If you are wondering just how bad the heatwave is in large parts of Europe today, take a look at this map: We are covering the heatwave in detail over on our weather blog today:
According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon has told senators it needs roughly $80bn, mostly to cover the cost of the US-Israel war on Iran. The White House Office of Management and Budget has yet to make a formal request to Congress. But AP, following on from a story by the Wall Street Journal, reports that the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been making the rounds on Capitol Hill, including on Monday evening The White House has already requested a remarkable $1.5tn boost in military spending for the Pentagon in 2027 – an increase of almost 50% on the funding levels for the current fiscal year. The Republic Senate majority leader, John Thune, has said he’s expecting a supplemental spending request from the administration for the war, and when it arrives, “we’ll work through it and see where the votes are”.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, is to meet Gulf allies on Tuesday and Wednesday in an attempt to reassure them that the US remains committed to their security and the 60-day ceasefire deal struck with Iran last week will not embolden Tehran. The Gulf is divided over the deal. While Qatar has played a central role in mediating the agreement, some countries – notably the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain – are fearful it hands Iran substantial sums that may be ploughed into its military. Donald Trump said in a post to his Truth Social platform on Tuesday that the unfrozen assets would be under US control and used to buy food and medical supplies from the US. The US president also claimed Iran had agreed to allow nuclear inspections long into the future, despite statements from Iran that it has not done so. In his first trip to the region since the US and Israel started the war on 28 February, Rubio will visit the UAE, Kuwait and Bahrain, the state department said. He is also likely to meet officials from the Gulf Cooperation Council regional body. All three countries, which house large US military bases, have been hit by Iranian missiles, but the US has declined to detail the scale of the impacts. Severe penalties have been imposed on those using social media to reveal the damage. Trump last week disclosed that the UAE played an active part in mounting counterattacks against Iran, and the Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson, Esmail Baghaei, said Iran believed the UAE, Kuwait and Jordan all helped the US attack Iran. “We will definitely not abandon this issue. We will both document and demand,” Baghaei said. “The US military presence in the region has shown what consequences and harm it has brought to the region and its countries. We hope that the countries of the region have learned from the experience of the past few months and years.” The long-term Iranian aim is to persuade the Gulf states to eject the US from the region. In what is still a fluid debate inside Iran and the Gulf, some Iranian voices are calling for a rapprochement with the region, perhaps by forming an alliance with a powerful new grouping of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. The Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian, flew to Pakistan on Tuesday in his first overseas visit since the war ended. There have also been signs that the UAE – the Gulf state with the closest economic relations with Iran – is also looking to defuse the crisis in relations with Iran. In the short term, Iran is expecting roughly $6bn (£4.54bn) of its assets locked in Qatar due to US sanctions to be unfrozen, with another $6bn to be given by Doha as a repayable loan. Over the next two months Iran can also expect to receive at least $8bn of income since the US Treasury’s decision on Monday to issue a sanctions waiver on Iranian oil exports. The treasury’s waiver document details that the payments can be made in dollars. Some internal Iranian estimates claim the income from unhindered oil sales –principally to China – could rise to more than $30bn over a year. Iran has long been evading US sanctions by covertly trading with China but at heavily discounted prices. The shipping monitors Kepler said 36 ships passed through the strait of Hormuz on Monday, the highest traffic volume since 1 March. Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has said he was working with Oman on a long-term agreement to manage the strait. Ghalibaf met the Sultan of Oman on Monday in Muscat. Tehran and Washington had clashed on Monday over whether – as Trump and the US vice-president, JD Vance, have claimed – unfrozen Iranian assets could only be used to buy US agricultural produce such as soya beans. Iran’s central bank governor, Abdolnaser Hemmati, said the memorandum of understanding did not obligate Iran to spend unfrozen assets on US goods, and purchase decisions would be made on the basis of quality and price. Iran also disputed claims that Rafael Grossi, the director general of the UN nuclear inspectorate, had been given an Iranian green light to prepare to return to Iran to inspect the damaged nuclear sites. Previewing what is likely to be a prolonged discussion about the terms of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s return, Baghaei said: “We have neither met with Grossi nor do we have any plans for the agency to inspect the damaged nuclear facilities resulting from the aggression of the United States and the Zionist regime. There is no protocol in this regard. We will continue the current procedure based on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.” Previously, Iran had allowed more intrusive inspections under a specially negotiated additional protocol. Iran also said further work was needed on the establishment of a mechanism to monitor the proposed Lebanon ceasefire. The MOU states that the US, Iran and “their allies in the current war” declare the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon” – a formulation that clearly gives the impression of trying to bind Israel to an end to operations against Hezbollah. This could complicate the US-backed Israel-Lebanon ceasefire reached in early June, which stated that any cessation of hostilities must be agreed directly between Israel and Lebanon, and not through a separate track.
Scientists have expressed concern after two wildfires broke out within a week of each other on the Arctic island of Greenland earlier this month. Fires were burning close to Sisimiut, Greenland’s second largest town and a popular tourism centre, on 14 and 15 June, satellite imagery has shown, while a second blaze hit Kujalleq, on the island’s southern tip, on 17 June. While most of Greenland, a largely autonomous territory, is covered in vast ice sheets and thick glaciers, a significant part is ice-free and covered in tundra. Wildfires in these areas are rare, but becoming more common. For two fires to break out this early in the summer, however, is particularly unusual. “Vegetation fires at high northern latitudes are more usual in July and August,” said Dr Mark Parrington, a senior scientist at Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. Sonja Diaz, a scientist at the Environmental Change Research Unit of the University of Helsinki, who conducted field research in Greenland after a major wildfire in 2019, said the timing was not unheard of but that it felt “quite wild” to see the island burning so early in the year. “Wet [conditions] and snow do not favour fire ignition and spread,” she said. “The conditions need to be warm and dry enough.” Inunnguaq Eigil Lundblad, the emergency manager for Qeqqata municipality, which includes Sisimiut, said the fires there had broken out after “someone used fire recklessly. We had not had much snow this winter and then very little rainfall, which is why we have very dry soil.” Miki Sikemsen, the emergency manager for Kujalleq municipality, said the immediate trigger for the fire there was not yet known, but added: “Weather conditions in the area have been unusually dry this year and we have not experienced any significant rainfall since May, which has left the vegetation very dry and highly flammable.” The anthropologist Pelle Tejsner, an associate professor at the University of Greenland, said the dryness of the soil meant “more fires could be expected”. A study of fires in ice-free regions of western Greenland did not detect any blazes from 1995 to 2007. It then recorded 21 separate events between 2008 and 2020, with major fires in 2017 and 2019. Climate breakdown has heated the Arctic four times faster than the rest of the planet. Parrington said it was “challenging” to determine why the latest fires had occurred earlier than usual but that Copernicus data showed “anomalously high” air temperatures that could make vegetation more flammable. “But the fires still need an ignition source,” he said. Fires that burn peaty soil in Arctic tundra can spew large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, hastening the heating of the planet that helps fires spread. Though Greenland wildfires are small by global standards, Diaz’s research suggests the carbon released per square metre is much higher than previously reported for other tundra fires. The research, which is under peer review, also suggests the carbon is old, having been locked in the ground for hundreds to thousands of years. Her husband, Lucas Diaz, a Brazilian environmental engineer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who was also part of the trip to study the 2019 fires, said he first thought of the TV show Game of Thrones when he saw an advert for a research position studying such blazes in a project called “fire in the land of ice”. “The general image that people have of Greenland is that it’s the land of ice – and that’s true, most of Greenland is covered by ice – but there are ice-free regions covered by tundra,” he said. “They can be ignited and burned.” The researchers, who met on a field trip to study Canadian wildfires, went to Greenland in 2024 on a project funded by the Research Council of Finland to gather data from the country’s second-worst wildfire. The results are intended to inform global fire models, which are not trained on Arctic fires. Fire weather is growing more common owing to fossil fuel pollution and the destruction of nature, which has heated the planet by 1.3C. “That does not mean every year it will get worse and we’ll have more and more and more fires every year,” said Lucas Diaz. “But what we see is that the overall conditions that create a fire-prone environment are increasing.”
At 10am on 9 June, a huge explosion rattled Las Claritas, a ramshackle town on the edge of a vast goldmine carved out of the Venezuelan Amazon. “The blast was so powerful that my sister’s house shook, and she was 10 kilometres away,” said one miner, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. “Imagine the impact.” Immediately afterwards, helicopters began circling overhead, as if they were hunting something or someone. For days there was almost no information about what had happened. Then Donald Trump posted a video on social media, saying that it showed the assassination of Héctor Guerrero Flores, the leader of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The aerial footage was just like the US strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific – but with the crucial difference that it took place on Venezuelan soil, apparently among the illegal open-pit mines in the country’s far south. The joint operation between the US and Venezuela marked a watershed moment in the relationship between the former adversaries, who less than half a year ago were shooting at each other as the US military swooped on Caracas to capture the regime’s then leader, Nicolás Maduro. It is also the latest push by the US to expand its military strikes on criminal groups into countries across the region – and perhaps a first step towards preparing a lawless region for investment by mining companies. “I think this is an inflexion point,” said Bram Ebus, a consultant for the International Crisis Group. “We’ve seen US forces targeting alleged drug-trafficking vessels, but this is within the terrestrial boundaries of a country. And joint action with the US is massively symbolic for a country whose government rhetoric for decades had been about rallying against Washington.” The attack swung the spotlight on to the Orinoco Mining Arc, a vast and mineral-rich swathe of land by the borders with Guyana and Brazil, where hundreds of thousands of miners have flocked, many of them displaced people who lost their livelihoods during Venezuela’s economic collapse. Crime factions – including Venezuelan gangs such as Tren de Aragua, but also Brazilian groups and Colombian guerrillas – are the de facto state in much of the region, where for years criminals have struck deals with members of the Venezuelan regime to control mines, collect taxes and keep a brutal kind of order. “They destroyed whatever institutional order had existed,” said Américo de Grazia, a former member of the Venezuelan national assembly representing Bolívar state. But the future of the region has been in question ever since the Trump administration captured Maduro in January and replaced him with Delcy Rodríguez, giving her instructions to open up Venezuela’s natural resources to investment by US companies. Donald Trump announced the strike after days of Venezuelan military operations around Las Claritas, a hub of illegal mining in the state of Bolívar, with locals reporting gunfire and explosions as helicopters flew overhead. Tren de Aragua, which was listed by the US as a foreign terrorist organisation last year, is known to control Las Claritas. And its leader, known as Niño Guerrero, may have been hiding there. But the details of the operation that killed him – including when and where it took place – remain almost completely opaque. Authorities are also yet to provide proof that Niño Guerrero is dead, and it is unknown whether other Tren de Aragua figures were targeted, or whether civilians were killed or injured during the operations. “Trusted sources tell us that the [Tren de Aragua] leaders fled to Guyana, but we don’t know for sure,” said another miner from El Dorado, near Las Claritas. “We have heard reports of a lot of wounded people, some dead,” said Cristina Burelli, founder of SOS Orinoco, which has a network of sources on the ground. “But really, there’s no information. It’s unbelievable.” Also unclear is the precise nature of US involvement in the operation. Trump said the US “delivered” the strike. US media have variously reported that the CIA supplied the intelligence and even that the missile was launched by Joint Special Operations Command. That would mark the second US military action in Venezuela after the operation to extract Maduro – only this time it appears to have been done hand-in-hand with the same regime, and against a criminal organisation that Washington once accused Caracas of protecting. It also signals an expansion of the US military’s attacks on criminal groups in the region, which started with strikes on alleged drug boats in Caribbean and the Pacific, but have since spread to joint operations in Ecuador and now Venezuela, while Trump pushes for the same in Mexico. Experts suspect the strike in Venezuela also had the parallel purpose of preparing the area for investment by mining companies. The Orinoco Mining Arc holds not just gold, but rare earths and critical minerals such as nickel, copper, bauxite and coltan that are vital for industrial and military production. Since January, the Venezuelan regime has passed a mining reform to open the sector to foreign private capital, while the US has issued licenses allowing US companies to carry out transactions involving Venezuelan-origin gold. The huge gold deposits near Las Claritas are of particular interest. Canadian and US companies – Crystallex and Gold Reserve – saw their concessions there expropriated by Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, and are still chasing the arbitration settlements. After the capture of Maduro, Gold Reserve announced its interest in returning to Venezuela. “I suspect the origin of this latest operation is that the United States wants the area cleared for Gold Reserve and Crystallex so they can regain control of the region,” said De Grazia, the former politician from Bolívar state. But Burelli estimates there are between 15 and 20 armed criminal groups across the Orinoco Mining Arc. “Getting rid of one guy does absolutely nothing to change the situation,” said Burelli. Last week the police chief of Las Claritas was found dead, killed by a bullet from his own gun. “I think this is the first kind of sign of revenge by people from Tren de Aragua,” said Burelli. Meanwhile, the criminal groups are just one part of a system that involves the Venezuelan state itself. As oil income collapsed, regime insiders turned to gold mining to raise money, allowing their cronies, among them military officers, to enrich themselves. “The Venezuelan army is so deeply entrenched in all these illegal economies that it’s difficult to see them completely flipping against the organised crime networks,” said Ebus. “Southern Venezuela is still an investor’s nightmare.”
Campaigners in Ecuador say a Polish anti-corruption activist who investigated allegations against the family business of the country’s rightwing president was murdered to silence her. Monika Silva Koniuszek, 41, was found dead in her home in Montañita, a coastal town in Ecuador’s Santa Elena province. The single mother of daughters aged four and nine, was found on the floor with a noose around her neck on 8 June. A day after her death, and before autopsy results had been released, Ecuador’s interior minister John Reimberg said that the initial hypothesis was that it was a suicide: “The necessary evidence to reach that conclusion was found at the scene,” he told local media. However, on Friday, a postmortem in Guayaquil found that the cause of death was a blow to the head and strangulation. “Based on the forensic reports, we are certain that this was a violent death; therefore, the alleged suggestion that it was a suicide falls apart,” said attorney Lita Martínez, director of the Ecuadorian Centre for the Promotion and Action of Women. Silva Koniuszek had spent the last decade denouncing environmental crimes and corruption on social media, and working with local journalists. She stated in her social media profiles: “You don’t need to be born in Ecuador to love it and defend what is right.” “Monika was the bravest person I have ever met,” said Beth Pitts, 47, a British author and fellow activist who collaborated with her in local campaigns. “She was often a lone voice, publicly and vociferously denouncing corruption and environmental crimes when everyone else was too afraid to speak out,” said Pitts, who has lived in Ecuador for 13 years and lived near Silva Koniuszek in a neighbouring village. “Beyond her activism, she was a dedicated single mother and a wonderful friend. Even when she was receiving death threats, she would still take the time to ask how I was doing and offer her support,” she added. Colleagues say Silva Koniuszek had begun to investigate Noboa Trading, the fruit conglomerate belonging to the family of the rightwing president, Daniel Noboa. They said she had been pursuing allegations that several tonnes of cocaine had been seized in Noboa Trading banana containers, but high-ranking Ecuadorian judicial officials were stalling the investigations. Shortly before she was killed, she told friends that she had delivered a dossier of allegations to the US embassy in Quito. She had also investigated allegations that politically connected figures in Santa Elena province were implicated in a massive land-trafficking ring. Friends say Silva Koniuszek was facing judicial harassment and explicit death threats, allegedly linked to the same crime networks that assassinated a fellow activist, local journalist Robinson del Pezo, in November 2025. Silva Koniuszek’s death made headlines in her native Poland, with scepticism over early reports suggesting she took her own life. Her friend, Joanna Cuper, told the Polish broadcaster TVP Info that the activist had claimed she was “followed and observed”. “None of us believe she killed herself,” she said. “She said that the cartels had put a price on her head. Three years ago, her then husband took the children to Brazil because she was receiving threats that she and her children would be murdered,” Cuper added. The Polish prosecutor’s office confirmed last week that it had requested mutual legal assistance from the Ecuadorian authorities probing her death, and suggested it would want to be closely involved in the investigation. The Polish embassy in neighbouring Peru said it hoped “the competent authorities will conduct a swift, thorough, independent and transparent investigation” to “clarify the circumstances of the case and ensure accountability”. It pointedly added: “The embassy of the Republic of Poland emphasises the importance of protecting human rights defenders, journalists, social activists and all individuals engaging in civic life.” The community in Montañita created a shrine to Silva Koniuszek, with photos and flowers, and kept candles burning for several days. Local street artists painted a mural, with neighbours renaming a street after her.
Good morning. It seems inevitable that Andy Burnham will become the UK’s seventh prime minister in a decade, after Keir Starmer announced his resignation on Monday morning and, hours later, Burnham’s most likely challenger, Wes Streeting, rowed in behind the former mayor of Greater Manchester. Starmer leaves office barely two years after his landslide victory that swept Labour into power on a mandate of change. Six weeks after the party’s humiliation at the hands of Reform across English councils, and historic defeats to progressive nationalists in the Welsh Senedd and Scottish parliament, Burnham offered the country another “change moment”: winning an emphatic victory over Reform in last week’s Makerfield byelection, cementing the view that he can defeat the hard right at the next general election. As it looks increasingly likely that Burnham will be elected uncontested as Labour leader and hence become prime minister by mid-July, I spoke to our correspondents across the UK about the challenges he’ll face from day one in the job. First, this morning’s headlines. Five big stories UK politics | A generation of young Britons who were locked out of the 2016 EU referendum because of their age now believe that Brexit has failed, with a majority demanding a fresh vote to rejoin the EU, exclusive polling shows. Northern Ireland | Former DUP leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, has been found guilty of 18 sexual offences against two victims who were children at the time of the abuse more than 30 years ago. Heatwave | Met Office forecasters have issued a rare red weather warning for Wednesday and Thursday in the face of extreme heat and humidity, while a red heat health alert has been issued in England indicating “a risk to life for even the healthy population”. Middle East | Iran has agreed to allow UN nuclear inspectors back into the country as part of an agreement under which Washington will lift sanctions on Tehran’s oil exports and the strait of Hormuz will reopen, the US vice-president, JD Vance, has said. UK news | The Metropolitan police is to expand its use of live facial recognition (LFR) technology, first into London’s West End by Christmas and then into a further six areas next year. In depth: Burnham ‘has to be very, very careful the sort of messages he sends’ Just after 9.30am yesterday, Keir Starmer stood before staff and supporters on Downing Street and confirmed that, after a weekend of intense pressure from Labour MPs and cabinet ministers, he had offered his resignation to King Charles. There was bitter irony that the section of his brief resignation speech he must most have wanted his critics across the country to hear, where he set out his achievements in office, was almost drowned out by the EU anthem Ode to Joy, blasting from the notorious anti-Brexit campaigner Steve Bray’s massive speaker beyond the Downing Street gates. While Starmer’s remaining allies spoke of his sense of profound unfairness at being booted out by a mayor with only a byelection mandate, he offered a dignified public face, saying he would do “everything I can” to ensure an orderly handover and offering his successor “my full and unequivocal support”. As he made his final thanks to his “beautiful children” and “fantastic wife Vic”, Starmer came close to tears. It was a reminder that politicians are not characters in a soap opera, but real people, however flawed, who still have to go home and tell the dog to get off the sofa for the umpteenth time and sit with all of this noise. The merciless spotlight then moved on to Burnham, who was flexing his selfie arm in Westminster Hall with over 200 Labour MPs who had assembled to greet the new MP for Makerfield after he was officially sworn in. (I do find it boggling that Burnham and Streeting both announced their intentions variously to stand and not to stand for Labour leadership on X, considering rising concerns about how that platform has amplified misinformation, including about the current government.) With a Burnham coronation now most likely, he has just under a month to pick his cabinet and confirm his policy priorities. *** The economy and cost of living During the Makerfield campaign, we heard ambitious long-term plans from Burnham to bring water and energy into public control, and radically overhaul the property tax and social care systems, alongside more immediate cost-of-living interventions on rent and energy levies. But there’s a big difference between spitballing on the stump and navigating the Treasury’s tight fiscal rules – which he’s already signed up to. “He has limited room for manoeuvre realistically,” says Heather Stewart, our economics editor, noting that the UK government is due to borrow £250bn this year, inflated by the long tail of bank bailouts and Covid. Heather thinks he has some wriggle room, “but it means he has to be very, very careful the sort of messages he sends”. “It’s one thing for the markets to lend you money because you want to do a long-term project with long-term returns,” she says. “It’s another for the market to think that you can’t control your day-to-day spending and they’re lending you money that’s going straight out the door for benefits.” During the campaign, Burnham was pressed repeatedly on previous remarks that politicians were “in hock” to the bond markets, saying they had been misinterpreted by his opponents and that his argument was about politicians retaking control of fiscal levers. And while his Makerfield win failed to prompt the bond market panic that Rachel Reeves’s backers had warned of, as Heather sets out in her column this week, she believes Burnham would be wise to set clear expectations about tax and spend, and be upfront about the fact that not everyone can be a winner. During the campaign he claimed he was “not squeamish” about reducing welfare spending to fund defence. But there are options for tax increases, she says, “that don’t step on the live wire of Labour’s manifesto pledges” – capital gains tax again, for example, a bank tax or increasing the tax on high-value homes, due to come into force in 2028. “Announcing a wealth tax would be a powerful symbol of intent, too, though the practicalities are challenging”. *** Europe and the world Foreign policy is widely acknowledged as an area in which Burnham is inexperienced and one of his first challenges in office is likely to be a reset summit with the EU on 22 July. The UK’s relationship with Europe has “immeasurably improved” since the Tories left government, our Europe correspondent, Jon Henley, tells me on a video chat from Paris. Glowing tributes from figures like Canadian premier, Mark Carney, who said yesterday “the world is safer and allies are more united” because of Starmer’s efforts, are testament to the international respect he earned for his leadership on Ukraine, managing the vicissitudes of US president Donald Trump. But there remains a degree of frustration among EU countries, Jon adds that for all of Starmer’s warm words about closer ties, “there are the famous red lines in Labour’s manifesto” on the single market, customs union and free movement, which Burnham will be boxed in by, too. Burnham was accused of reversing his position in favour of rejoining the EU, as he campaigned in Leave-voting Makerfield. He later clarified that, while he respects the result of the Brexit referendum, “I’d like to see us rejoin in my lifetime.” “The problem is there’s very little Burnham can do to improve relationships with Europe that doesn’t involve a major about-turn on those red lines,” says Jon. *** The north and devolution In his victory speech in the wee hours of Friday morning, Burnham said the people of Makerfield had “voted for more power for the north and everywhere forgotten by Westminster”. “We’ve heard all this before with Boris Johnson and levelling up,” our northern correspondent, Hannah Al-Othman, tells me when I catch her driving through Northumberland, “and the consensus here is that those areas have further declined. But with Burnham it does feel more authentic.” She reminds me that Burnham lives in the Leigh area, next to the constituency he’s been elected to represent and a similar sort of place. “There is a sense that he’s lived it and he knows what its issues are.” With growing numbers of regional leaders wielding different levels of power, Hannah wonders whether Burnham might effect some standardisation, devolving further responsibilities. “He has strong relationships with the other regional mayors. I imagine they’ll have his ear and will be holding him to account.” *** Telling Labour’s ‘story’ A perennial criticism of Starmer was that he was too much the technocrat, unable to draw together the threads of incremental progress into a narrative powerful enough to convince a public whose trust had been eroded by decades of austerity, stagnation and broken promises. We know Burnham’s story so far: it’s called Manchesterism, and it means a more interventionist