Airlines must not charge customers extra fuel fees after they have already bought tickets, the EU warned on Friday, as the aviation sector feels the pain from high energy prices because of the Middle East war.

“Airlines may adapt their published fares to the situation, but adding a fuel surcharge to a ticket after it has been bought cannot be justified,” EU spokesperson Anna-Kaisa Itkonen told reporters in Brussels.

Any changes post-booking can “raise issues under the EU’s unfair commercial practices”, she added.

In a document published on Friday on the energy crisis affecting the aviation sector, the EU said “any retroactive change of the price is excluded”.

“Airlines may not include terms and conditions which would allow them to increase the price of the ticket above what is advertised at the time of purchase simply because fuel was more expensive than they had accounted for,” the European Commission said.

The only exception is for package holidays if the seller has made it clear in the contract there could be a possibility of fuel-related changes to the costs.

In such cases, an increase of up to 8% is allowed, but if it is higher, the customer can accept or they have the right to cancel their booking.

Spanish low-cost carrier Volotea has been criticised in France where it is under investigation after demanding fuel surcharges from customers because of the energy shock from the war.

Gilles Gosselin, the airline’s France director, has defended the measure.

“The legality of our system has been confirmed by three independent law firms specialising in air transport and consumer law. The measure is transparent, it is temporary, and it works both ways”, up and down, Gosselin told AFP in France.

• One person remains missing in factory explosion.
• On-site research and rescue work completed.
• 51 people being treated at hospitals.

The death toll has risen to 37 from 26 and one person remains missing after a fireworks factory explosion in the southern Chinese province of Hunan, state news agency Xinhua said on Friday, in the deadliest blast reported in China since 2019.

The explosion happened at around 4:40pm (0840 GMT) on Monday in Hunan’s Liuyang, known as China’s fireworks capital because it manufactures 60% of the domestic supply of the devices and about 70% of exports.

Xinhua said on-site research and rescue work has been completed, and 51 people are being treated at hospitals.

An investigation into the incident has been launched and police have summoned eight people for questioning on suspicion of causing the deadly explosion, state media said.

The probe is under supervision of China’s top prosecutors while Hunan has ordered the suspension of operations for all fireworks plants in the city for safety inspections.

In June, an explosion at a fireworks factory in Hunan killed nine people.

In 2019, a chemical plant blast in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu left 78 people dead.

LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered heavy early losses in elections on Friday, showing the depth of voter anger with his government and raising fresh doubts about his future just two years after a landslide general election victory.

Starmer’s Labour Party haemorrhaged support in areas reporting results overnight, including traditional strongholds in former industrial regions of central and northern England, along with some parts of London.

The main beneficiary was the anti-immigration populist Reform UK of Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, which gained more than 200 council seats in England, and could form the main opposition in Scotland and Wales to the pro-independence Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru.

“The picture has been pretty much as bad as anyone expected for Labour, or worse,” said John Curtice, Britain’s most respected pollster.

The elections for 136 local councils in England, alongside the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales, represent the most significant test of public opinion before the next general election due in 2029.

Lawmakers in the governing Labour Party said if the party performs poorly in Scotland, loses power in Wales, and fails to hold many of the roughly 2,500 council seats it is defending in England, then Starmer will face renewed pressure to quit or set out a timetable for his departure.

Insurgent parties fracture two-party system

The early results showed the continued fracturing of Britain’s traditional two-party system into a multi-party democracy, in what analysts say represents one of the biggest transformations in British politics in the last century.

The once-dominant Labour and Conservative parties were losing votes to Reform, and at the other end of the political spectrum to the left-wing pro-environment Green Party, while nationalist parties were expected to win the elections in Scotland and Wales.

Farage said the results so far were “way exceeding” his expectations and represented a “historic change in British politics”.

Labour was wiped out in some of the most closely watched early results.

The party lost control of the council of Tameside in Greater Manchester for the first time in almost 50 years after Reform picked up all 14 seats Labour was defending.

In nearby Wigan, a former mining community it has controlled for more than 50 years, Labour also lost every one of the 20 seats it was defending to Reform, and in Salford, the party only held three of the 16 seats it was defending.

The results were “soul-destroying”, said Rebecca Long-Bailey, a Labour member of parliament for Salford.

While incumbent governments often struggle in mid-term elections, pollsters forecast that Labour could lose the most council seats in local elections since former Prime Minister John Major lost more than 2,000 in 1995, when his government was mired in endless corruption scandals.

The Reform UK party added 253 council seats in England with results in more than 4,200 seats still to be counted. The Labour party lost 185 seats, and the Conservative party was down 93 seats.

Most of the election results — including the seats in the Scottish and Welsh elections — are due to be declared on Friday afternoon and evening.

U-turns, scandals erode Starmer’s authority

Starmer, a former lawyer, was elected in 2024 with one of the largest parliamentary majorities in modern British history on the premise that he would bring stability, rather than charisma, after years of political chaos.

But his time in office has been marked by numerous policy U-turns, a rotating cast of advisers and the disastrous appointment of Peter Mandelson as Britain’s ambassador to the United States, who was fired nine months into the job over his links to the late convicted US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Starmer insists he will lead Labour into the next election, and the party has never successfully removed an incumbent prime minister in its 125-year history.

The prime minister is helped by the fact that two frontrunners to succeed him if he goes — Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and former Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner — are not yet in positions to mount leadership bids, and other potential rivals seem unwilling to move against him for now.

The energy minister Ed Miliband denied on Thursday a report in The Times newspaper that he had advised Starmer to consider setting out a timetable for his departure from Downing Street.