Keyword – Environment
Trefwoorden – Trees and forests, London, Environment, Young people, Biodiversity, Access to green space, Disability, Society, UK news
Title – ‘I don’t like being stuck in an office’: the young people helping plant a ring of trees around London | Trees and forests | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/isaaq-tomkins
Link – ‘I don’t like being stuck in an office’: the young people helping plant a ring of trees around London | Trees and forests | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T06:00:23.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/17/young-people-mission-to-plant-a-ring-of-trees-around-london

H arry Ewing is heaping branches and foliage from the forest floor on to a dead hedge, reinforcing the protective circle around his newly planted trees in Hadley Wood, north London . He is in a glade created by a fallen oak that was previously overrun with thick bramble.

“I feel very happy – the trees are growing already. It’s really nice seeing it when it starts,” says Ewing.

The 20-year-old is part of a group of young adults with learning disabilities who are transforming their environment and breaking into green sector jobs. They are working on a section of the London Tree Ring, an ambitious project to create corridors of plant and animal life around the capital.

In this section, new willow, hornbeam and hazelnut will diversify the age structure of the forest, and strengthen its biodiversity. Having strimmed away the bramble and planted the younger trees, Ewing and his co-workers are experimenting with different ways to protect them from deer.

“I don’t like being stuck in offices the whole time,” says Josh Limb, as he carries a wheelbarrow full of debris from the forest floor, “I love being outdoors – I can breathe.”

They are trainees with the Harington Scheme, a charity supporting young adults with learning disabilities and/or difficulties to find employment, which is helping the London Tree Ring project achieve its mission to encircle the capital with an unbroken ring of nature.

The London Tree Ring project started out in 2023 as an attempt from the countryside charity CPRE London to create an “M25 for nature”. Since starting work two years ago, it has worked with dozens of groups like Harington, as well as landowners, councils and volunteers, to plant showcase sites that improve the capital’s biodiversity.

Over 25 years, the project will work with hundreds more groups to create flourishing wildlife corridors that give nature a chance at recovery, and in the process reconnect a new generation with their environment.

Saman Shahabi, the Harington Gardeners operations manager, says training young adults in conservation will future proof their skillset as the UK’s economy becomes more green.

He adds that people with disabilities often face greater barriers in accessing nature , and this is part of the solution: “It’s amazing that the Harington Gardeners team are part of bridging that gap, and people with disabilities or learning difficulties being part of that change.”

In two decades’ time, their trees in Hadley Wood will be fully grown and will join up with some of the other tree ring projects started since 2024. In Hounslow a community tree nursery has been created with the environmental education charity Let’s Go Outside and Learn; in Sutton a micro forest has been planted with students from Glenthorne high school; in Chessington, disease-resistant elm have been planted into the local network of farm hedges.

“We want to have bigger habitats [that are] better connected and more diverse. Those are the secrets in halting nature decline,” says Phil Paulo, the director of London Tree Ring.

Despite its name, the philosophy of the London Tree Ring is not to plaster over urban sprawl with a line of trees. It is about considering ways to restore various ecosystems that exist alongside us by developing brownfield sites and improving existing ecosystems, says Paulo.

Making such a broad project work relies on being able to connect different groups of people who are eager to create change, he adds.

At Hadley Wood, the three Harington trainees are joined by volunteers from the Monken Hadley Common Trust. Local people from the common have been looking after the woodland since 1777, when it was created by an act of parliament.

Linden Reilly, 67, a retired university lecturer, discovered through ancient land documents that the age of her cottage in Hadley entitles her to be a commoner. This means she is technically entitled to her own strip of land to graze cattle.

Instead, she decided to join the trust and look after the land. As she works she points out all of the features an unobservant eye would miss: acid grassland, badger dens, yellow meadow ants.

Roger De La Mare, the curator of the common, says it is great to have a younger crowd helping their work. “It’s good fun working with them, because a couple of the days were really miserable [weather-wise] and both groups were spurring each other on,” he said.

As the London Tree Ring enters its next phase, CPRE London is hoping to collaborate with even more people. Every patch of land the charity works on has a different owner, different interest groups, and different communities who can benefit.

With more investment it hopes to procure new sites for habitat creation, and so provide “training and employment support for young people involved with the project”, says Paulo.

Ewing feels the initiative has worked for him. “It’s nice to do something like this for a change,” he says. “We do have fun. I’ve enjoyed this.”

Keyword – US news
Trefwoorden – FBI, Trump administration, US news, US politics, House of Representatives, Democrats
Title – Kash Patel accused of directing $1m to ‘slush fund’ to pay bonuses to loyalist agents | FBI | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/joseph-gedeon
Link – Kash Patel accused of directing $1m to ‘slush fund’ to pay bonuses to loyalist agents | FBI | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T15:32:11.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/17/kash-patel-slush-fund-bonus-loyalist-agents

Kash Patel, the FBI director, has been accused of directing more than $1m in taxpayer-funded bonus payments to a small circle of loyalist agents as part of a “personal slush fund” that may have violated federal law.

Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking member of the House of Representatives judiciary committee, alleged Patel had authorized substantial recurring payments to agents in his inner circle and security detail.

