U.K News
Hurricane Otis Now A Catastrophic Category 5 Storm Off Mexico’s Pacific Coast Nearing Acapulco
ACAPULCO, MX — Residents of Mexico’s once-glamorous resort of Acapulco and nearby coastal villages waited for the arrival of “potentially catastrophic” Hurricane Otis, a quickly strengthening Category 5 hurricane that brought up memories of a 1997 storm that killed dozens.
“A nightmare scenario is unfolding this evening for southern Mexico with rapidly intensifying Otis approaching the coastline,” a National Hurricane Centre forecaster said late Tuesday.
Hurricane Otis grew from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in 12 hours as it reached Mexico’s southern Pacific coast on Tuesday.
The National Hurricane Centre in the United States reported that Otis had maximum sustained winds of 160 mph (260 kph) late Tuesday evening and was projected to land near Acapulco early Wednesday. It was located around 55 miles (90 km) south-southeast of Acapulco and traveled north-northwest at 9 miles per hour (15 kilometers per hour).
Acapulco is a metropolis of about one million inhabitants at the base of rugged mountains. Luxury houses and slums coexist on the city’s hillside vistas of the glittering Pacific.
Hurricane Otis Now A Catastrophic Category 5 Storm Off Mexico’s Pacific Coast, Nearing Acapulco
While it once drew Hollywood stars for its nightlife, sport fishing, and cliff diving shows, Acapulco has fallen victim to competing organized crime groups, which have sunk the city into violence, driving many international tourists to the Caribbean waters of Cancun and the Riviera Maya, or hippie beaches further down the Pacific coast in Oaxaca.
From Punta Maldonado to Zihuatanejo, a hurricane warning was in place. A hurricane warning is in force from Lagunas de Chacahua to Punta Maldonado.
Otis was expected to stay a Category 5 hurricane until landfall, but it is expected to diminish quickly due to Mexico’s higher topography. On Wednesday night, Otis will very likely fade over southern Mexico.
“This is an extremely serious situation for the Acapulco metropolitan area with the core of the destructive hurricane likely to come near or over that large city early on Wednesday,” the National Hurricane Centre stated. “There are no hurricanes on record even close to this intensity for this part of Mexico.”
People in Acapulco rushed home as rain began to fall and winds increased, pushing tourists away from the beach.
The Guerrero state administration said it was constructing 396 shelters in case families were forced to flee their houses due to wind damage or rising seas.
“We’re on maximum alert,” Acapulco Mayor Abelina López said Tuesday night, urging residents to stay home or seek shelter. She believes Otis will be much more deadly than Hurricane Pauline, which devastated Acapulco in 1997 and killed over 200 people. Hundreds more were injured as a result of flooding and mudslides.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador advised citizens to “go to shelters, stay in safe places away from rivers, streams, ravines, and be alert, without being overconfident” via the platform X, formerly Twitter.
Jess Pantaleón, general manager of the Las Brisas hotel, located further inland from Acapulco’s coastline, said guests from oceanfront hotels began arriving late Tuesday. “People from various hotels along the ocean drive are arriving because they felt that being higher up, they are safer,” he said.
According to Roberto Arroyo, Guerrero state’s civil defense secretary, authorities toured through low-lying areas of the city, telling people to evacuate using megaphones.
Hurricane Otis Now A Catastrophic Category 5 Storm Off Mexico’s Pacific Coast Nearing Acapulco
Mexico’s army and navy sent around 8,000 personnel to the area with specialized equipment to assist rescue efforts. Authorities shut down Acapulco’s port, which housed 300 fishing vessels.
Otis was forecast to bring five to ten inches (13 to 25 centimeters) of rain to Guerrero, with up to 15 inches (38 centimeters) likely in isolated locations. Guerrero’s rugged, hilly terrain increased the risk of mudslides and flash floods.
