“We’re not going to engage in some race to the bottom,” Boris Johnson said. “All we want is mutual recognition of each other’s high standards, and access to each other’s markets.”

The new push by Russian-backed Syrian troops could worsen the humanitarian crisis that has displaced nearly a million people and left more than 300 civilians dead since the beginning of December.

Hosni Mubarak had long maintained his innocence and said history would judge him a patriot who served his country selflessly.

“If the new government goes through, Malaysia is heading toward a very regressive stage whereby racial supremacy and religious extremism would become the rule of the day,” said Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.

“Moderates need to either consolidate or see Sanders Bernie run away with it,” said Maria Cardona, a Democratic strategist. “It’s time for some decisions or live with the outcome.”

The president, who was represented by Lai Mohammed, minister of information, said such “wrong perception” of the legislative chamber is caused by the lack of understanding of their works.

“I don’t care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president,” Bernie Sanders said. “My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.”

A Syrian commercial flight landed at Aleppo airport on Wednesday from Damascus, marking the resumption of internal flights between Syria’s two largest cities for the first time since 2012. The flight carrying Syrian officials and journalists was a symbolic message from President Bashar Assad’s government, days after its forces consolidated control over the northwestern province of Aleppo and seized the last segments of the strategic M5 highway linking Aleppo to Damascus. The motorway between Syria’s two biggest cities was being repaired and was scheduled to reopen in coming days, for the first time in eight years. Backed by heavy Russian air strikes, government forces have been on the offensive for weeks to recapture the Aleppo countryside and parts of neighboring Idlib province in northwestern Syria, the last rebel-held areas in the country. The advances have sent hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians fleeing towards the border with Turkey in one of the biggest single displacements of the war, now in its eighth year. Escaping the bombs, many of them left with their belongings piled up on vehicles and are now staying in tents, in open fields and under trees in freezing temperatures near the Turkish border. The U.N. has put the number of those displaced since Dec. 1 at more than 900,000 civilians — more than half of them women and children. The military campaign has also killed hundreds of civilians and disrupted aid distribution, with the bitter winter compounding the suffering. The Syrian Air flight landed at Aleppo airport

“It was quite simply an unfortunate accident, the collateral result of security operations in the region,” army spokesman Colonel Cyrille Atonfack Guemo said in a statement.