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.

WASHINGTON: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he had a productive meeting with US President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday, discussing issues including housing and student detentions by federal immigration authorities.

It was the second meeting between them since Mamdani’s mayoral election win late last year. Mamdani is a Democrat and Trump a Republican.

Mamdani posted a photo with Trump on social media. “I had a productive meeting with President Trump this afternoon. I’m looking forward to building more housing in New York City,” Mamdani wrote.

Mamdani said he raised concerns with Trump about a detention on Thursday of Columbia University student Elmina Aghayeva from Azerbaijan by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and that Trump later informed him she will be “released imminently.”

The federal Homeland Security Department subsequently said it freed Aghayeva and launched removal proceedings against her.

While both men have been critical of each other’s policy positions and hold radically different worldviews, their previous meeting in November was unexpectedly friendly.

In that meeting too, they spoke about bringing down the price of housing. A former real estate developer, Trump had brightened at Mamdani’s call for more housing in New York.

Making housing more affordable has been one of Trump’s pledges ahead of the midterm elections in late 2026 as prices for housing remain significantly higher than they were a few years ago. Cost of living and affordability were also issues at the heart of Mamdani’s mayoral victory.

Trump reiterated his pledge in his State of the Union speech this week and has announced some policies aimed at addressing the problem. Still, US mortgage rates remain high and the housing supply in most of the country is short of what is needed to meet demand. This leaves the cost of home ownership increasingly out of reach for many families.

Economists and trade groups say Trump’s aggressive trade and immigration policies have raised prices for building materials and appliances and undercut labour supply, making it harder for builders to ramp up housing construction.

Mamdani has criticised Trump’s hardline immigration crackdown, especially his use of ICE agents and deportation attempts, along with the president’s policies towards Israel’s war in Gaza.

Mamdani’s office said he handed a list to the White House of four pro-Palestinian students battling deportation attempts and asked for help to dismiss those cases.

The four names were Mahmoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Mohsen Mahdawi and Leqaa Kordia. Kordia, who was recently hospitalised after a seizure in detention and has lost dozens of family members in Gaza, remains detained by ICE while the other three were released over the last year.

Trump has cast pro-Palestinian protesters as antisemitic. Demonstrators, including some Jewish groups, say he wrongly conflates their criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza and its occupation of Palestinian territories with antisemitism, as well as their advocacy for Palestinian rights with support for extremism.

• 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”.