Britain’s next prime minister, set to be former finance minister Rishi Sunak, inherits a UK economy that was headed for recession even before the recent turmoil triggered by Liz Truss.

Former finance minister Rishi Sunak yesterday won the battle for leadership of Britain’s Conservative party and will become the country’s first prime minister of colour.

Well-known Pakistani journalist Arshad Sharif was shot dead in Nairobi when police hunting car thieves opened fire on the vehicle he was travelling in as it drove through their roadblock without stopping, according to a Kenyan police report yesterday.

Western countries yesterday accused Russia of plotting to use a threat of a bomb laced with nuclear material as a pretext for escalation in Ukraine, as Moscow evacuated civilians from a southern city in anticipation of a major battle.

As winter approaches, the World Health Organization yesterday stressed the importance of staying vigilant as cases of Covid and influenza rise in Europe, encouraging more people to get vaccinated.

Rishi Sunak will become British prime minister on Monday after other candidates quit the race to lead the Conservative Party, leaving him with the task of steering a deeply divided country through an economic downturn set to leave millions of people poorer.

Rishi Sunak looked set to become Britain's next prime minister after Boris Johnson withdrew from the contest on Sunday, saying that although he had enough support to make the final ballot he realised the country and the Conservative Party needed unity.

Two days of tribal fighting in Sudan’s south killed at least 220 people, a senior health official said Sunday, marking one the deadliest bouts of tribal violence in recent years. The unrest added to the woes of an African nation mired in civil conflict and political chaos.

A car bomb and shooting attack on a hotel in the Somali city of Kismayu killed nine people on Sunday before security forces ended the siege at the hotel and killed the attackers, a regional official said.

British Conservative Rishi Sunak yesterday announced he is standing to be prime minister, just weeks after failing in a first attempt and setting up a potentially bruising battle with his former boss Boris Johnson.

Under pressure in the south of Ukraine, Russia fired missiles and drones into Ukrainian-held Mykolaiv yesterday, destroying an apartment block in the ship-building city near the front and warning the war was trending toward “uncontrolled escalation”.

Doctors have advised Saudi Arabia’s powerful crown prince not to travel to Algiers for an upcoming summit, the Algerian presidency said yesterday, amid an absence of Saudi reports confirming health issues.

The Israeli government yesterday decided to allocate millions of dollars for a museum to house the world’s largest collection of Albert Einstein documents, the Hebrew University said.

Author Salman Rushdie lost vision in one eye and was left "incapacitated" in a hand after he was stabbed in the United States in August, his agent said in an interview published this weekend.

Boris Johnson was fighting on Sunday to get enough support to make a shock return as Britain's prime minister after prominent figures on the right wing of the Conservative Party coalesced around the man once accused of betraying him, Rishi Sunak.

A Russian military jet crashed into a residential building in the Siberian city of Irkutsk on Sunday and the two pilots were killed, officials said, the second such fatal incident in six days involving a Sukhoi fighter plane.

Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian in the occupied West Bank on Saturday, Palestinian health officials said, and a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli in Jerusalem, police said.

Pro-Russian authorities yesterday urged residents in the southern Kherson region, which Moscow claims to have annexed, to leave the main city “immediately” in the face of Kyiv’s advancing counter-offensive.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson returned to Britain yesterday from a Caribbean holiday aiming to launch an audacious political comeback, as Conservative rival Rishi Sunak reached the minimum threshold to contest the UK’s top job.

Joe Biden, the oldest person ever in the US presidency, said Friday it’s his “intention” to run again in 2024 and that his wife Jill thinks he should not “walk away.”