An Indian court acquitted the former chief minister of the capital Delhi on Friday in a long-running corruption probe the man had called a “political conspiracy” by the ruling party.

Opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal was Delhi’s chief minister before losing elections in 2025 in the midst of the judicial proceedings.

Kejriwal, 57, who spent several months in jail after he was arrested in March 2024 on accusations that his administration received kickbacks from the allocation of liquor licenses, wept as he left court.

“Truth has won,” Kejriwal told reporters after the verdict, accusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah of using a “political conspiracy” to finish AAP.

On Friday, a Delhi court cleared him, his former deputy Manish Sisodia and 21 others of all charges.

A key opponent to Modi, he had consistently denied wrongdoing.

Rekha Gupta, a member of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, was elected as chief minister of the sprawling megacity of more than 30 million people in February 2025.

Kejriwal began his career as a tax collector but quit his civil service job to become an anti-corruption crusader, bringing him national fame.

Several of Modi’s opponents have faced criminal investigation or trial in recent years, including two state chief ministers.

In August 2025, the government introduced a bill to remove politicians if they are arrested and detained for 30 days, which opponents called a “chilling” bid to crush constitutional safeguards.

• Defeat increases pressure on unpopular PM Starmer.
• Labour pushed into third place in previously safe seat.
• Green Party win first parliamentary by-election.
  

MANCHESTER: Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour suffered an embarrassing election defeat to the left-wing Green Party on Friday in an area of Manchester it had dominated for almost a century, a resultthat underscored the breakdown of Britain’s two-party politics.

The loss of one of Labour’s safest seats, in the biggest electoral test in almost a year, piles further pressure on Starmer to prove that he should keep his job following weeks of political turmoil and calls for him to resign.

The Green Party’s Hannah Spencer won the contest for the vacant parliamentary seat of Gorton and Denton, with Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK party coming second, and Labour pushed into third place.

The result was “clearly disappointing”, said Labour Party chair Anna Turley.

John Curtice, Britain’s most respected pollster, called the result a “seismic moment”, which means the “future of British politics looks more uncertain than at any stage” since the end of World War Two.

Starmer had staked his personal authority on Labour winning the seat by blocking one of his rivals, the popular Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, from standing, and by visiting the constituency this week, when British leaders normally avoid campaigning in local areas if they risk losing.

The defeat comes after Starmer faced the most dangerous moment of his premiership this month when some of his lawmakers said he should resign over his decision to appoint Labour veteran Peter Mandelson as ambassador to Washington, despite his links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Defeat piles pressure on Starmer before May elections

Labour won just over half the vote in Gorton and Denton at the last general election in 2024. 

But Starmer’s unpopularity, sluggish economic growth and a series of scandals and policy U-turns contributed to a deep fall in the party’s support.

The Green Party won 40.7% of the vote on Friday in an election triggered when a member of parliament resigned for health reasons. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party came second with 28.7% of the vote and Labour finished third with 25.4%.

While so-called by-elections are often lost by the governing party, the scale of Labour’s defeat by the left-leaning Greens piles pressure on Starmer, who has brushed off calls to resign and has pledged to fight on.

Starmer was unlikely to face an immediate threat to his position if he lost, Labour lawmakers said before the vote.

But he could be challenged after May elections, they added, when Labour is expected to fare badly in local and regional polls, including for the parliaments in Wales and Scotland.

Old loyalties fracture as voters shift to insurgent parties

Gorton and Denton – which includes the area where the Gallagher brothers who formed Oasis grew up – was once part of Labour’s old coalition of industrial areas across England that was considered so impregnable that it was called the Red Wall.

But the election contest was an example of how the British electorate has become more volatile, with declining loyalty and growing support for insurgent parties on the right and left of politics.

It was the first time the Green Party, which supports leaving Nato and legalising recreational drugs, had won a one-off election for a seat in parliament or one in the north of England. That takes the party’s total number of seats in the House of Commons to five out of 650.

Nationally, five parties, including the Greens, Reform and the Liberal Democrats, are polling double-digit percentages, threatening the Labour-Conservative duopoly of the last century.

The Labour government’s main challenge at the next election is likely to come from Reform UK, which holds only a handful of seats in parliament, but has been leading in opinion polls for more than a year.

However, Friday’s result shows how Reform could struggle to win in some places, particularly ethnically diverse urban areas.

Reform’s candidate Matt Goodwin alienated some voters in Gorton and Denton, which had a large number of Muslim residents, with his past comments that millions of British Muslims “are fundamentally opposed to British values and ways of life”.

Farage said the result, in an area where some Muslim voters have called for greater support for Palestinians in Gaza, was a “victory for sectarian voting and cheating”.

Former US president Bill Clinton will be grilled by a Congressional panel on Friday on his well-documented links to Jeffrey Epstein, as Democrats seek to shift focus onto Donald Trump’s own ties to the convicted sex offender.

Clinton features prominently throughout the latest Epstein files disclosures, with the former president insisting that he broke ties with him well before the disgraced billionaire’s 2008 conviction for sex offences.

Mere mention in the files released by the US Department of Justice does not imply wrongdoing, and Clinton has not been accused of a crime or formally investigated.

He follows his wife, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who testified Thursday, defiantly calling for President Trump — who like Bill Clinton had ties with Epstein — to appear before the panel.

“If this committee is serious about learning the truth about Epstein’s trafficking crimes… it would ask (Trump) directly under oath about the tens of thousands of times he shows up in the Epstein files,” she said in an opening statement published online.

The depositions are being held behind closed doors even though the Clintons called for them to be open and televised, a move Bill Clinton denounced as akin to a “kangaroo court.”

The grilling comes with greater peril for the former president than for his wife, as he has acknowledged extensive interactions with Epstein, but said he never visited the shady financier’s private Caribbean island.

Epstein was associated with the world’s rich, famous and powerful, and was convicted in 2008 for soliciting sex from girls as young as 14.

He died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while facing trial on sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee is probing those who were linked to Epstein, particularly in light of the Justice Department’s disclosures of millions of new documents related to its investigation of him.

Hillary insisted that she had neither flown on Epstein’s plane nor visited his island.

The Clintons had initially rejected subpoenas ordering them to testify in the panel’s probe, but the Democratic power couple agreed to do so after House Republicans threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress.

Newly released pictures

Hillary Clinton said in her opening statement to the panel that it “justified its subpoena to me based on its assumption that I have information regarding the investigations into the criminal activities of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.”

“Let me be as clear as I can. I do not.”

Democrats say the investigation is being weaponised to attack Trump’s political opponents rather than to conduct legitimate oversight.

Bill Clinton features prominently in the trove of investigative files related to Epstein released by the Justice Department but has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

Previously unseen photographs from the files include one showing the former president reclining in a hot tub, part of the image obscured by a stark black rectangle.

In another, Clinton is pictured swimming alongside a dark-haired woman who appears to be Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

Clinton has acknowledged flying on Epstein’s private plane several times in the early 2000s for Clinton Foundation-related humanitarian work.

David Markus, an attorney for Maxwell, said recently that Clinton and Trump are “innocent of any wrongdoing.”

The depositions are being held in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons reside.

Dozens of journalists have converged on the wealthy hamlet and the Secret Service erected metal barricades around the arts centre where the depositions are happening.

Republican committee chair James Comer said at the conclusion of Hillary’s appearance that lawmakers had “a lot of questions for her husband tomorrow.”