内容摘要："Due to malnutrition they are always telling us, 'my baby cannot take enough supplement from my breast… my baby won't stop crying… they always need to be breastfed, but my breast is empty'."

"Due to malnutrition they are always telling us, 'my baby cannot take enough supplement from my breast… my baby won't stop crying… they always need to be breastfed, but my breast is empty'."

The immediate cause of these statements – one about Badenoch, the other about the party more generally, both utterly fatalistic – was the local election results at the start of May, a grim reminder for the Conservatives that the only way isn't up.What began as expectation management, that the Conservatives might lose control of every council they held at the start of the night, became a prophecy. Crucially, the local elections proved that the rapid surge of Reform UK in the polls was real at the ballot box too.

The results also made clear that the challenge facing Badenoch is a dramatically distinctive one.The Conservatives last left government in 1997, and in the following set of local elections in 1998, their new leader William Hague made modest gains.When Labour lost office in 2010, their new leader, Ed Miliband, made gains at the local elections the following year. There is a template for how defeated parties fare in their early period out of office – and Badenoch's Conservative Party is diverging from it significantly.

In fact, new analysis by the BBC's Political Research Unit shows that things have got worse for the Conservatives even in the few weeks since the local elections. The Conservatives have lost 47 more councillors since polling day, a rate of about two a day.There are diverse reasons for this – six (including two this week) have defected to Reform UK, whereas others who have quit have generally left to become independents. One has defected to Labour. Three have died. And it's worth noting that on the other side of the ledger, one independent councillor has defected to the Conservatives since the start of May.

While not completely unheard of, it is unusual for a party to lose so many councillors in such a short period of time and will be interpreted by some as another sign that the pillars of Conservative strength are continuing to crumble.

In the same time period, Reform have gained 19 new councillors, both through defections and by-elections, although they have also lost five. It is striking that in no council in the country has a Conservative-Reform coalition materialised, despite much speculation – underscoring that, even at the most local level, the two parties are vying directly with each other.She added: "We cannot talk on behalf of those who have passed away, but our best guess is that they wanted to take the Atlantic route to get to the Canary Islands".

Hundreds of thousands of people have been internally displaced inside Mali, whose central and northern regions have known little stability since independence from France in September 1960, and many others have fled abroad.Around 6.4 million people in the country are in need of humanitarian aid, according to the European Commission, and more than 1.5 million people require emergency food assistance.

Ms Byun explained that Mali had experienced "a cycle of violence" since 2012, when the Tuareg rebellion in northern Mali triggered a military coup and Islamist groups that helped defeat the government captured several towns.Access to services in the west African country had been "severely restricted" and Malians were crossing the border in search for better livelihoods, she added.