LONDON: UK Prime Minister Liz Truss was hanging on to power by a thread on Thursday, after a senior minister quit her government with a barrage of criticism and a vote in the House of Commons descended into chaos and acrimony.
A botched economic plan unveiled by the government last month triggered financial turmoil and a political crisis that has seen the replacement of Truss’ Treasury chief, multiple policy U-turns and a breakdown of discipline in the governing Conservative Party.
Many Conservatives say Truss must resign – but she has remained defiant, saying she is “a fighter and not a quitter.”
Conservative lawmaker Simon Hoare said the government was in disarray.
“Nobody has a route plan. It’s all sort of hand-to-hand fighting on a day-to-day basis,” he told the BBC on Thursday. He said Truss had “about 12 hours” to turn the situation around.
Through the morning, a growing number of Conservative members of Parliament called for Truss to step down and end the chaos.
“It’s time for the prime minister to go,” said lawmaker Miriam Cates. Another, Steve Double, said: “She isn’t up to the job, sadly.”
Newspapers that usually support the Conservatives were vitriolic. An editorial in the Daily Mail was headlined: “The wheels have come off the Tory clown car.”
International Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan, sent onto the airwaves Thursday morning to defend the government, insisted the administration was providing “stability.” But she was unable to guarantee Truss would lead the party into the next election.
“At the moment, I think that’s the case,” she said.
With opinion polls giving the Labour Party a large and growing lead, many Conservatives now believe their only hope of avoiding electoral oblivion is to replace Truss. But they are divided about how to get rid of her, and over who should replace her.
The party is keen to avoid another divisive leadership contest like the race a few months ago that saw Truss defeat ex-Treasury chief Rishi Sunak. Among potential replacements — if only Conservative lawmakers can agree — are Sunak, House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt and newly appointed Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt.
A national election doesn’t have to be held until 2024, and under Conservative Party rules, Truss technically is safe from a leadership challenge for a year. The rules can be changed if enough lawmakers want it. There is fevered speculation about how many lawmakers have already submitted letters calling for a no-confidence vote.
In a major blow, Home Secretary Suella Braverman resigned Wednesday after breaching rules by sending an official document from her personal email account. She used her resignation letter to lambaste Truss, saying she had “concerns about the direction of this government.”
“The business of government relies upon people accepting responsibility for their mistakes,” she said in a thinly veiled dig at Truss.
Braverman was replaced as home secretary, the minister responsible for immigration and law and order, by former Cabinet minister Grant Shapps, a high-profile supporter of her defeated rival Sunak.
Truss faced more turmoil in Parliament Wednesday evening on a vote over fracking for shale gas — a practice that Truss wants to resume despite opposition from many Conservatives.
With a large Conservative majority in Parliament, an opposition call for a fracking ban was easily defeated, but some lawmakers were furious that Conservative Party whips said the vote would be treated as a confidence motion, meaning the government would fall if the motion passed.
There were angry scenes in the House of Commons, with party whips accused of using heavy-handed tactics to gain votes. Labour lawmaker Chris Bryant said he “saw members being physically manhandled ... and being bullied.” Conservative officials denied there had been manhandling.
Rumors swirled that Conservative Chief Whip Wendy Morton, who is responsible for party discipline, and her deputy had resigned. Hours later, Truss’ office said both remained in their jobs.
The dramatic developments came days after Truss fired her Treasury chief, Kwasi Kwarteng, on Friday after the economic package the pair unveiled Sept. 23 spooked financial markets and triggered an economic and political crisis.
The plan’s 45 billion pounds ($50 billion) in unfunded tax cuts sparked turmoil on financial markets, hammering the value of the pound and increasing the cost of UK government borrowing. The Bank of England was forced to intervene to prevent the crisis from spreading to the wider economy and putting pension funds at risk.
On Monday Kwarteng’s replacement, Hunt, scrapped almost all of Truss’ tax cuts, along with her flagship energy policy and her promise of no public spending cuts. He said the government will need to save billions of pounds and there are “many difficult decisions” to be made before he sets out a medium-term fiscal plan on Oct. 31.
Speaking to lawmakers for the first time since the U-turn, Truss apologized Wednesday and admitted she had made mistakes during her six weeks in office, but insisted that by changing course she had “taken responsibility and made the right decisions in the interest of the country’s economic stability.”
Opposition lawmakers shouted “Resign!” as she spoke in the House of Commons.
But she insisted: “I am a fighter and not a quitter.”
Liz Truss faces clamor to quit amid UK government chaos
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Liz Truss faces clamor to quit amid UK government chaos
- Botched economic plan unveiled by the government last month triggered financial turmoil and a political crisis
- Under Conservative Party rules, Truss technically is safe from a leadership challenge for a year
Trump is receptive to contacts with North Korean leader, White House says
- Trump open to communication with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un
- North Korea rejecting Trump letter, according to a report
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump would welcome communications with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after having had friendly relations with Kim during his first term, the White House said on Wednesday.
“The president remains receptive to correspondence with Kim Jong Un,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.
She was responding to a report by Seoul-based NK News, a website that monitors North Korea, that the North’s delegation at the United Nations in New York had repeatedly refused to accept a letter from Trump to Kim.
