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However, there are major question marks over how the additional spending will be paid for while Downing Street has also been forced to deny that the new money for the military is simply an attempt to impress US President-elect Joe Biden.
There is growing speculation that some of the money could come from the foreign aid budget, with Chancellor Rishi Sunak due to set out the Government’s one-year Spending Review next week.
The UK is setting up „RAF Space Command“, a wing of the Armed Forces which will be capable of launching Britain’s first rocket as early as 2022, the prime minister has announced.
Boris Johnson said a military investment of £16.5 billion will also fund the development of Artificial Intelligence and a National Cyber Force aimed at targeting terrorism, organised crime and hostile state activity.
A letter to Boris Johnson from the Northern Research Group – a newly-launched alliance of Tory MPs led by ex-Northern Powerhouse minister Jake Berry – outlines the group’s demands, which include a tailored economic recovery plan for the north.
Mr Berry says that the virus could widen the North-South divide and ’send the North into reverse‘. His group is now calling for Mr Johnson to ‚level-up the North‘ – something the PM claimed he would do following sweeping Conservative gains in the region in the General Election.
The MPs reminded Johnson of his promises to “level up” disadvantaged parts of the country, which helped persuade voters in former industrial heartlands last December to back his Tories instead of the opposition Labour Party many had supported for decades.
It was described as ‚unenforceable‘ by the Police Federation earlier this week and there is still no sign of any high-visibility patrols or roadblocks to deter travel from Merseyside – despite Liverpool being in Tier 3.
Those who ignore the restrictions will be breaking the law and could face fixed penalty notices starting at £50 – but there have so far been no reports of drivers being stopped.
Following the announcement of a new three-tier lockdown system, which will see areas with higher Covid rates imposed with harsher measures, the Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) is leading a revolt against new rules that could see thousands of bars and restaurants ordered to close.
Two of the country’s biggest brewers and pub operators, Joseph Holt and JW Lees, are also involved in the challenge, alongside a further 10 hospitality businesses and organisations.
OVERNIGHT stays will be forbidden in northern virus hotspots for four weeks, Boris Johnson will announce today.
As well as the bed ban, residents can only leave the highest risk regions for essential travel such as work, education or health reasons, and must return that day.
Burnham told the Observer that by offering to pay only two-thirds of the wages of people hit by new closures – as opposed to the 80% which applied nationally under the original furlough scheme – ministers would be punishing people in the north in a way that was completely unacceptable.
Burnham said the Conservatives were betraying the people in so-called “red wall” seats who they had persuaded to vote Tory at the general election last December with pledges to “level up” the country.
Millions of people will be asked not to travel outside their local areas and could be banned from mixing with other households, even outdoors, amid fears that some hospitals in the North-West could be overwhelmed within days.
This weekend, Downing Street was briefing mayors and council leaders on the planned three-tier „Local Covid Alert Levels“ system of restrictions for England, expected to be announced by Boris Johnson on Monday.
(03.10.2020)
Last month, Professor Whitty and Sir Patrick – dubbed Glum and Glummer by critics – held their own press conference, warning the infection rate could rise to 50,000 cases a day by mid-October.
Conservative MPs and local leaders in the North have been venting fury about the government’s stance, with former minister Jake Berry accusing the premier of being ‚London-centric‘ and enjoying his sweeping emergency powers ‚a little bit too much‘.
Politicians in Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield raged at ‚diktats announced without notice‘ and said ministers were treating the North like a ‚petri dish for experimentation‘ while the South gets off lightly.
The north-south split could cost the Tories their majority
The authorities believe it will positively contribute to encouraging the use of local currencies for the settlement of trade and direct investment between the two countries, the statement said.
Today, using the coronavirus as an excuse, the Democrats seek to abolish how we conduct elections in the United States.
Our current system of voting came into being as a result of a great progressive reform movement in the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Ardent progressive reformers, like the socialist Henry George in 1886, strove to prevent corruption in the electoral process. The progressive reformers championed a system of voting by an official ballot printed at public expense by a neutral authority. Previously political parties had printed their own ballots and ward bosses paid people to vote for their candidates, stuff ballots and vote repeatedly.
The system was intimidating and enormously corrupt. A supervisory public authority was necessary to monitor balloting, ensure fairness, and provide the necessary element of voter secrecy.
The new structure of reform called the ‚Australian ballot‘, (named from its place of origin) specifies that a citizen coming to the poll be registered to vote and identified. At the poll, he gives his name and address. He receives an official ballot; marks it in the secrecy of a booth and hands it in to be counted.
The president portrayed the nation’s cities as out of control. “Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left,” Mr. Trump said. He added: “If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”
Democrats said the president was the one out of control.