According to information received by the House judiciary minority committee, some agents received payments of nearly $8,000 every two weeks, despite already earning at the federal salary ceiling. While the exact total received by each individual remains unclear, the committee says it can confirm a number of agents received at least five such payments in consecutive pay periods, amounting to close to $40,000 per person.

The pace of disbursements was so rapid, the committee says, that FBI reserve accounts set aside for bonus payments were drained dry, causing some payments to bounce back from exhausted funds.

“Why are these agents receiving extra pay simply for doing their jobs?” Raskin wrote in a 15 June letter to the FBI director. “Are they, in fact, collecting bonus compensation for engaging in actions outside of their duties and outside of the law?”

He added: “We write to find out precisely how much slush fund largess you have put on the American taxpayer’s tab.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment. As the minority, Democrats have no authority to compel the bureau to hand over documents, though they would gain that power if they retake the House in November’s midterm elections, as some forecasts suggest they may.

The main beneficiaries, according to Raskin, were agents serving on Patel’s “director’s advisory team”. The unit was created in 2025 and tasked with examining internal documents and government materials to expose and discredit federal law enforcement officials who had investigated Trump and his allies.

Notus reported in May that the team has been referred to internally as a “payback squad” tasked with building politically motivated cases, including one modeled on the indictment of James Comey , the former FBI director.

When Democratic senators questioned Patel at a hearing on 12 May about whether FBI staff had been subjected to polygraph tests to identify who had been speaking to journalists, Patel responded : “I can tell you unequivocally this FBI is targeting and investigating no journalists.”

Raskin’s letter raised the darker possibility that the alleged payments to agents on Patel’s personal security detail served a different purpose altogether: keeping witnesses to the director’s private conduct silent. The letter cited reporting from the Atlantic alleging Patel had displayed erratic behavior and excessive drinking, and noted that agents on the protective detail had accompanied him on personal outings.

Patel has filed a $250m defamation lawsuit against the Atlantic and reporter Sarah Fitzpatrick, who authored the article on his alleged drinking and absences.

The letter also catalogued a series of what Raskin views as politically motivated firings, including that of former acting director Brian Driscoll, an FBI medal of valor recipient; Steven Jensen, who led the bureau’s response to the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021; and a dozen counterintelligence agents tracking Iranian threats, who were dismissed days before the US launched military strikes on Iran.

Raskin gave Patel until 29 June to provide a full accounting of all bonus payments, the identities of those who received them, and any internal communications assessing their legality.

Keyword – World news
Trefwoorden – Germany, Opera, Culture, Women, Music, UK news, Judith Kerr, Europe, World news
Title – Lost for years, the music of The Tiger Who Came to Tea author’s mother is heard again | Germany | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/kateconnolly
Link – Lost for years, the music of The Tiger Who Came to Tea author’s mother is heard again | Germany | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T07:00:26.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/17/julia-kerr-music-mother-tiger-who-came-to-tea-author-judith

Albert Einstein throws a party at his lakeside house at which he presents to his guests his latest invention: a time machine.

So opens the opera Chronoplan, started in the late 1920s by the composer Julia Kerr, who took the score with her when she fled Nazi Germany with her family in early 1933, its planned premiere having been halted following Hitler’s takeover.

The wider family story was chronicled in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, an autobiographical novel by Kerr’s late daughter, Judith, in which passing references are made to her mother playing the piano. But Kerr’s reputation as one of the most gifted musicians of her time was widely forgotten after the family’s dramatic escape, which brought her composing career to an end.

Until now. On a recent blustery afternoon, descendants who had travelled from London gathered in the garden of Einstein’s former summer house in Caputh, south-west of Berlin, in the location where Chronoplan was set, to celebrate the life and works of Julia Kerr. Compositions which had been found wrongly catalogued and gathering dust in archives were performed by the singer-actor Ruth Rosenfeld and pianist Norbert Biermann, who has spent much time reconstructing them.

Julia and her husband, Alfred, who was considered the leading theatre critic in Weimar-era Berlin, were occasional guests at Einstein’s house, along with other cultural figureheads of the day, such as the composer Richard Strauss and the authors George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Schnitzler, all of whom feature in the opera.

The wooden house, financed by the prize money from Einstein’s Nobel prize, was where friends enjoyed intimate intellectual soirees and boat trips on the nearby lake before Einstein, who like the Kerrs was Jewish, and many others in their circle were forced into exile.

Christian Leitmeir, a historical musicologist from the University of Oxford, first came up with the idea of looking into Julia Kerr’s musical life after reading When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit to his son. “There were fleeting descriptions of her playing the piano and composing. I was intrigued, but I could find no reference to her in the encyclopedia of female composers,” he said.

After searching in the archives of the Academy of Arts in Berlin he discovered Kerr’s handwritten scores, which had been incorrectly catalogued under her husband’s name, in the literature and drama section.

Meanwhile, Sonja Westerbeck, dramatic adviser to the State theatre in Mainz, rediscovered Chronoplan, which was given its world stage premiere earlier this year, almost a century after it was written.

Westerbeck, who was at the Caputh gathering, said: “Julia Kerr has spent too long as the sub-clause in the story – it’s time to bring her back to the fore”.

The Kerr family was invited to Berlin by the curators of a new Exile Museum due to open in early 2028 which will bring together Julia, Alfred and Judith’s stories, alongside those of others forced to flee.

