Keir Starmer has announced he will stand down as prime minister after days of intense pressure from Labour MPs, including cabinet ministers, following the return of Andy Burnham to Westminster.

Less than two years after a historic election victory, Starmer had faced calls from his MPs to set out a timeline for his departure, with many of them unnerved by the threat from Nigel Farage’s party before the next general election.

Starmer’s decision to announce his departure will now start a race among Labour MPs to become the UK’s seventh prime minister in 10 years, with Burnham in pole position to win. If he is uncontested, he could be in Downing Street within weeks.

The Kennedy Center’s management isn’t making a commitment to scheduling new shows or building up its staff even as the performing arts venue considers options short of a full two-year closure that a federal judge blocked last month.

In a court filing Friday, Kennedy Center lawyers said the institution plans to “maintain an operational model” after the July 5 date when it was initially scheduled to shutter for renovations. Under that status, the Kennedy Center’s public spaces will still be accessible but the stages may largely be silent.

“The Court’s order did not affirmatively require the Board to reschedule programming that had previously been cancelled or to seek new programming,” the lawyers wrote in the filing.

A forthcoming book chronicling the first year of Donald Trump's second administration alleges that his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, made a series of disparaging remarks about Volodymyr Zelensky ahead of the Ukrainian president's visit to the White House early last year.

Regime Change was co-authored by the New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, based on "hundreds of interviews and unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration's most closely guarded rooms," according to the Simon & Schuster website. It is set to be published on Tuesday, June 23.

According to excerpts published by The Guardian on Saturday, Bessent referred to Zelensky as a "little f****r" and a "special-needs child for the Europeans," and called him "Mr. Bean on crack."

Donald Trump threatened to “take over” Iran if the Strait of Hormuz was not immediately re-opened, the president told Fox News.

His latest round of threats came in response to news Saturday that Iran was once again closing the key waterway, just days after signing an agreement to ensure that traffic could flow through.

Iran announced that it would close the Strait of Hormuz after Israeli forces continued an all-out assault into Lebanon aimed at dislodging Hezbollah militants.

A severe heatwave gripped much of Europe on Sunday, with temperatures nearing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), prompting nationwide warnings, transport disruption and signs of strain on wildlife and at tourist hotspots.

The heat surge ‌on June 21, the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere and typically the start of the three hottest months of the year, raised concerns of an early and persistent onset of extreme conditions.

New College of Florida to acquire USF Sarasota-Manatee in deal that leading Democratic lawmaker says ‘reeks of grift’

A liberal arts college seized by Florida’s hard-right governor, Ron DeSantis, and transformed into a model for conservative higher education is to triple in size after state Republicans engineered a hostile takeover of a rival university’s campus.

New College of Florida, which is controlled by DeSantis’s hand-picked board of trustees, will acquire the Sarasota-Manatee campus of the University of South Florida (USF) next month in a deal described by a leading Florida Democrat as “a grift”.

The transfer of the 32-acre, 2,000-student facility, which has a new six-story residential hall and $44m student center, will significantly expand the footprint of the 900-student New College that the governor has touted as a blueprint for his “anti-woke” agenda.

The transfer will proceed despite almost universal opposition from USF students and faculty, education leaders, and the local business community, who say popular, thriving programs including nursing, tourism and hospitality, will end.

When the Elon Musk-affiliated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) swept through Washington in 2025, slashing the workforce of federal agencies, the ramifications were far-reaching.

Those decisions are now drawing renewed scrutiny as the New World screwworm, a parasitic threat to livestock and other animals, resurfaces in Texas, and questions emerge about whether federal agencies have enough resources to contain it.

White House officials have for months delayed the release of a U.S. government report that outlines what it describes as significant vulnerabilities in the nation's voting machines ahead of the November midterms, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

The report, produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concludes that voting ‌machines could be further safeguarded by, for example, updating their software, the sources said. It does not say the vulnerabilities have led to votes flipping, but examines security gaps in how the machines are used during U.S. elections.

Some White House officials have argued the report could undermine voter confidence, particularly among Republicans. Others have said they do not believe the report goes far enough in supporting Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged, the three sources said. Some Democrats said privately they worried Gabbard’s probe into voting machines would be used by the administration to push states to use paper ballots.

Donald Trump on Saturday announced that federal authorities had made “multiple arrests” of people he said were vandalizing the Reflecting Pool as he struggled to explain why the $14-million-plus rehabilitation project he launched for the nation’s 250th anniversary seemingly backfired.

Trump said his predecessors had let the pool turn an algae-stained green and that he’d line it with “American flag blue” so it better reflected the Washington Monument. But after the new pool was unveiled, its blue tinge quickly became a familiar green. Workers treated it with chemicals to kill the algae, but then the painted blue lining on the bottom began to peel.

Unclear if threat has been carried out or if move will jeopardise talks with US scheduled for Sunday

Iran has said it is closing the strait of Hormuz after waves of Israeli strikes in Lebanon in a move that threatens to derail the fragile interim peace deal with the US, signed just days ago.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned ships not to approach the strategic waterway, which before the war carried a fifth of global oil and liquid gas supplies, citing what it called Israeli crimes in Lebanon and a US violation of commitments to establish a ceasefire there.

It was unclear if the threat had been carried out, or if it would jeopardise talks in Switzerland scheduled for Sunday that were supposed to start the process of turning the current interim agreement between the US and Iran signed this week into a more detailed deal covering Iran’s nuclear programme.