Month: February 2023

Tourists from New Zealand, China and Germany were among the dead at a number of different ski resorts.

Austrian authorities put in place a level four avalanche alert – the second highest – following intense snowfall and wind in the area.

Despite the warnings, ski resorts in western Austria have been filling up due to school holidays in Vienna.

Austrian police announced five deaths on Sunday, including that of a 59-year-old man who was using a snow plough in the western region of Tyrol.

They also recovered the bodies of a ski guide in Sankt Anton am Arlberg and a 62-year-old man who was cross-country skiing around the summit of Hohe Aifner.

On Saturday, a 17-year-old New Zealander, a 32-year-old Chinese national and a German man in his 50s – who were all said to be skiing off designated ski trails when avalanches hit – were also found dead.

In Switzerland, a 56-year-old woman and 52-year-old man were also killed by unstable snow in the south-east canton of Graubuenden on Saturday morning. Swiss police said a third member of their group managed to escape unharmed.

Avalanches are common in both countries. According to Austria’s APA news agency, 30 avalanches were reported in the Tyrol region on Saturday alone – 11 of these involving people.

Austria’s level four alert level means “very large avalanches are likely” – it advises inexperienced skiers to remain on open ski runs and trails and for experienced skiers to stay away from very steep terrain.

The US Geological Survey said the 7.8 magnitude tremor struck at 04:17 local time (01:17 GMT) at a depth of 17.9km (11 miles) near the city of Gaziantep.

In Turkey, officials confirmed more than 76 deaths so far and 10 cities hit, including Diyarbakir.

In Syria, more than 50 people were killed, state media reported.

There are fears the death toll will rise sharply in the coming hours.

Many buildings have collapsed and rescue teams have been deployed to search for survivors under huge piles of rubble.

Turkish Interior Minister Suleymon Soylu said 10 cities were affected: Gaziantep, Kahramanmaras, Hatay, Osmaniye, Adiyaman, Malatya, Sanliurfa, Adana, Diyarbakir and Kilis.

In Malatya province, north-east of Gaziantep, at least 23 people were killed, local officials said. In Sanliurfa, to the east, there were 17 deaths. And more deaths were reported in Diyarbakir and Osmaniye.

A BBC Turkish correspondent in Diyarbakir, reported that a shopping mall in the city collapsed.

The tremor was also felt in Lebanon and Cyprus.

“I was writing something and just all of a sudden the entire building started shaking and yes I didn’t really know what to feel,” Mohamad El Chamaa, a student in the Lebanese capital Beirut, told the BBC.

“I was right next to the window so I was just scared that they might shatter. It went on for four-five minutes and it was pretty horrific. It was mind-blowing,” he said.

Rushdi Abualouf, a BBC producer in the Gaza Strip, said there was about 45 seconds of shaking in the house he was staying in.

Turkish seismologists estimated the strength of the quake to be 7.4 magnitude. They said that a second tremor hit the region just minutes later.

Turkey lies in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones.

In 1999, more than 17,000 people were killed after a powerful tremor rocked the north-west of the country.

Shirley-Anne Somerville called for “more compromise” as pupils move closer to the exam season.

Members of the EIS union have held three weeks of rolling strikes affecting two council areas each day.

The union has accused the Scottish government of “a complete lack of urgency” to end the dispute.

The last day of the current action will take place on Monday in Inverclyde and Shetland.

And the EIS has refused to rule out further walkouts during the exam period and said its strategy was being kept “under review”.

The education secretary previously said there will be no new pay offer for teachers and that the union’s requested 10% pay rise is unaffordable.

The current 5% offer includes rises of up to 6.85% for the lowest-paid staff.

Ms Somerville told BBC Scotland’s The Sunday Show that local government body Cosla and the unions “remain some way apart”.

But she called for more talks in the coming week.

“Trade union colleagues have their mandate to strike and I absolutely respect that.

“But what we could see, as we have seen in other sectors, is a suspension and no further strike dates while talks are continuing.

“I’ve asked trade unions to look at that – they have so far refused. But, particularly as we move forward to exam season, I would like them to consider it.”

She added: “I would hope that everyone involved would be able to agree that we do not want exams disrupted.

“As you would expect, Scottish government is working with local government and the SQA (Scottish Qualifications Authority) to make sure contingencies are in place.

“But I would like to think, for the benefit of children, young people and parents across the country, it wouldn’t be too difficult for trade unions to say we absolutely respect children and young people’s right to be able to carry out their exam and not have any threats to that hanging over them.”

EIS salaries convener Des Morris, who is party of the union’s negotiation team, said nothing in the government’s stance had changed during six months of pay talks.

He told The Sunday Show: “It should come as no surprise that our members are out on picket lines.