The rediscovery of Kerr’s work comes amid a surge in scholarly and public interest in forgotten female composers, many of whom have been unjustly expunged from the history of classical music.

George Kerr, a civil servant who is Julia’s great-grandson, said he had only recently become aware of Julia’s artistic life.

“I’m very inspired to learn of how immensely talented and creative she was,” he said. “Yet she was compelled by circumstances to put the composing aside in order to provide for her family. She’d have been delighted I’m sure that such a keen interest is now being shown in her work when she was so overlooked in life.”

As readers of her novel will know, Judith’s stuffed pink rabbit was left behind in Berlin, but Julia managed to take the score of her incomplete opera with her, across half of Europe . But on arriving in England, she had to put her ambitions aside to become the family’s breadwinner, working as a secretary and translator, as Alfred spoke no English.

After his death in 1948, she returned to Berlin and worked as an interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials and for the US president John F Kennedy when he visited Berlin in 1963.

In 1952, Chronoplan was recorded by Bavarian Broadcasting, becoming the first opera to have a radio premiere, in what Leitmeir said was a reflection of how visionary the work was. “Her music was very eclectic,” he said. “She was like a magpie absorbing all the influences around her from a range of different genres.”

Corresponding with her family, Julia called the six days spent recording it “the most wonderful of my life. Darlings, practically everything sounded exactly as I have heard it in my head for 20 years. Nobody can take that away from me ever and I know now that I can write music,” she wrote. Julia Kerr died in 1965.

Her grandson Tim Kerr, a retired high court judge, remembered her as a “powerful figure, very single-minded”. He added: “She’d play lovely little tunes she had written on the piano and I’d play the same melodies on the recorder. But I really knew nothing about her music, or that she had been or would be taken seriously as a composer. As is often the case, her life has been filtered through that of her husband, and perhaps to an even larger extent overshadowed by that of her daughter, Aunt Judy, who was more famous than all of them put together.”

Best known in the UK for her picture book The Tiger Who Came to Tea , Judith Kerr, who died aged 95 in 2019, is most famous in Germany for When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, where it appears consistently in the school curriculum.

In a letter to her mother in 1952, Judith Kerr recalled how unhappy Julia had been at not being able to have her works performed.

Keyword – Environment
Trefwoorden – Plants, Insects, Hay fever, Environment, Rural affairs, UK news
Title – Country diary: Everybody loves to hate the stinging nettle – don’t they? | Plants | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/derek-niemann
Link – Country diary: Everybody loves to hate the stinging nettle – don’t they? | Plants | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T04:30:21.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/17/country-diary-everybody-loves-to-hate-the-stinging-nettle-dont-they

E yes smarting, throat tickling, nostrils dog-wet, I pick my way along a thready footpath up the combe, only half-prepared for the next irritation. Nettles, I am watching you. But not well enough it seems, for a sneaky one hidden under the skirts of encroaching grasses and umbellifers grazes the back of my bare calf. It induces that tingling somewhere between pain and pleasure – one that quickly develops into a needling throb.

It is hard to love a nettle. This much-loathed plant may be one of the first that many children learn to identify, for their own protection. It has a secondhand look, with wrinkly, crinkly jagged hearts for leaves. It has no sheen; it does not shine. Near-invisible fine hairs on the upper surfaces give the dulled green a dusty, soiled appearance.

Glass spines hang like malign stalactites from the undersides and poke their points out from the stems. Such small spikes, yet so much discomfort . Other than a bramble , no plant says no so emphatically, forming high, hairy phalanxes on these slopes, midsummer’s biggest block to off‑path wanderers.

A barrier to some; an opening for others. Close inspection picks out aphids aplenty, feeding, crawling, being. And the sap-suckers are being sucked, chomped and chewed by a red soldier beetle , alighting on the apex of one plant and finding meals on the downpipe. Spiders have hung out speculative chains between leaves and stems. A blackfly leg dangles halfway along one thread.

Most prominent of all are the little dark dots of insects swarming all over the purple-tinged flowers. Nettle flowers may be underwhelming, looking like over-tied knots of thin string, but they are irresistible to the aptly named nettle pollen beetles, locked into an orgy of eating and mating.

Tonight I will pay for breathing in during all this observation. The weather report might report a high grass pollen count for hay fever sufferers, but the air knows better. Those microscopic grains shooting the breeze include not just grasses, but also the near weightless dust of any wind-pollinated flower. And copious amounts are produced by the stinging nettle. Atishoo!

Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, World Cup, Football, Sport, Cape Verde, New Zealand, Australia, Curaçao, Morocco football team
Title – From Vozinha to Tim Payne: how the World Cup is creating viral stars | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/malaika-khan,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/cara-graham
Link – From Vozinha to Tim Payne: how the World Cup is creating viral stars | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T07:00:25.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/2026/jun/17/from-vozinha-to-tim-payne-how-the-world-cup-is-creating-viral-stars

B reakout talent emerges at every World Cup , but in 2026 these players’ actions are not confined to the pitch. Social media has become football’s parallel tournament, an arena where one viral clip can reshape an entire career. Here are some standout risers from the tournament so far.

Vozinha

The Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha has become a global sensation after starring in his country’s stunning goalless draw with Spain on Monday. Before the match, reports suggested the 40-year-old had roughly 20,000 followers on social media – that figure now stands at 7.2 million and rising. It’s fair to say Vozinha could end up being one of the faces of the tournament.

