The town council by-election candidate continued to be listed as a Conservative despite having changed his allegiance
Reform UK has secured victory in a Penarth Town Council by-election, despite the ballot paper listing winner Zak Weaver as a Conservative Party candidate. Mr Weaver, the former deputy chief of staff to Welsh Conservative leader Darren Millar, won with 38% of the vote and will now represent the Plymouth ward.
Advertisement
He resigned from the Conservatives a week before the by-election meaning it was too late for the ballot papers to be altered. The results leaves the council with only one Conservative representative.
Speaking to The Cardiffian before the by-election, Mr Weaver said: “While my party may have changed, my dedication to our community has not changed. My focus has been on our town, not party politics.” For the biggest stories in Wales first sign up to our daily newsletter here
The defection was criticised in the run-up to election day by residents who described it as “totally outrageous”.
Penarth resident Conrad Bartlett said: “I really don’t see, if he did win, how he could possibly be allowed to keep his post.”
Advertisement
Meanwhile, Plaid Cymru’s by-election candidate, Aled Thomas, said Mr Weaver had “betrayed the people”.
Returning officer Rob Thomas explained that there was no provision under Welsh law “to amend the ballot or halt the election due to a change in political affiliation”.
The by-election was triggered after former Councillor Ben Gray was automatically disqualified for failing to attend the town council for six months.
Independent Mr Gray had held the seat since 2017, having been elected as a Conservative. He walked away from the party two years later over political infighting on Vale of Glamorgan Council.
Advertisement
Campaign material released ahead of Mr Weaver’s defection described his priorities as campaigning against Penarth’s controversial parking charges, which have been suspended, and the now-defunct aqua park on Cosmeston Lake.
He also pledged to fix the area’s roads, pavements and car parks.
Mr Weaver came first with 546 votes, while the Green Party’s Todd Bailey came second with 452 votes followed by Welsh Labour and Plaid Cymru who secured 221 and 204 votes respectively.
Ensure our latest news and sport headlines always appear at the top of your Google Search by making us a Preferred Source. Click here to activate or add us as Preferred Source in your Google search settings
“Since potentially significant and, as yet, unquantified risk of long-term biological harms is present to participants and biological safety has not been definitively demonstrated in this proposed cohort, at the very least, there should be a graded/stepwise approach starting with those aged 14 as the lower limit of eligibility,” it reads.
Ruben Ray Martinez was killed during a traffic stop on South Padre Island in Texas last March, several outlets, citing documents obtained by nonprofit watchdog American Oversight, reported.
Martinez had just turned 23, and he and his best friend were driving from San Antonio to South Padre Island to celebrate, his mother, Rachel Reyes, told the Associated Press.
Shortly after midnight on March 15, 2025, a driver, confirmed by family to be Martinez, and a passenger in a blue Ford were passing through an intersection where Homeland Security Investigations officers had been helping South Padre Island police redirect traffic after an accident, according to an internal ICE incident report included in the new release of documents.
Advertisement
Reyes confirmed to the Associated Press that the victim in the report was her son, and Charles Stam, a lawyer for Martinez’s family, also confirmed Martinez was the one killed to The New York Times.
U.S. citizen Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, was shot dead by Immigration and Customs Enforcement months before the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, records have shown (Rachel Reyes via AP)
Agents surrounded Martinez’s car and ordered him and the passenger to get out, according to the report. Martinez “accelerated forward” and hit an HSI special agent, “who wound up on the hood of the vehicle,” the report said.
An HSI supervisory special agent then fired multiple times through the open driver’s side window, according to the report.
Advertisement
Martinez was taken to a hospital and later died, the report said. The HSI agent hit by the car was treated for a knee injury, according to the report.
Martinez was killed during a traffic stop on South Padre Island in Texas last March, according to the records (Henrique Campos/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)
“It was his first time getting to go out of town,” Reyes said of her son. “He was a nice guy, humble guy. And he wasn’t a violent person at all.”
