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Liz Truss has resigned as Britain’s prime minister and will step down after a week-long emergency contest to find her successor, she announced outside Downing Street, leaving the possibility of a return of Boris Johnson.
Her resignation follows a turbulent 45 days in office, during which Truss’s mini-budget crashed the markets, making her the UK’s shortest-serving prime minister.
The prospect of Johnson returning to Downing Street is dominating debate amid fevered speculation the former premier is plotting a comeback.
Only six weeks after he left No 10, forced out by his own Conservative party MPs after a slew of scandals, supporters are calling on Johnson to run again for a second shot at leading the country.
But as many supporters of Johnson call for his return, his critics have also made their feelings known, with some threatening to defect to Labour if he is chosen as leader again.
Who else is running? Several Tories have come out in support of Rishi Sunak as the successor to Truss. Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Penny Mordaunt are also expected to stand as leadership candidates.
Could Johnson really return? “I wouldn’t want to make any cast-iron prediction in this crazy world of politics at the moment but I think Boris Johnson returning is a very real possibility,” said the founder of the ConservativeHome website, Tim Montgomerie.
Republicans plan to torpedo key Biden policies as polls predict midterm victory
A standoff over the debt ceiling. Aid to Ukraine on the chopping block. And impeachment proceedings against the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas – or perhaps even Joe Biden himself.
With polls indicating they have a good shot of winning a majority in the House of Representatives in the 8 November midterms, top Republican lawmakers have in recent weeks offered a preview of what they may do with their resurgent power, and made clear they have their sights set on key aspects of the Biden administration’s policies at home and abroad.
Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the chamber, this week signaled in an interview with Punchbowl News that if Congress approves an increase in the amount the federal government can borrow – as it is expected to need to by sometime next year – Republicans will want an agreement to cut spending in return.
“You can’t just continue down the path to keep spending and adding to the debt,” said McCarthy, who is likely to be elevated to speaker of the house in a Republican-led chamber.
What did he say about aid to Ukraine? He said members of his caucus were starting to question the money Washington was sending to Ukraine to help it fend off Russia’s invasion. “Ukraine is important, but at the same time it can’t be the only thing they do and it can’t be a blank check,” he told Punchbowl.
Iran providing ‘technical support’ for Russian drones killing civilians, says US
Iran has significantly deepened its involvement in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by providing technical support for Russian pilots flying Iranian-made drones to bomb civilian targets, the White House has confirmed.
The national security council lead spokesperson, John Kirby, said on Thursday it was the US’s understanding that the Iranian advisers were in Crimea to provide training and maintenance – but not to actually pilot the drones – after Russian forces experienced difficulties in operating the unmanned flying bombs.
“The information we have is that the Iranians have put trainers and tech support in Crimea, but it’s the Russians who are doing the piloting,” Kirby said. “Tehran is now directly engaged on the ground and through the provision of weapons … that are killing civilians and destroying civilian infrastructure.
“These are systems that the Russian armed forces are not familiar using and these are organically manufactured Iranian UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles]. The Russians just don’t have anything in their inventory.”
Will Iran face a backlash? The UK and the EU have announced sanctions on Iran for its provision of Shahed-136 drones, a delta wing unmanned aircraft designed to fly into a target and explode on impact, which Russian forces have used extensively against Ukrainian cities.
In other news …
When the US supreme court decided to strip away constitutional abortion protections in June, in effect it made the situation for many pregnant incarcerated women seeking abortions a lot worse. Conditions for reproductive healthcare in many US prison facilities are often abysmal.
After making a break for it to get away from their abusive mother and her boyfriend in Texas, handcuffed and barefoot 16-year-old twins prompted an interstate search for their siblings and led to the arrests of the allegedly abusive couple at the center of a case that has caused shock across two US states.
Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon is expected to ask a federal appeals court to overturn his contempt of Congress conviction, contending that he should have been allowed at trial to argue he defied a subpoena from the House January 6 select committee on the advice of his lawyers.
A jury concluded on Tuesday that Kevin Spacey did not molest the actor Anthony Rapp when Rapp was 14, while both were relatively unknown actors in Broadway plays in the 1980s. The verdict in a federal court in Manhattan brings to a conclusion a civil trial that was an outgrowth of the #MeToo movement.
Elon Musk has told prospective investors that he plans to cut almost 75% of Twitter’s staff as part of his deal to take over the social media company, the Washington Post reported yesterday. Job cuts are expected in the coming months no matter who owns the company, according to the report.
Stat of the day: US doctor removes 23 contact lenses stuck in eye like ‘stack of pancakes’
A California eye doctor has said an elderly patient who came in complaining of blurry vision had 23 disposable contact lenses in her eye. “To this day, she does not understand how it took place,” Dr Katerina Kurteeva, a Newport Beach ophthalmologist, told a local TV news channel. “She’s still baffled by it all.” Photographs and a video of a cascade of contact lenses being removed from a woman’s eye have since gone viral on Kurteeva’s Instagram page, prompting a flurry of horrified news coverage.
Don’t miss this: I quit Netflix, bought an aerial and went back to free TV. Was it worth the savings?
There was a time in my life when I didn’t watch TV. That time was called “my early 20s”, and I was much more fun than I am now, writes Drew Millard. As I’ve progressively become more of a homebody, I’ve racked up subscriptions to major content providers like Netflix and Amazon Prime and even signed up for services so that I could watch a single show. After all this time, more than a small part of me feels like I’ve been throwing money down the drain. With all this in mind, I decided that it would be a great time to see what the alternative was like.
… or this: Maggie Haberman on Trump – ‘He’s become a Charles Foster Kane character’
“He’s become something of a Charles Foster Kane-like character down in Mar-a-Lago these days,” observes Maggie Haberman, the author of Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America. Like the protagonist in Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane, Trump was a swaggering capitalist and media star who forayed into politics, was brought down by hubris, and now rattles around a gilded cage in Florida, writes David Smith. The analogy raises the question: what is Trump’s Rosebud, the childhood sled that symbolized Kane’s lost innocence? “His father is Rosebud,” Haberman replies.
Climate check: Seattle and Portland mired by poor air quality as wildfires smoke up sky
Seattle, Portland and other cities in the US north-west are experiencing some of the worst air quality in the world as numerous wildfires burn nearby, choking residents and casting an eerie haze across the skyline. In the Seattle area, home to about 4 million people, the sky was brown and the air was difficult to breathe on Thursday. The late-season wildfires have been fueled by dry and unusually warm weather, according to Nasa. “Meanwhile, Seattle has seen record-setting warmth this fall,” the space agency wrote on its website.
Last Thing: Iceberg lettuce in blond wig outlasts Liz Truss
A wilting 60p lettuce in a blond wig has been crowned the winner of a bizarre competition after outlasting the doomed British prime minister’s Liz Truss’s tenuous grip on power. Seven days ago the Daily Star set up a webcam on the lettuce to see if it would have a longer shelf life than Truss. The lettuce won. As Truss made her resignation statement, those viewing the video on YouTube soared to more than 20,000. When the prime minister confirmed her departure on Thursday lunchtime, a plastic gold crown was placed on the now browning lettuce.
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