Tim Payne

Payne arrived at the World Cup with a mere 4,715 followers on Instagram. After being picked out by the Argentinian influencer Valen Scarsini in a challenge to find the “least-known player” at the tournament based on social media metrics, the New Zealand defender saw that figure rise to an enormous 5.8 million. Caught by surprise at his sudden rise in social media popularity, Payne posted videos thanking Scarsini for his support. The pair have also subsequently met in the flesh.

Kai Trewin

A couple of days before the World Cup started, the Australia defender saw his Instagram following jump from 3,000 to over 100,000 as part of an internet campaign instigated by the football content creator RubikayTV intended to make the 25-year-old the “the Cristiano Ronaldo of the World Cup” in response to Scarsini’s support for Payne. Trewin is now one of the most well-known players in the Socceroos squad despite not featuring in their 2-0 victory over Turkey on Sunday.

Trevor Doornbusch

A shoutout from the influencer FiagoBall catapulted Curaçao’s back-up goalkeeper from 1,606 to 45.1k followers on Instagram, which is some level of online support for a player who sat on the bench all season for VVV-Venlo in the second tier in the Netherlands and may not feature at all at this World Cup.

Zakaria El Ouahdi

The Morocco defender is not a viral star having gained a mere 2,000 followers since the start of the World Cup, but he very much remains one to watch after starring for Genk in the Belgian Pro League this season, registering eight goals and four assists in 34 appearances and subsequently being named the best player of African descent in Belgium’s top flight. What he needs now for his profile to truly soar is to play for his country at these finals – he was an unused substitute in Saturday’s 1-1 draw with Brazil – and/or for a influencer to shoot him to social media prominence.

Keyword – Politics
Trefwoorden – Makerfield byelection, Byelections, Labour, Andy Burnham, Reform UK, Rupert Lowe, Politics, Greater Manchester, UK news
Title – ‘I had one man spit at my poster’: Makerfield deeply divided as byelection campaign draws to a close | Makerfield byelection | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/josh-halliday
Link – ‘I had one man spit at my poster’: Makerfield deeply divided as byelection campaign draws to a close | Makerfield byelection | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T16:00:38.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jun/17/makerfield-byelection-deeply-divided-campaign

O n a wall inside Andy Burnham’s buzzy campaign centre, the signatures of hundreds of MPs, peers and councillors show the scale of the operation to return him to parliament. “MPs are like buses round here these days,” says one Labour volunteer. “You don’t see one for ages then hundreds turn up at once.”

The voters of this long-neglected corner of Greater Manchester will on Thursday decide whether Labour’s love-bombing has paid off in the most consequential UK byelection in decades.

Barely 24 hours before voting begins in Makerfield, the polls suggest Burnham will triumph, and Labour figures sound increasingly confident.

“It’s really positive,” beams the Labour MP Rachael Maskell as she climbs into a car piled with Burnham-branded leaflets on Tuesday afternoon. “I’ve had people take down Reform posters and come back to Andy because they can see it’s so divisive. In the last minutes of reaching a decision [voters] are turning to Andy because he’s bringing people together.”

Maskell, who led a rebellion against disability cuts last July, says Labour has “found its values and purpose again” in Makerfield and urged Burnham to launch an immediate leadership challenge if elected.

Asked whether he could be prime minister by the Labour party conference in September, Maskell says: “I’m optimistic that can happen very quickly … This country is crying out for his leadership.”

Constituency polls have given the Greater Manchester mayor between a three- and 12-percentage point lead over Reform. While the “Burnham bounce” is real, the result may be decided by another party entirely: the rightwing Restore Britain.

Rupert Lowe’s hardline party, which calls for the death penalty and mass deportations, is predicted to win about 7% of the vote in what would be an astonishing result for an outfit that launched only four months ago. It would also be enough to stand in the way of Reform.

“If Restore weren’t around Reform would walk it,” says Darren, the Reform-supporting owner of the Triangle snooker club, where Farage hosted a party event last week.

Darren, who declines to give his surname for fear of losing customers, says Labour has “hammered” the ground war but the split among the rightwing vote is likely to prove decisive: “Restore will take those votes that will push it Andy Burnham’s way.”

On the streets and on social media, the energy appears to be going in two directions: to Burnham and Restore. A Guardian analysis shows Restore has bought more Facebook and Instagram advertising on Makerfield than any other party – and more than double the number of Reform.

Outside the Triangle club in Stubshaw Cross, Reform’s open-top battlebus, plastered with posters of its candidate, Rob Kenyon, a plumber, sits empty.

Its driver, Trevor Jones, was elected as the Reform leader of Bolton council in May and takes the bright teal bus across England for party events. He is used to the odd insult but this campaign, he says, has been “more aggressive than I’ve ever seen”.

Restore Britain activists were filmed last week blocking Reform’s bus with a union flag-branded Land Rover and Jones says some had tried to plaster it with Restore posters: “We should be fighting the same cause not one another. I bet Burnham is laughing his head off.”

Voters across this semi-rural stretch of former mining villages south of Wigan, where 95% of the population is white British, said the byelection had become increasingly toxic.

