Good morning.
Record high turnout in a tightly fought election has presented the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with the greatest challenge to his leadership in two decades, amid signs that the vote was heading for a runoff even as Erdoğan attempted to claim victory before an official vote count had ended.
Speaking to a jubilant crowd of supporters, an energised and delighted Erdoğan declared: “The fact that the election results have not yet been finalised does not diminish the fact that our nation’s choice is clearly in favor of us.”
Despite Turkey’s supreme election council, the YSK, declaring that the count was not yet finished in either the parliamentary or presidential election, Erdoğan claimed his alliance had won a majority.
“We believe I will finish with above 50% in the first round,” he added, projecting an outright win the presidential election without the need for a runoff.
What are the results so far? With just over 99% of ballot boxes opened, Erdoğan has received 49.4% of votes in the country’s presidential election, the head of the country’s election council has said. Reuters is quoting Ahmet Yener as saying on Monday that Erdoğan’s rival, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, had scored 44.96%.
What has Kılıçdaroğlu said? He hit back at Erdoğan in a more subdued speech: “Despite all of his lies and attacks, Erdoğan did not receive the desired outcome. No one should be enthusiastic about this being a done deal. The election is not won on the balcony,” he said.
Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrives in London to meet ‘my friend’ Rishi Sunak
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has arrived in the UK for “substantive negotiations” with the UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak.
In an early morning message as he landed in the UK, Zelenskiy confirmed he would “meet my friend Rishi” as Britain announced that it would send hundreds of new long-range attack drones with a range of over 200km to Ukraine.
The visit is part of a tour of several key European allies ahead of an expected major Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russian forces.
Over the weekend, he was in Germany and Berlin announced Germany’s largest pledge in military aid since the start of the war. In a statement, the German defence ministry said the package would include 30 Leopard and 20 Marder tanks from industrial reserves, as well as armoured personnel carriers, reconnaissance drones and ammunition.
Meanwhile, Zelenskiy has issued a new appeal to Nato today to make a “positive political decision” on Kyiv’s membership at its July summit.
What is happening on the ground in Ukraine? Russia has said two of its military commanders were killed in eastern Ukraine, as Kyiv’s forces renewed efforts to break through Russian defences in the embattled city of Bakhmut. The Russian defence ministry said yesterday that commander Vyacheslav Makarov of the 4th motorised rifle brigade and deputy commander Yevgeny Brovko from a separate unit were killed trying to repel Ukrainian attacks.
Border crossings reportedly decrease after Title 42 rules scrapped
Crossings at the US border with Mexico have dropped 50% after Title 42 restrictions ended at the end of Thursday and the Biden White House implemented an arguably tougher immigration policy, the US homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, said on Sunday.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden told White House pool reporters yesterday that the border situation immediately after Title 42’s elimination was “much better than you all expected”. The president said he did not plan to visit the border “in the near term” because to do so at this stage “would just be disruptive”.
Mayorkas and Biden’s remarks yesterday were a defense of the policy which replaced the expired measure that allowed border officials to expel migrants 2.7m times to their home country or Mexico without hearing their asylum claims, ostensibly to limit the spread of Covid-19.
Advocates have argued that the new Biden restrictions mimic two Donald Trump-era policies, but Mayorkas defiantly touted the updated measures, saying on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday that the “US Border Patrol has experienced a 50% drop in the number of encounters versus what we were experiencing earlier in the week before Title 42 ended”.
What does the new rule mean? The rules now bar migrants from asylum if they don’t request refugee status in another country before entering the US.
How many people have tried to cross the border following the end of Title 42? Mayorkas added that, on Friday, border patrol officers had detained 6,300 migrants and about 4,200 on Saturday, down from more than 10,000 “before the end of Title 42 earlier last week”.
In other news …
Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who is vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has distanced herself from calls for a federal abortion ban, saying that to promise such a universal barrier to terminations would be to lie to the American people.
A Chinese court has sentenced a 78-year-old US citizen to life in prison on espionage charges. John Shing Wan Leung was detained in April 2021 by Chinese security services. The Hong Kong resident was chair of the Texas branch of Chinese ‘reunification’ association.
The US rental car giant Hertz has apologized and pledged to retrain its staff after an employee denied a Puerto Rican customer a prepaid vehicle on the mistaken belief they needed a passport. During the incident a law enforcement officer allegedly threatened to turn the man over to immigration authorities even though Puerto Rico has been a US territory since 1898.
The amount of adult speech children are exposed to in their early years may help to shape the structure of their brains, researchers say. Studies have previously suggested there are benefits to talking to young children, with research suggesting it can help improve their language processing and boost their vocabularies.
Don’t miss this: why are so many young Americans adopting fake British accents?
Americans have long been called out for their phoney British accents – think Madonna in her Guy Ritchie era, or the friend who just came home from studying abroad in London. But generation Z has embraced bad imitations of cockney slang or a Yorkshire dialect, using obviously fake, theatrical voices to make light of low-grade daily dramas. “Fake British accent” videos have over 188,000 views on TikTok, where young people say they use the voice whenever they feel uncomfortable.
Brinton Parker, a 30-year-old who lives in the Bay Area, works in tech marketing. She recently asked her manager for support at work after feeling like she was approaching burnout. “I said, ‘It’s affecting me mental health, innit?’” she explained. “And my boss was like, ‘Why did you say it like that?’ I think it adds levity to a vulnerable situation. The tougher the conversation, the more cockney I become.”
… Or this: DNA evidence reveals family man in Australia was teenage killer who escaped Nebraska jail
William Leslie Arnold was just 16 years old in 1958 when he killed his parents and buried them in the back yard after they refused to let him borrow the family car to take his girlfriend to a drive-in movie showing of The Undead. Two weeks later he was arrested, confessed to the killings and led investigators to his parents’ makeshift gravesite. The following year he was sentenced to two life sentences in the Nebraska state penitentiary. And that – most people expected – should have been that. But by the time Arnold died in 2010 in Brisbane, Australia, his life had taken a series of very unexpected turns. For one, he’d escaped prison in 1967, in what the prison warden said was one of the “cleanest” escapes in his experience, and then gone on the run for half a century.
Climate check: climate crisis deniers target scientists for vicious abuse on Musk’s Twitter
A number of top scientists have spoken out about what they describe as a huge rise in abuse from climate crisis deniers on Twitter since the social media platform was taken over by Elon Musk last year. Since then, key figures who ensured “trusted” content was prioritised have been sacked, according to one scientist, and Twitter’s sustainability arm has vanished. At the same time several users with millions of followers who propagate false statements about the climate emergency, including Donald Trump and rightwing culture stirrer Jordan Peterson, have had their accounts reinstated. Climate scientists say the change has been stark, and they are fighting to make themselves heard over a “barrage” of often hostile comments.
Last Thing: not having cellphone allowed US boy to save runaway bus from crashing
A Michigan boy who recently stopped a school bus from crashing after the driver lost consciousness leapt into action because he was the only passenger not distracted by an electronic device, according to a new report from CBS. On Sunday, two weeks after seventh-grader Dillon Reeves regained control of a school bus when its driver became unconscious, the network reported that the boy’s parents’ refusal to provide him a cellphone paid off in a big way. Dillon’s father, Steve, told CBS: “What else are you going to do when you don’t have a phone? You’re going to look at people, you’re going to notice stuff. You’re going to look out the window. It’s a very powerful lesson, maybe a change-the-world kind of lesson.”
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