It’s unclear why Martinez was stopped in the first place.
Advertisement
Without confirming the identity of the victim, the Department of Homeland Security said a federal agent had fatally shot a man that day in March to “protect himself, his fellow agents, and the general public.”
“A driver of a blue Ford intentionally ran over a Homeland Security Investigation special agent resulting in him being on the hood of the vehicle. Upon witnessing this, another agent fired defensive shots to protect himself, his fellow agents, and the general public,” a DHS spokesperson told The Independent. “This incident is under active investigation by the Texas Department of Public Safety Ranger Division.”
The Trump administration sparked nationwide backlash over the deaths of Good, a mom of three, and Pretti, an ICU nurse (Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images)
According to the Associated Press, Martinez’s death is one of at least six fatal shootings by federal immigration agents since the start of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has grown increasingly unpopular.
Both shootings have been framed by the Trump administration as self-defense, a claim that has been scrutinized.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 55 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, while just 38 percent approve, the lowest level since the president returned to the White House.
Teesside Airport fly to a range of destinations over February half-term, whether it is sun, a city break or a chance to see the Northern Lights your after.
2025 also saw the expansion of several routes at the airport following growing public demand. Alicante, operated by Ryanair, has grown from two flights a week in the summer to four. It also operates all year-round.
Advertisement
Mr Forster previously thanked Ryanair for its vote of confidence and talked about the success of the flights it operates.
He said: “Alicante has doubled in capacity and is now year-round and we were able to get Malaga, which I was delighted about as there was a lot of clamour for that. That is also a year-round service, so you can really start to see the growth that we’re starting to get on those routes.”
Flights to Malaga also operate all year-round, with there also being flights to Amsterdam three times a day.
Donald Trump has announced a global tariff after the US Supreme Court ruled that his previously imposed duties are illegal.
The new 10% import duty will apply to all countries and be effective “almost immediately”, the US president said in a post on his Truth Social platform.
The White House announced the levy would take effect on 24 February, although it could face legal challenges.
The law Mr Trump has used to impose the tariff caps it at 150 days, but he brushed off a question about the limit by saying “we have a right to do pretty much what we want to do”.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Supreme Court rules against Trump’s tariffs
It comes after six of the Supreme Court‘s nine judges voted to overturn Mr Trump’s signature economic policy, handing him a significant loss.
The judgment was in response to an application brought by businesses affected by the tariffs from 12 mostly Democrat-run states.
The applicants challenged the way the US president imposed the sweeping country-specific taxes.
Advertisement
Traditionally, tax-raising measures like tariffs are taken through Congress but the president wished to bypass that process.
But the majority judgment found the US Constitution “very clearly” gives Congress that power.
“The framers did not vest any part of the taxing power in the executive branch,” US Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.
The case is the first challenge to a major part of Mr Trump’s agenda to be ruled on by the Supreme Court.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Foreign countries ‘are dancing in the streets’
Trump ‘ashamed’ of judges who ruled against him
Responding to the decision, Mr Trump described it as a “disgrace”.
He said he was “ashamed” of the six Supreme Court judges who ruled against him for not “having the courage to do what’s right” for the US, describing them as “fools and lapdogs” who are “very unpatriotic and disloyal to our Constitution”.
Advertisement
Three of the six judges who ruled his tariffs illegal are Republicans. They include Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, who were appointed during Mr Trump’s first term in office.
Mr Trump thanked the three justices who voted in his favour, before claiming that foreign countries “who have been ripping us off for years” were now “dancing in the streets”.
Mr Trump’s administration had argued that a 1977 law allowing the president to regulate importation during emergencies also allowed him to set tariffs.
Other presidents have used the law to impose sanctions before, but Mr Trump was the first president to invoke it for import taxes.
Following the Supreme Court ruling, he said: “Today I will sign an order to impose a 10% global tariff under section 122 over and above our normal tariffs already being charged.”
Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act allows the president to institute a “temporary import surcharge” of up to 15% for a maximum of 150 days if he finds there are “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits to prevent an “imminent” and “significant” depreciation of the US dollar in foreign exchange markets.
Advertisement
What has been the British response?
The UK government said it expected its “privileged trading position” with the US to continue.
A spokesperson said Britain would work with the US to understand “how the ruling will affect tariffs for the UK and the rest of the world”.
The British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) said the decision did little to “clear the murky waters for business”.
Advertisement
William Bain, head of trade policy at the BCC, said Mr Trump could use other legislation to reimpose tariffs – which is exactly what he’s planning.
What are tariffs?
From 2 April last year, a day described by Mr Trump as “Liberation Day”, countries across the world were hit with taxes on their exports.
The tariffs were brought in via executive order from Mr Trump, who invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to do so.
Advertisement
The Act is a 1977 law intended to be used during national emergencies, which Mr Trump invoked, saying the country was in a national emergency because of US trade deficits.
It was also this law that was used to apply levies on Canadian, Chinese and Mexican goods and services entering the US, although Mr Trump’s national emergency rationale was the trafficking of the drug fentanyl into the US.
Image: Donald Trump responding to the Supreme Court’s decision. Pic: Reuters
What does it mean for the economy?
What happens next, and whether roughly $175bn in import taxes will be refunded, remains to be seen.
The decision immediately lowers the effective tariff rate sharply, from 12.8% to 8.3%, according to Michael Pearce, the chief US economist at Oxford Economics.
Advertisement
Many companies, including wholesale chain Costco, have already gone to court seeking tariff refunds.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote in the dissent: “The court says nothing today about whether, and if so how, the government should go about returning the billions of dollars that it has collected from importers.
“But that process is likely to be a ‘mess’, as was acknowledged at oral argument.”
That uncertainty is likely to remain, potentially eliminating any economic benefit from tariff removal.
Emergency services are at the scene of the crash this afternoon (Friday, February 20)
A woman has suffered serious injuries after a crash along a residential street. Emergency services were called to West Street in Wisbech just after 1pm today (Friday, February 20).
Advertisement
The crash involved a car and a woman. Cambridgeshire Police are at the scene with paramedics.
The woman is believed to have suffered serious, but not life-threatening injuries. A police spokesperson said: “We were called at 1.03pm to reports of a collision between a car and a pedestrian on West Street, Wisbech.
“Officers are at the scene together with paramedics and the pedestrian, a woman, is thought to have suffered serious but not life-threatening injuries.”
The East of England Ambulance Service has been contacted for more information.
They are hunted for their unique scales, and the demand makes them the most trafficked mammal in the world.
Wildlife conservationists are again raising the plight of pangolins, the shy, scaly anteaters found in parts of Africa and Asia, on World Pangolin Day on Saturday.
Pangolins or pangolin products outstrip any other mammal when it comes to wildlife smuggling, with more than half a million pangolins seized in anti-trafficking operations between 2016 and 2024, according to a report last year by CITES, the global authority on the trading of endangered plant and animal species.
The World Wildlife Fund estimates that over a million pangolins were taken from the wild over the last decade, including those that were never intercepted.
Advertisement
Pangolins meat is a delicacy in places, but the driving force behind the illegal trade is their scales, which are made of keratin, the protein also found in human hair and fingernails. The scales are in high demand in China and other parts of Asia due to the unproven belief that they cure a range of ailments when made into traditional medicine.
There are eight pangolin species, four in Africa and four in Asia. All of them face a high, very high or extremely high risk of extinction.
While they’re sometimes known as scaly anteaters, pangolins are not related in any way to anteaters or armadillos.
They are unique in that they are the only mammals covered completely in keratin scales, which overlap and have sharp edges. They are the perfect defense mechanism, allowing a pangolin to roll up into an armored ball that even lions struggle to get to grip with, leaving the nocturnal ant and termite eaters with few natural predators.
