Voters went to the polls yesterday in local elections in England and Wales seen as a key test for embattled British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
The polls include a high-profile contest for the mayor of London, where incumbent Ken Livingstone of the governing Labour Party is facing a stiff challenge from Conservative former journalist Boris Johnson.
Some 13,000 candidates are fighting for more than 4,000 seats on 159 municipal councils in England and Wales as well as the 25-member London Assembly.
Labour has seen support plummet to its lowest since former prime minister Margaret Thatcher?? heyday in the late 1980s after former prime minister Tony Blair stepped down last June and the local polls are seen as a harbinger for general elections in two years.
The capital is a big political prize: The mayor controls a budget of more than 瞿11 billion (US$22 billion) and policies that affect 7.5 million Londoners and the millions more who visit.
Victory for the Conservative Party over Livingstone would be a symbolic boost for the center-right Tories at a time when they are riding high in the opinion polls.
A third consecutive four-year term for Livingstone, however, could reassure center-left Labour that their recent dip in form is only temporary and they can recover before the country goes to the polls before May 2010.
Brown has himself recognized that the government has faced a hard time as the impact of the global credit crunch begins to bite, hitting the housing market and economic growth, alongside rising food and fuel prices.
Political analysts predict that Labour will do well or better than the last time the seats were contested in 2004, when they came third in the national vote.
A missing fingertip offers a clue to Mako Nishimura’s criminal past as one of Japan’s few female yakuza, but after clawing her way out of the underworld, she now spends her days helping other retired gangsters reintegrate into society. The multibillion-dollar yakuza organized crime network has long ruled over Japan’s drug rings, illicit gambling dens and sex trade. In the past few years, the empire has started to crumble as members have dwindled and laws targeting mafia are tightened. An intensifying police crackdown has shrunk yakuza forces nationwide, with their numbers dipping below 20,000 last year for the first time since records
CAUSE UNKNOWN: Weather and runway conditions were suitable for flight operations at the time of the accident, and no distress signal was sent, authorities said A cargo aircraft skidded off the runway into the sea at Hong Kong International Airport early yesterday, killing two ground crew in a patrol car, in one of the worst accidents in the airport’s 27-year history. The incident occurred at about 3:50am, when the plane is suspected to have lost control upon landing, veering off the runway and crashing through a fence, the Airport Authority Hong Kong said. The jet hit a security patrol car on the perimeter road outside the runway zone, which then fell into the water, it said in a statement. The four crew members on the plane, which
Indonesia was to sign an agreement to repatriate two British nationals, including a grandmother languishing on death row for drug-related crimes, an Indonesian government source said yesterday. “The practical arrangement will be signed today. The transfer will be done immediately after the technical side of the transfer is agreed,” the source said, identifying Lindsay Sandiford and 35-year-old Shahab Shahabadi as the people being transferred. Sandiford, a grandmother, was sentenced to death on the island of Bali in 2013 after she was convicted of trafficking drugs. Customs officers found cocaine worth an estimated US$2.14 million hidden in a false bottom in Sandiford’s suitcase when
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its junior partner yesterday signed a coalition deal, paving the way for Sanae Takaichi to become the nation’s first female prime minister. The 11th-hour agreement with the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) came just a day before the lower house was due to vote on Takaichi’s appointment as the fifth prime minister in as many years. If she wins, she will take office the same day. “I’m very much looking forward to working with you on efforts to make Japan’s economy stronger, and to reshape Japan as a country that can be responsible for future generations,”
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