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      Archbishop of Canterbury Resigns Over U.K. Church Abuse Scandal

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      Justin Welby, the leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, announced his resignation days after a report found he had taken insufficient action over claims of abuse.The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, on Tuesday announced his resignation, days after a report concluded that he had failed to ensure a proper investigation into claims that more than 100 boys and young men were abused decades ago at Christian summer camps.Pressure had mounted on Mr. Welby, the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans worldwide, after the report was published and after one senior figure in the church, the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley, called on him publicly to step aside.In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Welby said, “It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatizing period between 2013 and 2024.”He said that he had sought permission to resign from King Charles III, and added: “I hope this decision makes clear how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to creating a safer church. As I step down I do so in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse.”Mr. Welby, 68, has held his position since 2013 and was scheduled to retire in 2026. His departure brings to a premature end the tenure of the country’s best known cleric, who took over the leadership of the Church of England at a time of tension between liberals and traditionalists.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Rent: 4-Bedroom London House. The Owner? Prime Minister Keir Starmer

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      Keir Starmer has rented out his home in north London since moving to Downing Street, according to newly published official records.For rent: a four-bedroom home within easy reach of the shops, restaurants and bars of fashionable north London. It might be a good idea to look after the place, however. The owner is Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer.After winning the general election in July, Mr. Starmer moved with his family into perhaps the nation’s most famous address, 10 Downing Street, freeing up the house in which he had lived for about two decades.According to official records released this week, his home has now been leased, as has a south London house owned by Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the Exchequer, who has also moved into her official residence, 11 Downing Street.They are not the first senior British politicians presented with the dilemma of what to do with their properties when coming into power. Both the prime minister and the chancellor are given the use of a London home as well as a palatial country house for weekends.In 1997, when Labour’s Tony Blair was elected prime minister, he was advised against staying in his north London house for security reasons. But he was also warned against renting it out because of potential political embarrassment.That was because of a scandal that arose several years earlier when a previous chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, unknowingly rented his west London apartment to a tenant who, tabloid newspapers gleefully discovered, worked as a sex therapist under the name “Miss Whiplash.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kemi Badenoch, New Leader of the U.K.’s Tories, Vows to Make the Party More Conservative

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      Ms. Badenoch is expected to move the party, now in the opposition, further to the right.Britain’s Conservative Party announced on Saturday that it had selected Kemi Badenoch as its leader, putting a charismatic, often combative, right-wing firebrand at the helm of a party that suffered a crushing election defeat in July.Ms. Badenoch, 44, whose parents were immigrants from Nigeria, becomes the first Black woman to head a party that has had three other female leaders — Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss. She succeeds Rishi Sunak, who became the first nonwhite British prime minister after taking over the Tories, Britain’s oldest party, in 2022.“It is the most enormous honor to be elected to this role, to lead the party that I love, the party that has given me so much,” a smiling Ms. Badenoch said to a group of Conservative Party members after being announced the winner. “I hope that I will be able to repay that debt.”There is no guarantee, despite her swift ascent, that Ms. Badenoch will ever get to 10 Downing Street. The Labour Party’s landslide victory gave it a huge majority in Parliament and the Tories face at least four years in opposition before the next election is due.While the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, has gotten off to a shaky start, his party remains more popular than the Tories, who left voters frustrated and exhausted after 14 turbulent years in government.In a lively, occasionally bitter, leadership contest, Ms. Badenoch edged out Robert Jenrick, another former cabinet minister, by a vote of 53,806 to 41,388 among the party’s 130,000 or so dues-paying members (about 73 percent voted). She and Mr. Jenrick emerged as the two finalists in a multiple-round contest that left the members with an unexpectedly narrow choice of two candidates from the party’s right.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tommy Robinson, U.K. Anti-immigrant Agitator, Jailed for Contempt of Court

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      The founder of the English Defence League was sentenced to 18 months for ignoring a court order to stop making false claims about a teenage Syrian refugee.Tommy Robinson, Britain’s best-known far-right and anti-immigrant agitator, was sentenced on Monday to 18 months in prison for defying a court order by repeating false claims about a teenage Syrian refugee who had successfully sued him for libel.Mr. Robinson appeared in court and admitted to breaching a High Court order in 2021 that barred him from repeating the libelous allegationsIn announcing the sentence, Justice Jeremy Johnson said that no one was above the law.“The breaches were not accidental or negligent or merely reckless,” he said, according to Reuters. “Each breach of the injunction was a considered and planned and deliberate and direct and flagrant breach of the court’s order.”Mr. Robinson, 41, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was the founder of the English Defence League, a nationalist, anti-Muslim group known for its violent street protests in the late 2000s and 2010s.He had returned to Britain last week after several months abroad and turned himself in on Friday at a police station in Kent ahead of his court hearing in Woolwich, a town in southeastern London.The sentencing came two days after thousands of his supporters took to the streets of London for a rally that prompted a large counter demonstration. Both events were mostly peaceful, with a heavy police presence and just a handful of arrests.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alex Salmond, Scotland’s Former First Minister, Dies at 69

