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  • Zohran Mamdani and London’s Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, have much in common, but also key differences

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    LONDON (AP) — He’s the left-leaning Muslim mayor of the country’s biggest city, and U.S. President Donald Trump is one of his biggest critics.

    London’s Sadiq Khan has a lot in common with New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani — but also many differences.

    Khan, who has been mayor of Britain’s capital since 2016, welcomed Mamdani’s victory, saying New Yorkers had “chosen hope over fear, unity over division.”

    Khan’s experience holds positive and negative lessons for Mamdani, the 34-year-old Democrat who beat former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in Tuesday’s election.

    Khan has won three consecutive elections but routinely receives abuse for his faith and race, as well as criticism from conservative and far-right commentators who depict London as a crime-plagued dystopia.

    Trump has been among his harshest critics for years, calling Khan a “stone cold loser,” a “nasty person” and a “terrible mayor,” and claiming the mayor wants to bring Sharia, or Islamic law, to London.

    Khan, a keen amateur boxer, has hit back, saying in September that Trump is “racist, he is sexist, he is misogynistic and he is Islamophobic.”

    Khan told The Associated Press during a global mayors’ summit in Brazil on Wednesday that it’s “heartbreaking” but not surprising to see Mamdani receiving the same sort of abuse he gets.

    “London is liberal, progressive, multicultural, but also successful — as indeed is New York,” he said. “If you’re a nativist, populist politician, we are the antithesis of all you stand for. ”

    Attacked for their religion

    Mamdani and Khan regularly receive abuse and threats because of their Muslim faith, and London’s mayor has significantly tighter security protection than his predecessors.

    Both have tried to build bridges with the Jewish community after being criticized by opponents for their pro-Palestinian stances during the Israel-Hamas war.

    Both say their political opponents have leaned into Islamophobia. In 2016, Khan’s Conservative opponent, Zac Goldsmith, was accused of anti-Muslim prejudice for suggesting that Khan had links to Islamic extremists.

    Cuomo laughed along with a radio host who suggested Mamdani would “be cheering” another 9/11 attack. Mamdani’s Republican critics frequently, falsely call him a “jihadist” and a Hamas supporter.

    Mamdani vowed during the campaign that he would “not change who I am, how I eat, or the faith that I’m proud to call my own.”

    Khan has said he feels a responsibility to dispel myths about Muslims, and answers questions about his faith with weary good grace. He calls himself “a proud Brit, a proud Englishman, a proud Londoner and a proud Muslim.”

    Very different politicians

    Mamdani is an outsider on the left of his party, a democratic socialist whose buzzy, digital-savvy campaign energized young New Yorkers and drove the city’s biggest election turnout in a mayoral election in decades.

    Khan, 55, is a more of an establishment politician who sits in the broad middle of the center-left Labour Party.

    The son of a bus driver and a seamstress from Pakistan, Khan grew up with seven siblings in a three-bedroom public housing apartment in south London.

    He studied law, became a human rights attorney and spent a decade as a Labour Party lawmaker in the House of Commons, representing the area where he grew up, before being elected in 2016 as the first Muslim leader of a major Western capital city.

    Mamdani comes from a more privileged background as the son of an India-born Ugandan anthropologist, Mahmood Mamdani, and award-winning Indian filmmaker Mira Nair. Born in Uganda and raised from the age of 7 in New York, he worked as an adviser for tenants facing eviction before being elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020.

    Similar big-city problems

    Khan and Mamdani govern huge cities with vastly diverse populations of more than 8 million. Voters in both places have similar worries about crime and the high cost of living – big issues that many mayors struggle to address.

    Khan was won three straight elections, but he’s not an overwhelmingly popular mayor. As Mamdani may also find, the mayor gets blamed for a lot of problems, from high rents to violent crime, regardless of whether they are in his control, though Mamdani made freezing rents a pillar of his campaign.

    Mamdani campaigned on ambitious promises, including free child care, free buses, new affordable housing and city-run grocery stores.

    “Winning an election is one thing, delivering on promises is another,” said Darren Reid, an expert on U.S. politics at Coventry University. “The mayor of New York definitely does not have unlimited power, and he is going to have a very powerful enemy in the current president.”