Following a Stuttgarter Zeitung report on Saturday that a local police chief had announced research into the family trees of suspects with German passports, police in the southern city of Stuttgart responded on Sunday that this was a routine procedure.
While the national jobless rate has rebounded as many states started to reopen, New Yorkers continue to lose jobs and seek benefits.
(08.06.2020)
In April, as coronavirus infections multiplied and laboratory testing was limited, the CSTE and the CDC advised states to count both probable cases and deaths — where symptoms and exposure pointed to infection — along with those confirmed by tests.
Yet weeks after the guidance was handed down to standardize coronavirus reporting, a Post review found states as of early June counting cases and deaths in all sorts of ways.
At least 24 states are not heeding the national guidelines on reporting probable cases and deaths, despite previously identifying probable cases in other national outbreaks, including H1N1 flu during the country’s last pandemic in 2009.
USA TODAY Network journalists in towns all across the country spoke to citizens from May 31 to June 3 at protests and community centers to better understand the situation on the ground. Here’s what we heard:
WJBK-TV reported that Whitmer extended her order on Friday evening at around 5:00 p.m., just as the Memorial Day weekend kicked off.
In a statement Wednesday afternoon, the Georgia Department of Health said it would remove the antibody testing data from the diagnostic data, although it had been following the current CDC guidance on the reporting data.
Thursday, Toomey addressed the issue during a state news conference.
“I’m actually am grateful that the media are looking at this closely because often you can recognize things that I did not see, or there are some inconsistencies that I didn’t notice,” Toomey said.
As of May 16, the state had performed close to 700,000 COVID-19 tests, according to the Florida Department of Health; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that Florida had conducted more than 900,000 COVID-19 tests.
With a 33% difference between the two agencies, Florida is one of 10 states to report such large discrepancies in testing numbers, with Florida being the most extreme case, according to an analysis by The COVID Tracking Project, which compared cases, deaths and testing numbers reported by each state and by the CDC’s Data Tracker.
This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.
Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this.
The CDC combines the results of genetic tests that spot people who are actively infected, mostly by using a process known as polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, with results from another, known as serology testing, which looks for antibodies in people’s blood. Antibody testing is used to identify people who were previously infected.
Massachusetts has added more than 1,000 workers and sent some into communities with large numbers of cases. California last week began training the first recruits of a planned 20,000-person contact tracing team. And New York plans to add as many as 17,000 contact tracers through a partnership with former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Resolve to Save Lives, headed by former CDC Director Tom Frieden.
State governments are building armies of contact tracers in a new phase of the battle against the coronavirus pandemic, returning to a fundamental practice in public health that can at once wrestle the virus under control and put hundreds of thousands of newly jobless people back to work.
California is already conducting contact tracing in 22 counties, and it eventually plans to field a force of 10,000 state employees, who will be given basic training by University of California health experts.
Raucous protests erupted around California this week as demonstrators demanded that Gov. Gavin Newson’s stay-at-home order be lifted.
Demonstrators were also protesting the authoritarian mask mandate that takes effect on Wednesday.
Dubbed the “Liberty Rally,” the protest, promoted by conservative radio host Jeffrey Kuhner, was planned in the event Republican Governor Charlie Baker didn’t reopen businesses on May 4.
Governor Baker extended his state’s stay-at-home order until May 18 and signed an order requiring Massachusetts residents to wear masks in public.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday faced the most intense pressure yet to lift restrictions on daily life, with a series of raucous protests around the state, a legal tussle with Orange County over closing its beaches and a rural Northern California county that defied his stay-at-home order and opened up for business.
Modoc County moved Friday to reopen hair salons, churches, restaurants and the county’s only movie theater. There haven’t been any confirmed cases of COVID-19 among 9,000 residents, but the reopening came with strict social distancing limits.
The debate over how soon to ease restrictions and start opening California has pitted local and state officials against one another in one of the states hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak. It comes as other states such as Georgia and Texas are moving faster to open up their economies.
The step came as hundreds of conservative activists, including some who were openly carrying rifles, returned to the Capitol to denounce her stay-at-home order.
Whitmer wanted lawmakers to extend her emergency declaration by 28 days. It expires late Thursday.
The “American Patriot Rally” started on the statehouse steps, where members of the Michigan Liberty Militia stood guard with weapons and tactical gear, their faces partially covered. They later moved inside the Capitol along with several hundred protesters, who demanded to be let onto the House floor, which is prohibited. Some protesters with guns — which are allowed in the statehouse — went to the Senate gallery, where a senator said some armed men shouted at her, and some senators wore bulletproof vests.
