Keyword – Politics
Trefwoorden – Politics, UK news, Keir Starmer, Andy Burnham, Labour
Title – Keir Starmer has quit as prime minister – what will happen next in UK politics? | Politics | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/benquinn
Link – Keir Starmer has quit as prime minister – what will happen next in UK politics? | Politics | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T17:57:28.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/22/keir-starmer-quits-prime-minister-what-will-happen-next-uk-politics-explained

Britain is to get its fifth prime minister in four years after the current incumbent of Downing Street, Keir Starmer , announced that he would resign.

It was widely expected and came after months of mounting pressure on Starmer, who led the Labour party to a landslide victory in the 2024 UK general election but who has faced months of pressure to quit from members of parliament (MPs) for the centre-left party.

The announcement sets the scene for him to be replaced within weeks by Andy Burnham , who was a minister in the 2007-2010 government of Gordon Brown and, from 2017 until last week, the mayor of Greater Manchester.

Burnham is seen by many in Labour as the party’s best hope of defeating the challenge posed by the populist-right Reform party, led by Nigel Farage.

How did British politics reach this point?

Starmer, a softly spoken former human rights lawyer, had been hailed as a pragmatic and serious leader who could restore stability after years of political chaos and infighting that resulted in two changes of prime minister by the rightwing Conservative party after the 2019 general election.

But although he was elected with the biggest parliamentary majority in 100 years, there was a sense even among Labour supporters that Starmer lacked political nous and conviction. This was underlined by missteps including cutting some winter fuel subsidies for pensioners and a U-turn on welfare in the face of a parliamentary rebellion last year.

Starmer’s judgment was called into serious question after his decision to appoint a controversial former Labour minister, Peter Mandelson, as Britain’s ambassador to the US despite the latter’s known links to the child sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein .

After the true extent of Mandelson’s ties to Epstein became known in September 2025, Starmer sacked him – but it was too late to prevent the prime minister and his government from becoming embroiled in one of the worst political scandals since the second world war.

All the while, and amid deep unpopularity among voters, panic has continued to grow in Labour ranks that he has been unable to meet the challenge from Reform UK, the anti-immigration party headed by the divisive Farage.

Farage’s party routed Labour and the Conservatives in municipal elections last year and again last month , which was a catalyst for the draining away of support for Starmer and resignations by ministers in his government.

Both they and others who stayed in Starmer’s cabinet had privately and publicly urged him to resign, with backers of Burnham advocating for an orderly transition of power rather than a damaging leadership contest.

Who is Andy Burnham and how has he become the prime minister in waiting?

A veteran of the Labour governments of Brown and Tony Blair, 56-year-old Burnham has served since 2017 as the mayor of Greater Manchester, a newly created role which he was elected to after two failed bids to become Labour leader, in 2010 and 2015 .

He has thrived in the position, earning the moniker “the king in the north” for his high-profile interventions in the distinctive politics of north-west England and for presiding over an economic boom in UK’s fastest-growing city region.

Burnham has long been regarded by many in Labour, including those on the moderate left, as the answer to the party’s woes and in particular to the draining away of its support in traditional working-class strongholds.

In January he was blocked by allies of Starmer from returning to parliament when a vacant Westminster seat in the Manchester area became available. But they could not prevent him from becoming the Labour candidate in a fresh special election this month in the north-west of England, after the local MP stood down.

His victory in the constituency of Makerfield has paved the way for his return to the Westminster parliament, where he is eligible to become the Labour leader and consequently prime minister.

However, it was the manner of Burnham’s win that underlined his credentials as the answer to the conundrum faced by Labour after its support collapsed in two previous special elections for vacant seats in Westminster. Not only did he did see off the Reform UK candidate last week, but he did so by a significant margin, resurrecting his party’s support in an area where the populists had made sweeping gains during local elections in May.

What happens next?

Starmer had already informed King Charles III of his intention to resign, as is required by convention, before he announced the news to the British public on Monday morning.

During his resignation speech, the Labour leader said he would ask his party’s ruling national executive committee to set out a timetable for a contest to replace him, with 9 July the date from which contenders can seek nominations by their fellow Labour MPs.

A process of hustings, where candidates would make their case to fellow Labour MPs, would be intended to be completed by 16 July, the last day before the UK parliament breaks up for its summer recess.

If more than one person reaches the nominations threshold, there would be a contest. That would take place when parliament is not sitting, among an electorate comprising hundreds of thousands of members of the Labour party and trade unions and affiliated bodies. Starmer would stay in post in the interim, with a new leader in place by the resumtpion of parliament on 1 September.

However, a contest is almost certain to be avoided after Wes Streeting, another influential Labour MP who resigned last month as England’s health secretary, made a U-turn on his previously declared intention to stand and announced he would back Burnham .

Should Burnham remain unchallenged, he is expected to become the Labour leader on 17 or 18 July. He would expect to receive a call from the king inviting him to form a government.

It is possible that another minister could enter the fray, and some Labour MPs believe a contest would help to challenge Burnham on his ideas and plans, but many others believe a so-called coronation would minimise the disruption and sense of chaos before the instalment of the UK’s seventh prime minister in 10 years.

Of the opposition party leaders, only Farage has called for a general election , claiming it is “ridiculous to pretend that Andy Burnham has any kind of meaningful mandate to lead the country”.

How would Andy Burnham govern?

Much has been made of Burnham’s record as mayor of the Greater Manchester area. Supporters point to the region’s growth as evidence of his competence and ability to meld social democratic ideas with business-friendly policies.