    The mayor of London controls public transit and the police, but doesn’t have the authority of New York’s leader because power is shared with the city’s 32 boroughs, which are responsible for schools, social services and public housing in their areas.

    Khan can point to relatively modest achievements, including free school meals for all primary school pupils and a freeze on transit fares. But he has failed to meet other goals, such as ambitious house-building targets.

    Tony Travers, a professor at the London School of Economics who specializes in local government, said one lesson Mamdani might take from Khan is to pick “a limited number of fights that you can win.”

    Khan, who is asthmatic, has made it one of his main missions to clean up London’s air — once so filthy the city was nicknamed the Big Smoke. He expanded London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, which charges the drivers of older, more polluting vehicles a daily fee to drive in the city.

    The measure became a lightning rod for criticism of Khan, spurring noisy protests and vandalism of enforcement cameras. Khan staunchly defended the zone, which research suggests has made London’s air cleaner. His big victory in last year’s mayoral election appeared to vindicate Khan’s stance on the issue.

    Travers said that beyond their shared religion and being the targets of racism, both mayors face the conundrum of leading dynamic, diverse metropolises that are “surprisingly peaceful and almost embarrassingly successful” — and resented by the rest of their countries for their wealth and the attention they receive.

    He said London is “locked in this strange alternative universe where it is simultaneously described by a number of commentators as sort of a hellhole … and yet on the other hand it’s so embarrassingly rich that British governments spend their lives trying to level up the rest of the country to it. You can’t win.”

    ___

    Associated Press writer Eléonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this story.

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  • Biodiversity talks in final days with many issues unresolved

    Biodiversity talks in final days with many issues unresolved

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    Negotiators at a United Nations biodiversity conference Saturday have still not resolved most of the key issues around protecting the world’s nature by 2030 and providing tens of billions of dollars to developing countries to fund those efforts.

    The United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP15, is set to wrap up Monday in Montreal and delegates were racing to agree on language in a framework that calls for protecting 30% of global land and marine areas by 2030, a goal known as “30 by 30.” Currently, 17% of terrestrial and 10% of marine areas globally are protected.

    They also have to settle on amounts of funding that would go to financing projects to create protected areas and restore marine and other ecosystems. Early draft frameworks called for closing a $700 billion gap in financing by 2030. Most of that would come from reforming subsidies in the agriculture, fisheries and energy sectors but there are also calls for tens of billions of dollars in new funding that would flow from rich to poor nations.

    “From the beginning of the negotiations, we’ve been seeing systematically some countries weakening the ambition. The ambition needs to come back,” Marco Lambertini, the director general of WWF International said, adding that they needed a “clear conservation target” that “sets the world on a clear trajectory towards delivering a nature positive future.”

    Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault expressed more optimism. Guilbeault told The Associated Press Saturday morning that he has heard “few people talk about red lines” and that means “people are willing to talk. People are willing to negotiate.”

    “I’ve heard a lot of support for ambition from all corners of the world,” Guilbeault said. “Everyone wants to leave here with an ambitious agreement.”

    Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, told reporters Saturday afternoon that she was encouraged by the progress especially around committing resources but that a deal had not been reached yet.

    “The negotiating teams have more work to do. They have to turn promises made into plans, ambitions and actions,” she said.

    The ministers and government officials from about 190 countries mostly agree that protecting biodiversity has to be a priority, with many comparing those efforts to climate talks that wrapped up last month in Egypt.

    Climate change coupled with habitat loss, pollution and development have hammered the world’s biodiversity, with one estimate in 2019 warning that a million plant and animal species face extinction within decades — a rate of loss 1,000 times greater than expected. Humans use about 50,000 wild species routinely, and 1 out of 5 people of the world’s 8 billion population depend on those species for food and income, the report said.

    But they are struggling to agree on what that protection looks like and who will pay for it.

    The financing has been among the most contentions issues, with delegates from 70 African, South American and Asian countries walking out of negotiations Wednesday. They returned several hours later.

    Brazil, speaking for developing countries, said in a statement that a new funding mechanism dedicated to biodiversity be established and that developed countries provide $100 billion annually in financial grants to emerging economies until 2030.

    “You need a robust and ambitious package on finance that matches the ambition of the Global Biodiversity framework,” Leonardo Cleaver de Athayde, the head of the Brazilian delegation, told the AP.

