London: Boris Johnson said on Thursday he was resigning as Britain’s prime minister, bowing to calls from ministerial colleagues and lawmakers in his Conservative Party.

“The process of choosing that new leader should begin now,” Johnson said at the door of Number 10 Downing Street.

“And today I have appointed a cabinet to serve, as I will until a new leader is in place.”

After days of battling for his job, the scandal-plagued Johnson had been deserted by all but a handful of allies after the latest in a series of scandals broke their willingness to support him.

"His resignation was inevitable," Justin Tomlinson, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, said on Twitter. "As a party, we must quickly unite and focus on what matters. These are serious times on many fronts."

The Conservatives will now have to elect a new leader, a process that could take weeks or months. 

SOURCE: Reuters

Lahore: Five new members of Punjab Assembly of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) took oath today.

According to details, Speaker Punjab Assembly Chaudhry Perviaz Elahi chaired the 41st session of the House. Speaker Punjab Assembly administered the oath to the newly elected lawmakers.

Five new lawmakers of the PTI, who had been notified by the Election Commission of Pakistan on reserved seats, took oath during the Punjab Assembly session.

The ECP on Wednesday had issued notifications for five reserved seats of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) in the Punjab Assembly following the Lahore High Court verdict.

The ECP had issued notifications for the PTI’s lawmakers Batool Zain Janjua, Saira Raza, Fouzia Abbas Naseem on the vacant seats for women and Habkook Rafiq and Samuel Yaqoob were notified as the lawmakers on the minority seats.

It is pertinent to mention that the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) on May 26 de-seated 25 dissident MPAs of the PTI who had voted for PML-N’s Hamza Shehbaz in the election for Punjab chief minister, stating that they had defected from the party.

Beijing: Heavy rain battered China's northeastern rust belt on Thursday, triggering floods that trapped buses, swamped roads and disrupted commuters in cities, with more storms forecast for coming days.

In Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province, its 7.6 million residents were caught off-guard by the unexpectedly heavy rain even though several red alerts, the highest in a four-tier storm warning system, were issued on Wednesday.

Residents woke up to public messages on their mobile phones telling them to delay heading to work and call off any non-essential activities because of "extreme weather".

Traffic police data showed 52 waterlogged sections of roads, 30 of which were closed.

Five students and a driver were marooned in a school bus in one inundated area and had to be saved by rescuers in rubber boats, state television reported.

From the province of Hebei in the north to Anhui in the east, many motorists were trapped in their cars as engines stalled on waterlogged roads, state television footage showed this week.

In the past month, China has grappled with extreme weather from heatwaves to historic floods, with meteorologists blaming climate change and also the first typhoon of the season, Chaba.

Alerts for flood risks were also issued in Jilin province, north of Liaoning.

In Yanji, a Jilin city on the border with North Korea, a man was hailed for his bravery on social media after he dived into a raging river to rescue his wife despite not knowing how to swim, footage from state-run Xinhua news agency showed.

The two sustained some scrapes but suffered no severe injuries.

"I swear in my next life, I'll still marry him," the wife said in the footage, smiling.

Over the next 12 hours, flood-swollen rivers were expected to inundate farmland and urban areas in the cities of Changchun and Siping.

Liaoning and Jilin are expected to see more heavy downpours in the next two days before the rains start to dissipate.

SOURCE: Reuters