However, others hoping to establish what he stands for in a big picture sense have variously pointed to his faith – Burnham would be the first practising Catholic to become the UK’s prime minister – and the ideas he and others have put forward in speeches and writings that have come to be known as “Manchesterism” .

The term loosely refers to an argument for increasing devolution of decision-making powers from London to Britain’s cities and regions, providing investment in those regions and a much more interventionist state.

In contrast with the more pragmatic faction which had gathered around and supported Starmer, Burnham is also more closely associated with the so-called soft left of the Labour party while opponents on Britain’s political right have seized on Burnham’s past comments that politicians should not be “in hock” to the bond markets .

However, he has come to be regarded as a someone who has sought to bridge the right-left divides within Labour, albeit with critics ridiculing apparent changes of position on questions such as reopening the debate about whether Britain should seek to rejoin the European Union after the Brexit referendum in 2016.

On one other hot-button political issue, Burnham’s team have signalled that he would back controversial changes to the immigration system that have been pioneered by Starmer’s government, in a blow to those in Labour who hoped to soften them.

What does it mean for the next UK general election?

The UK’s next general election must be called by August 2029, although the prime minister can choose to hold it at any point before this.

Farage’s Reform UK have topped the opinion polls since last year, having gained a small foothold in parliament at the last general election. The party has consistently been projected to win a majority when British voters next elect a government.

Burnham can now lay claim to the mantle of being Labour’s potential “Reform slayer” by pointing to the line he drew in the sand in last week’s vote in Makerfield.

But Labour cannot run him as their candidate in every constituency across the UK, where his party faces challenges and an unprecedented array of rivals who include not just the populist right.

They also include the Green party of England and Wales, which has been outflanking Labour on the left among liberals and British Muslim voters in urban areas, and pro-independence nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales.

Quite apart from his electoral challenge, Burnham must grapple with profound policy challenges.

They include pressure to find money to fund Britain’s military and a debate within the party about how the welfare system can be overhauled.

Above all though, there is the need to get Britain’s economy firing on all cylinders and equip the country to weather the storm clouds gathering in the wake of the war in the Gulf.

Keyword – Society
Trefwoorden – NHS, Nottingham, Women’s health, Women, Health, Society, UK news
Title – ‘Truly horrific’: the stories of five people affected by the NHS maternity scandal | NHS | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jessica-murray
Link – ‘Truly horrific’: the stories of five people affected by the NHS maternity scandal | NHS | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T07:00:03.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/22/nhs-maternity-scandal-nottingham-report-five-stories

T he long-awaited report into maternity failures at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS trust (NUH), the largest investigation of its kind involving about 2,500 families, will be published later this week.

Led by the senior midwife Donna Ockenden, the inquiry investigated stillbirths, neonatal deaths, maternal deaths and babies or mothers who suffered brain damage and other injuries between 2012 and 2025.

It follows a decade-long campaign for justice and change by the families affected. Some share their stories about what happened to them in Nottingham, and explain why this is such a landmark moment.

Wynter Andrews

Wynter died in 2019 at the Queen’s Medical Centre (QMC) from hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy – a loss of oxygen flow to the brain – which could have been prevented had staff delivered her earlier.

Wynter’s mother, Sarah Andrews, said: “I went into labour and I was having contractions, and for six days, I was basically told to stay at home. I didn’t feel like I had any other choice. And then in hospital, the care was just beset by failures.

“I actually said to my husband I felt like I’d be better off dead than in the situation I was in … It was truly horrific. When they eventually called the emergency C-section and opened me up, the smell of infection filled the room and that’s when they realised that Wynter was stuck in my pelvis. All the warning signs of infection were there.

“Me and Gary had to watch for 23 minutes while they failed to resuscitate her. We had staff come visit us in the bereavement suite and they said it was one of those things, that sometimes babies die. One said to us: ‘If we listen to every mother’s concerns, we’d be overrun.’ They’re telling us that they can’t see anything that’s gone wrong. And a year later, at the inquest, the coroner rules that it’s a clear and obvious case of neglect.

“We have a lifetime of growing up without our daughter. When the cameras stop rolling, when the media goes home, we’re still traumatised people. We continue to live this every day. We’ll never be the same people we were before.

“This report is going to be very traumatic for families but I think it’s important that what happened in Nottingham is laid out so that we can ensure those failures aren’t repeated again.”

Felicity Benyon

Felicity had an emergency hysterectomy at QMC after giving birth in 2015 when she was 29, during which medics accidentally removed her bladder, leaving her with a urostomy bag.

Felicity said: “I had a difficult pregnancy, I was in hospital for weeks. I had a planned C-section and was told that since it was such a high-risk case, a multi-disciplinary team would be involved. But that never happened. They actually let a student doctor do it, despite it being the highest risk C-section they’d had in years. They took out my bladder without even realising. The whole thing.

“Originally they said the placenta accreta [a serious pregnancy condition where the placenta attaches too deeply into the uterine wall] had completely enveloped the bladder. Initially, I was just so happy my baby was alive, so happy that I’d survived because they made me think they had saved the day.

“But then they instigated an investigation, which found the accreta had not touched the bladder and it was completely healthy. I was absolutely floored. It should have just been a hysterectomy and then home, instead of living with lifelong complications.

“It’s completely taken my trust away. I have regular hospital appointments because I now live with this disability, and it’s horrific because I don’t feel like I can trust doctors. I don’t feel safe in hospitals. But that’s the place you’re supposed to feel safe because it’s where you’re at your most vulnerable.

