“It’s lame duck for Christmas,” the opposition Labour party-backing Daily Mirror wrote on its front page. The more independent-minded i commuter newspaper said May received a “stay of execution”.

And the Brexit-support The Sun said the “coup plot may lead to (a) historic breakup of the Tory party”. May won the backing of 200 Conservative party MPs in a secret ballot on Wednesday.

But 117 voted against her — a margin that underscored the extent of the opposition from her own ranks to the draft withdrawal agreement May struck with EU leaders last month.

    The no-confidence vote was initiated by staunchly anti-EU MPs in May’s party.

Her deal is also opposed by Labour and smaller opposition parties in parliament that want closer ties with Brussels.

The scale of the resistance — and May’s promise to her party on Wednesday to not contest the 2022 election — made newspapers question the extent of the British leader’s victory.

“Tory coup fails. But scale of rebellion damages May,” said the left-wing The Guardian.

“Theresa May scrapes home,” said The Times.

The traditionally right-wing paper said five minister were now urging May to let parliament “hold a series of ‘indicative’ votes on every conceivable option” of Brexit.

May pulled a vote scheduled for Tuesday on the draft agreed last month with  her 27 EU counterparts because of its certain defeat.

She heads back to Brussels on Thursday in a long-shot bid to wrest concessions that could win her some additional votes.

EU leaders refuse to renegotiate the actual draft but seem willing to offer May non-binding assurances on the main dispute involving measures to prevent the return of a hard border with Ireland.

May has promised to re-submit her Brexit deal for a vote in the House of Commons by January 21.

A viral video making the rounds on social media seemingly falsely depicts Miss USA holding court over Miss Colombia and Miss Australia as she appears to mock Miss Cambodia – Rern Sinat – for her lack of English during rehearsals in Bangkok.

“Miss Cambodia is here and doesn’t speak any English, and not a single person here speaks her language. Francesca [Miss Australia] said that it would be very isolating,” said Sarah Rose Summers from Nebraska, Omaha in the video.

However an anonymous source inside the pageant told The Post: “Actually, Miss Cambodia and Miss Australia are friends, and Miss Australia wants someone to talk to. They knew they were on camera.”

Sinat was said that she was “hurt” after the exchange, but the source said that she “felt better” after learning she had been assigned a translator by the pageant’s organisers.

“A lot of the contestants have a translator,” said the source. “It was a big issue for them last week. But now we’re OK … actually, Miss USA might visit Cambodia next year.”

Miss Australia, Francesca Hung, posted a photograph on Instagram of herself with Sinat with a caption reading: “I’m so upset that this situation has been misconstrued like this … We were merely saying it must be even more difficult at times not to have a single other delegate being able to speak [Khmer] … which in fact, makes Nat [Miss Cambodia] an even stronger contender [for the crown].”

A member from the Cambodian camp requested the pageant’s organisers provide them a translator as the video may have unfairly garnered Rose Summers criticism online.

Sinat previously had to rely on Google Translate to communicate during much of the preliminary rounds in Bangkok. Her team in Phnom Penh (which included a translator who did not travel with her to Thailand) requested organisers provide Miss Cambodia with a translator, who was provided on Wednesday morning.

“It’s difficult because Khmer isn’t a very [widespread] language [while] some of the Latinspeaking girls had two translators,” alleged the source.

The 67th Miss Universe is currently in the preliminary stages. The grand final is set for December 17.

According to latest reports, three people were killed and several injured when a gunman opened fire at the Strasbourg Christmas market on 11 December. The suspect is reported to be at large and the motive for the attack is still unclear.

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The New Species on the Block report describes three mammal, 23 fish, 14 amphibian, 26 reptile and 91 plant species discovered in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam by scientists who ventured into the region’s jungles, mountains, rivers and grasslands, often under punishing conditions.

New Species on the Block is the 10th in a series of reports highlighting species discoveries in the region.

The 157 species discovered in 2017 means that an average of three new species a week were discovered in the region, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

Thirty-nine species were discovered in Myanmar, a good sign that the opening of the country to field research and conservation will yield many more species.

Vietnam had 58 new species, Thailand 35, Laos 24 and Cambodia eight.

The new species include:

● A bat whose hair bears a likeness to Lance Bass frosted tips of the band NSync, was discovered in the sub-Himalayan habitat of Myanmar’s Hkakabo Razi forest.

● A pancake-shaped catfish that was found in fast-flowing water in Myanmar’s remote Hponkan Razi Wildlife Sanctuary.

● A bamboo species from Cambodia’s Cardamom Mountains with a unique bulb-shaped base that grows along roadsides, making it vulnerable to clearings.

