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TUNIS (Reuters) – Polls opened on Saturday in a Tunisian parliamentary election that will tighten President Kais Saied’s grip on power, capping what his opponents denounce as a march to one-man rule over a country that shook off dictatorship in 2011.

Taking place 12 years to the day after vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in an act of protest that sparked the Arab Spring, the vote is being boycotted by political parties which have accused Saied of mounting a coup.

Voters will be choosing a parliament largely defanged by a new constitution, approved with a low turnout in a July referendum that was engineered by Saied to shift Tunisia back towards a presidential system.

Nejib Chebbi, head of an anti-Saied coalition including Ennahda, has labelled the election a “still-born farce”.

Saied shut the previous parliament down last year, surrounding the legislature with tanks and assuming near total authority.

The vote appears to have stirred little interest among a population jaded by political dysfunction and struggling with economic hardship.

Voting is due to take place from 8 a.m.- 6 p.m. (0700 GMT-1700 GMT).

Saied, a former law lecturer who was a political independent when elected president in 2019, has described the election as part of a roadmap for ending the chaos and corruption he says afflicted Tunisia under the previous system.

His opponents including the Islamist Ennahda party meanwhile accuse him of a coup, and have rejected the ballot along with all the president’s other moves since last summer, when he dissolved parliament and began ruling by decree.

The election is taking place against the backdrop of an economic crisis that is fuelling poverty, leading many to attempt the perilous journey to Europe aboard smugglers’ boats.

With the main parties absent, a total of 1,058 candidates – only 120 of them women – are running for 161 seats.

For 10 of those – seven in Tunisia and three decided by expatriate voters – there is just one candidate. A further seven of the seats decided by expatriate voters have no candidates running at all.

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The mayor of Ukraine’s capital said early Saturday the city’s metro system was back in service and that all residents had been reconnected to water supply a day after the latest wave of Russian air strikes on critical infrastructure.

Ukrainian officials said Russia fired more than 70 missiles on Friday in one of its biggest attacks since the Kremlin’s Feb. 24 invasion, forcing emergency blackouts nationwide.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko also said heating had been restored to half the city and electricity had been returned to two-thirds.

“But schedules of emergency outages are being implemented,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app. “Because the deficit of electricity is significant.”

Klitschko had warned of an “apocalypse” scenario for the Ukrainian capital earlier this month if Russian air strikes on infrastructure continued but also said there was no need yet for people to evacuate.

“We are fighting and doing everything we can to make sure that this does not happen,” he told Reuters on Dec. 7.

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Elon Musk reinstated the Twitter accounts of several journalists that were suspended for a day over a controversy on publishing public data about the billionaire’s plane.

The reinstatements came after the unprecedented suspensions evoked stinging criticism from government officials, advocacy groups and journalism organizations from several parts of the globe on Friday, with some saying the microblogging platform was jeopardizing press freedom.

A Twitter pollthat Musk conducted later also showed that a majority of the respondents wanted the accounts restored immediately.

“The people have spoken. Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now,” Musk said in a tweet on Saturday.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. A Reuters check showed the suspended accounts, which included journalists from the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post, have been reinstated.

Officials from France, Germany, Britain and the European Union earlier condemned the suspensions.

The episode, which one well known security researcher labeled the “Thursday Night Massacre”, is being regarded by critics as fresh evidence of Musk, who considers himself a “free speech absolutist,” eliminating speech and users he personally dislikes.

Shares in Tesla (TSLA.O), an electric car maker led by Musk, slumped 4.7% on Friday and posted their worst weekly loss since March 2020, with investors increasingly concerned about his being distracted and about the slowing global economy.

Roland Lescure, the French minister of industry, tweeted on Friday that, following Musk’s suspension of journalists, he would suspend his own activity on Twitter.

Melissa Fleming, head of communications for the United Nations, tweeted she was “deeply disturbed” by the suspensions and that “media freedom is not a toy.”

The German Foreign Office warned Twitter that the ministry had a problem with moves that jeopardized press freedom.

The suspensions stemmed from a disagreement over a Twitter account called ElonJet, which tracked Musk’s private plane using publicly available information.

On Wednesday, Twitter suspended the account and others that tracked private jets, despite Musk’s previous tweet saying he would not suspend ElonJet in the name of free speech.

Shortly after, Twitter changed its privacy policy to prohibit the sharing of “live location information.”

Then on Thursday evening, several journalists, including from the New York Times, CNN and the Washington Post, were suspended from Twitter with no notice.

In an email to Reuters overnight, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, said the team manually reviewed “any and all accounts” that violated the new privacy policy by posting direct links to the ElonJet account.

“I understand that the focus seems to be mainly on journalist accounts, but we applied the policy equally to journalists and non-journalist accounts today,” Irwin said in the email.

The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing said in a statement on Friday that Twitter’s actions “violate the spirit of the First Amendment and the principle that social media platforms will allow the unfiltered distribution of information that is already in the public square.”

Musk accused the journalists of posting his real-time location, which is “basically assassination coordinates” for his family.

