Andy Burnham's arrival at Downing Street has spurred British veterans who participated in the UK's nuclear tests during the fifties and sixties to pressure the government for the current premier to fulfill a promise he had repeatedly defended when he was Mayor of Greater Manchester.

The ultra Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party, regained the seat for the Clacton-on-Sea constituency – southeast England – in Thursday's by-elections called following the his own resignation, in early July. Farage had turned the by-election into a plebiscite between his figure and the Westminster establishment. In objective terms, Farage has achieved a solid victory (22,239 votes, 63.34%), just over a thousand more ballots than in the 2024 general election, with lower turnout now (44.37% compared to 58.7% two years ago).

Last week, 186 passengers on a river cruise ship from the company Viking Cruises had to be evacuated by Bulgarian border police after the ship Viking Ullur ran aground on a sandbank in the Danube. The incident took place near the Bulgarian town of Gomotartsi, in a context of exceptionally low water levels that continue to disrupt river navigation and freight transport in much of Central Europe.

In 1999, coinciding with the total solar eclipse visible in a small strip of the United Kingdom – the first in over seventy years – the Morgan family gathered in St. Davids, in the Welsh county of Pembrokeshire. Among those present were some elderly relatives who remembered the 1927 eclipse. "But, as often happens in the United Kingdom, the clouds prevented us from seeing the spectacle. Nevertheless, the most vivid memory is not of the missed eclipse, but of the family reunion".

London has taken another step in the global race for the implementation of autonomous driving. The authority that regulates traffic in the city (TfL, Transport for London) has this week granted Uber and the British technology company Wayve the first licenses for them to offer commercial driverless rides on the streets of the British capital.

The former prime minister Boris Johnson, 62, spends a week a month in South Florida as a visiting professor of political science at the University of Miami, an activity as lucrative as it is comfortable: little preparation, captive audiences, and the opportunity to present himself as the man ingenious that he has always cultivated. It is one of his very enriching businesses since was ousted from Downing Streetfour years ago.Since then, Johnson has lived, above all, on the conferences he gives around the world and on writing columns without editors to control him. Between 2022 and 2024, he billed around six million euros for these activities, according to the Financial Times and the agency that represents him, Harry Walker. To this must be added the copyright of his memoirs (his memoirs (2.4 million) and the annual allowance of up to 135,000 euros as former prime minister. His estimated net worth is between 18 and 24 million euros.

Ceuta and the border crisis unleashed on Thursday in the autonomous city has been used on social media as fuel to spread the xenophobia of the global far-right. X, Telegram, Facebook, and other platforms have, in a few hours, turned the Spanish enclave in North Africa into a symbol of the reactionary international; a way to politically sweep at home and favor the most dehumanizing proposals in the face of North-South inequalities.

A large wildfire is keeping dozens of firefighters mobilized this Thursday in Suffolk, a rural county in eastern England (East Anglia), northeast of London and with a coast on the North Sea. The affected area, Dunwich Heath, is near Leiston, about 130 kilometers from the British capital, and is only about six kilometers from the Sizewell B nuclear power plant, one of the UK's main energy facilities, which generates 3% of the country's electricity.

The drought situation is worsening in England. The Environment Agency officially declared a drought on Wednesday in seven regions covering approximately half of the territory, following months of exceptionally scarce rainfall and a succession of heatwaves that have driven up water consumption. The affected areas are London and Hertfordshire, East Anglia, the Thames Valley, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Devon and Cornwall, West Midlands, and Wessex (which includes Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, and south Gloucestershire).

When the British monarchy or political class wants to appear as an integral and integrated part of the people they claim to represent, the recourse to visiting a pub is recurrent: like walking through markets during election time in Catalonia. From Boris Johnson to Nigel Farage; from Theresa May to Keir Starmer; from Charles III to Prince William, or also the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, they all let themselves be photographed with a pint of beer in their hands or filling one, as if they had been doing it since they were children.

The forward of the English football team, of Leicester and Barça, and former BBC star, Gary Lineker has joined a signed open letter for 120 British millionaires asking the new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, to create a wealth tax. The letter, driven by the Patriotic Millionaires collective, argues that the concentration of wealth has increased inequalities and calls for higher taxation on the highest fortunes, not on earned income.