● A tiny toad with sharp horns that was named after an elf due to its discovery in a foggy, mountainous, moss-covered “elfin forest” in Vietnam. Its habitat and eyelid horns have led some to call it the “toad from Middle Earth”.

● A newly discovered Thismia herb species from Laos that is already endangered due to its habitat being leased out for limestone mining.

● A leaf-toed gecko discovered in Thailand’s Khao Sam Roi Yot, or “Mountain of 300 Peaks”, which has two distinctive “racing stripes” from its snout to the tip of its tail.

● Myanmar’s Salween river basin mud snake, which is threatened by the development of its habitat and agricultural expansion.

● The skywalker hoolock gibbon that is listed as one of the top 25 most endangered primates on the planet.

“There are many more species out there waiting to be discovered and, tragically, many more that will be lost before that happens,” said Stuart Chapman, WWF’s Asia-Pacific regional director for conservation.

Dr Evan Quah of Universiti Sains Malaysia believes that his team’s work in discovering a snake species has shown that Myanmar’s Salween river basin is an area rich in unrecognised diversity.

According to WWF’s most recent Living Planet Report, there has been a 60 per cent population decline of the world’s wildlife in the last 40 years.

In the Greater Mekong region, the decline is probably much worse given the large-scale destruction of wild habitats and the industrial-scale poaching in many parts of the region.

In the golden triangle, where Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and China meet, endangered species are often openly sold or transported to neighbouring countries with large consumer demand for wildlife products in China and Vietnam.

There is good news though.

In Myanmar, the wildlife trade in the Yangon region is now illegal, while in Laos, a new prime minister’s order on the wildlife trade and enforcement has led to increased seizures of wildlife products.

However, with a recent ban on ivory in China, there will probably be a shift in the ivory market and more pressure on the wildlife of the Greater Mekong from tourists and traders.

“There is blood, sweat and tears behind every new discovery,” said Chapman.

“But it’s a race against time to announce a new discovery so steps can be taken to protect it before it’s too late,” he said.

“For us, he was a blank slate,” said a spokeswoman of the Federal Criminal Police Office, which handles cases related to terrorism.

An interior ministry spokeswoman also said that there has been no indications suggesting an Islamist link to the suspect.

The 29-year-old suspect was sentenced to two years and three months for burglaries in the southwestern city of Mainz and in Baden-Wuerttemberg state farther south, and jailed in 2016.

“He served a year in Germany before being expelled to France,” a spokesman from Baden-Wuerttemberg’s interior ministry told AFP.

According to the Tagesspiegel newspaper, the man broke into a dentist practice in Mainz, Rhineland Palatinate state, in 2012, making away with cash, stamps and gold used for teeth fillings.

Four years later, he hit a pharmacy in the Lake Constance town of Engen, Baden-Wuerttemberg, pocketing cash.

German authorities were on the lookout for the fugitive “along the Rhine” river region, the ministry spokesman said.

“But at the moment we do not believe that he has crossed into the country,” he added.

The gunman opened fire Tuesday evening at the famed Strasbourg Christmas market, which draws thousands of visitors every year.

The shooting left two people dead and 13 wounded.

French authorities said the attacker had been on their list of extremists and “is actively being hunted by security forces”.

Meanwhile, German police said they have released three people earlier detained following tipoffs from the public following the Strasbourg attack.

The three were in a taxi with French licence plates which was halted on the A1 motorway close to the city Bremen, a police spokesman in Delmenhorst told national news agency DPA.

Police said they have been freed after investigations ruled out any connection to the attack in Strasbourg.

Police also denied an earlier report that one of the three was masked.

Dorsey’s gushing thread on Sunday came after a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat near Mandalay in which he praised the country’s food, beauty and its people, whom he said were “full of joy”.

The comments drew heat online for leaving out any discussion of atrocities committed against Myanmar’s Rohingya minority during a military crackdown last year that drove more than 720,000 people into Bangladesh camps.

Critics piled into the tech mogul for being “tone deaf” at a time when the UN has said Myanmar’s generals should be investigated for genocide.

    In a series of tweets, Dorsey defended his actions but conceded he could have handled the situation better.

“I’m aware of the human rights atrocities and suffering in Myanmar. I don’t view visiting, practicing, or talking with the people, as endorsement,” he said.

“I didn’t intend to diminish by not raising the issue, but could have acknowledged that I don’t know enough and need to learn more.”

Dorsey said he has been a long-time meditator and wanted to travel to Buddhist-majority Myanmar where Vipassana is practised in its “original form”.

Twitter is not nearly as popular in Myanmar as Facebook, which has been accused of not doing enough to control hate speech that fueled anti-Rohingya and anti-Muslim sentiment.

But hate speech during the Rohingya crisis also spilled over onto the micro-messaging site, which is facing similar allegations over hosting toxic content in countries where it is more broadly used.

