It was hard to avoid the news around King Charles III’s coronation over the Bank Holiday weekend, so it wouldn’t be surprising if a few other stories slipped under your radar in the process.
Here’s a quick recap of important stories which you may have missed.
1. Tory councils lost almost 1,000 seats
Although the polls for local elections opened in various constituencies across England on Thursday, the full results were only revealed after the Bank Holiday.
After several days of counting, it has emerged that the Conservative Party lost 957 seats across 230 councils.
Labour gained 643, the Liberal Democrats gained 415 and the Green Party secured an extra 200.
Overall, the Tories lost control of 48 councils while Labour got an extra 22, the Liberal Democrats 12 and the Greens one. An extra 16 councils are now under no overall control.
This was the first major test for Conservative PM Rishi Sunak, who has only been in office since October – and clearly, it did not go in his favour.
He said that he would be sticking to his “priorities” despite the “obviously disappointing results”.
2. Russia started to evacuate citizens
While the Kremlin has been making headlines for its Victory Day parade where Vladimir Putin lambasted the West again, Russia is starting to prepare for Ukraine’s spring counteroffensive.
Not only were the Victory Day celebrations scaled back or even cancelled in parts of the country closer to the Ukrainian border, but Moscow is now apparently evacuating some citizens from occupied areas.
Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine is run by Russians, but is on Ukrainian land – and Kyiv plans to take it back.
According to the Moscow-installed governor of the region, Yevgeny Balitsky, more than 1,600 have been evacuated so far.
It came after the UK’s nuclear power watchdog warned that the situation around the nuclear plant could become “potentially dangerous” ahead of Ukraine’s expected counteroffensive.
Ukraine claimed that Russia was prioritising the evacuation of those who accepted Russian citizenship in the first months of the occupation, although news agency Reuters was not able to independently verify these reports.
3. Protests over Jordan Neely ramped up in the US
Demonstrators protesting Jordan Neely’s death continue to push back against New York authorities.
The 30-year-old homeless man was killed while riding the city’s subway after another passenger put him in a fatal chokehold last week.
A vigil held in his memory on Monday night escalated into a violent crackdown, and local police said they made at least 11 arrests.
4. Astronomers catch a star swallowing a planet
For the first time ever, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology accidentally caught a star engulfing a whole planet.
The team first noticed that a star – 12,000 light years from Earth – had suddenly become much brighter (by more than 100 times over a 10-day period).
Then they realised the planet in question was a gas giant, similar in size to Jupiter, but so close to the star that it could orbit it in just one day.
The star is a lot like our Sun – and it took around 100 days to completely absorb the planet, although a bright explosion only happened in the last 10 days as the planets was completely absorbed.
Experts think the same thing will happen to Earth in the distant future, although in a less dramatic way because our planet is smaller than Jupiter’s.