“We want this dispute resolved as quickly, and in as timely a manner, as possible. But we keep our industrial action strategy under review.

“The dates that we have are set out an publicly available.

“It is up to Scottish government and Cosla to back up their public statements about compromise and movement with actions that match that in the room.”

Scottish Labour have accused the government of “doing nothing to win back the lost trust of teachers and parents”.

The party’s education spokesperson Michael Marra said: “While the cabinet secretary goes on television to attack teachers, her government brings nothing new to table in negotiations.

“It is now months since any offer was made and the unions have nothing further to put to their members.

“Unless a resolution is found soon, our children will miss out on even more vital education and our teachers will remain feeling undervalued and overworked – all because the SNP are unwilling to find a compromise that works for everyone.”

Scottish Conservative education spokesman Stephen Kerr said Ms Somerville had “once again passed the buck to teaching unions to resolve this dispute, rather than recognising it’s her job to break the impasse”.

He added: “The public will rightly be wondering why pupils and parents are being treated with such contempt by Shirley-Anne Somerville.

“The onus is on the SNP government to resolve this so that pupils approaching vital exams can have the stable education they rightly deserve.”

In a return to the political fray, Ms Truss wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that her economic agenda was never given a “realistic chance”.

Business Secretary Mr Shapps said he agreed with Ms Truss on wanting lower taxes – but inflation must fall first.

“You can’t just go straight to those tax cuts,” he said.

In her 4,000-word essay, Ms Truss stood by her plans to boost economic growth, arguing they were brought down by “the left-wing economic establishment”.

But she acknowledged she was not “blameless” for the unravelling of the mini-budget.

They are the first public comments the former PM has made on her resignation in October of last year.

Ms Truss resigned after she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng introduced a £45bn package of tax cuts – including a cut to the top rate of income tax – which panicked the markets and alienated Tory MPs.

Mr Shapps was asked on BBC One’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show whether Ms Truss’s approach had been the right one.

“Clearly it wasn’t,” he said.

He admitted that the UK’s tax burden was currently “very high”, and said he agreed with Ms Truss that Conservatives must be “making the good arguments” that a lower-tax economy can be successful in the long term.

But before the government cuts tax, it must first halve inflation, get “growth into the economy” and get debt “under control”, he said.

He tried to avoid addressing Truss’s criticism that the Conservative Party had failed, for years, to make the case for free-market economics with low taxes and low regulation.

Mr Shapps said he took the role of home secretary in the final days of Ms Truss’s government out of a sense of “national duty”, and that by that point “we’d seen the impact on the markets”.

He replaced Suella Braverman, who resigned over two data breaches. Six weeks earlier, as Ms Truss entered Downing Street, she had fired Mr Shapps as transport secretary, a role he held under the former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Ms Truss’s brief time in power – 49 days – made her the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.

In her essay, Ms Truss said that while her experience last autumn was “bruising for me personally”, she believed that over the medium term her policies would have increased growth and therefore brought down debt.

She argued that the government was made a “scapegoat” for developments that had been brewing for some time.

“Frankly, we were also pushing water uphill. Large parts of the media and the wider public sphere had become unfamiliar with key arguments about tax and economic policy and over time sentiment had shifted leftward,” she wrote.

She also said she had not appreciated the strength of the resistance she would face to her plans – including plans to abolish the 45p top rate of income tax.

“I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was.”

Mr Kwarteng dropped the 45p income tax proposals 10 days after they were announced, telling the BBC it was “a massive distraction on what was a strong package”.

Less than a fortnight later, Ms Truss sacked Mr Kwarteng, something she said she was “deeply disturbed by”. She described Mr Kwarteng in her essay as “an original thinker and a great advocate for Conservative ideas” – but that it was clear the tax proposals could not survive.

With the benefit of hindsight, she would have acted differently during her premiership, she wrote – but she still backs her plans for growth.

Sir Jake Berry, who was Conservative party chairman under Ms Truss, said he agreed with her assessment of the problems facing the UK economy, but “not necessarily the cure”.

Speaking on the Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show, he added that Ms Truss had been wrong to say the Conservatives had failed to make the argument for lower taxes.

Meanwhile, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said Ms Truss’s policies “made working people pay the price”.

“The Conservatives crashed the economy, sank the pound, put pensions in peril and made working people pay the price through higher mortgages for years to come.

“After 13 years of low growth, squeezed wages and higher taxes under the Tories, only Labour offers the leadership and ideas to fix our economy and to get it growing.”

While Ms Truss resigned as prime minister, she is still serving in parliament as the MP for South West Norfolk.

She is one of millions of Turks struggling to cope with the cost of living in a country where the official inflation rate is higher than 57%.