There were reports of Labour placards being torn down, neighbours falling out and divisive rhetoric on local Facebook groups, which a study found this week have been swamped with pro-Reform misinformation.

Speaking beside a Reform placard outside her neat semi in Stubshaw Cross, Pam Flaherty, 70, says people are “turning against each other”. “I had one man spit at my poster,” she says. “He stood there effing and blinding and I’ve known this man for years.”

Flaherty, a retired nursery cook, and her husband, Ian, 69, were lifelong Labour voters but joined Reform over concerns about immigration. Pam is now a member of Restore Britain but will vote for Farage’s party on Thursday.

“People say I’m racist but I’m not. My knee surgeon was Pakistani, he’s a lovely man; my dentist is Egyptian and my doctor is Indian – I love them,” she says, adding that she worries about “letting every Tom, Dick and Harry in on the boats and taking over”.

Burnham may be peeling off a small slice of Reform voters, says Prof Rob Ford, of the University of Manchester, but the swing is “mainly coming from a squeeze on Lib Dem and Green voters” and “substantial numbers of Tories”, according to polling data.

This anti-Farage coalition is based largely in the suburb of Orrell, the most affluent part of the constituency, where Burnham placards are far more numerous than any other.

“This community has been neglected since Thatcher and people are really angry but we’ve got two groups, Reform and Restore, coming in stirring that anger towards the wrong people,” says Mal Jones, 64, normally a Green voter, who will vote Labour on Thursday.

Jones, a former social worker, says he has seen groups of burly Restore activists “abusing people” and that both rightwing parties are “dividing the community”, adding: “It’s like something from 1930s Germany.”

His friend, Peta Prescott, 48, is another Green voter backing Burnham. She worries about whether the area will be able to come back together after such an intense and polarised campaign. “I don’t know if people realise how far right they’ve fallen,” she says. “They’re just swept up in ‘Stop the boats’.”

Four miles away in the town of Hindley, Lynne Tindall, 70, and the staff at Izzy’s tea room were in raptures about Restore, whose leader visited them on Saturday. None would say who they will vote for but they were full of praise for Lowe, whom they had not heard of before this byelection.

“We need to send the immigrants back,” says Tindall. “We will be a minority in our own country soon.”

Her friend, Carole Dowd, 64, agrees: “They’re everywhere. It’s like they drop them in the middle of the night. We’ve got no money because we’re giving it to them.”

Helen McDonough, 55, praised Lowe and insisted none of them were racist, pointing to the “lovely lad” who owns the barber shop next door, Hajar Abbasi.

Abbasi, 32, who is Kurdish and arrived in Britain nine years ago, said his neighbours at Izzy’s tea room were “really nice to me” and brought him free cakes.

But the hostility towards immigrants has left him afraid, he says, one of the reasons he will vote for Burnham: “I’m very worried about this. They are thinking that all immigrants or black people do bad, bad things.”

Keyword – Music
Trefwoorden – Pop and rock, Indie, Ireland, Music, Culture, Alcoholism, Health, Christianity
Title – ‘Addiction is proof there is a devil. Recovery is proof there is a God’: Irish rockers Bleech 9:3 on struggle, sobriety and their stunning debut | Pop and rock | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/ben-beaumont-thomas
Link – ‘Addiction is proof there is a devil. Recovery is proof there is a God’: Irish rockers Bleech 9:3 on struggle, sobriety and their stunning debut | Pop and rock | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T09:41:47.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jun/17/irish-rockers-bleech-93-on-struggle-sobriety-and-their-stunning-debut

O n stage in a Camden pub, Barry Quinlan, frontman of Irish rockers Bleech 9:3, shares the intensity of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis. He hunches and jerks around the mic stand and his eyes bore a hole in the back wall as jubilant teenagers expand and contract in a circle pit. The gig in mid-May has the same I-was-there energy as early Arctic Monkeys or Fontaines DC shows; with major labels signing Bleech 9:3 on both sides of the Atlantic, dozens of festival dates this summer and a wildly impressive, impassioned five-song debut EP, the band will soon be playing much bigger rooms than this.

But when I meet Barry and his three bandmates earlier on that day, there’s none of that twitchy energy. Bleech 9:3 bring calm to a meeting room in their management company’s offices as staff bustle around outside. That stillness is hard-earned: Barry and guitarist Sam Duffy are each other’s sponsor for Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Quinlan smiles: “It’s an anonymous programme, so we’ll say ‘alleged sponsor’.”

Bleech 9:3 started out in two pairs: Barry and his younger bassist brother James in one band, and guitarist Sam and drummer Luke O’Neill in another. In his previous band, buoyed up by newfound sobriety and spirituality, Barry had written “bright, nearly saccharine” songs, but now, “this is the real story that I wanted to start telling”. That “Bleech” refers to a clean start (though they keep the meaning of the numbers a mystery).

With his voice soaring across grungy guitars, the EP contains autofictional portraits such as the nihilist protagonist of Jacky, and the doomed romantics on Cannonball. On No Surprise, he sings: “So to change your yesterdays / Call an angel in to sow your heart around your head.” He calls that line “a how-to. Like a book: Sort Yourself Out for Dummies. Seek some spiritual thing to take what’s in your heart and plant it around your head as if it was a garden. Grow love in your mind as opposed to the barren wasteland there.”