Advertisement
But they have no real defense against human hunters. And in conservation terms, they don’t resonate in the way that elephants, rhinos or tigers do despite their fascinating intricacies — like their sticky insect-nabbing tongues being almost as long as their bodies.
While some reports indicate a downward trend in pangolin trafficking since the COVID-19 pandemic, they are still being poached at an alarming rate across parts of Africa, according to conservationists.
Nigeria is one of the global hot spots. There, Dr. Mark Ofua, a wildlife veterinarian and the West Africa representative for the Wild Africa conservation group, has rescued pangolins for more than a decade, which started with him scouring bushmeat markets for animals he could buy and save. He runs an animal rescue center and a pangolin orphanage in Lagos.
His mission is to raise awareness of pangolins in Nigeria through a wildlife show for kids and a tactic of convincing entertainers, musicians and other celebrities with millions of social media followers to be involved in conservation campaigns — or just be seen with a pangolin.
Advertisement
Nigeria is home to three of the four African pangolin species, but they are not well known among the country’s 240 million people.
Ofua’s drive for pangolin publicity stems from an encounter with a group of well-dressed young men while he was once transporting pangolins he had rescued in a cage. The men pointed at them and asked him what they were, Ofua said.
“Oh, those are baby dragons,” he joked. But it got him thinking.
“There is a dark side to that admission,” Ofua said. “If people do not even know what a pangolin looks like, how do you protect them?”
In response to a reporter’s question on whether the U.S. could take limited military action as the countries negotiate, Trump said, “I guess I can say I am considering that.” A few hours later, he told reporters that Iran “better negotiate a fair deal.”
Earlier Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a TV interview that his country was planning to finalize a draft deal in “the next two to three days” to send to Washington.
“I don’t think it takes long, perhaps, in a matter of a week or so, we can start real, serious negotiations on the text and come to a conclusion,” Araghchi said on MSNOW’s “Morning Joe” show.
Advertisement
The tensions between the longtime adversaries have ramped up as the Trump administration pushes for concessions from Iran and has built up the largest U.S. military presence in the Middle East in decades, with more warships and aircraft on the way.
On Friday, the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group passed through the Strait of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean Sea after being sent by Trump from the Caribbean, according to images of the ship by maritime photographers posted to social media.
Both Iran and the U.S. have signaled that they are prepared for war if talks on Tehran’s nuclear program fizzle out. “We are prepared for diplomacy, and we are prepared for negotiation as much as we are prepared for war,” Araghchi said Friday.
Ali Vaez, an Iran expert at the International Crisis Group, said Iran “would treat any kinetic action as an existential threat.”
Advertisement
Vaez said he doesn’t think Iran’s leaders are bluffing when they say they would retaliate, while they likely believe they could maintain their hold on power despite any U.S. airstrikes.
What Iran and the US are negotiating
Trump said a day earlier that he believes 10 to 15 days is “enough time” for Iran to reach a deal following recent rounds of indirect negotiations, including this week in Geneva, that made little visible progress. But the talks have been deadlocked for years after Trump’s decision in 2018 to unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Since then, Iran has refused to discuss wider U.S. and Israeli demands that it scale back its missile program and sever ties to armed groups.
Araghchi also said Friday that his American counterparts have not asked for zero enrichment of uranium as part of the latest round of talks, which is not what U.S. officials have said publicly.
“What we are now talking about is how to make sure that Iran’s nuclear program, including enrichment, is peaceful and will remain peaceful forever,” he said.
Advertisement
He added that in return, Iran will implement some confidence-building measures in exchange for relief on economic sanctions.