“This review is a huge moment because we’ve fought for years to get this. Going into a pregnancy there’s a risk, but we’re talking about things that were preventable. Things that should never have happened. Things where there’s actually already a system in place to stop them from happening, but it’s just not being adhered to.”

Caitlin Stringer

Caitlin was born prematurely in 2021 at Nottingham City hospital and at 30 days developed necroti sing enterocolitis (NEC), a severe, life-threatening gastrointestinal emergency. Her parents allege the failure of staff to treat her quickly led her to collapse and suffer a severe brain injury.

Caitlin’s mother, Emily Stringer, said: “Caitlin did really well initially, and got off the ventilator really quickly. But we’d been having concerns for few days. We’d been taking photos and showing them to staff of Caitlin’s abdomen getting bigger and bigger, and she wasn’t tolerating her feeds. She was struggling with her breathing and becoming increasingly lethargic. These are all red flag signs of NEC.

“But staff had an answer for everything. They addressed all of our concerns in isolation. No one was either able or willing to join the big picture together, take a step back and think, no, these parents are right, this is a deteriorating baby.

“She collapsed and needed to be put on to a ventilator. The next day her condition worsened. She ended up having over half of her bowel removed because it had ruptured and died inside of her. About a month later, she had a brain scan which showed a devastating injury.

“The trust commissioned an external review and found an X-ray had been taken about 15 hours before Caitlin collapsed, which diagnosed NEC, and she should have been given antibiotics within an hour – but she wasn’t.

“Now she’s expected to die in childhood. She has cerebral palsy and has had multiple respiratory arrests at home. She was in paediatric intensive care 13 times last year. We know that one day one of these will be fatal. It’s horrendous.

“This review feels like the validation that I never wanted. It’s great that people will understand the truth, the scale of what’s happened to thousands of families in Nottingham, but heartbreaking that they have to. Things that you think are unthinkable, that you think are ludicrous, they can’t possibly do that – well, we know that they have.”

Quinn Parker

Quinn died at Nottingham City hospital 36 hours after his birth in 2021 . His mother, Emmie Studencki, went to hospital four times with bleeding in the late stages of her pregnancy and said her requests for a caesarean section were ignored.

Quinn’s father, Ryan Parker, said: “I know it’s very cliche, but you do think you’re in the best place at the time. Emmie had bled a lot, and in hospital we had a feeling that something wasn’t right. What is really happening is Quinn is just slowly dying but no one’s doing anything.

“Eventually a doctor decided to break her waters and I just remember the whole bed was covered in blood and liquid. People came flying in and tried to scan for Quinn’s heart, and Emmie was stretchered out. I didn’t know if either of them were alive. Eventually a midwife told me that Quinn was OK and Emmie was in recovery, but then 90 minutes later a neonatal consultant appeared and told me Quinn actually had brain damage.

“We later found out that paramedics had noted all of the concerns about rigid abdomen and blood loss of over a litre, and the notes were not collected properly by the hospital.

“The Ockenden review doesn’t feel like the end of a journey, it feels like a significant landmark moment which should result in more attention and a fundamental appreciation of how dire some maternity care in this country is. Ultimately you want to ensure other places aren’t a Nottingham, but the reality of the situation is other places are already Nottinghams.”

Harriet Hawkins

Harriet was stillborn at Nottingham City hospital in April 2016 after her mother had been in labour for six days. An external review of the case found 13 failures and concluded the death was almost certainly preventable.

Her mother, Sarah Hawkins, said: “You hope that you’re going to be the only person that’s been through this, but when you hear of other people, and it’s not just one or two, it’s hundreds and thousands. You just lose your faith in the NHS .

“When I was eventually brought in, Harriet’s head was coming out of me. For three years, they tried to tell us it was an infection. We had to wait two years to have Harriet’s funeral.

“For so long in Nottingham we were made to feel like the mad grieving parents. Harriet should have been a serious incident within 48 hours, and it took us 159 days to actually get an incident logged. It just felt like a complete cover-up.

“Quite a lot of people focus on statistics, and that’s fine. But you’ve got to think we drove home with an empty car seat, we had to empty our nursery, I gave birth so I still had leaky boobs and hair loss, you have everything. It’s not just an intrapartum death, it’s someone’s baby.

“The massive thing for me [with the Ockenden report] will be the feeling of eventually being heard and listened to. It took over 10 years. Loads and loads of families were referred to as tragic, isolated cases which clearly wasn’t the case.”

The NUH chief executive, Anthony May, said: “I want to pay tribute to the bravery of the many families who have worked tirelessly to get answers and to make maternity services safer for others.

“I have met some of the affected families, and they have shared their painful and life-changing experiences with me, for which I am very grateful. I am very sorry for the pain and suffering these families have endured.”

He said NUH staff had “shown their commitment to change”.

“Upon receiving the findings of the review, we will consider carefully what we need to do next to ensure that we learn from what happened in the past and to continue to improve maternity services,” he said.

Keyword – Art and design
Trefwoorden – David Hockney, Painting, Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, UK news
Title – David Hockney’s funeral held in private with just two mourners | David Hockney | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/donna-ferguson
Link – David Hockney’s funeral held in private with just two mourners | David Hockney | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-21T12:06:07.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jun/21/david-hockney-funeral-private-two-mourners

Only two people attended David Hockney’s funeral last week – in line with the British artist’s final wishes.

The two mourners at the private ceremony were Hockney’s 61-year-old partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, and his 33-year-old great-nephew, Richard Hockney, a photographer who worked as the artist’s assistant and frequently modelled for him. Both are trustees of the David Hockney Foundation, established by the artist in 2008.

When the pioneering painter of The Splash died peacefully at his home on 11 June aged 88, Keir Starmer and King Charles were among those who paid tribute to his “vivid, instantly recognisable” work and “irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation”.

Although Hockney wanted his funeral to be an intimate ceremony, his publicist, Erica Bolton, announced that his life and work would be celebrated in a series of memorial services to be held in places he has lived around the world, including London and Yorkshire.

Bolton said: “We have been overwhelmed by your tributes which have meant so much to us and we wanted to thank you.

“As we have already received so many inquiries about David Hockney’s funeral arrangements and memorials, we would like to clarify that it was David’s clear wish that his funeral should be attended only by his partner, JP, and his great-nephew Richard, and that their privacy would be respected. The funeral has already taken place.

“Also in accordance with David’s wishes, we are able to announce that the first memorial service to celebrate David’s life and work will be held in London in spring 2027, followed at later dates by memorials in Yorkshire, Paris and Los Angeles.”

She added that most of Hockney’s works in his private collection would be given to foundations and public institutions around the world “in furtherance of his legacy”.

Hockney refused a knighthood in 1990 and he revealed why 13 years later, in a 2003 interview with his local newspaper, Bradford’s Telegraph & Argus . “I do not care for a fuss,” he said. “I don’t value prizes of any sort. I value my friends.”

Hockney is thought to have created about 35,000 artworks throughout his six-decade career, including the Queen Elizabeth II window at Westminster Abbey, where the memorial in London is likely to be held.

He donated about 8,000 works to his foundation which were collectively valued at more than £1bn in 2024.

A free exhibition, David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting , runs until 23 August at the Serpentine in London.

Next year there will be two more exhibitions of Hockney’s work, at Tate Britain and in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern.

There was a surge in demand for the artist’s work at Art Basel last week, where buyers were given one of the first chances since his death to acquire his work in person.

Clare McAndrew, the author of The Art Basel and US Global Art Market Report, told the Observer there had been a “supply grab” of Hockney’s paintings, with demand reportedly up more than 1,200% in the 48 hours after his death.

Keyword – News
Trefwoorden – World news, UK news, Photography
Title – Starmer’s resignation and a ray of new year light: photos of the day – Monday | World news | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/natasha-rees-bloor
Link – Starmer’s resignation and a ray of new year light: photos of the day – Monday | World news | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T12:06:21.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2026/jun/22/starmer-resignation-ray-of-new-year-light-photos-of-the-day-monday

Keyword – Info
Trefwoorden – Information, Football, Newsletter sign-up
Title – Sign up for the Football Daily newsletter: our free football email | Information | The Guardian
Author – Guardian Staff
Link – Sign up for the Football Daily newsletter: our free football email | Information | The Guardian
Publish date – 2022-11-14T09:05:50.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/info/2022/nov/14/football-daily-email-sign-up

Keyword – Science
Trefwoorden – Mathematics, Education, Science
Title – Did you solve it? Dotty data and silly sentences | Mathematics | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/alexbellos
Link – Did you solve it? Dotty data and silly sentences | Mathematics | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T15:59:53.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/22/did-you-solve-it-dotty-data-and-silly-sentences

Earlier today I set these three puzzles about deception. Here they are again with solutions.

1. Super syllabus

A school cohort has two classes. At the end of the year 1, all pupils are graded. When all the pupils are listed in grade order, the median pupil is a C.

(The median is the middle value in a data set listed from smallest to largest.)

For year 2, the school introduces a new syllabus. At the end of the year, all pupils are again graded. Now when the pupils are listed in grade order, the median has dropped to a D.

Devise a scenario in which the new syllabus in fact improved every pupil’s grade.

Solution

Imagine that in the first year everyone in one class gets a C and everyone in the other gets has an E. If there is one more person in the first class, the median pupil gets a C.

Now lets say that in the second year, everyone with a C improves to a B, and everyone with an E improves to a D. All it takes is for two new pupils to join the second class and score a D or below for the median of the cohort to drop to D.

Yes, you might complain that I didn’t make clear that new pupils could join. But that’s the point! Often statistics deceive us because there are gaps in our knowledge.

2. Peculiar poll

Two market research companies, Smith Surveys and Jones Polls, each conduct a poll on support for a government policy.

Both polls of 125 people show that the policy is more popular amongst men.

READ THE DATA BELOW TO CHECK THAT THE PREVIOUS SENTENCE IS CORRECT.

Is the policy more popular amongst men or amongst women?

Data from Smith Surveys. Men who support the policy: 21/25, or 84 per cent. Women who support the policy: 80/100, or 80 per cent.

Data from Jones Polls: Men who support the policy: 22/100, or 22 per cent. Women who support the policy: 5/25, or 20 per cent.

Solution

You would expect it to be the case that if both polls show that the policy is more popular amongst men, then the policy is more popular among men.

But this is not true! Do the sums:

Men who support the policy overall: 43/125 = 34 per cent

Women who support the policy overall: 85/125 = 68 per cent

The policy is more popular among women.

This statistical curiosity is called Simpson’s Paradox , the phenomenon that trends in certain data sets can be reversed when the sets are combined.

Smith happened to survey mostly women in a place or way that produced high support overall, while Jones surveyed mostly men in a place or way that produced low support overall. When those different figures are combined the resulting figures point in the opposite direction.

3. Anguish Languish (prize draw!)

Anguish Languish is an ersatz language created by the US linguist Howard L Chase in which an English text is “translated” into a nonsense string of similar-sounding English words. (i.e English language = anguish languish.) Chase invented it to show “the marvelous versatility of a language in which almost anything can, if necessary, be made to mean something else.”

I asked readers to submit some examples to win a free copy of You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng by Kit Yates.

The most popular subject was today’s news and we will miss a PM who if nothing else has a surprisingly homophone-friendly name.

Star myrrh scone

(Starmer’s gone.)

Good bike here, fair wheel.

(Good by Kier, farewell.)

Soak eerie mane sin faun, ow! Andes potent chili necks.

(So, Kier remains in for now. Andy’s potentially next.)

Goods peed KISSED Armour

(Godspeed Kier Starmer)

Other notable contributions were

Wench all wheat tree metre gain

(When shall we three meet again?)

Eats ahead nog knife, forest.

(It’s a hard knock life, for us.)

Lord Fig-Wit against tie-in

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Anna plaid hey key psst thud Octo hey whey!

(An apple a day keeps the doctor away._

But the winner is Edward Barrett for the nursery rhyme:

Myriad Al tell ’em, eats fleas worse wight ass know

(Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.)

Thanks to everyone who submitted a line – I hope you had fun. I’ll be back in two weeks.

You Don’t Know What You’re M ss ng by Kit Yates is available to buy on the Guardian Bookshop for £22.50.

I’ve been setting a puzzle here on alternate Mondays since 2015. I’m always on the look-out for great puzzles. If you would like to suggest one, email me .

Keyword – Film
Trefwoorden – Film, Culture, Eating disorders, Diets and dieting, John Early
Title – Jabs, human ash and a tapeworm: behind the appetite for a new kind of disordered eating movie | Film | The Guardian
Author – Gayle Sequeira
Link – Jabs, human ash and a tapeworm: behind the appetite for a new kind of disordered eating movie | Film | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T11:15:44.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/22/jabs-human-ash-and-a-tapeworm-behind-the-appetite-for-a-new-kind-of-disordered-eating-movie

S accharine is soundtracked by a rumbling stomach. Ping-ponging between binge eating and regimented workout routines, first-year medical student Hana Hitching (Midori Francis) considers how she could drop down to her ideal weight. For someone whose body-image issues appear longstanding – a brief shot reveals the diet books stashed away in her drawer – a quick fix appears irresistible. Hana begins taking an illicit supplement guaranteed to make the weight just “melt off”. The secret ingredient? Human ash.

Soon she begins to be stalked by the ghostly presence of the woman whose cremated last remains she has been consuming. “It’s kind of worth it, right?” says a formerly overweight friend, who once took the same pills and experienced the same ensuing anxiety and audio hallucinations, in a scene that encapsulates the cruel motto central to extreme diet culture: nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

Like the female protagonists of writer-director Natalie Erika James’s previous two films, Relic and Apartment 7A, Hana experiences a destabilising loss of control over her own body. The entity grows increasingly violent as it pushes her to binge, often even in her sleep –and the more she does, the stronger this phantom tormentor grows. It isn’t long before Hana is drastically underweight but longer until she lets go of the denial that she is changing for the better.

The punishing toll of disordered eating is depicted even more viscerally in Maddie’s Secret, in which food influencer Maddie Ralph (John Early) is hospitalised for cardiac arrest and later a gastrointestinal perforation after mounting work pressures prompt her dormant bulimia to resurface, trapping her in a vicious cycle of bingeing and purging. The threat to her life is made clear but Maddie pushes on. It’s the loss of a friend under similar circumstances that breaks her but also breaks through to her.

Closeups of food being shovelled into, or smeared across, mouths recur throughout Saccharine and Maddie’s Secret. The protagonists, both shy and self-conscious, turn to food as a coping mechanism for stress and have jobs that enable their disorders. While one is a supernatural horror film and the other a melodramatic comedy, they both channel anxieties that are age old yet fuelled by distinctly modern mechanisms.

Saccharine’s Hana watches then eventually tries out the online potato masher challenge, in which users test the slimness of their arms by attempting to fit them through the narrow kitchen utensil. If this sounds ridiculous, it’s not entirely unrealistic. Recall last year’s similarly themed viral TikTok sunglasses challenge, designed to showcase waists tiny enough for a pair of sunglasses to fit around them. While Hana’s dad is obese, her slender mother fits the stereotype of the almond mom – a term originating from a 2013 Real Housewives of Beverly Hills episode, then popularised on TikTok a decade later, to describe a woman who not only adheres to restrictive eating habits but also imposes them on her kids. The misshapen birthday cake Hana’s mother bakes her daughter is sugar free, butter free and sans flour.

Maddie’s Secret was partly inspired by the “sinister and very sexual” style of food content that Early – who also wrote and directed the film – told IndieWire his algorithm began recommending. Ozempic gets namedropped. At an inpatient treatment centre Maddie later admits herself to, patients’ phones are confiscated so as to prevent their exposure to triggering online content. Sure enough, once they swipe a staff member’s phone, they gather around to watch a mukbang (or “eating show”) video characterised by the excessive quantities of food consumed.

