Veteran politician Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as Sri Lanka’s new president on Thursday, a day after winning a vote in parliament and urging the island nation to come together to find a way out of its worst economic crisis in decades. The six-time prime minister succeeded Gotabaya Rajapaksa who fled Sri Lanka and resigned مزید پڑھیں

Anti government protesters have returned to the streets of Sri Lanka’s capital and say they will continue their weeks long uprising after parliament voted in acting leader Ranil Wickremesinghe as the country’s new president. Hundreds of protesters gathered at the GotaGoGama site in Colombo, where only last week they had celebrated Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation as مزید پڑھیں

Sri Lankan lawmakers voted acting President Ranil Wickremesinghe as the new president on Wednesday, hoping he would pull the country out of a crippling economic and political crisis. “Ranil Wickremesinghe has been elected as the eighth executive president under the constitution,” the secretary general of parliament said after counting finished. The win for Wickremesinghe, opposed مزید پڑھیں

Australia is in the midst of a third wave of coronavirus, driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, and earlier this month broadened access to second booster shots to deal with the surge in cases. Daily cases climbed to 50,248 on Tuesday, the highest in two months. Some 5,239 Australians are currently in hospital مزید پڑھیں

Britain recorded its highest ever temperature of 40C (104F) on Tuesday as a heatwave gripping Europe intensified, forcing train tracks to buckle and fuelling a spate of fires across London. The Met Office said the provisional record, which still needs to be confirmed, was recorded at 12.50 pm (1150 GMT) at London’s Heathrow Airport, surpassing مزید پڑھیں

Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit Tehran on Tuesday for talks with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Kremlin leader’s first trip outside the former Soviet Union since Moscow’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine. In Tehran, Putin will also hold his first face-to-face meeting since the invasion with a NATO leader, Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan, مزید پڑھیں

Sri Lanka opposition leader Sajith Premadasa withdrew on Tuesday from the race to become president of the island nation, in order to support a rival candidate. “For the greater good of my country that I love and the people I cherish, I hereby withdraw my candidacy for the position of president,” Premadasa said on Twitter. مزید پڑھیں

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin are in Tehran for talks with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Putin and Erdogan will discuss a deal aimed at resuming Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea, officials say Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says a “personnel audit” of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) is مزید پڑھیں

The state of Australia’s environment is “poor and deteriorating”, a new government report has found. The 2021 State of the Environment Report, a mandatory assessment conducted every five years, was released on Tuesday by the recently-elected federal Labor government. It had been received by the previous Liberal-National coalition government in December 2021 but not published. مزید پڑھیں

The United Kingdom’s former finance minister Rishi Sunak has held onto his lead in the race to replace Boris Johnson, as another hopeful was knocked out, leaving four candidates in the increasingly bitter contest. Sunak got 115 votes in the third ballot of Conservative legislators on Monday, ahead of former defence minister Penny Mordaunt with مزید پڑھیں