Sunni Islamists lost ground in Kuwait’s general election, but women made history by bagging four seats, their first ever in the 50-member parliament, results released yesterday showed.
Official results from the five electoral districts showed that the two mainstream Sunni Islamic groups were dealt a heavy blow by losing most of their seats they held in the outgoing parliament.
The hardline Islamic Salafi Alliance won two seats out of four it held, while the Islamic Constitutional Movement, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, won a single seat down from three it had in the dissolved house.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Overall, the strength of Sunni Muslim groups and their supporters was reduced to just 11 seats out of 21 they won in the previous polls last year and instead of winning first positions like they did last year, several of them came in last place.
Liberals improved their tally by one seat to eight.
Four women candidates made history by winning the first seats in the Kuwaiti parliament, with one of them coming on top of the 10 winners from her district.
The Shiite Muslim minority emerged big winners, almost doubling their strength from five seats to as many as nine. Five of them are Islamist Shiites.
The nationalist Popular Action Bloc led by veteran opposition leader Ahmad al-Saadun took three seats, down one.
There are 21 new faces in the parliament, mostly from tribal areas. Major tribes, which account for half of the population, won 25 seats, a few of them pro-Islamists.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS