Your Friday Briefing

Liz Truss resigns as Britain’s leader

Liz Truss has quit after six weeks as Britain’s prime minister. Her agenda had floundered, her own party turned on her, and commentators speculated on whether she could outlast a head of lettuce. She couldn’t.

Truss departs as the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. Her resignation came just days after her new finance minister reversed virtually all of her planned tax cuts, in a stark repudiation of her leadership and one of the most dramatic turnabouts in Britain’s recent history.

In her resignation speech, Truss — who is eligible for a taxpayer-funded, lifelong allowance of 115,000 pounds ($129,000) a year — said she would remain in office until a successor was chosen. “Given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party,” Truss said, a day after declaring in Parliament, “I’m a fighter, not a quitter.”

What’s next: Conservatives plan to replace Truss by the end of next week, an extraordinarily short time frame. The opposition Labour Party called for a general election. Potential successors include cabinet members, former rivals and even Boris Johnson, who was forced to resign in July.

Reaction: Britons expressed relief, resignation and uncertainty as the country faced multiple crises. “Whoever is going to replace her, I don’t think they will make a difference,” a gas engineer said.

Ukrainians tell of Russian torture

Ukrainians recently liberated from Russian occupation are sharing accounts of detentions, torture and missing relatives.

Police officers who have returned to towns and villages in the Kharkiv region — much of which Ukraine recaptured a month ago — have been overwhelmed by accounts. Some people have complained of theft and property damage. Others told of torture.

Signs of abuse are already apparent in some of the 534 bodies recovered across the region, the region’s police chief said. “There are bodies that were tortured to death,” he said. “There are people with tied hands, shot, strangled, people with cut wounds, cut genitals.”

Scale: Officers said the scale of abuse of the population in eastern Ukraine was most likely greater than that seen in Bucha and other areas around Kyiv.

Other updates:

France’s culture wars, in miniature

A plan to revitalize the shrinking French town of Callac has become an emblem of France’s anxiety over its identity and future.

Callac, a 2,200-person town in rural Brittany, shows signs of decline. Some buildings have been empty for decades. Around half the remaining residents are retirees. The biggest employer is the nursing home.

Initially, the town council was enthusiastic about a program that would recruit refugees to renovate buildings and fill much-needed jobs such as nurses’ aides and builders, while also helping them assimilate and learn the language. A deputy mayor said the program saw “refugees not as charity, but an opportunity.”

But some residents saw the project as evidence of a “great replacement” of native French people, an idea that has caused anger and anxiety, particularly on the hard right. Competing protests have taken place in the town, which is now at the center of national debates about immigration and declining rural areas.

Reaction: A retired teacher who opposes the project said: “We aren’t lab rats. We aren’t here for them to experiment on.” She said she feared the plan would bring “radical Islam” to the community.

THE LATEST NEWS

Around the World

Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, has long built his personal brand on creating controversy. “The very act of consuming public oxygen has been a centerpiece of his art for two decades,” my colleague Jon Caramanica writes in an analysis.

But as Ye’s offensive comments, especially about Jews, push away even his most loyal supporters, Ye risks losing his audience — and the platform provided to him by mainstream media outlets.

SPORTS NEWS FROM THE ATHLETIC

How a soccer painting sold for $8.75 million: L.S. Lowry’s “Going to the Match” is the most famous football painting in history. On Wednesday, it sold for a stunning amount. How did soccer become the subject of such a massive fine art sale? We can explain.

The damning reality of Cristiano Ronaldo’s protest: By now you know the Manchester United legend watched his team beat Tottenham, walked down the tunnel before the full-time whistle and then left the stadium rather than heading to the dressing room. It was a spectacle, and a reminder of how much his status has changed. And Ronaldo should know this situation well. He’s seen it before.

ARTS AND IDEAS

Beirut’s drag icons

Stars like Dolly Parton, Madonna and Whitney Houston inspired a generation of American drag queens to take the stage. In the drag scene of Beirut, Lebanon, too, pop icons are the muses.

With their outfits and performances, Beirut’s drag queens evoke sequin-clad singers like Haifa Wehbe, Sabah and Sherihan, who have embodied camp and glamour across the Arab world for decades. Their stage looks ensure “Arab representation in drag culture,” Anya Kneez, a drag queen, said.

Anya gets messages from aspiring drag queens all over the Arab world. “This is what I want to see,” she said. “I want to see young Arab queers coming out and doing their thing.”