Although young people's loneliness is often discussed in public, demographer Mark Gortfelder rejected that notion. According to him, while people are still forming partnerships at the same rate, the main problem lies in the instability of relationships.

Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur (Reform) expects the EDF to present possible options by the end of the week for how Estonia could contribute to the mission protecting the Strait of Hormuz.

Minister of Energy and the Environment Andres Sutt (Reform) has completed a new version of the Climate Resilient Economy Act and plans to seek principled approval for it at the government's cabinet meeting on Thursday. The coalition plans to pass the law before next year's elections.

A bill that would define sexual intercourse without consent as rape has been sent to its second reading by the Riigikogu Legal Affairs Committee after additional amendments were added to define consent.

Although young people's loneliness is often discussed in public, demographer Mark Gortfelder rejected that notion. According to him, while people are still forming partnerships at the same rate, the main problem lies in the instability of relationships.

The Riigikogu on Wednesday passed a law with 76 votes in favor requiring all conscripts entering compulsory military service to have at least B1-level proficiency in Estonian starting at the beginning of 2027.

34-aastane Norra murdmaasuusataja Heidi Weng teatas, et järgmine hooaeg jääb tema jaoks viimaseks.

Espoosse Suvisaaristo nimelisse naabruskonda eramut püstitada soovinud paar on kaevanud linna kohtusse, väites, et ehitusjärelevalve vead ja lohakus lükkasid ehitusloa saamist 11 kuu võrra edasi. Paari sõnul põhjustas ametnike tegevus neile hiiglasliku kahju, mistõttu nõutakse linnalt enam kui 800 000 euro suurust valuraha.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky warns of "more waves" of Russian drone attacks on Wednesday.

The ship, which set sail from Belfast on Friday, is at port in Bordeaux after 49 people fell ill from gastrointestinal illness.

The travel operator says customers are delaying booking holidays over Iran war concerns.

A cyber security expert says deleting chat history could lead to a lack of accountability if things go wrong.