He’s been trying to cultivate his own mindset since his youth. The Quinlan brothers had grown up in Dublin “in a house of five kids, a madhouse”, says Barry. Family life was suffused with music: “In my granny’s cottage in County Clare, I have an image of these big bulbous glasses of red wine, cigarette smoke, and then these songs and acoustic guitar. It really resonated in my heart.” But, he says, “my dad’s dad was an alcoholic. Mum’s dad was a gambling addict. So we kind of had it coming from both sides. You’re born with that illness.”

Barry, now 28, began drinking in his teens and was in rehab by 20. “I didn’t fight it at all: please put me in somewhere.” But after coming out of his residential centre, he quickly relapsed. “That brought me into the real isolation period of my using – I couldn’t do it with my friends because they all knew I shouldn’t be doing it.”

He did another 15-week rehab stint, “and I was drunk after one day being home”. Then, on 22 February 2019, “I went into my last place – please God – and thought: how have I ended up in a place like this again? In that questioning, it all hit me. I was so far away from myself, from everything, and I knew that was all coming for me again, like the bullet had left the gun.”

He let his mind wander, “into the darkness of the room and beyond, into the ether, out into the night: there has to be something. ‘All right, God, you better be real because I’m fucked if you’re not.’ And in that moment, I felt something touch my heart and the obsession to use was taken away.” He decided to do an exercise he’d been asked to do before but never properly engaged with: writing the 10 serious consequences of his addiction. “I went into group therapy the next day and read those things out and just erupted into tears. It was beautiful; it felt like an exorcism, like finally reaching the shore.”

Because of Barry’s trials, his brother James was also sent to rehab aged 17. “My parents had gone through the nightmare years in the house, with Barry, and my sisters as well,” he says, more gruff and halting than his brother. “We were all … The fucking thing was fucked, for lack of a better word. I was kind of showing signs. So, like: do you want to go to rehab?” It didn’t last – unlike Barry and Sam, James and Luke aren’t alcoholics. “The therapist wasn’t convinced; I probably didn’t belong there. But I learned a lot.”

Luke was also affected by alcoholism around him. “Where we come from, it’s more common than not,” he says. “Overconsumption is socially normalised in Ireland . I started drinking when I was young, we all did, at 12, 13. And addiction runs in my family. I guess I know how to deal with it well, and I know that it should be treated very seriously.” Luke was who Sam first reached for when he wanted to get sober. “When Sam called me, I could sense that it was just panic. I only wanted to be there for him.”

Sam had long been “incredibly attracted to the idea of just getting fucked up all the time, because I was so uncomfortable in my own skin for so long”. Each attempt at sobriety would last a few months, then fail. “When that itch starts to tell you to have a drink again, you can never remember how much shit it caused you before,” Sam says. “Luckily, enough bad shit had happened to me, and I’d failed enough times, that the last time the itch came to me, I said to Barry: I need to do something about this or something really bad’s gonna happen.” By this point, Barry and Sam had been introduced via a mutual friend, and Barry had “sponsored a whole legion of dudes” in AA, so he helped Sam through AA’s 12-step programme.

Barry had already passed 1,000 days sober, but it hadn’t been smooth. “When you get rid of the alcohol, you’ve still got the -ism, you know?” he says. “I was carrying this sickening feeling all the time.” Trying to understand it, he visited a Buddhist centre near Cork, which had a room with a statue of Buddha on one side and Christ on the other. His earlier spiritual awakening crystallised. “I sat in the middle, not looking at anyone. And then I heard Jesus speak, as clear as day: ‘Come and speak to me.’ I can’t ignore that; I’m not foolish enough to put that down to psychosis. So I did, and since then I’ve felt a presence in my life that I can’t ignore. For me, recovery is proof that there is a God, and addiction is proof that there is a devil. You see the destruction that happens in an addict’s life, to them, to their family: nothing but carnage and evil.”

Equally, for the first year of sobriety, Sam “was on this ‘pink cloud’ as it’s called in recovery, this new way of life. Then the first year to second year was very difficult.” He also had a spiritual awakening – common in AA, which encourages a belief in a power greater than yourself – but his was different. “I didn’t understand Catholicism at all. I tried it, hard, but in the end I have a belief in a personal God. It is still Christian.”

The AA sponsorship brought an incredible closeness: Barry and Sam started making music together, and eventually all four of them ditched their previous bands. Sam’s girlfriend lived in London, and he realised, “in order for [the band] to do this properly, we needed to be here, in front of the industry”. He moved over and began working in a guitar shop; Barry joined him and got a job in All Saints in Spitalfields; the other two arrived four months later. All they’d been through fed into the songwriting, and for all the noise in their self-titled EP, it’s suffused with clarity; Luke likens the sound they make to “lightning and thunder, a big explosion. There was communal feeling that there was something different about this group – we were smiling more when we left the room.”

As well as their own struggles – Cannonball is inspired by Sam’s failing relationship – there are also real-life characters from outside the band: their most popular song to date, Ceiling, was inspired by another addict who was in recovery with Barry and Sam, and who relapsed. “I remember my last phone call with him,” Barry says. “I was saying, ‘Brother, I understand’, and he said: ‘No man, I don’t think you do’. And he hung up the phone and a month later he was dead. People our age that died as a result of the illness, that’s something that keeps calling to me, keeps coming up in the writing.”

