LONDEN (ANP) - Meer dan honderd Labour-parlementariërs hebben een steunbetuiging aan de Britse premier Keir Starmer getekend. Hij staat onder zware druk om af te treden, maar deze partijgenoten blijven achter hun leider staan.

"Vorige week hadden we een verpletterend slechte verkiezingsuitslag", staat in de verklaring. "Dit toont dat we een zware klus voor de boeg hebben om het vertrouwen van de kiezers terug te winnen. Daar moeten we vandaag nog mee beginnen - door allemaal samen te werken om de verandering te bewerkstelligen die het land nodig heeft." Volgens de ondertekenaars moet de regering zich focussen op die verandering en is dit niet het moment voor een leiderschapsverkiezing.

Inmiddels hebben wel al 84 partijgenoten Starmer opgeroepen om te vertrekken, onder wie drie onderministers die zijn opgestapt. Volgens Britse media hebben meerdere ministers tegen de premier gezegd dat het tijd is om een stap terug te doen.

No wonder they are upset by the slogan ‘tax the rich’. Despite their wealth increasing 81% since 2020, they need our emotional support now more than ever

Won’t anyone think of the poor, poor, billionaires? Their endless money can buy them political power, but it can’t buy them love. Instead of being worshipped by the hoi polloi, titans of industry are denounced! Despised! Disrespected! Insert another D-word of your own!

Thankfully, class solidarity is strong among the super-rich. Steve Roth bravely brought attention to the plight of his fellow billionaires during a recent earnings call. “I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ … spit out with anger and contempt by politicians … to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs,” the Vornado Realty Trust CEO said.

All the protocols that health experts like me look for have been followed. But outbreaks on cruise ships are notoriously hard to control

• Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh

Hantavirus: the disease you wish you’d never heard of, as visions of the Covid pandemic flash through your head. I’ve seen lots of breathless coverage and some bizarre takes on social media, so I imagine many people are confused as to what’s going on.

Let me start by saying that this isn’t the Covid pandemic – only Covid was Covid. Previous hantavirus outbreaks have been contained (although none were on a cruise ship). So, for now, the risk to the general public is low – colleagues and I are still carrying on as normal and watching to see whether new infections arise outside the original cruise ship group. Those new infections would be the key step-change determining whether we see further spread and higher-risk public health alerts – or whether we’re at the end of this outbreak.

Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, and the author of How Not to Die (Too Soon)

FOTO (Insta) - Niet de prik uit het verhaal

Nog niet gemeld op zijn persoonlijke social media kanalen, maar wel door de RVD: Rob Jetten, premier van alle Nederlanders, is vanochtend tijdens zijn vakantie bezoek aan de Overzeesche Gebiedschdeelen GEPRIKT. "Premier Rob Jetten moest vanochtend naar het ziekenhuis van Bonaire nadat hij ergens door was geprikt tijdens het zwemmen. Hij kreeg een allergische reactie, maar heeft er geen ernstige verwondingen aan overgehouden. Het is niet duidelijk waardoor de minister-president werd geprikt." GeenStijl wil hierbij in de felste bewoordingen afstand nemen van wie of wat de premier dan ook geprikt heeft. Premiers prikken is wat ons betreft volkomen onacceptabel. In een democratie bestrijd je elkaar met woorden, niet met prikken. STAY STRONG ROBBIE
Update - "Na een heftige allergische reactie moest ik even een paar uur worden opgenomen in het ziekenhuis. Dankzij de uitstekende zorg van Fundashon Mariadal voel ik me stukken beter."

sz-da has added a photo to the pool:

De weggelopen Lamia hoopt in 1991 de klok stil te zetten door een taart te bakken voor de Iraakse dictator. ‘The President’s Cake’ blikt met enige nostalgie terug op een verloren land.

Aphantasia (the inability to visualize) is one of those things that I find endlessly fascinating; I’ve written about it a few times since 2016, most recently in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2025 piece for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.

Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.

Some said that they had a tantalizing feeling that images were somewhere in their minds, only just out of reach, like a word on the tip of their tongue. This sounded right to Zeman—the images must be stored in some way, since aphantasics were able to recognize things. In fact, it seemed that most aphantasics weren’t hampered in their everyday functioning. They had good memories for facts and tasks. But many of them said that they remembered very little about their own lives.

Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster read the piece and realized she was aphantasic. Webster recently interviewed MacFarquhar for Cultured: What Not Having Mental Imagery Implies for Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Our Sense of Self, which I read with a lot of head-nodding. Like:

I didn’t have a lot of memories, which I always sort of chalked up to trauma, but I got memories back over the course of analysis. I realized while reading your piece that my memories were always spatial. I would remember a space or placements of things. I was always reconstructing a landscape, but without it really being imagistic.

And this is exactly how college was for me:

When I realized I had aphantasia, I reflected on how I always thought I had a photographic memory. For example, when I took tests, I would make notes, and I could see what I wrote on the page because I knew where I had written it. But it’s not a photograph; it’s a spatial memory.

As I said last year:

The more I read about this, the more I think that for those at either end of the phantasic scale, their inability (or extreme ability) to see things in their minds is a major component of what we think of as personality. Even just thinking about myself, there are all sorts of behaviors and traits I can connect to not being able to visualize things in my head that clearly. In some ways, it might be one of the most me things about me.

(via @timoni)

Tags: aphantasia · Jamieson Webster · Larissa MacFarquhar · memory · psychology · science