Andy Burnham wanted to make things clear from the outset. In the first meeting of his government, this Tuesday at Downing Street, the new prime minister has asked his ministers to focus on seeking "all possible avenues" to help families suffering from the high cost of living. Six hours earlier, the government's information and propaganda machine had already set the course for the new executive and, above all, how it wants its first actions to be perceived, after announcing a total suspension of VAT for domestic electricity from October 1, which until now was 5%. Burnham accompanied the announcement with a message on social media saying: "I said I wanted to relieve the pressure families are suffering, and that's what I'm announcing on my second day as prime minister".

The image is too symbolic to let it go: the United Kingdom has changed its prime minister through the back door. While Buckingham Palace reserves the main entrance for tourists, it forces the political power to reach the audience with the king through the so-called luggage door due to the restoration work being carried out there. It is through there that Andy Burnham entered, who this Monday at noon received the commission from Charles III to form a new government.

Second chance for Labour, but with little room for error. Andy Burnham was officially chosen as the party leader this Friday at an extraordinary congress with the overwhelming support of 379 out of 403 parliamentary group deputies, and will enter Downing Street on Monday with the mission "to tackle the big problems that politics has left aside", according to the first words he uttered after the formalization of his leadership.

A recent scene sums up Andy Burnham, 56, pretty well. Three weeks ago, as he was about to return to the House of Commons as a elected Member of Parliament for Makerfield, he explained that he was traveling to London to take up the post of "mayor". He immediately corrected himself: "I mean MP". The slip of the tongue was revealing. After almost a decade at the head of Greater Manchester, Burnham no longer sees himself as just another member of the Westminster establishment, but as the mayor who has turned the great northern city into a political idea and a different way of understanding the United Kingdom. A look that he now wants to move to Downing Street, and which he can start to make real from Monday, when he receives the commission from Charles III to form a government and thus become the first number 59 of the United Kingdom.

Shortly after midday this Wednesday, a couple of telescopic cranes lifted and removed the fences of one of the "last walls of continental Europe", in the words of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, which separated Gibraltar from La Línea de la Concepción. The ceremonial act has put an end to a negotiation process of almost five years between the European Commission and London, since the United Kingdom made Brexit effective (2020) and the status of the British territory was left in limbo caused by the divorce from the Union.

Hours before England and Norway played on Saturday in Miami in the World Cup quarterfinals, and that Argentina and Switzerland faced each other in Kansas a little later, the Foreign Minister of Javier Milei's government, Pablo Quirno, published a long article in the newspaper La Nación titled "Malvinas: the strength of a just cause". The memory of the 1982 war in which Margaret Thatcher's United Kingdom defeated the Argentine military junta, which wanted to regain sovereignty of the archipelago, remains alive in the imagination of the South American country.

It has been days since the dismantling work of the Gibraltar fence began. The scar that separated the Rock from the Campo de Gibraltar will be erased from the maps – not from history – this Wednesday, when it enters in force the agreement reached a year and a bit ago the United Kingdom, the European Commission, the Spanish state and Gibraltar, and that definitively regulates the post-Brexit status of the territory. This Tuesday the EU and the United Kingdom formalized the signing of the agreement in Brussels and, the following day, the most symbolic aspect of the new status, a frank and barrier-free step, will already be clearly visible. The new framework for relations comes into provisional effect until the definitive ratification by the European Parliament and the House of Commons.

The fuel crisis shaking Russia can be seen circulating through Moscow: at many gas stations there are queues of cars and trucks. Some longer than others; some stopped, others advancing regularly. What is happening? Is anything really happening? Ukrainian attacks against Russian refineries have become one of the newest – and until recently less visible – dimensions of the recent months of the war in Ukraine. Since 2022, and especially during this year, Kyiv has systematically hit Russian refining infrastructure. The goal is to weaken one of the main material bases of the Kremlin's war effort.

The dam of cross-attacks between the United States and Iran this week has left the ceasefire signed on June 15 not dead, but with assisted breathing. At the center of the resumption of hostilities is, once again, the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the key passage for gas and oil and other strategic goods that Iran has brought under its control. A weapon of mass economic destruction that has served it, so far, to survive an attack that surpassed it militarily.