The billionaire appeared briefly in a Twitter Spaces audio chat hosted by journalists, which quickly turned into a contentious discussion about whether the suspended reporters had actually exposed Musk’s real-time location in violation of the policy.

“If you dox, you get suspended. End of story,” Musk said repeatedly in response to questions. “Dox” is a term for publishing private information about someone, usually with malicious intent.

The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, one of the journalists who had been suspended but was nonetheless able to join the audio chat, pushed back against the notion that he had exposed Musk or his family’s exact location by posting a link to ElonJet.

Soon after, BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos, who hosted the Spaces chat, tweeted that the audio session was cut off abruptly and the recording was not available.

In a tweet explaining what happened, Musk said “We’re fixing a Legacy bug. Should be working tomorrow.”

On December 16, 2022, Russia launched another enormous missile attack on Ukraine’s civil and power infrastructure, getting fired 98 missiles and opened fire with a number of start rocket devices (MLRS) above 65 situations.

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Funeral homes across China’s COVID-hit capital Beijing, a city of 22 million, scrambled on Saturday to keep up with calls for funeral and cremation services as workers and drivers testing positive for the novel coronavirus called in sick.

After declaring that the Omicron strain has weakened, and unprecedented public protests against a zero-COVID policy championed by President Xi Jinping, China abruptly shifted its COVID management protocols more than a week ago.

Moving away from endless testing, lockdowns and heavy travel restrictions, China is realigning with a world that has largely reopened to live with COVID.

China has told its population of 1.4 billion to nurse their mild symptoms at home unless symptoms become severe, as cities across China brace for their first waves of infections.

In Beijing, which has yet to report any COVID deaths since the policies changed on Dec. 7, sick workers have hit the staffing of services from restaurants and courier firms to its roughly one dozen funeral parlours.

“We’ve fewer cars and workers now,” a staffer at Miyun Funeral Home told Reuters, adding that there was a mounting backlog of demand for cremation services.

“We’ve many workers who tested positive.”

It was not immediately clear if the struggle to meet the increased demand for cremation was due to a rise in COVID-related deaths.

At Huairou Funeral Home, a body had to wait for three days before it could be cremated, a staffer said.

“You can transport the body here yourself, it’s been busy recently,” the staffer said.

China’s health authority last reported COVID deaths on Dec. 3, in Shandong and Sichuan provinces. The Chinese capital last reported a fatality on Nov. 23.

Yet Chinese media reported on Friday that two veteran state media journalists had died after contracting COVID-19 in Beijing, among the first known deaths since China dismantled most of its zero-COVID policies.

The National Health Commission reported on Saturday no change to its official COVID death tally of 5,235.

China’s abrupt lifting of its ultra-strict policies could spark an explosion of cases and over a million deaths through 2023, according to new projections from the U.S.-based Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).

Cases in China would peak around April 1, when deaths would reach 322,000, it said.

“There’re long queues of hearses here, and it’s hard to say when there’ll be available slots,” said a staffer at Dongjiao Funeral Home.

“Normal deaths,” the staffer said, when asked if the deaths were COVID-related.

The lack of reported COVID deaths for the past 10 days have stirred debate on social media over data disclosure, fuelled also by a dearth of statistics over hospitalisations and the number of seriously ill.

“Why can’t these statistics be found? What’s going on? Did they not tally them or they just aren’t announcing them?” one netizen on Chinese social media asked.

China stopped reporting asymptomatic cases from Wednesday, citing a lack of PCR testing among people with no symptoms that was making it difficult to accurately tally the total count.

Official figures have become an unreliable guide as less testing is being done across the country following the easing of zero-COVID policies.

In Shanghai, more than 1,000 km (620 miles) south of Beijing, local education authorities on Saturday told most schools to hold classes online starting on Monday, to cope with worsening COVID infections across China.

In a sign of staffing crunches to come, Shanghai Disney Resort said on Saturday that entertainment offerings may reduce to a smaller workforce, although the theme park was still operating normally.

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Elon Musk’s team has reached out to investors to raise new funds for his struggling social media platform Twitter, one of the investors said.

Ross Gerber, president and CEO at Gerber Kawasaki Wealth & Investment Management, told Reuters that he was contacted by a Musk representative about offering more shares at the same price, $54.20, that Musk paid to take the company private in October.

Jared Birchall, the managing director of Elon Musk’s family office reached out to potential investors this week, news platform Semafor reported on Friday, citing two people familiar with the fundraising effort.

Twitter and Musk did not respond to Reuters requests for comments.

Twitter has seen advertisers flee amid worries about Musk’s approach to policing tweets, hitting revenues and its ability to pay interest on the $13 billion debt that Musk took on to buy the social media company.

Musk sold another $3.6 billion worth of shares in Tesla earlier this week, making it nearly $40 billion worth of shares in the electric-vehicle company sold this year.

Tesla shares on Friday posted their worst weekly loss since March 2020, with investors increasingly concerned about Musk being distracted by Twitter and the slowing global economy.