According to the National Hurricane Center, a storm is considered to be rapidly intensifying if its wind speed increases by 35 mph (46 kph) in 24 hours. Warmer waters are now more than twice as probable for Atlantic hurricanes to swiftly accelerate from wimpy minor hurricanes to destructive and catastrophic, according to a study published Thursday by Andra Garner, a climate scientist at Rowan University in New Jersey.
Six storms swiftly intensified that much in 2020, a record year for hurricanes and the final year of Garner’s study. Hannah, Laura, Sally, Teddy, Gamma, and Delta are some of the characters. Since then, numerous catastrophic storms have rapidly intensified, including Ida in 2021, Ian in 2022, and Idalia in 2023.
According to Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach, Otis has intensified by 80 mph in the last 12 hours, from 65 mph to 145 mph. “That’s the fastest 12 hr intensification rate in the eastern North Pacific” since 1966, according to NASA.
After sweeping over the Lesser Antilles over the weekend, Hurricane Tammy proceeded northeastward over open water with winds of 85 mph (140 kph). Tammy was approximately 570 miles (915 km) south of Bermuda. According to the National Hurricane Centre in the United States, the storm was projected to strengthen into a powerful extratropical cyclone by Thursday.
SOURCE — (AP)
U.K News
Britain’s Conservative Party Elects Kemi Badenoch as Leader
Britain’s Conservative Party elected outspoken MP Kemi Badenoch as its new leader on Saturday, making her the first woman of color to lead a major British political party.
She has promised to give the right-of-center Tories “renewal” by advocating for a smaller state and rejecting identity politics.
The new leader faces a daunting challenge in restoring the party’s reputation after years of division, scandal, and economic turbulence, hammering Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s policies on key issues such as the economy and immigration and returning the Conservatives to power in the 2029 election.
“The task that stands before us is tough but simple,” Kemi Badenoch said in a victory address to a room full of Conservative legislators, staff, and journalists in London. She stated that the party’s role was to hold the Labour administration accountable while developing commitments and a government strategy.
Addressing the party’s electoral defeat, she stated, “We have to be honest — honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip.”
“The time has come to tell the truth, to stand up for our principles, to plan for our future, to reset our politics and our thinking, and to give our party, and our country, the new start that they deserve,” according to Badenoch.
Kemi Badenoch was Born in London
Kemi Badenoch, a business secretary in Sunak’s cabinet, was born in London to Nigerian parents and grew up in West Africa.
The former software engineer positions herself as a disruptor, advocating for a low-tax, free-market economy and promising to “rewire, reboot, and reprogram” the British state. Like her adversary Jenrick, she has opposed multiculturalism and advocated for decreased immigration, but unlike him, she has not asked that Britain abandon the European Convention on Human Rights.
Kemi Badenoch, a self-proclaimed hater of wokeness, opposes identity politics, gender-neutral toilets, and government initiatives to reduce carbon emissions in the United Kingdom. During the leadership race, she was chastised for claiming that “not all cultures are equally valid” and implying that maternity pay was excessive.
Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, predicted that under Badenoch, the Conservative Party would “swing to the right both in terms of its economic and social policies.”
He foretold that Badenoch will follow “what you might call the boats, boilers and bathrooms strategy …. focusing very much on the trans issue, the immigration issue and skepticism about progress towards net zero.”
Conservative Party Becoming More Diverse
While the Conservative Party is unrepresentative of the country as a whole, with a decreasing membership of 132,000 mostly affluent, elderly white men, its higher echelons have become significantly more diverse.
Badenoch is the Tories’ fourth female leader, following Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and Liz Truss, who became prime ministers.
She is the second Conservative leader of color, following Sunak, and the first with African heritage. The center-left Labour Party has a more diversified membership, but its leaders have always been white men.
In a more than three-month leadership contest, Conservative MPs narrowed the field from six to two in a series of votes before presenting the last two to a vote of the party’s membership.
Both finalists were from the party’s right-wing and claimed they could reclaim votes from Reform U.K., the hard-right, anti-immigrant group led by populist leader Nigel Farage that has eroded Conservative support.
