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.

Elva vallavalitsus otsustas täna vallandada Elva gümnaasiumi direktori Marek Sammuli, kelle osas tekkisid ametnikel kõhklused pärast eile avalikkuse ette lekkinud kirja, mille koolijuht oli oma alluvatele saatnud.

EGS on tuntumaid soome grafitikunstnikke, kes avas hiljuti popkunstimuuseumis PoCo näituse «EGS-i konsulaat». Täheühend EGS tähendab ka Eesti Geograafia Seltsi, mis on meie loo kangelase suhtes väga kohane ära märkida, sest teda huvitavad väga kaardid ja paigad. Näitusel segunevad suuresti reaalne ja imaginaarne Eesti.

Attacks are continuing after Ukraine's president warned of "more waves" of Russian strikes throughout 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 — Wes Streeting looks poised to challenge Keir Starmer’s leadership of Britain’s ruling Labour Party. Now the health secretary’s critics are racing to get an opponent in the game. Senior MPs in the soft-left core of the party seem to have settled on Andy Burnham as their candidate to face off against Streeting, who’s firmly on the right of the party, if a contest kicks off as expected. The problem for Burnham? The Greater Manchester mayor is ineligible to run for the leadership. First he must get a seat in parliament. Two of his supporters told POLITICO there is now a plan afoot to force a by-election in early June so Burnham, a former government minister who quit as an MP in 2017, can return to the Commons in time to enter a leadership race. “Andy can absolutely contest. A timetable can be accommodated that would allow a by-election to take place by early June,” a senior Burnham-backing MP told POLITICO. They were granted anonymity like others in this article to speak about live discussions. “It would be outrageous to block the most popular politician in the country from standing,” they added. Burnham’s allies insist they do have a seat lined up for him to contest, a move which would likely require a serving Labour MP to stand aside. Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee has signaled it would be less likely to block a Burnham candidacy again, as they did in January. But whether even Burnham, who has been nicknamed the “King of the North” thanks to his popular support around Manchester, could win what would be a fierce challenge from opponents on the right and the left-wing Greens in a by-election is another matter. The latest round of infighting in the Labour Party was triggered by last Thursday’s dismal results in the elections in English councils and devolved administrations in Wales and Scotland. More than 90 Labour MPs called for Starmer to quit, including four ministers who resigned to demand his demise. Streeting is seen as a major agitator for the PM’s ousting. Starmer held private talks in Downing Street with Streeting on Wednesday morning lasting less than 20 minutes. It didn’t take long after Streeting emerged from the meeting for a report in the Times to land, in which his allies said he planned to resign as health secretary in order to run for the leadership. Three Labour MPs told POLITICO they had been informed by Streeting’s camp that he plans to resign and challenge the PM, with one saying that will happen as early as Thursday. If Burnham cannot enter parliament to challenge Streeting, then his supporters are looking to Angela Rayner, the former deputy prime minister who still needs to resolve a tax issue, or Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, as the soft-left standard bearer. Miliband, who led Labour to electoral defeat in 2015, is already organising and sounding out support from colleagues, according to one soft-left MP.  Another figure in government who is preparing a bid is Al Carns, the armed forces minister. “He is definitely open to running. He won’t be disloyal, but if someone fires a starting gun he is not shy of gunfire,” one MP in his camp said of the special forces veteran. Burnham’s return is further complicated by parliamentary process. By-elections are held 21 to 27 working days after the writ triggering the contest is moved in the Commons. That’s a process controlled by the government whips. Dan Bloom contributed to reporting.

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.”

The British ship docked in the southwestern French city of Bordeaux reports 49 suspected cases.

US President Donald Trump has landed in Beijing to meet China’s President Xi Jinping.

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...

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