LONDON — Boris Johnson once said that “when the herd moves, it moves.” Keir Starmer is trying to stop it trampling him alive. The British prime minister’s legislative agenda for the year ahead was delivered in parliament this morning by King Charles III — but minutes before he sat down, news leaked of a planned challenge to his leadership from Health Secretary Wes Streeting. It leaves the PM trying to push through a series of bills despite more than 90 of his MPs calling for his exit and his authority draining low. So how do you get stuff done — or more simply, cling to office — when you’ve lost the room with your own party? POLITICO interviewed four former No. 10 staff in administrations where the hordes were at the gate — including for a special episode of the Westminster Insider podcast out this Friday — for their top tips. 1) Brief hard and fast (most of the time) Get your spin out the door while your opponents are still putting their socks on.  Starmer’s aides did this on Tuesday by briefing the PM’s comments at Cabinet facing down a leadership challenge — while the meeting was still going on. “Getting that line out did change things,” said Guto Harri, former communications director for ex-Tory PM Boris Johnson. “Having a head start is about as good as it gets in a difficult race.” Harri did similar when Johnson sacked his Cabinet colleague Michael Gove in 2022, hours before his own resignation. It landed just before the BBC’s 10 O’Clock News. “I rang Chris Mason [the BBC’s political editor] and told him [Johnson] had fired Gove because he was snake and treacherous,” said Harri. “On a mad day when there was enough to say anyway, he got the icing on the cake.” The PM’s diary can work to his advantage. Starmer refused to see Streeting on Tuesday, except setting up a brutally short meeting hours before the King’s speech on Wednesday.  News of Streeting’s intention to quit leaked moments before the king sat down, causing the leadership hopeful maximum embarrassment. One Streeting ally (without any evidence) accused the leak of coming from allies of No. 10 to force Streeting’s hand at the worst possible time. Shutting off all briefing can work too — temporarily. Beatrice Timpson, a former senior press aide to Liz Truss and then Rishi Sunak, would sometimes engage airplane mode on her phone to avoid giving out a bad line to take. “If the line is awful, it’s better just to have the awkwardness of not being contactable and resurfacing when you have a better line and a better answer,” she said. 2) Use the trappings of office — and play for time Sometimes it’s serious. Johnson survived for months longer as the full-scale war in Ukraine raged in 2022, and Starmer has been relying on a similar strategy by focusing on the economic fallout of the Iran war. Sometimes it’s logistical. No. 10 aides arranged for the king’s speech to fall days after the May elections — ensuring there was a “firebreak,” in the words of one Labour official, where plotting gave way to pageantry. (In the event, it did not.) Sometimes it involves playing for time. Gavin Barwell, the former chief of staff to Theresa May, recalled the ex-PM winning her first confidence vote by Tory MPs in 2018, months before she resigned. “The key argument we made was that if you change leader at that point, there would be a protracted process, and you would have to extend the deadline for leaving the EU,” he said. “Because there will be no time for whoever emerged as the leader at the end of that process to implement whatever policy that they had set out by the deadline.” Sometimes it’s the No. 10 building itself. Harri let TV cameras in to record Johnson talking at the start of a Cabinet meeting, then ushered them out. “I explained to the team this is the nearest thing you get to a free hit,” he said. “As long as you are hanging on in there, you’ve got to behave like a prime minister at his height.” And sometimes it’s silly. Harri recalled a “very senior figure in No. 10” who “suggested to me that we ask the custodians to just bolt the door and not let them in. I said there’s a word for that — it usually happens in a banana republic, it’s called a coup.” But don’t expect much help from the civil service to weaponize the apparatus of the state, said Ross Kempsell, a former special adviser in Johnson’s government. Mandarins will “reject the idea of getting involved in anything that could look like a political project to shore up the prime minister of the day,” he said. 3) Keep your enemies close — or far away You’ll need to decide what to do with people who have “privately” told you to go — such as Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, whose chat with Starmer on Monday night soon became public knowledge. “You cannot have somebody sitting in your cabinet who has let the world know they don’t think you’re fit to be prime minister,” argued Harri. But sack them — as Johnson did to Gove — and it can accelerate your demise. Having a cuckoo in the nest can lead to leaks. Kempsell recalled one reshuffle week when “a minister who I will leave nameless just appeared in the reshuffle room completely uninvited. We were locking the door, [but] he managed to get in during one of the periods where the door must have been unlocked because someone needed to go to the loo or something.” It’s not just the Cabinet. Managing unruly MPs, who will be prime voters in any leadership contest, is crucial. “Having a very political chief whip who really understands where the opposition is inside the back bench is important,” said Kempsell. “And it’s very important as well that the chief whip is on extremely good personal terms with the prime minister.” 4) Demand their alternative Theresa May’s key strategy was to ask the warring Brexit camps if they had a viable plan — not that it mattered in the end.  Downing Street is making the same demand of Starmer’s challengers as he pursues a center-left Labour platform at a time of war and a rising cost of living, with rivals whose vision for the country does not always appear too different. Changing the face might help. Barwell said: “Theresa herself would say the biggest challenge she had was as a communicator, so to a degree maybe there’s a bit of a parallel there.”  But Barwell argues the similarities end there — and May was always in a much weaker position than Starmer should have been. “She was trying to deal with a kind of existential problem that the country had voted very narrowly to leave the European Union, without any kind of detail about what that might mean in a parliament that was bitterly divided,” he said. “[Starmer] is leading a government with a huge majority.  “I think nearly any observer is flabbergasted that two years after winning a landslide majority, he can find himself in this situation. Her challenge came from the parliamentary arithmetic and the Gordian knot of Brexit. Neither of those exist in this situation.” 5) Don’t go abroad Prime ministers in peril can be tempted to project business-as-usual with a bit of international summitry — but this can cut valuable face-to-face time with persuadable MPs and allow plotters to plot. With a leadership contest already underway, Margaret Thatcher infamously pressed ahead with attending a Paris meeting on the future of Europe. She learned that her premiership had been dealt a major blow in the contest’s first ballot while still in France. Kempsell said: “The hard political management problems that I’ve seen under several prime ministers always occur when the prime minister is traveling. When they are out of the country, people behave differently … their loyalty can slip and they start having secret meetings.” 6) But most of all … they need a reason to back you Ultimately many of Starmer’s MPs just aren’t enthusiastic about his vision or personality. In the end that will be his undoing, said Barwell: “You can buy yourself time with all sorts of tricks and gimmicks, but it’s not going to solve the problem. That’s why I think this is ultimately going to play out with him going.” And it becomes a vortex as policy is swallowed in the news agenda — and government time — by leadership speculation. “The bunker itself destroys the chance to get anything meaningful done,” said Kempsell, and can leave people “disappearing into the plughole of the news cycle and just trying to survive?” Timpson recalled Liz Truss, who lasted only 49 days, gathering her staff for a war room in the Pillared Room in Downing Street. “Frankly, it wasn’t a lack of coordination that was the problem,” she said. “It was a complete lack of substance, of a future of that administration. It was on its knees.”

