No more plans for mean, unpopular cuts. Instead, tell voters that taxes must rise – and be clear about the good that will do

Rachel Reeves will not be sacked, because she is unsackable. The ever-hysterical bond markets just confirmed that by spinning out of control over her tears, then restoring previous rates as soon as Keir Starmer’s serial interviews confirmed heartfelt support after she was seen to be crying during PMQs. Quite right. Joined at the hip, her tough fiscal policy is his. History shows that prime ministers rarely last after sacking their chancellors.

The question for both, and all of Labour, is: what next? Every management guru and motivational speaker will tell you that mistakes don’t matter – the key to success is what you learn and how adroitly you change. Labour has four long years ahead and, most important of all, a stonking great majority. They are the masters so long as they don’t frighten the bond markets that ejected Liz Truss and forced Donald Trump’s handbrake tariff U-turn.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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PM says work in England will focus on prevention, with early diagnosis, community hubs and lifestyle measures

Keir Starmer has outlined a 10-year plan for the NHS based on a shift from hospitals to community health hubs, a renewed focus on prevention and an embrace of technology, which was billed as perhaps the last chance to save the health service in its current form.

Speaking at a health centre in Stratford, east London, alongside Wes Streeting, the health secretary; and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor – who had not been expected to appear – Starmer insisted this would be different to the long list of previous NHS revamps that achieved little.

More people reporting problems as climate crisis means plants and trees flower earlier, extending the pollen season

Pollen levels were so extreme in parts of Europe during spring that even people not known to suffer allergies felt the effects of hay fever, data has shown.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (Cams) observed a seasonal rise in grass and olive pollen release and transport across southern Europe and “extreme levels” of birch pollen in north-eastern regions, it said on Thursday.

The phrase, which refers to difficulty in sensing the passage of time, is now taking over TikTok. But can it always be a get-out-jail-free card?

Dr Melissa Shepard has a problem with managing her time. She had always been a high achiever, making it through medical school to become a psychiatrist and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. But no matter how hard she worked, she struggled with one of life’s simplest expectations: being on time.

“I really felt like I could just not crack the code,” Shepard said. “I worried: am I just an asshole? Is that why I’m always late? No matter how hard I wanted to be on time, it was a struggle.”

Without his, my husband resembles an estate agent. It’s time more men took advantage of this hairy little glow-up

It’s a convenient truth of our time that if you Google for long enough, you will eventually find the answer you want. In other words, there’s a lot of anti-beard propaganda out there, and I’m not falling for any of it. I love beards. So I keep scrolling.

Past the recent Washington Post report that some toilets contain fewer germs than the average beard (that’s pretty much true of phone screens, and we happily rub them on our faces). Not even pausing on an investigation into whether it would be hygienic to scan canines and humans in the same MRI machine, which found most beards contained more microbes and bacteria than dog fur. La la la, I’m not listening.

Holloman Lake was a haven for wildlife and seemed an ideal campsite. But strange foam around the shoreline turned out to be more than just an oddity – and reveals the alarming way forever chemicals move through ecosystems

For years, Christopher Witt took birdwatchers to Holloman Lake in the Chihuahuan desert off the route 70 highway in New Mexico. By mid-morning the sun would beat down as they huddled in the scant shade of the van. There were no trees other than a collection of salt cedars on the lake’s north shore. But the discomfort didn’t matter when the peregrine falcons appeared, slicing through the sky. “It was hard to leave that place,” says Witt.

The lake – created in 1965 as part of a system of wastewater catchment ponds for Holloman air force base – is an unlikely oasis. Other than small ponds created for livestock it is the only body of water for thousands of square kilometres in an otherwise stark landscape. However, Witt says there was always something slightly weird about the foam that would form around the edge. “But I only saw that stuff once I knew.”

Health secretary says the drugs are the ‘talk of the House of Commons tea rooms’ as he vows to widen access to jabs

Weight loss injections are the “talk of the House of Commons tea rooms” and widely used by MPs, the health secretary has said as he pledged to widen public access to them.