In response to Araghchi’s claim, a White House official said Trump has been clear that Iran cannot have nuclear weapons or the capacity to build them and that it cannot enrich uranium. The official wasn’t authorized to comment publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Tehran has long insisted that any negotiations should only focus on its nuclear program and that it hasn’t been enriching uranium since U.S. and Israeli strikes last June on Iranian nuclear sites. Trump said at the time that the strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear sites, but the exact damage is unknown as Tehran has barred international inspectors.
Although Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful, the U.S. and others suspect it is aimed at eventually developing weapons.
Advertisement
What Congress has to say
Trump’s comments have faced pushback from some lawmakers who say the president should get Congress’ approval before any strike.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said Friday that he has filed a war powers resolution that would require that step. Though it has no chance of becoming law — in part because Trump himself would have to sign it — some bipartisan consensus has arisen recently among senators who forced votes on previous resolutions on military action in Venezuela.
None of those resolutions passed, but they were successful in showing how lawmakers are troubled by some of Trump’s aggressive foreign policy maneuvers.
“If some of my colleagues support war, then they should have the guts to vote for the war, and to be held accountable by their constituents, rather than hiding under their desks,” Kaine said in a statement.
Advertisement
___
Amiri reported from New York. Associated Press writers Michelle L. Price, Ben Finley, Stephen Groves and Konstantin Toropin in Washington and Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
Mr Griffiths cofounded fast-fashion retailer ASOS in 2000 and remained a large shareholder after leaving the company.
A spokesperson for the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “We are supporting the family of a British national who has died in Thailand and are in contact with the local authorities.”
Anyone feeling emotionally distressed or suicidal can call Samaritans for help on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org in the UK. In the US, call the Samaritans branch in your area or 1 (800) 273-TALK
Since 2019, Hodgkinson has trained with coaches Trevor Painter and Jenny Meadows in Manchester.
Meadows, a former international runner, was in France to watch her protege take almost a second off the 800m indoor record, set by Slovenia’s Jolanda Ceplak almost 24 years ago.
“She actually said to me the day before: ‘obviously I know I’m going to get it’,” said Meadows.
“There had been so many benchmarks we measure in training, we had no doubt that she would do it.
Advertisement
“Her biggest fear was to set a world record, but be disappointed with the time. She said ‘what if I can’t smile? What if I’ve got the world record, and everyone’s so excited, and I think, oh that was rubbish. I could have gone faster’?”
The date – 19 February 2026 – had long been set in the diary by Meadows and Hodgkinson given the track in Lievin is notoriously fast.
“Lievin has had a lot of world records over the years, and we kind of thought ‘you know what, let’s go with the statistics’,” Meadows said.
“We’re only probably going to get one opportunity during this indoor season to go for it. So that’s the event that we picked, and that’s the date we’ve really had etched in our minds the last three months.”
Advertisement
“I’ve got to say, the time she did was the bare minimum of what she was happy with,” Meadows added.
“She definitely would have liked to run faster, and there was definitely half a second, maybe even up to one second in those legs.”
Everything you need to know as person seriously injured in major crash | Cambridgeshire Live
Need to know
Two people were taken to hospital
Police closed the road(Image: Getty Images)
Everything you need to know
A person has been seriously injured in a major crash in Cambridgeshire. The incident saw a head-on collision take place involving two vehicles this morning. One of the vehicles involved was a truck.
Police officers were called to the A1307 Babraham westboundat 5.25am and they closed the road. Ambulance crews, including two ambulances and a paramedic car, arrived shortly after to provide urgent medical assistance.
Two people were injured in the crash and were taken to hospital for treatment. Both patients were taken to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge.
One person has been left with serious injuries, while the second is reported to have sustained only minor injuries. The A1307 Babraham westbound was closed to all traffic immediately following the arrival of the emergency services. This closure began around 6am and remained in place for several hours.
Drivers faced significant delays while the westbound stretch of the A1307 was closed. Drivers were advised to seek alternative routes while the road was cleared and investigated.
Cambridgeshire Police has launched an investigation. The East of England Ambulance Service said two ambulances and a paramedic car were sent