Protesters frustrated with ongoing shelter-in-place restrictions in California due to the novel coronavirus pandemic are gathering at the state capitol in Sacramento.
People protest state’s stay-at-home orders; William La Jeunesse reports.
Modoc County, in the northeastern corner of California, is one of the least-populated counties in the state, with fewer than 9,000 residents. It plans to allow all businesses, schools and churches to reopen starting Friday, as long as people stay six feet apart, according to a statement signed by the county health officer, sheriff-coroner, chair of the Board of Supervisors, and other county officials.
Modoc County, Calif. — sparsely populated and located in the northeast corner of the state — is planning on reopening schools, hair salons, churches, restaurants and its lone movie theater on Friday, in direct defiance of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D) statewide stay-at-home order.
The Huntington Beach City Council voted Thursday night during an emergency session to seek an injunction against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s order to close Orange County beaches.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday directed the temporary “hard close” of state and local beaches in Orange County after thousands of Californians flocked to the shoreline there over the weekend in defiance of a statewide stay-at-home order enacted to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
Carter Evans reports.
In a two-page memorandum to the country’s 93 U.S. attorneys, Barr cautioned that some state and local directives could be infringing on protected religious, speech and economic rights.
“If a state or local ordinance crosses the line from an appropriate exercise of authority to stop the spread of COVID-19 into an overbearing infringement of constitutional and statutory protections, the Department of Justice may have an obligation to address that overreach in federal court,” Barr wrote.
There has been a growing movement from politicians in some rural or less urbanized parts of the state to request an easing of the rules, arguing that the situation there is not as severe as hot spots like Los Angeles County and Silicon Valley.
The latest request to Newsom comes from elected officials in Butte, Glenn, Tehama, Yuba, Sutter and Colusa counties in Northern California.
The moves to reopen follow in the steps of Georgia, Oklahoma, and Alaska, which on Friday began loosening lockdown restrictions on businesses despite health officials warning the gradual return to daily life might be happening too soon.
In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee (R ) said on Monday that “the vast majority of businesses” will be allowed to reopen when the state’s stay-at-home order expires on April 30, and as of Friday state parks and dine-in restaurants were allowed to open with reduced capacity. Tennessee was one of the last states to issue a stay-at-home order.
„Given the favorable data, enhanced testing, and approval of our healthcare professionals, we will allow gyms, fitness centers, bowling alleys, body art studios, barbers, cosmetologists, hair designers, nail care artists, estheticians, their respective schools, and massage therapists to reopen their doors this Friday, April 24, 2020. Unlike other businesses, these entities have been unable to manage inventory, deal with payroll, and take care of administrative items while we shelter in place. This measure allows them to undertake baseline operations that most other businesses in the state have maintained since I issued the shelter-in-place order.
„This measure will apply statewide and will be the operational standard in all jurisdictions. This means local action cannot be taken that is more or less restrictive.
And it says the Scottish Government will likely keep in force bans on large gatherings – such as at public events and pubs – “for some time to come”.
It sets out six principles that will guide Scottish ministers in lifting measures, promising to make decisions that are “safe”, “lawful”, “evidence-based”, “fair & ethical”, “clear”, “realistic” and “collective”.
Here are the reopening timelines announced so far by all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Krystal and Saagar talk about an MSNBC guest who called protestors advocating to re-open the government apart of a, ‚Fox News death cult.‘
Protests occurred in Colorado, Illinois, Florida, Tennessee and Washington.
Governors are heading for a clash with their own citizens and local officials as they weigh how and when to reopen the country’s economy amid the coronavirus pandemic.
– Legislative—including budget and veto—authority
Wolf has not said whether he will sign the measure but has said he will consider it.
President Trump has moved from stating that he alone can fix it to telling America’s governors that they need to “call your own shots” when it comes to reopening their economies during the nation’s worst health crisis in 100 years.
That’s our top takeaway from Trump’s announcement Thursday on federal guidelines to reopen the country “that put the onus on governors of making decisions about their states‘ economies,” per NBC News.
Read the White House’s plan for „Opening Up America Again“ here.
The guidelines released by the president effectively mean that any restoration of American society will take place on a patchwork basis.
A group of House members authored a new one-sentence resolution to remind President Trump of the limits on his power and challenged anyone in the House to vote against it.
A looming showdown between President Trump’s eagerness to revive a cratering economy and governors facing a deadly pandemic is leading to what could become the most contentious standoff between state and federal governments since the civil rights era.
For almost 250 years, the competing interests of states and the U.S. government have undergirded the most divisive debates in American history.
A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!
