Tory leadership
Liz Truss will become the UK’s third female prime minister after securing victory in the Tory leadership contest.
She defeated rival Rishi Sunak with 81,326 votes to 60,399 and will take over as prime minister on Tuesday with the immediate challenge of easing the cost-of-living crisis for households across the country faced with soaring energy bills.
Boris Johnson will depart No 10 on Tuesday and Ms Truss will fly to Balmoral to meet the Queen for the formal handover of power.
She will then begin work putting together a response to the energy crisis, with support promised within days.
Obama Emmy
Barack Obama is halfway to an “Egot” after the former president won an Emmy Award to go with his two Grammys.
Mr Obama won the best narrator Emmy for his work on the Netflix documentary series Our Great National Parks.
The five-part show, which features national parks from around the globe, is produced by his production company Higher Ground.
Tallaght violent attack
Postmortems will be carried out today on the bodies of 8-year-old twins killed during a violent incident at their family home in Dublin.
Chelsea and Christy Cawley were stabbed to death along with their 18-year-old sister Lisa Cash at their home on Rossfield Avenue in Tallaght, just after midnight on Sunday.
The postmortem on Lisa Cash was completed last night.
The siblings' 14-year-old brother managed to escape but was seriously injured and is still being treated in hospital.
The three siblings were taken to Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) in Crumlin, but all three were later pronounced dead.
Yellow rain warning
A status yellow warning has been issued for three counties in Munster.
Met Éireann says Kerry, Cork and Waterford will see localised heavy rainfall, strong gusty winds and hazardous driving conditions.
The warning will come into place from midday until 11pm tonight.
Met Éireann said after a rather calm start today it will become windy, especially in the southwest with some strong gusts expected.
It will be a largely dry and sunny morning.
Mortgage repayment
Mortgage holders on either variable or fixed rates with less than two years to run need to act now to avoid challenging repayment hikes, experts have warned.
They say people rolling out of historic low fixed-term contracts in the next few years will face immediate rate increases of more than 1 per cent.
Homeowners are paying an average €4,595 in extra mortgage repayments per year by not switching lenders, the quarter two doddl.ie mortgage switching index found.
This is almost €500 more than 12 months ago, it said.
Third-level fees
A 25 per cent increase in student grants and a reduction in third-level fees are among the measures being considered as part of the budget.
As the Irish Examiner reports, the Department of Higher Education has estimated the price of a number of significant changes to the student grants scheme, including increases in student grants which would see some people receive €1,279 more each year.
The Minister for Higher Education, Simon Harris will publish the annual options paper on reducing the cost of higher education today, which contains measures that will reduce the financial burden of going to college on families and students.
New UK PM
Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney has said it would be a great shock if Liz Truss was not named as the winner of the leadership race for the Conservative Party.
Mr Coveney told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland that he had known Liz Truss for a long time and that they had shared many portfolios.
He said he hoped the “talented and earnest politician” would change the direction of Ireland-UK relations of the last few years.
Previous comments from Ms Truss had been strident and unhelpful, he said. There was concern about the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill which effectively would breach international law and would lead to “a whole new set of problems”.