    “This will cost a lot of money to implement. The targets are extremely ambitious and cost a lot of money,” he continued. “The developing countries will bear a higher burden in implementing it because most biodiversity resources are to be found in developing countries. They need international support.”

    The donor countries — the European Union and 13 countries — responded Friday with a statement promising to increase biodiversity financing. They noted they doubled biodiversity spending from 2010 to 2015 and committed to several billion dollars more in biodiversity funding since then.

    Zac Goldsmith, the U.K.’s minister for Overseas Territories, Commonwealth, Energy, Climate and Environment, acknowledged the focus cannot only be on popular protection measures like the 30 by 30 goal.

    “The 30-by-30 is a headline target, but you can’t deliver 30-by-30 without a whole range of other things being agreed as well,” he said. “We’re not gonna have 30-by-30 without finance. We’re not going to have it unless other countries do as Costa Rica has and break the link between agricultural productivity and land degradation and deforestation. And we’re not gonna be able to do any of these things if we don’t address … subsidies.”

    Even protection targets are still being squabbled over. Many countries believe 30% is an admirable goal but some countries are pushing to water the language down to allow among other things sustainable activities in those areas that conservationists fear could result in destructive logging and mining. Others want language referencing ways to better manage the other 70% of the world that wouldn’t be protected.

    Other disagreements revolve around how best to share the benefits from genetic resources and enshrining the rights of Indigenous groups in any agreement. Some Indigenous groups want direct access to funding and a voice in designating protected areas that impact Indigenous peoples.

    “Any protected areas that affect Indigenous peoples need to have the free prior informed consent of Indigenous peoples, otherwise there will be the same old patters of Indigenous peoples being displaced by protected areas,” Atossa Soltani, the director of global strategy for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, an alliance of 30 Indigenous nations in Ecuador and Peru working to working to permanently protect 86 million acres of rainforest, said in an email interview.

    The other challenge is including language — similar to the Paris Agreement on climate change — that creates a stronger system to report and verify the progress countries make. Many point to the failures of the 2010 biodiversity framework, which saw only six of the 20 targets partially met by a 2020 deadline.

    “It’s very important for parties to see what others are doing. It’s important for civil society, people like you to track our progress or sometimes unfortunately lack thereof,” Guilbeault said. “It’s an important tool to help keep our feet to the fire. If it’s effective on climate. We should have it on nature as well.”

    ———

    Follow Michael Casey on Twitter: @mcasey1

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    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Britain wants an election. It’s not getting one

    Britain wants an election. It’s not getting one

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    LONDON — Now on their third prime minister since the last general election, the despairing British public want a vote on who runs the country. They appear to be out of luck.

    New U.K. premier Rishi Sunak did not secure the 2019 election win for the Tories. Neither did his predecessor Liz Truss, who instead for a chaotic 44 days tried to rip up many of the economic and policy promises in Conservative manifesto.

    It was, of course, Boris Johnson who secured the Tories’ 80-seat majority almost three years ago — before being kicked out of Downing Street in the summer by his own MPs following a string of humiliating scandals. His replacement Truss, elected by just 81,00 Conservative members, lasted less than two months before her colleagues wielded the knife again.

    This carousel of leaders has left some observers pondering how Britain, can repeatedly change its figurehead — not to mention, in Truss’ case, its entire economic direction — without once consulting the public.

    Unsurprisingly, it’s a question opposition leader, Labour’s Keir Starmer, hopes to capitalize on.

    Asking questions to the new PM in the House of Commons Wednesday, Starmer noted that the last time Sunak took part in a vote — his head-to-head contest with Truss — “he got trounced by the former prime minister … who herself got beaten by a lettuce.”

    “Let working people have their say,” Starmer told the PM, “and call a general election.”

    A defiant Sunak replied that his mandate “is based on a manifesto that we were elected on — an election that we won, and they lost.”

    Public panic

    Constitutionally, Sunak is correct.

    The U.K. government retains total control over whether a snap election should be called ahead of the January 2025 deadline for the next vote — unless dozens of Tory MPs suddenly go rogue and decide to bring down their own regime via a no-confidence vote in the Commons.