Speaking as the government launches a 10-year-plan for the NHS, Wes Streeting said access to weight loss injections should be “based on need and not the ability to pay”.

In today’s newsletter: With no new funding and a workforce already stretched, questions loom over whether ambition alone can overcome a system in crisis

Good morning. Wes Streeting’s first statement as health secretary was a startling one. Just a day after Labour’s historic election triumph, he declared that “the NHS is broken”. Now, almost exactly a year later, he returns with a 10-year plan to fix it, in what’s been billed as the most ambitious health reform agenda in a generation.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this moment. Reforming the NHS was central to Labour’s election manifesto, and last year prime minister Keir Starmer made the consequences clear: “Reform or die,” he warned, and with it, staked the next election on his government’s ability to deliver meaningful change.

UK politics | Downing Street has said Rachel Reeves will keep her post and has not offered her resignation, after the chancellor was seen in tears at prime minister’s questions.

US news | The federal sex-trafficking and racketeering conspiracy trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs reached its conclusion on Wednesday, with the jury finding the music mogul guilty on two charges The government has said that it will seek the maximum 20-year sentence.

UK news | Detectives investigating the former nurse Lucy Letby have passed evidence to prosecutors alleging she murdered and harmed more babies, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed on Wednesday.

US military | Iran’s nuclear program was set back roughly one to two years as a result of the US strikes on three key facilities last month, according to an assessment by the Pentagon.

Covid inquiry | Discharging untested patients from hospitals to care homes during the Covid crisis was the “least worst decision”, the former health secretary Matt Hancock has told a public inquiry.

Amendments to children’s wellbeing and schools bill call for ban on Pfas and synthetic fibres over health concerns

The volume of microplastics and potentially harmful “forever chemicals” in school uniforms should be restricted, experts have said, as they urge peers to back two amendments to a crucial bill.

The children’s wellbeing and schools bill, which applies mainly to England and Wales and is at committee stage in the House of Lords, is poised to introduce new regulation on the cost of school uniform items, as well as the number of branded uniform items schools can require pupils to wear.

Prime minister unveils 10-year health plan to ‘put care on people’s doorsteps’ and prevent illness in first place

• Wes Streeting: My job is to make the NHS fit for the future

The NHS will shift a huge amount of care from hospitals into new community health centres to bring treatment closer to people’s homes and cut waiting times, Keir Starmer will pledge on Thursday.

The prime minister will outline radical plans to give patients in England much easier access to GPs, scans and mental health support in facilities that are open 12 hours a day, six days a week.

Our 10-year plan, backed by an extra £29bn, will transform the service through AI and neighbourhood care – and hand power back to patients

• Wes Streeting is secretary of state for health and social care

There are moments in our national story when our choices define who we are. In 1948, Clement Attlee’s government made a choice founded on fairness: that everyone in our country deserves to receive the care they need, not the care they can afford.

That the National Health Service was created amid the rubble and ruin of the aftermath of war makes that choice all the more remarkable. It enshrined in law and in the service itself our collective conviction that healthcare is not a privilege to be bought and sold, but a right to be cherished and protected. Now it falls to our generation to make the same choice.

Wes Streeting is secretary of state for health and social care

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Major health service reforms have had mixed results, and more emphasis on tech, community-based care and prevention has been tried before

• Starmer outlines plan to shift NHS care from hospitals to new health centres

Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting say the 10-year health plan will usher in a “new era for the NHS” in England. Their promised transformation will ensure it works in a more patient-friendly way and offers faster care, with health professionals providing a greater range of services in the same place and spotting illness earlier.

The “three big shifts” in the way the health service operates will involve it becoming more tech-based, moving significant amounts of care into community settings and giving greater priority to preventing illness rather than treating it.