“ The president doesn’t have total authority. We have a constitution. We don’t have a king. We have an elected president. That’s what our founding fathers did when they wrote the constitution. And the constitution clearly says the powers that are not specifically listed for the federal government are reserved to the states. And the balance between federal and state authority was central to the constitution, it’s one of the great balances of power. „
Trump would not offer specifics about the source of his asserted power, which he claimed, despite constitutional limitations, was absolute.
“When somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said Monday at the White House. “The governors know that.”
An immunity rate of 15 per cent is already enough to slow the spread of the virus significantly, they added.
However, they admitted that all governments need to collect more data as the world still doesn’t know enough about the virus.
Last week, research conducted by Prof Streeck showed that the home of one infected family did not have ‚any live virus on any surface‘, adding even more questions as to how the virus is spread from person to person.
Prof Streeck said the virus had not even been found on door knobs or animal fur.
(04.04.2020)
The Wisconsin Republican Party has requested that the U.S. Supreme Court block extended absentee voting in the state’s presidential primary scheduled for Tuesday.
Many other states who were supposed to have primaries in April have rescheduled them for a later date due to the coronavirus pandemic, but Wisconsin is still slated to go through with its election as planned.
(31.03.2020)
The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Republican Party of Wisconsin on Tuesday in a case related to Wisconsin’s upcoming election.
The party brought the case against Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell last week.
McDonell issued guidance last week that any Dane County voter confined by the COVID-19 pandemic could mark themselves as „indefinitely confined“ on their absentee ballot application. Doing so would allow them to bypass the state’s voter ID requirement in their application.
A group of Senate Democrats want a federal watchdog to investigate the decision to change an online description of the country’s Strategic National Stockpile following a press briefing with White House adviser Jared Kushner.
The website of the Strategic National Stockpile was edited on Friday to soften language about how the stockpile is supposed to be used by states — a day after media outlets reported that the original version contradicted a claim by senior White House official Jared Kushner.
Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who doesn’t often make public appearances, says he has been serving on the coronavirus task force at the direction of Vice President Mike Pence.
When asked about data showing states‘ need for equipment, Kushner said, „The notion of the federal stockpile is that it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states‘ stockpiles that they then use.“
Despite government orders to restrict movements, tighten controls at airports and isolate the capital area to contain the spread of the virus, the number of infections registered in the region of Helsinki increased to 934.
This is 38 cases more than those reported on Tuesday and this amount also represents 61% of the total of new infections detected in Finland.
President Trump is holding back on declaring a nationwide stay-at-home order, even as some governors resist imposing restrictions that Trump’s top public health officials say are needed to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
The president has been reluctant to wade into matters he argues are better left to governors.
And on Monday, Hogan announced he issuing a „stay at home“ directive for the state, which makes it a misdemeanor for residents to leave their homes except to get food, medicine or medical treatment as of 8 p.m. EDT.
Earlier this month, Hogan issued an executive order making it a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail, a fine of up to $5,000, or both, for people to hold large gatherings.
For those wondering if this violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, the National Guard can be used to assist state and local law enforcement, if invited by the state’s governor.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday announced that he is issuing a stay-at-home order for the southern portion of the state as the number of positive coronavirus cases grows.
The order will apply to Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and Monroe counties through the middle of May.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R), Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) all urged residents to only leave their homes to buy food and carry out essential tasks.
Donald Trump decided late on Saturday against imposing a broad lockdown on New York and its neighbours after a strong pushback from local political leaders and warnings of the panic it could spark.
„A quarantine will not be necessary,“ he tweeted, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would issue a „travel advisory“ later in the evening.
The CDC shortly after issued a Domestic Travel Advisory urging against „non-essential domestic travel“ in the tri-state area for 14 days.
n 1946, after the war ended, the Supreme Court ruled in Duncan v. Kahanamoku that the statute authorizing martial law in Hawaii did not enable military trials of civilians, and it warned against the “subordination of executive, legislative and judicial authorities to complete military rule”—but it offered no further guidance about the circumstances that would justify a declaration of martial law, or about the consequences of such a declaration. Nor has Congress ever tried to clarify the criteria for or limits of martial law.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo responds to President Donald Trump considering a short-term quarantine of coronavirus „hot spots,“ including New York.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo reacts to President Donald Trump floating the idea of a temporary quarantine for New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
Trump suggested the quarantine would be travel based, meaning people inside the quarantine area couldn’t travel to other places in the country. He also said he would talk to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) about the possible quarantine.
Cuomo said he had talked to the president Saturday morning but that they hadn’t discussed a quarantine.
Masks that used to cost pennies now cost several dollars. Companies outside the traditional supply chain offer wildly varying levels of price and quality. Health authorities say they have few other choices to meet their needs in a ‘dog-eat-dog’ battle.
