Leftist Petro elected president of Colombia, runoff results show
For the first time, Colombia will have a leftist president.
Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and a longtime senator who has pledged to transform the country’s economic system, won Sunday’s election, according to preliminary results, setting the third-largest nation in Latin America on a radically new path.
Petro, 62, received 50.57% of the vote with over 97% counted Sunday night. His opponent, Rodolfo Hernandez, a 77-year-old construction magnate who had energized the country with a scorched-earth anti-corruption platform, collected 47.1% of the vote.
Petro’s victory reflects widespread discontent in Colombia, with poverty and inequality on the rise and widespread dissatisfaction with a lack of opportunity, issues that sent hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate in the streets last year.
The win is all the more significant because of history. For decades, the government fought a brutal leftist insurgency known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, with the stigma from the conflict making it difficult for a legitimate left to flourish. FARC signed a peace deal with the government in 2016.
Petro had been part of a different rebel group, M-19, which demobilized in 1990 and became a political party that helped rewrite the country’s constitution.
Petro and Hernandez beat Federico Gutiérrez, a former big-city mayor backed by the conservative elite, in a first round of voting May 29, sending them to a runoff.
Petro believes the economic system is broken, overly reliant on oil exports and a flourishing and illegal cocaine business that he said has made the rich richer and poor poorer. He is calling for a halt to all new oil exploration, a shift to developing other industries and an expansion of social programs, while imposing higher taxes on the rich. One former finance minister called his energy plan “economic suicide.”
Petro will take office in August.
Yellowstone plans: Yellowstone National Park will partially reopen Wednesday morning, after catastrophic flooding destroyed bridges and roads and drove out thousands of tourists.
The Park Service announced that visitors will be allowed on the park’s southern loop under a temporary license plate system to manage crowds: Those with even-numbered plates and motorcycle groups will be allowed on even-numbered days, and those with odd-numbered or vanity plates on odd-numbered days.
Commercial tours and visitors with proof of overnight reservations at hotels, campgrounds or in the backcountry will be allowed in whatever their plate number.
The north loop is expected to remain closed through the summer, if not longer.
Massacre in Ethiopia:
Witnesses in Ethiopia said Sunday that more than 200 people, mostly ethnic Amhara, have been killed in an attack in the country’s Oromia region and are blaming a rebel group.
It is one of the deadliest such attacks in recent memory as ethnic tensions continue in Africa’s second most populous country.
“I have counted 230 bodies. I am afraid this is the deadliest attack against civilians we have seen in our lifetime,” Abdul-seid Tahir, a resident of Gimbi county, said after barely escaping the carnage Saturday.
Another witness, who gave only his first name, Shambel, over fears for his safety, said the ethnic Amhara that settled in the area about 30 years ago in resettlement programs are now being “killed like chickens.”
Both witnesses blamed the Oromo Liberation Army for the attacks.
In a statement, the Oromia regional government also blamed the OLA.
An OLA spokesman, Odaa Tarbii, denied the allegations.
France elections: French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist alliance was projected to lose its majority despite getting the most seats in the final round of the parliamentary election Sunday.
The projections, which are based on partial results, show that Macron’s candidates would win between 200 and 250 seats — much less than the 289 required to have a straight majority at the National Assembly, France’s most powerful house of parliament.
A new coalition — made up of the hard left, the Socialists and the Greens — is projected to become the main opposition force with about 150 to 200 seats. The far-right National Rally is projected to register a huge surge with potentially more than 80 seats, up from eight before.
Strong performances by both the National Rally and the leftist coalition is expected to make it harder for Macron to implement the agenda he was reelected on in May, including tax cuts and raising France’s retirement age from 62 to 65.
Europe wildfires: Firefighters in both Spain and Germany struggled to contain wildfires Sunday amid an unusual heat
wave in Western Europe for this time of year.
The worst damage in Spain has been in the northwest province of Zamora where over 61,000 acres have been consumed, regional authorities said, while German officials said that residents of three villages near Berlin were ordered to leave their homes.
Spain has been on alert for wildfires as parts of the country swelter under record June temperatures. Thermometers registered readings above 104 in many Spanish cities last week.
A lack of rainfall this year combined with gusting winds produced conditions for the fires.
Germany has also seen wildfires in recent days following intense heat and little rain. The country’s national weather agency said Sunday that temperatures neared 103 in the cities of Dresden and Cottbus.
Director detained: Oscar-winning film director Paul Haggis was detained Sunday for investigation of allegations he sexually assaulted a woman in southern Italy, Italian news media said, quoting local prosecutors.
Haggis, 69, has been in Italy for a festival that begins Tuesday in Ostuni.
The news agency Lapresse and other Italian media carried a written statement from prosecutors in Brindisi that they were investigating allegations a “young foreign woman” was forced to have “non-consensual” sexual relations over two days.
Prosecutors said the woman was “forced to seek medical care.”
After a couple of days “of non-consensual relations, the woman was accompanied by the man” to Brindisi airport Sunday and “was left there at dawn despite (her) precarious physical and psychological conditions,” they said.
The Canadian-born Haggis won an Oscar in 2006 for best original screenplay for “Crash.”