Bleech 9:3 are part of a huge wave of Irish alternative talent today, from Fontaines DC to Kneecap , CMAT , Sprints and countless others. For Barry, Ireland having such a vibrant scene feels hard-won after “the long years of being occupied by another country, your culture being this thing that if you openly share in it you might be attacked or thrown in prison”.

And the poverty the country has historically faced meant art was created from “very minimal and ubiquitous things. Anyone can write a poem. Instruments are slightly more expensive but they were all over the place. You imagine people gathering in the pub, sheltering, it’s warmer than the place they live. People share in these difficult things through art. You come from the same soil as these people, and you inherit the idea that everyone has the right.”

The band have been working non-stop; just last week they supported Nick Cave. “I feel empty, dude,” Barry says. “You turn into this machine that comes to life for like an hour every day [for a gig] and the rest of it you’re just trying to conserve your energy.” Sam outlines their itinerary: “We’re in the middle of a five-week UK tour, then we write the album, then we do 40 festivals. Then October we record, and then tour. But how lucky are we, to be tired in pursuit of our dreams?”

The album, when it comes, will “tell the broader story of those years back home”, Barry says. But there are already lifetimes of wisdom and enlightenment condensed into their little catalogue so far. Playing them live, Barry says, “is the best test of all: of how true to your art you have really been. And I’m so glad that we’ve done what we’ve done with those songs, because that’s a little lifeline every day. You get to play them.”

Bleech 9:3’s self-titled EP is out now on Polydor

Keyword – Opinion
Trefwoorden – Climate crisis, US news, Oceans, Environment, World news
Title – The ocean has shielded us from the worst of climate change. Now it is running a fever | Karina Von Schuckmann | The Guardian
Author – Karina Von Schuckmann
Link – The ocean has shielded us from the worst of climate change. Now it is running a fever | Karina Von Schuckmann | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-17T10:00:28.000Z
Category – Opinion
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/17/ocean-fever-climate-change

The ocean is running a fever. In 2025, the number of days of marine heatwaves – prolonged spells when the sea turns abnormally, dangerously warm – was more than triple what it was in the early 1990s.

These are not abstract statistics. A severe and persistent marine heatwave bleaches coral reefs, strips away the kelp forests that shelter young fish, empties fishing grounds and – if occurring frequently – can tip whole ecosystems past the point of recovery.

It scrambles the chemistry the ocean lives by, its acidity, its oxygen, the carbon it trades with the air, and can feed fiercer weather on land. For the coastal communities whose food and livelihoods come from the sea, the harm is immediate and personal.

I have spent my career studying where the heat from climate change actually goes. The answer, overwhelmingly, is the sea. The ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat that human activity has trapped on Earth, quietly buffering those of us on land from the full force of warming. For decades, that made it our greatest and most uncomplaining ally. Ocean warming and more frequent and intense marine heatwaves are signs that the buffer is straining. The heat we have poured into the ocean is beginning to surface as harm.

More frequent and intense marine heatwaves are just one of many new warning lights in this year’s Indicators of Global Climate Change (IGCC) report , the annual health check on the climate system compiled by more than 70 researchers from more than 50 institutions worldwide in the years between the next official UN assessment in 2028. But the climate system is changing in ways we can measure every year, and the single most revealing measurement is one most people have never heard of.

It is called the Earth’s energy imbalance , and it is the closest thing we have to a master gauge of climate change: the gap between the energy reaching us from the sun and the energy the planet manages to radiate back out to space. In a stable climate, the two are roughly equal. However, several things are now prising them apart. By far the largest is the greenhouse gases humans keep adding, which thicken the atmosphere’s insulating blanket and trap heat that would otherwise escape. But they are not the whole story.

As we clean up the dirty air pollution of the past, we are also losing the faint reflective haze it cast , letting more sunlight through. As the planet heats, it triggers feedback that amplifies warming. Bright, reflective ice giving way to dark, heat-absorbing ocean, cloud changes that tend to leave the Earth absorbing more energy than before and warming soils and waters releasing greenhouse gases of their own. Together, greenhouse gas emissions and this feedback are tipping the scales. Far less energy is now leaving than coming in, and the imbalance has more than doubled since the late 20th century.

The Earth is, quite literally, out of balance, storing heat faster and faster. This is the engine behind nearly everything else the report records: rising temperatures, melting ice, fiercer extremes, and the intensifying marine heatwaves now scarring the ocean. The latest findings estimate that human-induced warming has reached approximately 1.37C above pre-industrial levels

The other indicators in this IGCC report build a fuller picture of how this growing energy imbalance is fuelling impacts for people around the globe. The rate of sea-level rise has more than doubled in recent decades, and it continues to accelerate. In 2025, we passed a new record of 23cm of rise since 1901, which is pushing floodwaters further into low-lying coastlines and raising the floor of every tide and every storm.

And this is what troubles me most: the very ability of scientists and policymakers to track these changes is now under threat. What we know about the ocean and Earth’s energy imbalance rests on a sophisticated network of sensors kept in waters across the globe and satellites.

Last month, the scaling back of this work was announced: four of five monitoring sites across the Pacific and Atlantic are set to be closed , and equipment is already being pulled from the water. Other funding is under similar pressure. At the precise moment we most need to see clearly, we are turning off the lights.