Commercial and office spaces on the first to 12th floors of the building, which include a wedding hall and a Starbucks franchise, have been shut down, while the city government is closely monitoring residents who live on the 13th to 19th floors of the building, he said.
The health ministry, meanwhile, said that five of the 207 workers were found to be followers of Shincheonji, which is associated with more than 60 percent of South Korea’s total infections.
All five have so far tested negative,
Seoul’s confirmed cases jumped by 52 to 193, with at least 65 cases linked to a call center in Guro Ward and another 14 cases linked to Eunpyeong St. Mary’s Hospital in Eunpyeong Ward. Another 13 cases in Seoul came from an apartment building in Seongdong Ward.
Incheon’s cases rose by 12 to 25, with 14 cases linked to the Guro call center. Gyeonggi Province, which surrounds Seoul and Incheon, saw confirmed cases climb by 12 to 175, with 26 cases tied to Shincheonji and 13 cases tied to the Guro call center.
According to the local Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC), there were 131 new cases as of March 10, compared to 248 and 367 new cases the previous two days, respectively. However, the KCDC does note the decline in Daegu and Gyeongbuk region—where the majority of cases are—is because nearly all members of the Shincheonji church at the center of the outbreak now have been tested.
Germany’s political establishment was rocked earlier this month after the CDU’s chapter in Thuringia cast its lot in with the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD, to install the eastern state’s premier. The fallout sent shockwaves across the nation and was the main catalyst for Kramp-Karrenbauer’s resignation.
To add to the sense of chaos, tensions around extremist activity in Germany intensified late Wednesday, when an assailant killed 11 people, including himself, in the city of Hanau near Frankfurt.
The American Federation of Musicians Local 47 is proud to endorse Bernie Sanders for President of the United States in the 2020 Primary Election.
Members of the Los Angeles musicians union’s political action committee voted unanimously to recommend that the AFM Local 47 executive board – the elected leadership body of the 7,000-member union – endorse Sen. Sanders as the candidate who best represents the interests of musicians. On Tuesday, the board in turn voted unanimously to endorse Sanders in an unprecedented move for a union historically removed from taking official stances in presidential elections.
Angela Merkel’s grand transition plan has derailed after her handpicked successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, unexpectedly called it quits on Monday.
Kramp-Karrenbauer, better known as AKK, announced she would not stand as the Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) candidate to be German chancellor in the next federal election. She is also stepping down as the party’s chairwoman, according to the CDU’s press office
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer plans to step down as leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, a spokesman for the party said in a statement on Monday. Kramp-Karrenbauer will also not seek to run as chancellor candidate for the CDU in the next election.
An exit poll for state television RAI said the PD incumbent was seen taking between 47.0%-51.0% of the vote, while the rightist candidate looked on course to take 44.0%-48.0%.
“And I can imagine people’s pencil’s hovering over the ballot paper and wavering before coming down for us and the Conservatives, and I know that people may have been breaking the voting habits of generations to vote for us.
“And I want the people of the North East to know that we in the Conservative Party and I will repay your trust – and everything that we do, everything that I do as your Prime Minister, will be devoted to repaying that trust.
Boris Johnson is considering a raid on a £80bn fund to fuel an infrastructure blitz in regions that helped deliver his election victory, it has emerged.
Speaking in Tony Blair’s former seat, Sedgefield, which voted in a Tory MP last week, Johnson said his party “will repay your trust” and that voters had “changed the Conservative party for the better”.
Speaking in Tony Blair’s old constituency, Boris Johnson has thanked Conservative activists and voters across north-east England for the party’s electoral gains in the region.
Boris Johnson is to visit the north of England later, hours after celebrating his party’s biggest election win for 30 years by sweeping aside Labour in its traditional heartlands.
(02.12.2019)
One of the two Israeli Communist demonstrators injured at Kafr Qaddum is evacuated by Palestinians, last Friday October 4. (Photo: Zo Haderech)
Public Security and Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan draws ire of Joint List leader who calls the remarks ‚racist‘ and accuses the minister of victim blaming; comments come in wake of protests against lack of police response to rise of violence in Israel’s Arab communities.
Many Israeli-Arab communities have experienced a recent surge in violence, with some 70 people killed in 2019, marking a 20% increase from last year. This September, 13 Arab-Israeli civilians were murdered.
Arab leaders place most of the blame on the Israeli authorities, accusing police of not putting enough effort into fighting illegal firearms.
Perhaps the most infamous recent example was the breakdown of the 127-year-old Denver Post. Since private equity firm Alden Global acquired the paper, it has cut two out of every three staff positions — twice the industry rate for downsizing.
