Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated President Jair Bolsonaro in a runoff election on Sunday that marked a stunning comeback for the leftist former president and the end of Brazil's most right-wing government in decades. Brazil's Supreme Electoral Court declared Lula the next president, with 50.9% of votes versus 49.1% for Bolsonaro. The 77-year-old Lula's inauguration is scheduled for Jan. 1. The vote was a rebuke for the fiery far-right populism of Bolsonaro, who emerged from the back benches of Congress to forge a novel conservative coalition but lost support as Brazil ran up one of the worst death…

Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) says the preliminary number of registered voters in Nigeria is 93.5 million. Mahmood Yakubu, INEC chairman, said this on Wednesday at the third quarterly meeting with political parties. Following the suspension of continuous voter registration (CVR) on July 31, the number of persons who completed their registration was announced to be 12,298,944. Yakubu, however, said after cleaning up the voter data using the automated biometric identification system (ABIS), a total of 2,780,756 (22.6 percent) were identified as ineligible registrants and invalidated from the record. He said the remaining 9,518,188 new voters have been added to…

A federal high court sitting in Port Harcourt, the Rivers capital, has nullified primaries conducted by the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the state. A claimant, George Orlu, and four other persons identified as aspirants had filed a case before the court seeking a nullification of the primaries over their alleged exclusion. E.A. Obile, the presiding judge, gave the ruling on the grounds that the plaintiffs were unlawfully excluded from the primaries. The court ruled that those whose names have been submitted as having been elected from the primaries should not be recognised as validly-elected candidates for the APC in…

Former Treasury chief Rishi Sunak is set to become Britain’s next prime minister after winning the Conservative leadership race Monday — and now faces the huge task of stabilizing the party and country at a time of economic and political turbulence. Sunak will be Britain’s first leader of color, and the nation’s third leader just this year. He will take over as prime minister from Liz Truss, who quit last week after 45 tumultuous days in office, leaving a staggering economy and a shell-shocked and divided party. His only rival, Penny Mordaunt, conceded and withdrew after failing to reach the…