While films about disordered eating date back at least to the made-for-TV movie The Best Little Girl in the World (1981), Saccharine and Maddie’s Secret are released less than a year after “ shrinking girl summer ” – spurred by the proliferation of weight-loss drugs – and are the inevitable extension of 2024’s wave of films about women driven to fixate over and then “fix” their perceived physical flaws. Take body horror movies The Substance and Shell, in which female actors sidelined by an ageist industry desperately grasp at dubious experimental treatments, only to undergo traumatic physical transformations.

From period films to futuristic dystopias, concerns of bodily imperfections have remained constant over the past few years. If the young female protagonist of 2024’s Uglies yearns to undergo the government-mandated procedure that will beautify her, that of 2025’s The Ugly Stepsister is subjected to barbaric, primitive cosmetic surgery, including a “nose job” carried out with hammer and chisel. A weight-loss remedy foisted on her by a well-meaning teacher in this Cinderella reimagining is even harder to swallow – it involves ingesting a tapeworm.

The maternal figures of Saccharine and Maddie’s Secret aren’t evil stepmothers, as in that film, but they saddle our protagonists with inherited trauma all the same, fuelling their unhealthy relationships with food. Hana’s cravings reflect her bottomless need for validation – having grown dangerously thin, she voices the deep-seated suspicion that she is finally the size her mother, long prone to making comments about her face and body, always wished her to be. And while Maddie has the familial support system Hana doesn’t – a husband who utterly dotes on her – the disordered eating patterns she relapses into were taught her as a child. Not only is she triggered by her mother’s stinging jabs but she has so internalised them that the putdowns about her appearance are just echoes of what she’s been told before.

Even outside the family unit, bodies are scrutinised, weight becomes a focal point of discussions and casually cutting remarks are inescapable. Hana’s fellow students mock the obese cadaver they’re meant to be dissecting, and cruel online comments about Maddie’s appearance accompany her first brush with virality. To someone struggling with body-image issues, however, even well-intentioned compliments can feel barbed. Referencing her own struggles with disordered eating, a new hire tells Maddie how refreshing it is to see a food content producer with an “actually healthy” body, “like not scary thin”.

The inability to feel at home in your own body is a profoundly isolating experience, examined through both these protagonists losing out on meaningful connections either by pushing away the people who care about them or by being too self-conscious to put themselves out there in the first place. For all its messages of body positivity, Saccharine succumbs to its own form of “othering”: an obese woman is turned into a monstrous figure and an object of revulsion in death, despite being remembered as kind and caring while alive. Maddie’s Secret, on the other hand, radiates a sincere empathy for its protagonist throughout, readily offering her the acceptance she struggles to extend to herself.

In the UK, Beat can be contacted on 0808-801-0677. In the US, help is available at nationaleatingdisorders.org or by calling ANAD’s eating disorders hotline at 800-375-7767. In Australia, the Butterfly Foundation is at 1800 33 4673. Other international helplines can be found at Eating Disorder Hope

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, Mexico, Football, World Cup, Sport
Title – Merlin the duck unruffled after meeting president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author – Reuters
Link – Merlin the duck unruffled after meeting president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T18:23:06.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jun/22/merlin-the-duck-unruffled-after-meeting-president-of-mexico-claudia-sheinbaum

Merlin, the pet duck in a mini Mexico shirt who has ⁠become a viral sensation and an unofficial mascot of the World Cup , met Mexico’s president on Monday.

The duck waddled on ⁠to the stage ⁠at the ​start of Claudia Sheinbaum’s regular morning press conference, took a seat where ministers and officials are usually seen, and unfazed ⁠by the occasion, let out a few quacks.

“We feel very honoured to be here with the president, it is an honour for ⁠us to stand before you and for the whole world to see the ​beautiful side of Mexico ,” said Karla ‌Gómez, Merlin’s owner.

Merlin’s fame ‌was ignited during street celebrations after the co-hosts beat South Africa 2-0 in the ‌opening game on 11 June, when the costumed duck was seen wandering among the crowd on the capital’s bustling Reforma avenue. Since then, Merlin has become one of the stars of the World Cup.

Gómez said she is hoping to make Merlin a registered trademark and that his newfound fame can help their ‌family, especially her eldest son who has a mental illness.

Sheinbaum said Merlin’s family will receive assistance without providing details. “Today we brought the ​family that has Merlin the duck as their pet, because he has been a symbol of the World Cup, a symbol of what Mexican families stand for, of who we are as Mexican families, and that is above all else, it is ⁠what the world is seeing from Mexico today,” Sheinbaum said.

Gómez described ​Merlin as the “boss” of ​her business as a streetside ​beverage vendor. She said Merlin has a balanced diet but enjoys ​a pork ‌taco on Sundays. Merlin ​is two years ​old and came into the family as a gift from a customer. He usually wears shoes to protect his webbed feet because, according to Gómez, he loves to walk.

Keyword – US news
Trefwoorden – Donald Trump, US news, US politics, Washington DC, Trump administration
Title – Trump claims ‘vandals’ foiled his $14m revamp of DC’s reflecting pool. What actually happened? | Donald Trump | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rachel-leingang
Link – Trump claims ‘vandals’ foiled his $14m revamp of DC’s reflecting pool. What actually happened? | Donald Trump | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T16:02:34.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/22/what-happened-dc-reflecting-pool-vandalism-arrest-algae

Donald Trump’s rush to repaint the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, a symbol of Washington DC , has hit roadblock after roadblock as the country’s 250th anniversary nears.

The public has been gripped by the ill-fated $14m attempt to renovate the reflecting pool, which the US president vowed to make “beautiful” in time for this summer’s birthday celebrations at the capital.