BERLIN — An adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin has invited politicians from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to an economic forum in June in an illustration of how the Kremlin is cultivating ties with Germany’s far right. At least two AfD members of the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament — lawmakers Markus Frohnmaier and Steffen Kotré — are set to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum after receiving invitations, according to three party politicians with knowledge of the situation. “We are confident that pragmatic cooperation will help strengthen your business, political, and cultural ties for the benefit of a just world and a secure future,” reads an invitation to one AfD politician seen by POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook and signed by Putin adviser Anton Kobyakov. The letter also stresses that Putin is expected to attend the forum. AfD national co-leader Alice Weidel sought to tamp down on party lawmakers’ trips to Russia ahead of two state elections in western Germany earlier this year, calculating that overtly pro-Putin displays would not play well with voters in those states. But the planned attendance of relatively senior AfD politician Markus Frohnmaier at the forum in June suggests the party leadership may be shifting course ahead of two state elections in eastern Germany set for September. Voters in the former East Germany are more likely to favor closer ties to Russia, and the AfD is far ahead in polls in both states where elections will be held. Stefan Keuter, an AfD lawmaker authorized to approve party travel requests, said he would sign off on Frohnmaier and Kotré attending the forum. “Politically speaking, there’s absolutely no reason not to,” Keuter said. Before Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the annual forum in St. Petersburg — sometimes dubbed “Putin’s Davos” —  regularly attracted German political heavyweights including Angela Merkel, who attended in 2013. But the forum is now shunned by mainstream European leaders. AfD lawmaker Kotré sparked controversy last November when he attended a BRICS conference in Sochi despite pressure within his party to cancel the trip. But ahead of the two eastern state elections in September, AfD leaders have renewed their calls for closer ties with Moscow, including a call for the resumption of cheap natural gas flows from Russia.

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No 10 confirms Streeting is still health secretary despite reports he could launch a leadership bid as early as tomorrowStreeting to resign and challenge Starmer, allies sayFarage faces inquiry over £5m gift from crypto billionaireLibby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.An odd dispute of interpretation has emerged overnight between the Scottish and UK governments. Yesterday evening a Scottish government spokesperson announced that, during a call between first minister John Swinney and prime minister Kier Starmer, both parties agreed to meet face to face next month to discuss a referendum on independence.It is particularly welcome that the prime minister agreed to meet next month to discuss a referendum on independence.The PM committed to meeting to discussed shared issues including the cost of living.As the PM told the first minister, the manifesto this government was elected on was unambiguous that ‘Labour does not support independence or another referendum’. Our position remains unchanged.We, in Scotland, as in the rest of the UK, had a devastating set of election results and we were simply unable to articulate our offering, or indeed critique, of the SNP government because of the noise created at the centre.Therefore, we became, and the prime minister became, the inadvertent midwife of a fifth-term SNP government. And that scenario you saw then, people waiting for a speech to try and articulate his new direction, a strategy, and it simply was not forthcoming.This is not one faction of the Labour party. This is about the Labour party articulating, I think, now a commonly held view that this is unsustainable and unstable. Continue reading...

Operator says majority of passengers on board of cruise ship stuck are British, while about 50 people are showing symptomsResponding to the Guardian’s questions, the operator also confirmed that the vast majority of the 1,187 guests on board are British. There are also 514 crew members.Ambassador Cruise Line also confirmed that a 92-year-old man died on board earlier this week, but he did not report any symptoms at the time and the cause of his death is yet to be established. Continue reading...

Human rights groups say Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent back 50 people via Polish airport

Brussels seeks to replicate air travel bookings for trains, ferries and coaches