However, the party lost many votes to the winning party, Labour, and the centrist Liberal Democrats, and some Conservatives are concerned that tacking right may move the party away from popular sentiment.
Kier Starmer’s Labor government has had a difficult first few months in power, plagued by unfavorable headlines, fiscal woes, and a sinking approval rating.
However, Bale stated that the historical record implies Badenoch’s chances of leading the Conservatives back to power in 2029 are slim.
“It’s quite unusual for someone to take over when a party gets very badly beaten and manage to lead it to election victory,” according to him. “However, Keir Starmer did just that after 2019. So there are records to break.”
Source: AP
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U.K News
UK Inflation Surprises Allow For a Less Harsh Budget And Reduced Interest Rates.
(VOR News) – Following last month’s drop in inflation to 1.7%, the Bank of England now has all the data needed to decide whether to reduce interest rates next month.
From 2.2% in August, the rate of price growth has sharply declined and is now much below the 2% objective set by the central bank. We have returned to the state we were in at the beginning of 2021, just before Russia invaded Ukraine and increased energy prices.
Low interest rates and inflation will soon boost Labour, which relieves Rachel Reeves.
This will help her finance the investments in this month’s budget by allowing her to borrow money without scaring the financial markets.
A decline in departmental spending may be predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in conjunction with a decline in inflation. For example, the September inflation rate will decide the working-age benefit increase in April of the following year, saving billions on the welfare tab.
The OBR projects that the cost of servicing government debt will go down. It came to more than £100 billion in the fiscal year 2023–2024, or around 10% of all spending. This is because the Bank currently anticipates a quicker decline in borrowing costs.
In her budget for October 30, Reeves has the chance to raise long-term infrastructure expenditures while keeping actual spending on daily expenses same. This depends on the Treasury’s capacity to borrow money at a cheaper cost and the ability of Whitehall departments to set lower inflation-aware budgets.
This illustrates the significant influence that lowering inflation can have. Of course, the chancellor will still need to enact some big tax rises, but this might potentially be a part of a larger story that is far more positive about the UK than most analysts—including the Treasury—had previously thought.
A lot will depend on how the OBR evaluates the ensuing five years, as its March estimate cannot have altered significantly. It is therefore anticipated that significant revisions to the projected borrowing costs and inflation will be needed.
A forecast of borrowing costs needs to take the Bank of England’s response into consideration. Prior to the latest numbers being released, eighty percent of investors were certain that interest rates would be decreased by a quarter of a percentage point to 4.75% when policymakers met the following month.
Consequently, those odds have dropped to 90%, and as Bank governor Andrew Bailey told the Guardian earlier this month, there is an increasing possibility that rates may be further lowered in the coming year if inflation declines faster than expected.
The financial markets behaved as anticipated after the September inflation estimate was released. Because of sterling’s ongoing depreciation in currency markets.
The pound has fallen from $1.34 at the inflation end of last month to less than $1.30.
It is anticipated that a sizable portion of the nine members of the Bank’s monetary policy committee (MPC), which determines interest rates, will continue to harbor doubts regarding the likelihood of long-term price stability.
They will stress how the recent decline in inflation is a direct result of the recent decline in energy costs and their effects on sectors like transportation. According to data from the Office for National Statistics, the average cost of gasoline decreased by 5.5 pence per liter to 136.8p in September of 2024.
MPC members, who are frequently impacted by the falling cost of transportation, will be concerned about the continuous, notable increase in food expenses. The main measure of longer-term inflationary trends, the core inflation number, was revealed at a significantly higher rate of 3.2%. Food and energy are not included in this figure due to their considerable volatility.
However, sluggish wage growth indicates that borrowing costs need to be lowered as the economy is about to collapse. These days, Beijing’s economic policies have a greater influence on oil prices than wars in the Middle East.
Additionally, China, the biggest consumer of oil in the world, is currently going through a major slowdown as a result of the stunning collapse of the real estate bubble.