Trump sought to turn the monument “American flag blue” in time for the Fourth of July holiday, awarding a no-bid contract to a company he said had previously done work on swimming pools at one of his golf clubs. But it has endured problems with algae, peeling paint and a ballooning price tag.

The pool, built in 1922, runs more than 2,000ft between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Martin Luther King Jr delivered his I Have a Dream speech in front of the reflecting pool in 1963.

Trump claimed this renovation of the site would be far more successful than those which took place under other presidents. He even posted an AI-generated image of himself and other administration officials shirtless in the renovated pool (you cannot swim in the reflecting pool).

But as an unmistakably green hue continues to cover the pool, the president is now claiming foul play. Here’s a rundown of his many claims about the project, and what actually happened.

How much has it cost?

Trump originally said the renovation would cost $1.8m to repair and repaint the reflecting pool.

But the price has ballooned to nearly $15m, the federal contract shows .

The Obama administration repaired and renovated the pool over the course of two years, ending in 2012, spending about $34m to address leaks, filtration and paint. The project also made the pool shallower to save water.

Who took on the renovation project?

The Trump administration claimed the work needed to be done at “Trump speed”, and bypassed the competitive bidding process typically required for federal projects and awarded a no-bid contract.

This went to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based businessthat has not previously won any federal contracts. About $14.7m has been allocated to the firm, which Trump said had previously worked at his golf club in Virginia, though the company did not confirm this tie.

Unions have scrutinized the project, saying there are companies with expertise that would have wanted to bid and that workers’ safety could be at risk.

Another no-bid contract was awarded to a Trump donor who is a neighbor of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club. John J Cafaro’s water treatment company got a $1.7m contract for the filtration system intended to address issues with algae.

What color is the pool?

The bottom of the reflecting pool has historically been grayish, intended to reflect the monuments around it. But Trump sought to make the site “American flag blue”, a dark shade of navy officially called “Old Glory Blue”.

The Cultural Landscape Foundation filed a lawsuit to try to stop the work, saying the paint job amounted to an “aesthetic injury”, adding that “painting the basin blue would cause it to compete for attention and fundamentally alter the existing harmony, solemnity, and dignity of the current memorial landscape”.

To some, the deep blue which emerged in the immediate aftermath of the project appeared very deep – nearly black.

Why did it turn green?

Within days of the completion of the work, the water started to appear green – because of algae plaguing the standing water.

The Trump administration has claimed the water is “crystal clear” when it visibly was not . It blamed reports to the contrary on the “fake news” media.

The interior department said it was using an “advanced nanobubbler technology” to kill algae, which the National Park Service is then vacuuming up. Workers and contractors have been wading through the pool for days, cleaning algae, and have also been seen pouring hydrogen peroxide – bleach – into the pool to attempt to clean it.

Officials have repeatedly prematurely declared victory over the algae, including last week, when the interior department likened it to “the destroyed Iranian navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf”. The algae remained visible in the pool.

Algae growth is common in conditions with shallow, stagnant water in the summer, as is the case for the reflecting pool. Emptying and replacing the water could have accelerated the growth.

“It’s called ‘new pond syndrome’,” Steve Goodale, a swimming pool specialist known online as “Swimming Pool Steve” told NPR . “It’s a known thing that happens when you take a natural, clear body of water like this that sits in an open air environment and you try to start it up, very often you end up with green water almost immediately.”

What happened to the paint?

To make matters worse, the coating of paint applied during the renovation also started to peel off. People have pulled chunks of floating paint out of the pool in recent days after it detached from the bottom.

Who is at fault?

Trump acknowledged “ real problems ” with the site, which he said he had examined himself, this week. He has not acknowledged any issues with the renovation he ordered, however.

Instead, the president blamed the pool’s woes on “vandals”, who he claimed had taken “some form of knife or blade” and delivered a 250ft gash into the pool’s facade. By Monday, when Trump was still posting about the site, this alleged damage had grown into a “300 foot long gash”.

Reporters at the Washington Post who visited the pool on Sunday, could see no evidence of such damage, it reported , despite Trump’s claims.

Trump also claimed that unidentified vandals had poured “corrosive and destructive chemicals” into the pool. Contractors would probably have to drain the water to do repairs, he said.

Government workers were seen pouring hydrogen peroxide into the water to tackle the algae.

Who has been blamed?

Five people had been arrested for vandalizing the pool and another five were issued federal citations as of Saturday, CBS News reported, citing an unnamed administration official.

It’s not clear if any committed acts of vandalism. Washington Post reporters witnessed people interacting with police after pulling objects from the water. Peeling paint has been floating on the surface at times.

A three-time US Olympian and canoeist was arrested on Friday after noticing a partly detached piece of the blue liner and reaching into the water to see what it felt like, he said.

“I didn’t vandalize anything,” David Hearn, who had been cycling, told the Washington Post . “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”

What happens now?

Trump said over the weekend that contractors “will probably be forced to release and drain much of the water” to repair the pool.

“Work will begin immediately on fixing the seriously vandalized Reflecting Pool,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I just inspected it, and could only say to myself, and those gathered around me, WOW, who would do such a thing? SICK, DERANGED PEOPLE! We will fix it?”

Time will tell.