Dorsey batted away speculation that there was a business twist to the visit, saying he had no conversations with the government during his trip, and described the platform as a way to raise awareness about human rights issues.

“Twitter is a way for people to share news and information about events in Myanmar as well as to bear witness to the plight of the Rohingya and other peoples and communities,” he said.

It is not the first time the travelling tech whizz has stirred outrage online.

On a trip to India in November, Dorsey was accused of inciting hatred against the highest caste after he was photographed holding a poster declaring “smash Brahminical patriarchy”.

The villagers initially thought the giant snake, which was resting by the river, was just an old log before one of them touched the serpent, triggering it into action.

The November 22 video, shot by villager Ronal Efendi Coto, shows the man fighting as others try to pry him loose from the python’s notorious death grip.

After calling for help and managing to subdue the serpent, the men put it into a cage in Pucuang Anam village in Sumatra and asked a local zoo for assistance.

But the zoo declined to take in the python, citing overcapacity. “For now we are just keeping it in the cage so people can come and have a look”, Coto told AFP, adding that the snake was eight meters (26 feet) long.

Pythons are some of the largest snakes in the world, but are not known to measure more than seven meters in the wild.

In June, an Indonesian woman was found dead inside in the belly of a giant python after it was captured near where she vanished while tending her vegetable garden on Sulawesi island.

But former secretary and real estate agent Janet Wong Li Yoong, 52, has a chockful of ideas about what to do with unwanted items. She upcycles them into new materials and better quality products. She believes in doing her bit to save Planet Earth and reduce the mountains of garbage. Besides, she can earn some money and be happy!

Wong uses waste materials to make jewellery and house decor items, when she has time on her hands. She enjoys “the challenge of repurposing items from empty perfume bottles, forks and spoons, sea shells, beach stones, scrap metals, keys, locks, glass tiles, broken ceramic pieces, buttons and other discards that people deem useless” and turns what’s worthless into works of art.

Upcycled items, Wong said, are still not popular yet. However, some Malaysians are working hard to educate people about upcycled products.

These cute robots make quirky table-top decorative items.

Upcycled items, she said, remind us of the need to create a culture of mindfulness towards others and our environment.

She sells her designer items and pre-loved branded items via the website, Carousell, a smartphone- and web-based consumer-to-consumer marketplace for buying and selling new and second-hand goods. She was introduced to this online platform by her daughter who has had positive experiences selling second-hand items here.

Wong finds Carousell to be very user-friendly as it allows her to easily track items that are most viewed and liked by users. This, in turn, enables her to create more artistic items that would attract buyers.

“At Carousell, I did get to sell some pre-loved branded and vintage items,” she said.

“Previously, I sold my items at bazaars but last November, I stopped after I broke my left arm. Until now, I still cannot carry heavy things although my left arm is 90% recovered. However, I’m blessed that I can still use both hands for craftwork,” she said.

Trinkets

Janet Wong’s daughter Sophia Low models fabric cuff bracelets made from scraps of jeans and other items.

When she was a real estate agent, she felt very stressed out even though she could make more money. “In this line, I saw people fighting for buyers. I also disliked the job because of the frequently travelling,” she said.

“At my age, I don’t think I want to work for others.”

Even though selling handcrafted items doesn’t make much money, she said, she felt more comfortable and has more time to take care of her pet dog and three cats which include one recently rescued in the rain. A kind soul, she also feeds five neutered stray cats in her garden.

From ideas to final products

Wong’s design concepts are based on nature, environment and daily living. Her craftwork involves a lot of mix and match.

She makes upcycled jewellery like necklaces and earrings as well as accessories. She also makes house décor items from old keys or unwanted wire racks.

A hotseller seems to be cute robots made with old door knobs and other stuff. She said: “When I uploaded a photo of a robot I just made, it was quickly snapped up.” A memorable robot with “red hair”, Street Dancer, was bought by a friend.

Even scraps of materials such as pieces cut from old jeans can be turned into accessories like fabric cuff bracelets. Her new creations, she said, were inspired by her late maternal grandmother who loved to sew and knit.

“She was still knitting and sewing at the age of 93. She passed away at 103 a few years ago,” Wong said.

Wong is a handyman of sorts using recycled materials. She said: “I learnt mostly from YouTube or tutorial books.”

Lately, she has been creating wire-wrapped jewellery, which are among the most saleable items. In fact, one day she posted an antique coin pendant – and got commissioned work to wire-wrap a collector’s antique coins, which she turned into wearable pendants.

Well, someone’s junk can be Wong’s gems. In her skilful hands, she can magically turn them into dazzling pieces – from cute robots to edgy steampunk jewellery!

To check out Wong’s upcycled craftworks, go to: https://my.carousell.com/jeanninehandmade