Trump and Kim held three summits during Trump’s 2017-2021 first term and exchanged a number of what Trump called “beautiful” letters. In June 2019, Trump briefly stepped into North Korea from the demilitarized zone with South Korea.
Little progress was made, however, at reining in North Korea’s nuclear program, and Trump acknowledged in March that Pyongyang is a “nuclear power.”
Since Trump’s first-term summitry with Kim ended, North Korea has shown no interest in returning to talks.
The attempts at rapprochement come after the election in South Korea of a new president, Lee Jae-myung, who has pledged to reopen dialogue with North Korea.
As a gesture of engagement on Wednesday Lee suspended South Korean loudspeakers blasting music and messages into the North at the Demilitarized Zone along their shared border.
Analysts say, however, that engaging North Korea will likely be more difficult for both Lee and Trump than it was in the US president’s first term.
Since then North Korea has significantly expanded its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, and developed close ties with Russia through direct support for Moscow’s war in Ukraine, to which Pyongyang has provided both troops and weaponry.
Kim said in a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin that his country will always stand with Moscow, state media reported on Thursday.
Russia hits Ukraine’s Kharkiv with deadly nighttime barrage of drones
- Zelensky: Attack shows Russia is not facing enough pressure
- Two southern regions without electricity after attacks
KHARKIV, Ukraine: A concentrated, nine-minute-long Russian drone attack on Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv on Wednesday killed six people and injured 64, including nine children, Ukrainian officials said.
The attack followed Russia’s two biggest air assaults of the war on Ukraine this week, part of intensified bombardments that Moscow says are retaliatory measures for Kyiv’s recent attacks in Russia.
A new wave of drone attacks on four city districts was reported early on Thursday by Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov, including a drone that landed in a school courtyard and smashed windows. There were no other reports of casualties or damage.
Elsewhere, two southern Ukrainian regions, Mykolaiv and Kherson, were left without electricity on Wednesday after Russian forces attacked an energy facility, the governors said.
Kharkiv, in Ukraine’s northeast, withstood Russia’s full-scale advance in the early days of the war but has since been a regular target of drone, missile and guided aerial bomb assaults.
Prosecutors in Kharkiv region said on the Telegram messaging app that the death toll in Tuesday night’s incidents had risen to six as rescue teams pulled bodies from under the rubble. They said three people were still believed to be trapped.
The strikes by 17 drones on Kharkiv sparked fires in 15 units of a five-story apartment block and caused other damage in the city close to the Russian border, Mayor Terekhov said.
“There are direct hits on multi-story buildings, private homes, playgrounds, enterprises and public transport,” Terekhov said on the Telegram messaging app.
“Every new day now brings new despicable blows from Russia, and almost every blow is telling. Russia deserves increased pressure; with literally every blow it strikes against ordinary life, it proves that the pressure is not enough,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram.
A Reuters witness saw emergency rescuers helping to carry people out of damaged buildings and administering care, while firefighters battled blazes in the dark.
Nine of the injured, including a 2-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy, have been hospitalized, Oleh Sinehubov, the governor of the broader Kharkiv region, said on Telegram.
In total, the Ukrainian military said Russia had launched 85 drones overnight, 40 of which were shot down.
Blackouts
In the southern Kherson region, workers were trying to restore electricity supplies after Russian forces attacked what its governor, Oleksandr Prokudin, said was “an important energy facility.”
“It is currently impossible to predict the duration of the work. Residents of the region, I ask you to show understanding and prepare for a prolonged power outage,” he said on the Telegram messenger.
The governor of the neighboring Mykolaiv region, Vitaliy Kim, said his region was also experiencing emergency shutdowns but that power would soon be restored.
Kherson region directly borders a war zone and is under daily drone, missile and artillery attack. The Mykolaiv region faces mainly missile and drone attacks.
There was no immediate comment from Russia on the latest overnight attacks.
Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched on its smaller neighbor in February 2022. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.
Mali’s government adopts bill granting junta leader 5 more years in power
- The bill now awaits ratification by the National Transitional Council, the legislative body overseeing the transition
BAMAKO, Mali: Mali’s Council of Ministers on Wednesday adopted a controversial bill granting the head of the military junta an additional five years in power.
Gen. Assimi Goita has led the West African nation since orchestrating two coups in 2020 and 2021. The move follows the military regime’s dissolution of political parties in May.
According to the government’s cabinet statement, the bill will lead to the “revision of the Transition Charter, granting the Head of State a five-year renewable mandate starting in 2025.” It implements the recommendations of the national dialogue consultations organized by the military regime in April, which the political parties boycotted.
The bill now awaits ratification by the National Transitional Council, the legislative body overseeing the transition.
Earlier in May, Gen. Goita signed a decree dissolving political parties, a decision made against a backdrop of burgeoning opposition. It coincided with a surge in kidnappings of pro-democracy activists in the capital, Bamako, and just days after a demonstration by several hundred activists.
Mali, a landlocked nation in the semiarid region of Sahel, has been embroiled in political instability that swept across West and Central Africa over the last decade.