Keyword – Books
Trefwoorden – George Orwell, Books, Essays, Fiction, Culture
Title – From Burma to Big Brother: George Orwell’s best books – ranked! | George Orwell | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/dorianlynskey
Link – From Burma to Big Brother: George Orwell’s best books – ranked! | George Orwell | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-22T11:00:22.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/22/from-burma-to-big-brother-george-orwells-best-books-ranked

10 A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935)

Imagination was not George Orwell’s forte. In each novel the protagonist is to some extent an Orwell surrogate doing things that Orwell did in places where Orwell had been. Here, somewhat unconvincingly, the author’s representative is a repressed young woman, Dorothy Hare, who loses her memory, identity and faith. Orwell considered it “tripe” except for the dream-like, polyphonic chapter where Dorothy sleeps rough in Trafalgar Square – a fascinating legacy of his youthful infatuation with James Joyce.

Sample line: “There’s quite enough evil in the world without going about looking for it.”

9 Burmese Days (1934)

An exorcism of sorts. Orwell swerved university to become a colonial policeman in Burma and spent the next few years trying to wash off the stink of his complicity in imperialism. The clammy atmosphere of corruption and guilt is vividly evoked in the story of jaded teak merchant John Flory’s desperate struggle to live honestly. Orwell’s debut is unusually florid but establishes his lifelong interest in disillusioned, self-hating people who mount doomed rebellions against systems they can no longer bear to endorse.

Sample line: “It is a corrupting thing to live one’s real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.”

8 Coming Up for Air (1939)

Orwell was a pacifist when he wrote Coming Up for Air, not for want of anti-fascist zeal but because he feared wartime conditions would turn Britain fascist, hence this revealingly fraught view of a world sliding into madness. Orwell’s narrator is George Bowling, an apolitical middle-aged insurance salesman who takes a nostalgic trip to his boyhood home and sees his memories overwritten by progress. Written when Orwell was recuperating in Morocco, longing for England, it’s most interesting when he breaks character and vents.

Sample line: “Fishing is the opposite of war.”

7 The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

When Victor Gollancz published The Road to Wigan Pier through his Left Book Club, he felt moved to apologise to readers for the second half. It is essentially two books. The first is viscerally well-observed and righteously indignant reportage about working-class life in northern England. The second is a polemical demand for a better socialism, free from “crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia”, with many hilarious but mean-spirited sideswipes at existing socialists. IPart one still holds up.

Sample line: “We spend our lives in abusing England but grow very angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things.”

6 Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)

Eric Blair became George Orwell on the cover of his first book, because he thought his memoir of dishwashing in Paris and tramping in England might embarrass his middle-class parents. His expeditions into the demimonde were driven less by necessity than by a compulsion to shed his skin and to find some good material. The book is a little unbalanced (Paris wins) but his tragicomic eye for detail and talent for a provocative aphorism are already apparent, as is his sincere empathy for the downtrodden.

Sample line: “It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.”

5 Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

Gordon Comstock is Orwell’s finest comic creation: a furiously misanthropic poet demented by his love-hate relationship with money. Fittingly, Orwell claimed he only wrote the novel because he was in a tight spot, but that undersells the entertainment value of its bitter vigour and fizzing rants against 1930s capitalism, heavily influenced by George Gissing. Comstock is a trailblazing prototype of John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter or Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon and the seething embodiment of Orwell’s fear of failure. Sample line: “How can you be attractive to a girl when you’ve got no money?”

4 The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (1984)

The majority of Orwell’s output, including many of his most quoted lines, was in the form of hand-to-mouth freelance journalism. There’s no such thing as a definitive collection but this is a great introduction to his extraordinary range, including political essays (Antisemitism in Britain), autobiographical parables (Shooting an Elephant), pioneering cultural studies (Boys’ Weeklies), comedic riffs (Confessions of a Book Reviewer), nature writing (Some Thoughts on the Common Toad), literary criticism (Charles Dickens) and an evergreen take on separating the art from the artist (Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí). Sample line: “The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.”

3 Homage to Catalonia (1938)

Orwell’s three best books all flowed from the six months he spent fighting for a tiny, impotent Marxist militia in the Spanish civil war, where he discovered that the Stalin-backed communists and Franco’s fascists had more in common than anyone would admit. Homage to Catalonia is a terrific combination of experience and insight: the grubbiness of combat, the proliferation of murderous lies, his narrow escape from the Stalinists with his wife, Eileen. A brave and thrilling book that epitomises Orwell’s determination to tell inconvenient truths.

Sample line: “The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail.”

2 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

First sketched out in 1943, its ideas previewed in numerous articles, Orwell’s final book was his career’s summation, pitting everything he loved against everything he hated. With apologies to Yevgeny Zamyatin and Aldous Huxley, it’s the first truly satisfying dystopian novel because it combines political argument and satire with the genre pleasures of spy thrillers and love stories. The novel’s colossal influence on fiction, language and thought obscures its strangeness. Its paradoxes and elisions give Winston Smith’s struggle against Big Brother the texture of a bad dream, where reality is always slipping away.

Sample line: “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”

1 Animal Farm (1945)

With Eileen’s editorial assistance, Orwell wrote one perfect book and it was almost never published because it was deemed politically explosive. Subtitled “A Fairy Story”, Animal Farm is a tight, elegant allegory of the Soviet Union’s journey from revolution to tyranny, yet it can still move a 10-year-old who doesn’t know their Kronstadt from their Kerensky. Whether a scene is funny, sad or shocking, the prose’s deadpan clarity never wavers. It can also be read as a prologue to Nineteen Eighty-Four, with similar ideas about language, memory and travestied ideals. What’s more, an unpublished preface, not seen until 1971, is a classic defence of freedom of expression.

Sample line: “And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him.”

The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey is published by Picador.