To add insult to injury, the firm has been using staff pension funds as its own personal piggy bank. In total, they’ve moved nearly $250 million into investment accounts in the Cayman Islands.
By joining forces in Umbria, traditionally a PD stronghold, 5-Star and the PD hope to halt a long streak of victories by the center-right, which has triumphed in seven regional ballots since the national election in March 2018.
Success at the Oct. 27 Umbria vote would probably pave the way for similar alliances in the next few months in the regions of Emilia-Romagna in the industrial north, and Calabria in the poorer south.
The defecting 10 met with the Brexit Party at Nigel Farage’s rally in Sedgefield two days ago, where they informed Richard Tice of their decision. Guido suspects this will be far from the last council taken over by the Brexit Party if we don’t leave on the 31st…
President Donald Trump appeared to sarcastically call out a break-in at Rep. Elijah Cummings‘ Baltimore home after a week of attacking the prominent African American lawmaker over the conditions of his Baltimore district — even comparing the city’s murder rate to third world countries.
„Really bad news! The Baltimore house of Elijah Cummings was robbed. Too bad!“ the President tweeted on Friday morning.
Jane Dodds, the Lib Dems‘ leader in Wales, won with 43.5% of the vote, ahead of former Tory MP Chris Davies on 39% after he triggered the by-election following his conviction for submitting false expenses.
Polls have closed in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election as new prime minister Boris Johnson faces his first test at the ballot box.
Polls have now opened in the Brecon and Radnorshire by-election.
The 93 polling stations in the constituency are open until 10pm tonight.
Mr Davies was fined £1,500 and ordered to pay £2,500 towards legal costs, whilst also forced to carry out 50 hours of community service.
He was again chosen by the Tories to fight for the crucial Parliamentary seat after more than 10,000 constituents signed a petition to remove him.
Finally, while we would not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner — or ruefully point out that he failed to spell the congressman’s name correctly (it’s Cummings, not Cumming) — we would tell the most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office, the mocker of war heroes, the gleeful grabber of women’s private parts, the serial bankrupter of businesses, the useful idiot of Vladimir Putin and the guy who insisted there are “good people” among murderous neo-Nazis that he’s still not fooling most Americans into believing he’s even slightly competent in his current post. Or that he possesses a scintilla of integrity. Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.
The Baltimore Sun editorial board ripped President Trump as the „most dishonest man to ever occupy the Oval Office“ on Saturday in a scorching piece after Trump referred to Rep. Elijah Cummings‘ (D-Md.) 7th congressional district, which includes west Baltimore, as a „rat and rodent infested mess.“
CNN’s Victor Blackwell became emotional while responding to President Donald Trump’s tweets calling Rep. Elijah Cummings‘ (D-MD) district a „very dangerous & filthy place“ and calls out the President’s repeated use of the word „infested“ while attacking minority lawmakers.
Trump tweeted Saturday morning that Baltimore was a „disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,“ saying that „no human being would want to live there.“
The President’s rant was directed at Rep. Elijah Cummings, who represents Maryland’s 7th Congressional District and recently lambasted conditions at the border.
“The story has been for young people growing up there of hopelessness, or the hope that one day they will get out and never come back. The crucial point is it certainly isn’t really the fault of the places, and certainly isn’t the fault of the people growing up there.
They haven’t failed. It’s we, us, the politicians, our politics has failed them.”
In a clear pitch to traditional Labour voters, Mr Johnson insisted that politicians had failed people in the North.
He said: “The centre of Manchester, like the centre of London, is a wonder of the world.
“A few miles away from here, the story is very different.
“The story has been for young people growing up there of hopelessness, or the hope that one day they will get out and never come back.
(02.06.2019)
“It could have been me…” At an emergency memorial and protest held June 2 to remember the murder of a woman by a serviceman in the U.S. Marine Corps in Chatan, Okinawa in April, participants prayed for the victim to rest in peace and confirmed the importance of thinking of the incident not as someone else’s sorrow but as an event directly involving each and every person in Okinawa.
(12.06.2019)
In a prefectural referendum in February, a decisive 72 percent of voters in Okinawa expressed opposition to the base relocation.
Tamaki’s pledge to halt the base transfer led to his overwhelming victory in the gubernatorial election last September.
Forbes won 10,484 votes, beating the Brexit party’s Mike Greene, who took 9,801 votes, a margin of just 683. The Conservatives were beaten into third place with 7,243 votes. Turnout was 48%.
Nigel Farage, the Brexit party leader, left the count through a backdoor just minutes before the result was announced.
In a result that will alarm Tory headquarters Lisa Forbes took the seat despite winning less that a third of the vote – showing how Jeremy Corbyn could sneak a general election victory.
The narrow result saw the Brexiteer vote split between the Brexit Party and the Tories – combined they would have been enough to easily win the seat in an area what voted Leave in 2016.
The upstart eurosceptic party candidate Mike Greene lost the marginal by less than 700 votes to Corbynite Ms Forbes.
After a long night of counting, and an even longer campaign, the Labour party have been declared the winners of the Peterborough by-election. Lisa Forbes, the Labour party candidate, will replace Fiona Onasanya who was ousted from the seat earlier this year after she was convicted of perverting the course of justice. Forbes won 10,483 votes in the election, ahead of the Brexit party on 9,801, and the Conservatives on 7,243.
The polls have closed in the Peterborough parliamentary by-election, with the result due in the early hours of Friday morning.
Keep up-to-date with everything that is happening through the Peterborough Telegraph live blog below.
The polls in the Cambridgeshire city opened at 07:00 BST and will close at 22:00.
Results are expected in the early hours of Friday and coverage can be watched on BBC One’s This Week from 23:35.
Vote triggered after former Labour MP Fiona Onasanya was jailed for lying about a speeding offence.
Estimating around 70% of his support is coming from Conservative voters angry at Theresa May’s failure to deliver Brexit, however, Greene says: “They are standing up and saying ‘I support Brexit’ and it’s a bit of an ‘I Am Spartacus’ moment. The fears that have been pushed on them by the media and institutions are dropping away and it’s like ‘I Am Spartacus, I vote Brexit’.”
The Guy Newsroom can confirm from personal experience the levels of sheer unbridled incompetence at many local councils’ electoral departments. Trying to blame Brexit is a bit rich when exactly the same problems were reported five years ago, five years in which councils have still failed to get their acts together…
Where I live, in West Yorkshire, everywhere I go – to work, to the shops, to the pub, speaking with neighbours and friends – people have never been more openly political and unafraid to air their opinions. Talk is of democracy and its denial by Westminster; of traitors and authoritarians. The kind of language that would once only be used by marginal, radical groups has become the new normal. Even the local papers, not known for their political coverage, echo the public’s disgust at the denial of the referendum vote.
RUDE Tories have forced Theresa May’s chief of staff out of a local WhatsApp group after slagging her off constantly.
Gavin Barwell said he’d had enough of everyone attacking the party boss and dramatically quit the group, it was revealed yesterday.
(03.05.2019) Gavin Barwell, as Inside Croydon’s loyal reader will know, is the former MP for Croydon Central. After writing the book How To Lose A Marginal Seat, Barwell duly lost his parliamentary seat in 2017.
Since then, he has been in a £150,000 per year job in Downing Street, advising the Prime Minister, Theresa Mayhem, as her chief of staff. And haven’t they been doing a real bang-up job?
“I am so sorry at the loss of many excellent Tory councillors,” he told the Observer. “But frankly, given the performance of the government, it’s pretty amazing that anyone turned out to vote Conservative at all.”
A grassroots movement to force out the prime minister is gaining ground in the wake of a set of election results that saw the Tories lose an astonishing 1,300 councillors. MPs and local constituency chiefs also warned May that agreeing a Brexit deal with Labour would lead to the party’s annihilation.
She today wrote in the Mail on Sunday: ‘To the leader of the opposition, I say this: let’s listen to what the voters said in the elections and put our differences aside for a moment. Let’s do a deal.’
By Friday evening, with seven councils still to declare, 1,009 candidates who stood as an independent or for minor parties had been elected, 236 more than before polling day.
Many of these ‚other‘ candidates represent so-called “hyperlocal” parties, which operate in only one council or ward.
Theresa May is considering agreeing a cross-party deal with Labour to keep Britain in the tariff-free wall, which would bar Britain from striking new trade deals with other countries on goods but would allow agreements solely on services.
Middle England’s seismic revolt against the Conservatives has officially begun. After losing over 1,200 seats in local elections, the party will likely be obliterated in European elections later this month.
Graham Brady, the head of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers, is expected to meet Ms May on Tuesday to again urge her to set a date for her departure.
If she refuses, they will consider rewriting the rules to allow a fresh vote of no confidence this summer – a move the 1922 stepped back from last month.
Only a fool believes the political landscape will never change. As the Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan once told his aides: ‘There are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.’
As it happens, Callaghan said those words almost exactly four decades ago, as he was preparing to lose the 1979 election to Margaret Thatcher.
The Conservatives have lost 1,334 councillors, with Theresa May saying voters wanted the main parties to „get on“ with Brexit.