    And the Tories’ rock-bottom poll ratings mean any kind of electoral gamble is off the table for the foreseeable future. Conservative support among the public — already dire at the tail-end of the Johnson tenure — plunged to record lows under Truss.

    “The short answer to anyone at home or abroad asking why the Conservatives don’t have an election, is because they don’t have to have an election,” said Joe Twyman, director at U.K. polling firm Deltapoll. “Given the situation the polls are in, they would be assured of a loss.”

    Under the British political system, the public votes for a governing party rather than a specific prime minister — and it’s for each party to pick its leader as and when it sees fit. The set-up differs markedly from presidential systems in places like France and the U.S., which are led by directly-elected heads of state.

    “It’s a fundamental rule of a parliamentary democracy that it isn’t the prime minister who wins a mandate at a general election, it’s the parliamentary party,” said Catherine Haddon, a constitutional expert at the Institute for Government think tank. 

    “Once you start going down the route of arguing every prime minister needs to win a general election to be able to hold the job, you are fundamentally changing the system.”

    Furthermore, the U.K.’s “first-past-the-post” voting system tends to deliver single-party rule, meaning coalition governments — which might collapse in times of turbulence, so triggering an election — are historically rare.

    So Sunak retains a healthy parliamentary majority, inherited from Johnson’s 2019 victory.

    Left wanting

    But the one thing counting against the Conservatives is public opinion.

    A YouGov poll this week found 59 percent of the British public think Sunak should call an election — including 38 percent of all Conservative voters — compared with just 29 percent who thought he shouldn’t. That’s far higher than normal, and way above even the peak figure of 41 percent who wanted an election at the height of the Partygate scandal. 

    “Turmoil in the government, with the Conservatives now two leaders removed from the one who took them to election victory in 2019, has clearly convinced many Britons that the time is right for a new vote,” said YouGov’s head of data journalism, Matthew Smith.

    An internal poll for the opposition Labour Party this week found similar results, with support for an election strongest among swing voters, according to a Labour official. Even a third of those 2019 Conservative voters who are still planning to vote the same way next time round want a snap election, the official said. Those leaning toward Labour are even more enthusiastic about a fresh campaign.

    Other research confirms the public is getting restless. A focus group this week for the non-partisan “More in Common” campaign found seven out of eight participants wanted an election once the current economic crisis has died down — a significant increase on previous exercises.

    Luke Tryl, the U.K. director of More in Common, said most people want “a choice over who is in charge” — although he noted that the same people also often feel conflicted, being “exhausted with the constant politics of the past few years.”

    Consultants at the agency Public First have found similar results in their own focus groups. The firm’s founding partner James Frayne said demands for a general election had “surged in recent weeks, and won’t be going anywhere.” He added: “As far as most voters are concerned, one unelected PM screwed up the economy so badly that another unelected PM must impose brutal austerity in response.”

    Internal dissent

    Indeed, even some Conservatives — chiefly those supportive of Boris Johnson — have suggested an election is necessary following his departure from No. 10 Downing Street.

    Former Cabinet Minister Nadine Dorries said publicly that an election would be “impossible to avoid” after her fellow MPs rejected Johnson’s recent comeback bid. Backbencher Christopher Chope and Tory peer Zac Goldsmith both made similar claims.

    “Imposing a new prime minister no-one voted for goes against the grain of what is democratic,” said one Johnson-supporting Conservative MP. “Colleagues who removed Boris can’t have their cake and eat it. We’ve had a sh*t show since, and appointing Rishi without a single vote is precarious. But colleagues insist they don’t want a general election.”

    For the vast majority of Conservative MPs, who want to avoid a vote at all costs, Sunak appears their best hope of calming the waters and so holding off the clamor for an election.

    “It is legitimate to feel there should be an election,” said a former Johnson adviser. “But in a world where there’s no general election, the best thing for everyone is to have Rishi — because however well he ends up doing, I think he will be quite calm, professional, and not trying to do crazy things that f*ck up all our mortgages.”

    Twyman, from Deltapoll, suggested that ultimately, being accused of dodging democracy is probably the “lesser of two evils” for the Tories.

    “It doesn’t look good for the Conservatives,” he said. “But a Labour majority of 300 doesn’t look good for the Conservatives either.”

    Annabelle Dickson contributed reporting.

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