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      Mr. Salmond led the Scottish National Party twice, guiding it from a fringe political group into a powerful electoral force in Britain.Alex Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland who campaigned for the country to leave the United Kingdom and led the nation during an independence referendum, has died at 69.Mr. Salmond, who as first minister led the Scottish government from 2007 to 2014, died after delivering a speech in North Macedonia on Saturday, the BBC reported. Mr. Salmond had led the Scottish National Party twice, guiding it from a fringe political group into a powerful force that won an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2011. It was a push for Scotland’s political independence that had propelled his own career, and he was the nation’s first pro-independence first minister.That movement fractured after a failed independence referendum and a multiyear saga in which Mr. Salmond was accused of multiple sexual assaults and eventually acquitted. But Mr. Salmond continued to campaign for the cause until his death, and his influence in British politics persisted after he stepped down as first minister.Keir Starmer, the prime minister of Britain, paid tribute to Mr. Salmond, calling him a “monumental figure of Scottish and U.K. politics” for more than three decades.“He leaves behind a lasting legacy,” Mr. Starmer said. “As first minister of Scotland, he cared deeply about Scotland’s heritage, history and culture as well as the communities he represented as M.P. and M.S.P. over many years of service.”Mr. Salmond served as a member of the British Parliament in Westminster, as an M.P., from 1987 to 2010 and again from 2015 to 2017, as well as serving as a member of the Scottish Parliament, or M.S.P.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Boot Found at Everest Could Be From Sandy Irvine, Who Vanished 100 Years Ago

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      When Sandy Irvine went on a pioneering expedition to Mount Everest’s summit in 1924, he and his partner vanished. The recent discovery may shed light on the ill-fated adventure.A well-preserved boot found by a group of climbers on Mount Everest could be a clue to solving one of the most enduring adventure mysteries in the history of exploration of the world’s highest peak.The climbers who made the discovery in late September have reason to believe that it could contain some of the remains of Andrew Comyn Irvine, 22, whose ascent with an expert climber in an attempt to be the first to reach the summit in 1924 led to their disappearance.The recent explorers, from a National Geographic film crew, were on a glacier below the north face of Everest when they spotted a brown leather boot sticking out of the ice.Looking closer, they noticed a sock with a patch sewed to it that spelled “A.C. Irvine” in stitched red letters.“We just kind of walked around, like for a few minutes, being like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Jimmy Chin, a mountaineer and filmmaker, said of the find. “We just stumbled upon one of the great discoveries of our time.”In April 1924, Mr. Irvine, a talented engineer but inexperienced climber from Birkenhead, England, who was better known as Sandy, joined George Mallory, a British mountaineer renowned for having reached 27,000 feet above sea level on Mount Everest in 1922.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Who Will Be U.K. Conservative Leader? The Contest Narrows to an Unexpected Choice.

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      After an epic election defeat in July, opposition lawmakers have presented their party’s paying members with an unexpected choice of two candidates from the right.The race to lead Britain’s vanquished Conservative Party narrowed to two finalists on Wednesday, as the party’s lawmakers in a surprise twist set up a clash between two right-wing candidates.After four knockout rounds of voting, the lawmakers left two finalists standing: Kemi Badenoch, a favorite of the right who has said the party needs to fight against “nasty identity politics,” and Robert Jenrick, a rival hard-liner who has appealed to the right by promising to slash annual immigration numbers.The choice of two right-wing candidates was completely unexpected, provoking gasps in the room when the vote totals were announced on Wednesday.James Cleverly, a centrist who was buoyed by a well-received performance at the party’s recent conference, had surged to the front of the pack in the most recent vote by the party’s lawmakers. But he was unexpectedly eliminated on Wednesday.Whoever wins will face a prolonged, painful job of rebuilding a party that suffered the worst electoral defeat of its modern history in July — losing voters not just to the victorious Labour Party but also to a hard-right anti-immigrant party, Reform U.K., and the more centrist Liberal Democrats.The new leader will be selected in the next few weeks by the party’s dues-paying members, who number fewer than 170,000 and are generally older, wealthier and less ethnically diverse than the broader British population. The result of the vote is set to be announced on Nov. 2.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In London, a Pro-Palestinian Protest Disrupts the Launch of an American Mural

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      The U.S. ambassador Jane Hartley was en route to the dedication of a climate-themed mural in London by Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic Obama ‘Hope’ poster. But then a protest began.It’s the kind of cultural exchange any diplomat would savor: A prominent American street artist paints a mural, dedicated to the cause of climate activism, on an apartment building in one of London’s hippest neighborhoods.Jane D. Hartley, the United States ambassador to Britain, who proposed the idea to the artist Shepard Fairey, has a track record in these projects. When she was ambassador to Paris from 2014 to 2017, she asked another well-known American artist, Jeff Koons, to create a sculpture to honor victims of terrorist attacks there.But when Ms. Hartley was on her way to the dedication ceremony for this latest project on Monday morning, she got word that a small band of pro-Palestinian demonstrators had gathered in the Shoreditch neighborhood, beneath the red-and-blue mural, which rises four floors above the street.They began chanting anti-American slogans and unfurling banners calling for justice for the Palestinians in Gaza — a message that seemed even more fraught than usual, given the timing on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.It was another example of how the Israel-Gaza conflict has reverberated around the world, fueling protests, large and small, on college campuses, city squares,and in this case, in a normally tranquil neighborhood.Ms. Hartley’s security team diverted her car, while Mr. Fairey, who was on hand to greet her, hurriedly relocated with embassy staff members to a nearby café. He seemed bemused by the disruption, noting that much of his work has a protest element, even if his patron on this project was a government official.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More