The nation has seen two military coups since 2020 as an insurgency by jihadi groups linked to Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group worsened. The junta had promised a return to civilian rule by March 2024, but later postponed elections. No date has been set yet for the presidential election.
At least 49 people have died in flooding in South Africa with toll expected to rise, officials say
- The death toll included six high school students who were washed away when their school bus was caught in floodwaters
JOHANNESBURG: At least 49 people were confirmed dead Wednesday as floods devastated one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, and officials said the toll was expected to rise as more bodies are recovered in the search for missing people.
The floods hit the largely rural Eastern Cape province in the southeast of the country early Tuesday after an especially strong weather front brought heavy rains, gale force winds and also snow in some parts.
“As we speak here, other bodies are being discovered,” Eastern Cape Premier Oscar Mabuyane told reporters at a briefing, adding that it was one of the worst weather-related disasters his province had experienced. “I have never seen something like this,” he said.
The death toll included six high school students who were washed away when their school bus was caught in floodwaters on Tuesday near a river close to the town of Mthatha, which was especially hard hit and at the center of the worst flooding. Four other students were among the missing, Mabuyane said.
Authorities found the school bus earlier Wednesday, but it was empty. Three of the students were rescued on Tuesday when they were found clinging to trees and crying out for help, the provincial government said.
A driver and another adult who were on the bus with the schoolchildren were among the dead.
Search and rescue operations would continue for a third day on Thursday, authorities said, though they didn’t give details on how many people might still be missing. They said they were working with families to find out who was still unaccounted for.
Disaster response teams have been activated in Eastern Cape province and the neighboring KwaZulu-Natal province after the torrential rain and snow hit parts of southern and eastern South Africa over the weekend. Mabuyane said there had also been reports of mudslides.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the National Disaster Management Center was also working with local authorities in the Eastern Cape, the province that took the brunt of the extreme cold front that weather forecasters had warned was on its way last week. There were unusually large snowfalls in parts of Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State province in South Africa’s interior.
Ramaphosa offered his condolences to the affected families in the Eastern Cape in a statement from his office and described the situation as “devastation.”
Power outages have affected hundreds of thousands of homes in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
Eastern Cape provincial government officials said hundreds of families were left homeless and in temporary shelters in that province after their houses were washed away or broken apart, while at least 58 schools and 20 hospitals were damaged by the floods, which mostly affected Mthatha and the surrounding district.
Other houses were left submerged under water. Cars and debris that were carried away by the floods were left strewn in piles as the rain stopped and the water began to subside.
South Africa is vulnerable to strong weather fronts that blow in from the Indian and Southern Oceans. In 2022, more than 400 people died in flooding caused by prolonged heavy rains in the east coast city of Durban and surrounding areas.
Poor areas with informal housing are often the worst affected and where the majority of fatalities occur.
Northern Ireland hit by third night of violence but main flashpoint calmer
BALLYMENA, Northern Ireland: Violence erupted in different parts of Northern Ireland for the third successive night on Wednesday, with masked youths starting a fire in a leisure center but unrest in the primary flashpoint of Ballymena was notably smaller in scale.
Hundreds of masked rioters attacked police and set homes and cars on fire in Ballymena, a town of 30,000 people located 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Belfast, on Tuesday night in what police condemned as “racist thuggery.”
The violence flared on Monday after two 14-year-old boys were arrested and appeared in court earlier that day, accused of a serious sexual assault on a teenage girl in the town.
The charges were read via a Romanian interpreter to the boys, whose lawyer told the court that they denied the charge, the BBC reported. Police are investigating the damaging of properties on Monday and Tuesday in Ballymena, which has a relatively large migrant population, as racially-motivated hate crimes.
Two Filipino families told Reuters they fled their home in Ballymena on Tuesday night after fearing for their safety when their car was set on fire outside the house.
A few dozen masked youths threw some rocks, fireworks and petrol bombs at police after officers in riot gear and armored vans blocked roads in the town on Wednesday evening.
Police deployed water cannon against the crowd for the second successive night but the clashes were nothing like the previous night that left 17 officers injured and led to five arrests.
Much of the crowd had left the streets before midnight.
A small number of riot police were also in the town of Larne 30 kilometers west where masked youths smashed the windows of a leisure center before starting fires in the lobby, BBC footage showed.
Swimming classes were taking place when bricks were thrown through the windows and staff had to barricade themselves in before running out the back door, a local Alliance Party lawmaker, Danny Donnelly, told the BBC.
Northern Ireland’s Communities Minister Gordon Lyons had earlier posted on Facebook that a number of people had been temporarily moved to the leisure center following the disturbances in Ballymena, before then being moved out of Larne.
The comments drew sharp criticism from other political parties for identifying a location used to shelter families seeking refuge from anti-immigrant violence. Lyons condemned the attacks on the center.
Police said youths also set fires at a roundabout in the town of Newtownabbey, a flashpoint for sectarian violence that sporadically flares up in the British-run region 27 years after a peace deal largely ended three decades of bloodshed.
Debris was also set alight at a barricade in Coleraine, the Belfast Telegraph reported.
The British and Irish governments as well as local politicians have condemned the violence.
