chester Zoo. As well as being food for other native species, she explained, snails break down organic matter and bring nutrients to the soil.
“They help plants grow. All of that is dependent on the little guys – the insects and the snails that so often get overlooked.”
[BBC]
Azerbaijan’s transport minister has said the Azerbaijan Airlines plane that crashed on 25 December was subjected to “external interference” and damaged inside and out, as it tried to land in Russia’s southern republic of Chechnya.
“All the survivors without exception stated they heard three blast sounds when the aircraft was above Grozny,” said Rashad Nabiyev.
The plane is thought to have come under fire from Russian air defence systems before being diverted across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, where it crashed with the loss of 38 lives.
The Kremlin has refused to comment, but the head of Russia’s civil aviation agency said the situation in Grozny was “very complicated” at the time and a closed-skies protocol had been put in place.
“Ukrainian combat drones were launching terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure in the cities of Grozny and Vladikavkaz,” said Dmitry Yadrov, head of Rosaviatsia, in a video statement posted on Russia’s Tass news agency.
“Because of this a ‘Carpet plan’ was introduced in the area of Grozny airport, providing for the immediate departure of all aircraft from the specified area,” he said. “In addition, there was dense fog in the area of Grozny airport.”
Later on Friday White House spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that the US had seen “early indications” that the plane may have been downed by Russian air defence, but declined to comment further.
The Washington Post reported Kirby had said the indications the US had seen went beyond the widely-circulated photos of the damaged plane.
Ukrainian presidential spokesman Andriy Yermak has said Russia must be held responsible.
Azerbajian Airlines said on Friday that a preliminary inquiry had blamed both “physical and technical external interference”, without going into details.
However, aviation experts and others in Azerbaijan believe the plane’s GPS systems were affected by electronic jamming and it was then damaged by shrapnel from Russian air-defence missile blasts.
The transport minister said investigators would now examine “what kind of weapon, or rather what kind of rocket was used.”
The government in Baku has so far avoided directly accusing Russia, possibly to avoid antagonising President Vladimir Putin.
However, pro-government MP Rasim Musabekov was clear: “The plane was shot down over Russian territory, in the skies above Grozny. Denying this is impossible.”
He told AFP news agency the plane had been damaged and the pilot had asked to make an emergency landing in Grozny. Instead of being directed to nearby airports, he said it was “sent far away” across the Caspian Sea without GPS.
Flight attendant Zulfuqar Asadov described the moments when the plane was hit by “some kind of external strike” over Chechnya. “The impact of it caused panic inside. We tried to calm them down, to get them seated. At that moment, there was another strike, and my arm was injured.”
Veteran Azerbaijani pilot Tahir Agaguliev told Azerbaijani media that shrapnel had damaged the hydraulics that controlled the plane: “The missile itself did not hit the plane; it was shrapnel from the missile that struck. The missile exploded about 10m (30ft) away, before reaching the plane.”
The pilots of the Embraer 190 plane are credited with saving 29 of those on board by managing to land part of the plane, despite themselves being killed in the crash.
The Kremlin has refused to comment on the increasing number of reports that the Azerbaijan Airlines plane was hit by Russian air defence.
“An investigation into this aviation incident is underway and until the conclusions are made as a result of the investigation, we do not consider ourselves entitled to give any assessments,” said spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Azerbaijan is looking for a Russian apology, or at least an acknowledgement, that the plane was hit by its air defences in Grozny, according to figures close to the government in Baku.
Four years ago, Baku apologised and offered compensation when a Russian air force Mi-24 helicopter was shot down at the end of the 2020 war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
“Now the Azerbaijani side is also expecting Russia to take those steps,” said political commentator Farhad Mammadov.
Kazakh authorities have been treating the injured and working closely with Azerbaijan on the investigation.
Officials say the Brazilian plane manufacturer Embraer has sent two specialists to the crash site, 3km (1.9 miles) from Aktau airport in Kazakhstan, and three members of Brazil’s aviation agency will arrive on Saturday.
Reports in Baku suggest both Russia and Kazakhstan have proposed having a committee from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – a regional organisation dominated by Russia – investigate the crash, but Azerbaijan has instead demanded an international inquiry.
Azerbaijan Airlines and several other airlines have suspended flights to some Russian cities in response to the crash.
In a social media post, the airline said this was “for security reasons”. It had already halted flights to Grozny and Makhachkala in neighbouring Dagestan, but has now added the cities of Sochi, Volgograd, Ufa, Samara and Mineralnye Vody.
Israel’s flagship airline, El Al, has meanwhile suspended all flights to Moscow, citing developments in Russian airspace, and UAE-based budget carrier Flydubai has halted flights to Sochi and Mineralnye Vody.
[BBC]
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