approach to the economy, bringing essential assets such as transport, water and energy into greater public control, a closer partnership between the state and business to spread the proceeds of wealth, and a major expansion of devolution. That’s the ambition, and what Labour MPs are excited about this morning. But how realistic are they, given Burnham’s constraint by manifesto commitments and the economy? Much will depend on who Burnham picks as his chancellor. A briefing war has already broken out between advocates for Streeting and those close to Ed Miliband. Senior political correspondent Peter Walker, who was on Downing Street to watch Starmer at the podium, recalls Burnham’s campaign launch in Makerfield: “The message very much was, ‘If I become PM, I can’t really go beyond what the manifesto said because I haven’t got a mandate to do that.’ And the sheer state of public finances means there’s not much he can do, unless he wanted to significantly change taxation, which he said he’s not going to do.” And that, says Peter, leaves a problem many Labour MPs fear: “Is Burnham just going to be Starmer with a slightly more human presentation style?” What else we’ve been reading Patrick Barkham has written an extraordinary piece about volunteers in Somerset who were trained to experience the world as otters, salmon and other native wildlife in a bid to understand the risks of human-dominated landscapes. Patrick Guardian correspondents revisited Brexit bellwether constituencies 10 years on for this cracking read, which I enjoyed in no small part because I remember the original Scottish commission. Libby I loved reading about how Laura Evans set herself a target of dead lifting 100kg and changed her relationship with her body in the process. Patrick World Cup 2026 On the pitch Argentina 2-0 Austria | Lionel Messi has become the leading goalscorer in World Cup history after scoring in Argentina’s group game against Austria. France 3-0 Iraq | Kylian Mbappé scored twice and Ousmane Dembélé added another as France cruised to a win over Iraq that was delayed for two hours at half-time. And the rest | Erling Haaland scored twice as Norway battled to a 3-2 win over Senegal, while Algeria beat Jordan 2-1, keeping alive their hopes of reaching the World Cup knockout rounds. Off the pitch Mexico | Merlin, the pet duck in a mini Mexico shirt who has become a viral sensation and an unofficial mascot of the World Cup, waddled onto the stage of the president’s morning press conference. Sportswashing | This week’s edition of our Hotspot newsletter looks at how Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company, embedded itself in the World Cup. Say cheese | Jonny Weeks has produced a great behind-the-scenes photo essay from the World Cup’s official portraits. Today’s fixtures • Portugal v Uzbekistan, 6pm BST on ITV • England v Ghana, 9pm BST on BBC • Panama v Croatia, 12am BST on BBC • Colombia v DR Congo, 3am on ITV The front pages “Starmer bows out”, is the Guardian’s front page today, while the Times’ is “Burnham angles for power”, and the Telegraph’s take is “Burnham set for coronation”. The i Paper writes “Prime minister in three weeks: Burnham arrives for coronation”, and the FT leads with “Starmer’s exit clears way for Burnham”. The Mail calls the potential PM “‘Messiah’ without a mandate”, and the Mirror, alongside a picture of Starmer, writes “Out of time”. The Sun says “He thinks it’s all over … and it definitely is for Starmer”. Metro has “Keir’s tears … Andy’s crown”. And lastly, the Express pleads “Give us a proper Brexit”. Today in Focus: The Latest Starmer resigns: who will replace him and when? Keir Starmer has announced he is standing down as prime minister after days of intense pressure from Labour MPs, including cabinet ministers, following Andy Burnham’s byelection victory in Makerfield. Wes Streeting has ruled himself out of the running, so will it be a coronation for the ‘king of the north’ or could another candidate emerge? Lucy Hough speaks to senior political correspondent Peter Walker – watch the full episode on YouTube here. Cartoon of the day | Ben Jennings The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Compensation paid to a deceased Windrush victim has been transformed into the £10,000 Windrush prize, for British Caribbean playwrights over 18. “I wanted something positive to come out of it,” says founder Shereener Browne, the artistic director of Orísun Productions, who set up the prize in memory of her late father, Myron Brown. Aiming to support underrepresented British Caribbeans in theatre, the scheme will also see the winning play staged at London’s Arcola theatre and published by Methuen Drama. Through the prize, Browne hopes to establish a pathway for British Caribbeans theatre makers. More broadly, Orísun Productions has set out to support young writing talent through workshops, seminars and networking events. “There isn’t just one British Caribbean experience,” she says, a narrative she hopes to the scheme will help to change. Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply