POLAND
PiS party loses majority
The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party won most votes in Sunday’s national election, but fell short of a majority, final official results showed yesterday, confirming that the liberal, pro-EU opposition is on track to form the next government. The official results gave PiS, a nationalist, socially conservative party, 35.38 percent of the vote, while the liberal Civic Coalition was in second place with 30.70 percent. The center-right Third Way took third place with 14.4 percent and the New Left had 8.61 percent of the vote. The far-right Confederation had 7.16 percent of the vote, the results showed. The Civic Coalition, New Left and Third Way have said they are ready to form a coalition government and that they would start talks once the official results are published.
NEW ZEALAND
Hipkins to stay party leader
Labour Party leader Chris Hipkins is to remain at the helm for now, despite a heavy election defeat. The now caretaker prime minister said that any decisions about party leadership would need to wait until the final composition of the caucus was confirmed once overseas and special votes are counted on Nov. 3. “I’m certainly still the leader of the Labour Party,” Hipkins told reporters yesterday in Wellington. “I’ve still got a bit of fight left in me. I am absolutely committed to supporting Labour into opposition.” Labour secured just 27 percent of the vote based on preliminary results from Saturday’s election, giving it 34 seats — down from 65.
UNITED STATES
Ma ticket price soars
Cellist Yo-yo Ma’s (馬友友) upcoming concert in Hong Kong is in such high demand that scalpers are charging more than US$2,200 for a ticket, similar to the resale value of those for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. On US-based tickets resale platform Viagogo, entry to Ma’s performance on Nov. 8 costs as much as US$2,206 — almost nine times the highest price of a ticket sold by the concert organizer. Swift’s show a day later in Buenos Aires, Argentina, fetches as much as US$2,288 for a ticket on the same Web site. Ma is to perform with Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra music director Jaap van Sweden at the Concert Hall of the Hong Kong Cultural Center, which has about 2,000 seats. The 90-minute concert is to open with Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 and close with Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien.
THAILAND
Tycoon to be freed early
A Thai tycoon convicted of poaching wildlife in a national park was yesterday to be released from prison more than a year early, the corrections department said, one of more than 100 prisoners freed for good behavior. Construction magnate Premchai Karnasuta was arrested in February 2018 when park officials found guns and animal carcasses, including a kalij pheasant, a red muntjac and the pelt of a black leopard, at his campsite. He lost his final appeal in December 2021 against three poaching-related criminal charges and was sentenced to three years and two months, in a long-running case that drew public outrage over the elite’s perceived impunity. The department yesterday agreed to release 113 prisoners — including Premchai — and reduce the sentences of 484 others who had displayed good behavior while in jail. The department said Premchai would not be required to wear an electronic monitoring bracelet on his ankle because he has recently had surgery on his right foot related to diabetes.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees