BANGKOK (AP) — The newly elected parliament in Myanmar will convene for its first session next month, the country's state-run media reported on Tuesday after an election that critics said was neither free nor fair.
The March 16 session will also be the first parliament meeting in more than five years since the military in 2021 seized power, taking over from the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi. The takeover plunged Myanmar into widespread unrest and armed resistance that has since evolved into civil war.
The parliament session comes after phased elections were held in December and January in 263 of the country’s 330 townships.
The army-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, or USDP, won a majority of the seats in the vote. Myanmar's former ruling National League for Democracy and other parties declined to run under conditions they deemed unfair.
The military government presented the vote as a return to democracy but critics say the polls were designed to legitimize the power of the military after Suu Kyi's ouster in February 2021.
The state-run Myanma Alinn newspaper said the 440-seat lower house of parliament will begin its session on March 16 while the 224-seat upper house will open two days later in the capital, Naypyitaw. The 14 regional chambers will convene on March 20, a separate announcement said.
The two-chamber legislature is expected to — at least in theory — replace the current ruling military government but the process is not likely to signal a transition to full civilian rule. The military and its allies hold most of the seats in both houses of parliament, ensuring that the army can stay in control.
According to the Union Election Commission, the USDP won 339 of the total 586 seats in the two-chamber parliament. That means that along with the military, which is automatically allocated 166 seats under the constitution, the two hold 505 seats — more than 86% of the legislature. Twenty-one other parties won between one and 20 seats each.
The new Parliament's first task will be to elect a speaker for each house, then elect a president and two vice presidents.
Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the current head of the military government, is widely expected to assume the presidency. The constitution, however, bars a president from serving concurrently as the army’s commander-in-chief — Myanmar's most powerful post — raising questions about whether he would step relinquish that role.
Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s 80-year-old former leader, is serving a 27-year prison term on charges widely viewed as spurious and politically motivated. Her party, which won landslide victories in the 2020 and 2015 elections, but was forced to dissolve in 2023 after refusing to register under new military rules.
FILE - A man walks in front of Parliament Building in Naypyitaw, Myanmar on Jan. 24, 2018. (AP Photo/Aung Shine Oo, File)
LONDON (AP) — Police in Britain said Peter Mandelson, the former U.K. ambassador to the United States, has been released on bail after he was arrested in a misconduct probe stemming from his ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein. It came days after a friendship with Epstein landed the former Prince Andrew in police custody.
A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said in a statement issued just after 2 a.m. Tuesday: “A 72-year-old man arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office has been released on bail pending further investigation.
The man was not named, in keeping with British police practice, but the suspect in the case previously was identified as the former diplomat, who is 72. Mandelson was filmed being led from his London home to a car by plainclothes officers on Monday afternoon.
Both Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, are suspected of improperly passing U.K. government information to the disgraced U.S. financier, and the high-profile British arrests are some of the most dramatic fallout from the trove of more than 3 million pages of Epstein-related documents released last month by the U.S. Justice Department.
Police are investigating Mandelson over claims he passed sensitive government information to Epstein a decade and a half ago. He does not face allegations of sexual misconduct.
His arrest came four days after Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested in a separate case on suspicion of a similar offense related to his friendship with Epstein. He was released after 11 hours in custody while the police investigation continues.
Mandelson served in senior government roles under previous Labour governments and was U.K. ambassador to Washington until Prime Minister Keir Starmer fired him in September after emails were published showing that he maintained a friendship with Epstein after the financier’s 2008 conviction for sex offenses involving a minor.
The files released in January contained more explosive revelations about Mandelson's ties to Epstein, whom he once called “my best pal.”
Messages suggest that Mandelson passed on sensitive — and potentially market-moving — government information to Epstein in 2009, when Mandelson was a senior minister in the British government. That includes an internal government report discussing ways the U.K. could raise money after the 2008 global financial crisis, including by selling off government assets. Mandelson also appears to have told Epstein he would lobby other members of the government to reduce a tax on bankers’ bonuses.
British police launched a criminal probe earlier this month and searched Mandelson’s two houses in London and western England.
The decision to appoint Mandelson nearly cost Starmer his job earlier this month, as questions swirled around his judgment about someone who has flirted with controversy during a decades-long political career.
Though he acknowledged he made a mistake and apologized to victims of Epstein, Starmer’s position remains precarious. His future may rest on the release of files connected to Mandelson’s appointment. The government has pledged to begin releasing those documents in early March, though the timeline may be complicated by his arrest.
Mandelson has been a major, if contentious, figure in the center-left Labour Party for decades. He is a skilled — critics say ruthless — political operator whose mastery of political intrigue earned him the nickname “Prince of Darkness.”
The grandson of former Labour Cabinet minister Herbert Morrison, he was an architect of the party’s return to power in 1997 as centrist, modernizing “New Labour” under Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Mandelson served in senior government posts under Blair between 1997 and 2001, and under Prime Minister Gordon Brown from 2008 to 2010. In between, he was the European Union’s trade commissioner. Brown has been particularly angered by the revelations and has been helping police with their inquiries.
Mandelson twice had to resign from government during the Blair administration over allegations of financial or ethical impropriety, acknowledging mistakes but denying wrongdoing.
He later returned to government and was back on the political front line when Starmer named him ambassador to Washington at the start of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Mandelson’s trade expertise and comfort around the ultra-rich were considered major assets. He helped secure a trade deal in May that spared Britain some of the tariffs Trump has imposed on countries around the world.
The status of the deal is now up in the air after Trump announced a new set of global tariffs in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision quashing his previous import tax order.
Earlier this month Mandelson resigned from the House of Lords, Parliament’s upper chamber, to which he was appointed for life in 2008. But he still has the title — Lord Mandelson — that went with it.
In this photo taken from video by Sky News, Britain's former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson is seen in a vehicle leaving a police station in London in the early hours of Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Sky News Exclusive via AP)
In this photo taken from video by Sky News, Britain's former ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson is seen in a vehicle leaving a police station in London in the early hours of Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2026. (Sky News Exclusive via AP)
FILE - Peter Mandelson leaves his home in Wiltshire, England, Feb. 20, 2026. (Ben Birchall/PA via AP, File)
Peter Mandelson is seen outside his home in north west London, Saturday, Feb. 21, 2026. (James Manning/PA via AP)
