Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made victory speeches after the country’s electoral authority declared him the outright winner in yesterday’s general election, with 87% turnout. The 64-year-old, who has led Turkey as first prime minister and then president since 2003, has won 52.54% of the vote, with 97.7% of votes counted, in the tightest race in years.
Daily Briefing
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Erdogan claims victory in Turkey election
Councils charging £74m to collect garden waste
Council charges for garden waste collection amount to £74m annually across the UK, the BBC has discovered. More than half of all councils have introduced such charges in order to meet funding shortfalls. The service was previously included within the overall council tax. The Local Government Association said the charges were essential.
Prince makes diplomatically sensitive tour
Prince William has begun a five-day visit to the Middle East, his most diplomatically sensitive engagement yet. The Duke of Cambridge is in Jordan, where he will meet Syrian refugees. Later this week the Prince will visit Israel and meet Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, becoming the first British royal to visit the occupied Palestinian territories.
Uber appeal against licence loss begins
Taxi app Uber today begins its appeal against the loss of its operating licence in London. In September, Transport for London told Uber it would not renew its licence because of concerns over the company’s failure to report serious incidents to police, among other issues. Uber has been able to operate pending its appeal and insists it has made changes to address such concerns.
MP seeks to ban homophobic football chants
Conservative MP Damian Collins will today ask Parliament to make homophobic and transphobic chanting at football matches illegal. Collins is suggesting an amendment to the Football Offences Act, which bans racist chants, to criminalise “chanting or gesturing of an indecent nature with reference to sexual orientation or gender identity”.
Unite union at odds with Corbyn over Heathrow
The head of the Unite union, one of Jeremy Corbyn’s most powerful backers, has written to all Labour MPs asking them to support the construction of a third runway at Heathrow airport. Len McCluskey is directly at odds with Corbyn on the issue. The SNP said yesterday that its 35 MPs might abstain or vote against the runway plan.
Curb buy-to-let, says right-wing think tank
Conservative think-tank Onward is urging the Government to curb the boom in buy-to-let property, warning that private landlords are putting home ownership out of reach of at least two million families. In a newly published report, Onward also calls for London councils to be given the power to limit the ownership of property by foreign landlords.
Entire police force arrested in Mexican town
The entire police force of a Mexican town has been arrested after a mayoral candidate was shot dead, part of a wave of killings of politicians in the run-up to the 1 July general elections. All 27 officers in Ocampo, in the western Mexican state of Michoacan, were detained by federal forces in the early hours of Sunday in connection with the death of Fernando Angeles Juarez, 64.
Cleaner London skies boon for astronomers
Astronomers are to resume studying the skies at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, following a 60-year hiatus. Cleaner air in the capital and technological advances mean scientific work can resume at the site. New telescopes have been installed and will be used by professionals, amateurs and school groups in the Grade II listed building.
Briefing: where are England’s 7,000 missing schoolchildren?
Up to 7,700 secondary school pupils in England have left mainstream schooling and slipped off the radar, according to new research.
Of the 553,000 children who started Year 7 at state schools in England in 2012, 531,000 were still enrolled in 2017, when they would be due to sit their GCSEs, according to education research group FFT Education Datalab.
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