Against this backdrop of economic turbulence, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has announced elections for 14 May in a bid to stay in power, after 20 years at the top.

Parliamentary and presidential elections will be held on the same day and polls suggest both will be very tight.

Seda’s search for a flat continues, but rents have surged as high as 30,000 liras – and her earnings have not kept pace: “I feel very vulnerable – as though I’m in a jungle, trying to survive.”

Hoping to stimulate the economy, President Erdogan has announced record public spending.

His plan includes energy subsidies, a doubling of the minimum wage and pension increases, as well as the chance for more than two million people to retire immediately.

But one elderly man shopping for groceries in a street market in Istanbul was unimpressed.

“We have become poorer all of a sudden this year. I think that the inflation we feel on the street is 600%, but the rise in pensions is only 30%,” he said.

Some analysts argue that an earlier election date could help President Erdogan capitalise on his stimulus measures.

But Global Source Partners Turkey consultant Atilla Yesilada believes that inflation will eat into the pay rises too soon.

“Unless there is another wage and pension adjustment… the feeling of gratitude that some voters currently feel will dissipate rapidly,” he said.

President Erdogan’s main opposition is an alliance of centre-left and right-wing parties, known as the Table of Six.

They have pledged to reverse his economic policies, introduce a tighter monetary policy and restore central bank independence.

But they are yet to pick a presidential candidate.

A decision is likely to come on 13 February and many expect they will choose Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP).

Another much-discussed figure is Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.

Last month a court banned the mayor from politics for allegedly insulting electoral officials and sentenced him to nearly three years in prison – in a case he dismissed as politically motivated. He is still in office while he appeals against the judgement.

Soner Cagaptay from The Washington Institute think tank believes any attempt to ban the mayor of Istanbul from political life could backfire.

He points out that President Erdogan himself was in a very similar situation in the 1990s – a popular and successful mayor of Istanbul who was banned from politics by Turkey’s secular courts.

“That made him a martyr and a hero and he made a spectacular comeback,” said Mr Cagaptay.

It is Turkey’s third-biggest party that could play the role of kingmaker.

The Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) is pro-Kurdish. In January its state funding was cut off by Turkey’s top court and it could even be banned for alleged links to Kurdish militants.

Its former co-leader Selahattin Demirtas has been jailed since 2016, accused of “spreading terrorist propaganda”.

The party’s vice chair Hisyar Ozsoy admits that the authorities could shut them down. But he says it won’t stop his party, or the people who support it.

“Even if it is banned, our people will find ways to enter the elections by using some other political parties,” he said.

If the presidential race goes to a second round, the HDP’s support will most probably determine Turkey’s next president.

No-one yet has officially declared their candidacy for the presidency, including President Erdogan himself. There is a debate on whether he should even be allowed to run, since he has already been elected twice – the maximum limit.

Article 101 in the Turkish constitution states that “a person may be elected as president of the republic for two terms at most”.

“If Erdogan wants to run he will run,” said Mr Cagaptay.

“Because his brand is that he is the underdog fighting the elites, it might actually help his case if someone came up and said he’s not allowed. This is the kind of argument that has helped Erdogan in the past.”

There is a lot at stake in the upcoming elections, with opposition figures arguing that it will be a choice between increasing autocracy or democracy. The ruling AKP says only it can bring the cost of living down and sustain stability.

For Mr Erdogan, who has led Turkey since 2003, first as prime minister and later as directly elected president, the vote will decide whether his rule will go into a third decade.

Masayoshi Arai reportedly said he would not want to live next to, or look at, people in same-sex relationships.

Mr Arai also warned that permitting gay marriage in Japan would lead to many abandoning the country.

Mr Kishida said the remarks were “outrageous” and “completely incompatible” with his government’s policies.

Japan – a country still largely bound by traditional gender roles and family values – is the only G7 nation that does not recognise same-sex marriage.

However, recent polling suggests most Japanese support gay marriage.

A number of same-sex couples have also filed lawsuits across Japan in recent years arguing that the ban on same-sex marriage violates the country’s constitution.

Prior to Mr Arai’s dismissal, Mr Kishida had talked about issues surrounding same-sex marriage in parliament.

He stated that it needed to be carefully considered because of its potential impact on traditional family structures.

Mr Arai reacted to the remarks afterwards, telling reporters that he “wouldn’t like it if [LGBT couples] lived next door” and “doesn’t even want to look at them.”

He added that it would “change the way society is” and “quite a few people would abandon this country,” according to Kyodo News.

In response, Mr Kishida said he had dismissed Mr Arai, adding: “We have been respecting diversity and realising an inclusive society.”

Mr Arai later apologised, stating that his remarks were not appropriate and were not representative of the prime minister’s views.