But paying attention is not the same as looking on helplessly. Thanks to this year’s IGCC report, we understand better than ever how human activity is pulling the climate further out of balance, and we know it lies within our power to ease it. Nearly every indicator of climate change is flashing red, but citizens, businesses and policymakers still hold the tools available to bring the planet back into balance.

Karina Von Schuckmann is an IGCC author and senior adviser of Mercator Ocean International

Keyword – Television & radio
Trefwoorden – Television & radio, Culture, Podcasts
Title – The passionate, fun pop culture show you don’t want to stop listening to: best podcasts of the week | Television & radio | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/hollie-richardson,https://www.theguardian.com/profile/hannah-j-davies
Link – The passionate, fun pop culture show you don’t want to stop listening to: best podcasts of the week | Television & radio | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-15T06:00:05.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jun/15/the-passionate-fun-pop-culture-show-you-dont-want-to-stop-listening-to-best-podcasts-of-the-week

Pick of the week Clara & Munroe Are Into It

If the first episode is anything to go by, Clara Amfo (let loose from BBC broadcasting) and activist Munroe Bergdorf could well be your fun commute companions. The pair are passionate, incisive and just the right amount of gossipy as they unpack the latest pop culture moments – such as what the loud conversation around Olivia Rodrigo’s baby-doll dress says about women in music. Our one complaint? Half an hour isn’t long enough! Hollie Richardson Widely available, episodes weekly

Successpod

Podcast doyen Adam Buxton leans into his more offbeat instincts in this six-parter about what it means to be accomplished in the influencer age. It won’t be for everyone, but Bux stans will surely appreciate songs about him losing his hair – and his edge – and frank chats with Guz Khan, Romesh Ranganathan and more. Hannah J Davies Audible, all episodes out now

OnlyFantasy

It would be easy to tap into moral panic, but Leon Neyfakh (Slow Burn, Fiasco) swerves the obvious in this smart series about online sex work. He’s aided by comedian and OnlyFans creator Gracie Canaan for a nuanced examination of the relationships forged between X-rated creators and ordinary people, featuring candid revelations from Neyfakh himself. HJD Widely available, episodes weekly

Hunting the Suicide Salesman

Six years on, the child abuse investigative series Hunting Warhead remains one of the most accomplished but upsetting podcasts ever released. This follow-up of sorts from Canada’s CBC hears reporter Daemon Fairless turn his attention to a man who sold lethal chemicals online to suicidal people, and is as gripping as it is devastating. HJD Widely available, episodes weekly

This Is TV Now

Podcasting’s pivot to video is in full swing – cue this meta show about the increasingly blurry lines between the mediums. Magazine founder Dane Cardiel hosts alongside producer Stella Young, who reckons – as many will be relieved to hear – that, while change is afoot, video hasn’t killed the radio stars quite yet. HJD Widely available, episodes weekly

Keyword – Football
Trefwoorden – World Cup 2026, Football, World Cup, Sport, US sports, Australia sport, Mexico, Czechia, South Korea, South Africa football team, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Qatar, Switzerland, Brazil, Haiti football team, Morocco football team, Scotland, Australia, Paraguay, Turkey, USA, Curaçao, Ecuador, Germany, Côte d’Ivoire football team, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, Tunisia football team, Belgium, Egypt football team, Iran, New Zealand, Cape Verde, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Uruguay, France, Iraq, Norway, Senegal football team, Algeria football team, Argentina, Austria, Jordan, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo football team, Portugal, Uzbekistan, Croatia, England, Ghana football team, Panama
Title – Golden Boot: World Cup 2026 top goalscorers | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Author –
Link – Golden Boot: World Cup 2026 top goalscorers | World Cup 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-15T07:33:34.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/football/ng-interactive/2026/jun/04/golden-boot-world-cup-2026-top-goalscorers-winner

The Golden Boot is awarded to the World Cup’s top goalscorer, with assists used as a tie-breaker if two or more players finish level. The 2026 tournament has three former Golden Boot winners taking part: Kylian Mbappé of France (eight goals in 2022), England’s Harry Kane (six goals in 2018) and James Rodríguez of Colombia (six goals in 2014).

Mbappé and Kane are among the pre-tournament favourites to finish top scorer in North America, alongside Norway’s Erling Haaland – making his World Cup debut – and Argentina’s Lionel Messi.

Other pre-tournament favourites include Spain’s Mikel Oyarzabal and Lamine Yamal, Vinícius Júnior of Brazil and Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo. However, history tells us not to discount a surprise package. Totò Schillaci, initially a back-up striker in Italy’s squad, won the Golden Boot in 1990, while Russia’s Oleg Salenko finished joint-top scorer in 1994, albeit aided by five goals in one game against Cameroon.

Golden Boot contenders have an extra match to rack up the goals in 2026, with a 48-team tournament meaning a round of 32 for the first time. Any team that reaches the semi-finals will finish the World Cup having played eight games, although the highest Golden Boot total ever – Just Fontaine’s 13 goals in six games for France in 1958 – remains an imposing target.

You can no longer have joint winners. If two or more players have the same number of goals and also of assists, the total minutes played in the final competition will be taken into account, with the player playing fewer minutes ranked first.