Labour also lost 82 seats in the English local elections, in which it had been expected to make gains.
– Votes took place in 248 English councils and 11 Northern Ireland authorities amid a backdrop of Brexit anger
– Tories lose 409 seats and Labour 60 with results in from 109 of 248 councils in humbling backlash for both
– However Lib Dems gain 283 seats amid predictions they could get up to 500 in their best showing for years
– Labour and Tories suffer biggest losses in North and South East heartlands after internal rows over Brexit
– Voters shared pictures of spoilt ballot papers, writing ‚Brexit means Brexit‘ and ‚Get May Out‘ as a protest
Thursday’s elections precede European Parliament polls later this month, when both the Brexit Party and Change UK – who did not stand candidates in the local ballots – will also look to exploit voters‘ dissatisfaction with bigger parties.
Some had made their anger explicit on Thursday by scrawling protest messages such as „Brexit“ and „traitors“ on their ballot papers.
The Tories have lost more than 350 seats and a dozen councils across England overnight as fuming Brits abandoned them – and Labour have dropped three major councils too.
But this time, few MPs from any party seem keen to talk about this week’s local elections — or the impact they are likely to have on Brexit, Theresa May’s tenure in No. 10 and the future of British politics in general. This is because they know that the European elections, which are just three weeks away, will have a huge influence on all of these questions.
The European elections are the vote that was never meant to happen.
– Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is not involved and Ukip only has a few candidates
– The election guru suggested infuriated Tories might stay at home instead
– But he warned the election would still be ‚difficult‘ for the Conservatives
For those new media darlings Change UK and the Brexit Party (and that’s the only time you’ll see the B-word mentioned in this piece; isn’t that refreshing?) there are no or almost no candidates at all. These local elections came too early for them; as this column has pointed out on several occasions, the local election cycle turns more slowly than the 24-hour news cycle.
It’s because of interpretation difficulties like this that we have the Projected National Shares of the Vote, calculated by the BBC and by Rallings and Thrasher as estimates of what might have happened had the whole of the country voted. In 2015, when most of the councillors being elected this year started their terms, the BBC’s Projected National Shares were 35% for the Conservatives, 29% for Labour, 13% for UKIP and 11% for the Liberal Democrats;
‘Well I’m really frustrated with politicians as a whole, not just Conservatives… because of where we are with Brexit”. Optimistic…
Seasoned campaigners were shocked by the level of anger they encountered on the nation doorsteps – invariably from Brexiteers who felt betrayed.
One councillor in the East Midlands told me:
“I had somebody who was so furious he started getting a nosebleed. Even then he kept talking about the local Conservative MP letting him down.”
Someone from the North West, in a Conservative council, suggested that this week it was even harder pounding than last week:
“The decision to hold the Euro Elections is a disaster for us. For a start, it confuses matters. People think we might be canvassing for them and then really go mad. Before we have a chance of talking about local issues they start the conversation by saying they will definitely not be voting for us in the Euro Elections.”
But the most significant set of local elections are ones the Conservative Party won’t meaningfully contest, and were last fought not in 2015, but 2014: local council elections in Northern Ireland. All 11 local councils are up for re-election, and in an ideal world for the Tory party, these elections would confirm that the Democratic Unionist Party very strong performance in 2017 was not a passing phase but that the party is actually getting stronger.
The Australian government adopted the “Indo-Pacific” term in 2012 as a pivotal idea in its diplomacy. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe used the same term for the first time in August 2016 during the Sixth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD VI), held in Nairobi, when he unveiled a “free and open Indo-Pacific strategy.”
The recently held Inter-Korea summit seems to have created some progress towards a peace treaty, and the potential for the nuclear disarmament of North Korea. While the countries of the immediate region and United States are deemed to have the most a stake in a less hostile posture on the Korean peninsula, Australia also has a significant interest in the development of greater trust and cooperation between the two Koreas.
Q: What role do you want Japan to play to solve North Korea’s nuclear issues and achieve peace and security on the Korean Peninsula?
A: Japan will be able to fulfill a very important role in the peace and prosperity of the Korean Peninsula. I think this is true for such various fields as close cooperation among South Korea, Japan and the United States for the achievement of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and the normalization of diplomatic ties between Japan and North Korea for the security of the North Korean regime. In particular, I think dialogue between Japan and North Korea should be resumed. If Japan-North Korea relations are normalized, that would greatly contribute to peace and security in Northeast Asia beyond the Korean Peninsula.
Japan and North Korea should begin talks to normalize relations between the two countries and contribute to peace and stability in the region, South Korean President Moon Jae-in told a Japanese newspaper on Tuesday.