Former health secretary defends decision to discharge untested patients into care homes as ‘least worst option’

Bereaved families have said Matt Hancock’s evidence to the Covid inquiry “was full of excuses and completely devoid of accountability” as he described discharging untested patients into care homes as “the least worst option”.

In his testimony to the UK Covid-19 inquiry on Wednesday, the former health secretary defended the decision to move hospital patients into care homes during the early weeks of the pandemic to free up bed space.

Program mirrors earlier successful mission to fight new world screwworm fly, whose larvae can infest living tissue

The US government is preparing to breed billions of flies and dump them out of airplanes over Mexico and southern Texas to fight a flesh-eating maggot.

That sounds like the plot of a horror movie, but it is part of the government’s plans for protecting the US from a bug that could devastate its beef industry, decimate wildlife and even kill household pets. This weird science has worked well before.

Liberal justices rule the state’s 19th-century ban was replaced by later law allowing abortion until viability

The Wisconsin supreme court’s liberal majority struck down the state’s 176-year-old abortion ban on Wednesday, ruling 4-3 that it was superseded by a newer state law that criminalizes abortions only after a fetus can survive outside the womb.

State lawmakers adopted the ban in 1849, making it a felony when anyone other than the mother “intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child”.

Chief medical officer for England urges people to set media cliches aside to focus on health benefits of physical activity

Culture war-based coverage of cycling based on stereotypes of middle-aged men in Lycra could harm the nation’s health because it shifts focus away from the people and communities who benefit from physical activity, Chris Whitty has said.

Speaking a day before the launch of the NHS’s 10-year-health plan, which is expected to focus heavily on prevention, the chief medical officer for England called on people to set aside media cliches and instead focus on “data which nobody can dispute”.

Rates are three times as high in young women as in young men and mental ill health up across age groups, study shows

Sharp rises in rates of anxiety, depression and other disorders have led to one in four young people in England having a common mental health condition, an NHS survey shows, with young women nearly three times more likely to report them than young men.

The study found that rates of such conditions in 16- to 24-year-olds have risen by more than a third in a decade, from 18.9% in 2014 to 25.8% in 2024.

More than a fifth (22.6%) of adults aged 16 to 64 have a common mental health condition, up from 18.9% in 2014.

More than one in four adults (25.2%) reported having had suicidal thoughts during their lifetime, including about a third of 16- 24-year-olds (31.5%) and 25- to 34-year-olds (32.9%).

Self-harm rates have quadrupled since 2000 and risen from 6.4% in 2014 to 10.3% in 2024, with the highest rates among 16- to 24-year-olds at 24.6%, especially young women at 31.7%.

Decision to restrict thimerosal in immunizations could impact future vaccine availability on a global scale

• US pediatricians criticize RFK Jr’s new vaccine panel: ‘Truly an embarrassment’

A critical federal vaccine panel has recommended against seasonal influenza vaccines containing a specific preservative – a change likely to send shock through the global medical and scientific community and possibly impact future vaccine availability.

The panel was unilaterally remade by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine skeptic who has urged against the use of thimerosal despite a lack of evidence of real-world harm.

Pediatric health experts slam ACIP’s plans to reassess current vaccination schedules for children

Robert F Kennedy Jr’s newly appointed vaccine advisory panel is facing criticism from pediatricians after its announcement of plans to reassess the current vaccination schedules for children and adolescents.

Experts warn that the move appears designed to undermine public trust in immunization.

Steve Wilkinson says young pupils’ poor fitness is a cultural challenge that can only be resolved by parents’ choices

Once again, primary schools are expected to “fix” the obesity problem affecting young children (Majority of children will be overweight or obese in nine areas of England by 2035, study shows, 23 June). As a primary teacher and PE specialist, I know that this is largely ineffective.

While half an hour or even 45 minutes of vigorous exercise a day sounds like the answer, one has only to observe three things that completely undermine this: how the children travel, what is in their lunch box and what they do when they get home.