Russian President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday made a final push to win votes for ruling party United Russia in legislative polls, saying the country needed a stable parliament untroubled by divisions.
Medvedev is heading the party list for United Russia in tomorrow’s elections and opinion polls have shown that while it is still almost certain to keep a majority in parliament, its support may be eroding after years of dominance.
In an address to the nation being broadcast across the country’s nine time zones, Medvedev made clear he did not want to see a squabbling and tightly contested parliament of the kind Russia had in the 1990s under former president Boris Yeltsin.
Photo: AFP
He said Russia needed a “credible legislative organ where the parliament majority carries out responsible politics capable of helping raise the quality of life of our people.”
He spoke out against electing a parliament “that is torn by irreconcilable contradictions and is not capable of deciding anything, which unfortunately we have already had in our history.”
“Make the right choice on December 4,” he told voters on what is the last day of legal campaigning.
Medvedev did not mention United Russia directly, but his comments were a clear call to vote for the party whose dominance has been compared by critics to the grip of the Communist Party on the former USSR.
Up to three opposition parties are expected to win seats in the next parliament, with liberal anti-Kremlin forces again not represented and the Communist Party the largest opposition faction.
However, a relatively weak showing for United Russia would be troubling for the authorities after the announcement that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will seek to return to the Kremlin in next year’s polls determined Russia’s medium-term political future.
Medvedev is to take Putin’s post as prime minister, in a job swap that will continue their tandem rule of Russia for the years to come.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.