The US economy is expected to expand on the other side of the Atlantic. The situation in Ukraine and the waning demand from its primary export markets, China and the US, are adding to the already heavy load that the rest of Europe is already carrying.
Interest rates will probably decrease more quickly than first predicted since the MPC will evaluate changes in interest rates in light of the state of the world economy.
Reeves will voice his disapproval of the way the world economy is going. Her goal is to restore public finances while making up for more than a decade of improper public spending allocations during the Conservative administration.
SOURCE: TGN
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U.K News
Alex Salmond, Leading Figure In Scottish Independence Movement, Dies At Age 69
Public leaders from Scotland and the United Kingdom have paid tribute to former Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, who died on Saturday at the age of 69.
Salmond, a key member of the Scottish independence movement, became unwell in North Macedonia on Saturday after delivering a speech, according to British media reports.
Salmond was presumed to have died of a heart attack, according to the British Press Association, but a post-mortem examination will be conducted to determine the cause.
Alex Salmond, Leading Figure In Scottish Independence Movement, Dies At Age 69
Tributes to Salmond, who was Scotland’s First Minister from 2007 to 2014 and led the Scottish National Party twice – from 1990 to 2000 and 2004 to 2014 – came from all sides of the political spectrum, led by King Charles.
“My wife and I are greatly saddened to hear of the sudden death of Alex Salmond,” the monarch told reporters. “His devotion to Scotland drove his decades of public service.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated, “For more than 30 years, Alex Salmond was a monumental presence in Scottish and UK politics. He leaves a lasting legacy. As First Minister of Scotland, he was strongly committed to Scotland’s tradition, history, and culture, as well as the communities he represented as MP (member of parliament) and MSP (member of the Scottish parliament) over many years. My sympathies are with all who knew him, including his family and loved ones. Today, on behalf of the UK government, I extend our sympathies.
Salmond had spent decades championing the cause of Scottish independence and came close to achieving it, receiving 45% of the vote when the matter was put to a referendum in September 2014.
Following the defeat, he resigned as first minister and SNP leader and was succeeded by Nicola Sturgeon, although he continued to work for Scottish independence through the newly established Alba Party, which he founded in 2021.
“I will never be able to thank Alex enough for all of his lessons, counsel, guidance, mentorship, love, and friendship, as well as everything he has done for Scotland. For many years, he was the nation’s father, and he has long been a father figure to me. Chris McEleny, General Secretary of the Alba Party, said on Saturday that his sympathies are with everyone in the family and everyone in Scotland who is mourning.
Scottish First Minister John Swinney said he was “deeply shocked and saddened by the untimely death” and sent his condolences to Salmond’s wife Moira and family.
“Over many years, Alex made an enormous contribution to political life – not just in Scotland, but throughout the UK and beyond,” Swinney stated.
“Alex worked tirelessly and battled valiantly for his beloved country and its independence. He brought the Scottish National Party from the edges of Scottish politics into government and led Scotland so close to independence,” he said.
After losing his seat in parliament, Salmond maintained a prominent role in Scottish and British politics, serving as a commentator and hosting the Alex Salmond Show on Russian state broadcaster RT.
Alex Salmond, Leading Figure In Scottish Independence Movement, Dies At Age 69
In 2018, he sued the country’s government over allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him. Salmond said that the Scottish government denied him the opportunity to adequately defend himself against the allegations, which stemmed from his alleged behavior toward a member of staff at the official Bute House house, according to the Daily Record of Scotland.
A jury eventually cleared Salmond of all charges in a March 2020 trial.
“The terrible news of Alex Salmond’s death today will come as a shock to everybody who knew him in Scotland, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Our thoughts are with his family and friends during this sad time, and on behalf of Scottish Labour, I extend our heartfelt condolences to everyone who will be mourning his loss,” said Anas Sarwar, leader of the Scottish Labour Party.
“Alex was a central figure in politics for over three decades and his contribution to the Scottish political landscape cannot be overstated.”
SOURCE | CNN
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