His resignation represents a further blow to Mr Kishida, whose government has seen plummeting approval ratings after a number of his ministers have resigned over various scandals in recent months.

In a 4,000-word essay in the Sunday Telegraph, Ms Truss stood by her plans to boost economic growth, arguing they were brought down by “the left-wing economic establishment”.

They are the first public comments the ex-PM has made on her resignation.

But she said she was not “blameless” for the unravelling of the mini-budget.

Ms Truss was forced to quit after she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s £45bn package of unfunded tax cuts panicked the markets and tanked the pound to a record low.

Her brief time in power – 49 days – made her the shortest-serving prime minister in UK history.

Ms Truss said that while her experience last autumn was “bruising for me personally”, she believed that over the medium term her policies would have increased growth and therefore brought down debt.

The ex-PM said she had not been warned of the risks to the bond markets from liability-driven investments (LDIs) – bought up by pension funds – due to the mini-budget, which forced the Bank of England to step in to prevent them collapsing as the cost of government borrowing soared.

The government did not tell the Bank of England about its tax cut plans before the mini-budget, one of its deputy governors said at the time.

But the ex-PM argued that the government was made a “scapegoat” for developments that had been brewing for some time.

She wrote: “While the government was focused on investigating what had happened and taking action to remedy the situation, political and media commentators cast an immediate verdict blaming the mini-budget.

“Frankly, we were also pushing water uphill. Large parts of the media and the wider public sphere had become unfamiliar with key arguments about tax and economic policy and over time sentiment had shifted leftwards.

“Regrettably, the government became a useful scapegoat for problems that had been brewing over a number of months.”

After 100 days of “soul searching” we have a version of events from the shortest serving UK Prime Minister in history.

This is Liz Truss’s catastrophic time in office, described and defended in her own words.

At some length, she attempts to argue her case and answer for her actions. There is reflection and regret but not the apology which many might expect.

What burns through this 4000 word essay is a sense from Liz Truss that almost everything was against her as she makes a case for what might have been.

The system, officials, Conservative MPs all played a part, she argues, in stopping her from achieving her aim of economic growth through tax cuts and de-regulation.

There are breath taking reminders of how high the stakes were as her policies sent shockwaves through the economy – Kwasi Kwarteng had to go to avoid “a serious meltdown for the UK” and “the starkest of warnings” came from officials that the country may have to default on its debt.

Despite her downfall, Liz Truss argues many still share her enthusiasm for what she was trying to achieve.

And as Conservatives engage in open debate about whether her successor Rishi Sunak should move to cut taxes more quickly, she’s promised more to come.

She also said she had not appreciated the strength of the resistance she would face to her plans – including plans to abolish the 45p top rate of income tax.

“I assumed upon entering Downing Street that my mandate would be respected and accepted. How wrong I was. While I anticipated resistance to my programme from the system, I underestimated the extent of it,” she writes.

Mr Kwarteng dropped the 45p income tax proposals 10 days after they were announced, telling the BBC it was “a massive distraction on what was a strong package”.

Less than a fortnight later, Ms Truss sacked Mr Kwarteng, something she said she was “deeply disturbed by”.

“Kwasi Kwarteng had put together a brave package that was genuinely transformative – he is an original thinker and a great advocate for Conservative ideas. But at this point, it was clear that the policy agenda could not survive and my priority had to be avoiding a serious meltdown for the UK,” she wrote.

With the benefit of hindsight, she writes that she would have acted differently during her premiership – but she still backs her plans for growth.

“I have lost track of how many people have written to me or approached me since leaving Downing Street to say that they believe my diagnosis of the problems causing our country’s economic lethargy was correct and that they shared my enthusiasm for the solutions I was proposing,” she said.

“While I regret that I wasn’t able to implement my full programme, I am still optimistic for the future, with the United Kingdom now able to steer its own course as a free nation.”

Ms Truss’s explanation for the failure of her premiership has elicited strong reactions from inside and outside of her party.

The Tory peer Lord Barwell, who was Theresa May’s chief of staff, said Ms Truss was brought down because “in a matter of weeks you lost the confidence of the financial markets, the electorate and your own MPs.”

He tweeted: “During a profound cost of living crisis, you thought it was a priority to cut tax for the richest people in the country.”

While shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves said Ms Truss’s policies “made working people pay the price”.

“The Conservatives crashed the economy, sank the pound, put pensions in peril and made working people pay the price through higher mortgages for years to come.

“After 13 years of low growth, squeezed wages and higher taxes under the Tories, only Labour offers the leadership and ideas to fix our economy and to get it growing.”

While Liz Truss resigned as prime minister, she is still serving in parliament as the MP for South West Norfolk.