Today we'll be discussing some of the biggest stories, including Colombia's election results and the transgender swimming ban. We'll also be answering as well. We discuss the UK's largest rail strike for decades, but first, Macron loses his majority.
Emmanuel Macron, the first president to be re-elected since Jack Shirak, lost his parliamentary majority. His alliance ensemble remains the largest grouping in parliament. They garnered just 245 seats in Sunday's election, far below the 289 needed for an absolute majority. The elections saw both the far left and far right surge. The far-left nuke alliance headed by Jean-Luc Mélenchon is on course to get 131 seats. Marine Le Pen's Rossomblemont national party has seen a tenfold increase in seats from just eight to eighty-nine. Macron will now likely look to the right-wing republicans to build a working majority, something that might not be immediately on the cards after their chairman called the result a stinging failure for Macron. The prime minister, Elizabeth Born, called the results a risk for our country. There is already pressure on her to resign.
Guillermo Petro, a former left-wing guerrilla, ex-mayor, and senator from Colombia, has won the country's presidential election.'s victory is historic in a few ways; it marks the first time that Colombia has elected a leftist president and his running mate, Francia Marquez, will be the country's first black female vice president. Petro defeated right-wing businessman Rodolfo Hernandez in yesterday's runoff vote by 50.44 percent to 47.31 percent. Both Petro and Hernandez ran on platforms promising change, taking advantage of the deep unpopularity of Colombia's outgoing right-wing government. Inequality, inflation, and violence. Petro's campaign pledges include banning oil exploitation, tackling inequality and corruption, implementing a wealth tax and seeking negotiations with the still active ELN rebel group while upholding the 2016 peace deal with FRAC rebels.
Germany will reopen and fire up coal power plants in an attempt to preserve gas supplies ahead of the winter following Russia's tightening of gas flows to Europe. Robert Harbeck, from the green party, described the move as bitter but simply necessary. He added that it was the highest priority to do everything to store as much gas as possible that could be used in winter. Germany officially aims to phase out coal by 2030. However, the government is now working on emergency laws to temporarily bring back up to 10 gigawatts of currently idle coal plants for up to two years. Russian gas giant Gazprom said it's recently restricted flows through the Nordstrom pipeline due to repair work, though EU officials believe Russia is punishing allies of Ukraine.
In a landmark decision yesterday, the world governing body of swimming or FINA has decided that transgender female athletes are unable to participate in elite sporting events if they've experienced any part of male puberty. The decision was taken in Budapest after the publication of a report which found that transgender female athletes have a significant advantage over cisgender females even after taking testosterone suppressants. In total, %71 of the 152 national federations in Budapest voted for the change. This change actually set swimming aside from other sports, the vast majority of which haven't introduced a ban on scientific grounds. While many have testosterone limits, the only other Olympic governing body to introduce an outright trans ban was world rugby, who introduced a similar ruling in 2020. FINA have additionally though opted to introduce a new open category which trans athletes would be able to compete.
In the first apple workers union has today been created in the US workers in the Apple Store in Maryland have voted by a margin of two to one to unionize, the decision was relayed to the national labor relations board. The union is called the apple coalition of organized retail employees, or applecore for short. While the workers in Maryland are the first to have officially unionized, there's evidence that other Apple retail workers are planning to follow suit. Of apple's 270 us stores, more than two dozen have expressed an interest in unionizing. Apple management are obviously not a huge fan of their retail workers unionizing, last month upon increasing pay for retail workers from twenty dollars an hour to twenty-two dollars an hour the head of Apple retail released a short video explaining that unions could hurt apple's business. Following today's news, apple management said it had nothing to add at this time.