Andy Burnham remains committed to an orderly transition of power in early September, despite growing expectations that Sir Keir could announce a timetable for his resignation as early as today, a senior source has told the Manchester Evening News.

The MEN understands a handover in early September is the preferred option, with Mr Burnham expected to meet Labour MPs over the coming weeks as the party maps out its next steps.

It is understood Burnham’s team would like time to work with civil servants ahead of a transfer of power.

Regardless of their wishes much will depend on what Sir Keir Starmer decides.

Read our full story on this HERE.

In its statement, Taiwan’s agriculture ministry said authorities would focus on “sustainable agricultural development and stable income for farmers”, and “continue to guide the atemoya industry toward diversified processing”, including by producing frozen fruit products, puree and wines.

However, it seems likely that all three IPOs will materially reshape the markets. JP Morgan estimates some $410bn in passive buying from the index inclusion of major AI IPOs. “At index level, the increased weights of the newly included companies would come at the expense of the weights of the companies they replace as well as the biggest tech companies like Mag 7,” the “magnificent seven” tech firms, wrote Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, an analyst at JP Morgan, in a research note published in mid-May.

Officials in Russia-occupied Crimea suspended civilian gasoline sales Sunday as Ukraine ramped up attacks on fuel supplies on the Black Sea peninsula.

The Russia-appointed Crimean governor Sergei Aksyonov said that overnight Ukrainian strikes killed four people and wounded 28. He later wrote on social media that local gas stations would halt all sales to non-state companies and individuals for an undefined period.

“Fuel will be sold only to government agencies that ensure the functioning and security of the Republic of Crimea,” Aksyonov said. “I ask everyone to remain calm and to only trust official sources of information.”

Ukrainian forces have repeatedly targeted fuel supplies to Crimea in recent weeks, triggering the worst energy crisis in the region since it was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement Sunday that a Crimean oil depot, as well as an oil transport facility in Russia’s southern Krasnodar region were among the targets. He described the attacks as part of Ukraine’s “long-range sanctions” against Russia’s energy infrastructure.

“Russia understands only strength, and our long-range strength is certainly working for peace,” he wrote.

Russian officials in Krasnodar reported earlier Sunday that a drone strike sparked a fire at a Black Sea oil terminal in the village of Chushka. They said that Ukrainian attacks struck a ferry, killing one person.

Motorists struggle to find fuel

The Crimean peninsula has had periodic fuel shortages from Ukrainian strikes before, but the current crisis is the worst since its 2014 annexation.

At the end of May, authorities restricted the sale of gas to 20 liters (5 1/3 gallons) per vehicle owner per week, using prepaid coupons. Those were snapped up immediately following their release on an official messaging app channel, and motorists lined up for hours, waiting to refuel.

Social networks have been abuzz with requests and advice on where to find fuel, and authorities launched a hotline for tourists in the area who have found themselves trapped.

Some motorists bring their own gas from Krasnodar and elsewhere via the Kerch bridge, but they are restricted to carrying 100 liters (about 26 1/2 gallons) per vehicle. Some speculators are selling gas at double the market price.

In a rare public acknowledgment, the Kremlin has recognized the scope of the problem and promised to address the issue quickly.

However, Ukraine’s successes have highlighted its ability to inflict painful damage on Russia and change the course of the conflict while Moscow’s advances recently have ground to a near halt. On June 11, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine reached its 1,569th day, surpassing the duration of World War I.

Ariel Anderssen, 49, has been in the adult industry for 25 years, and in that time she’s amassed a property portfolio that will make your eyes water.

She’s a sex worker in a looser sense of the word, fulfilling men’s niche requests on OnlyFans and raking in the cash as a bondage model.

‘Men typically come to me if they can’t find their kink represented widely in porn,’ Ariel tells Metro. ‘So, I’ve pretended to be eaten by a monster under the bed, and I do submissive stuff where I pretend to be auctioned off to the highest bidder.’

Charging £100 for a five-minute OnlyFans video, or £270 for 30-minutes, means she earned £228,000 last year. It’s enabled her to purchase eight properties so far, and she intends to purchase 11 in total.

And she’s just one of multiple sex workers future-proofing her income in this way, with OnlyFans creators telling Metro they’re buying up property for passive income.

Ariel bought her first flat in 2007 at 29 – a one-bedroom for £140,000 by the Tube station in Ealing. It’s now worth £260,000.

‘I was just going to live in it but then I met my husband and after two years we bought a house together,’ Ariel explains. ‘I was scared my relationship wouldn’t work out because we hadn’t lived together before, so I rented the flat out instead.’

In the 20 years since, the flat hasn’t sat vacant for more than three days, and Ariel makes £1,1300 a month from the rent. ‘That was going to be my pension pot initially,’ she adds, ‘but then I thought living off £12,000 a year in retirement didn’t sound great – could I double it?’

So, in 2016, Ariel purchased a two-bed flat in Wolverhampton for £67,000 (now worth £90,000). But once she read a book on property investing, she set herself a challenge to buy one more flat every two years.

‘I’d always thought you need to get the smallest mortgage you can and pay it down, but the book said to do a 25% deposit, get an interest-only mortgage for the rest and keep buying properties,’ Ariel says. ‘It sounded terrifying but that’s what I started doing.

‘As you buy more, you can save the deposit for the next one much faster because of the rent coming in.’

The bondage model bought a two-bed maisonette in Telford in 2018 for £80,000 (now worth £105,000) and a two-bed flat in Barry, South Wales, for £127,000 in 2021 which is now worth £144,000.

When Covid hit people started buying more porn from Ariel, increasing her income and enabling her to buy her three most recent properties mortgage-free.

This includes two two-bed flats in Peterborough, the first bought for £105,000 in 2023 (now worth £120,000), and the second bought for £140,000 in 2024. Then Ariel took the plunge and bought a three-bed house in Newcastle for £68,000 in 2025 (worth £83,000 after renovations).

This is all in addition to her three-story Georgian home in the Welsh Borders, which she purchased with her husband for £300,000 11 years ago.

‘I rent to people in need’

Dominatrix Melissa Todd, 49, also has eight properties to her name.

‘When I entered the sex industry aged 19, I liked to torture myself with worry about what on earth I’d do when I “got old”,’ Melissa tells Metro.

So, she began buying up property after charging her wealthy clients up to £20,000 for her sex worker services, which include spanking, bondage and ‘headmistress school’.

Her first purchase was when she was 19, before she entered the world of sex work, using money she made as a care assistant. It was a three-bed with a huge garage and garden for £41,000 in east Kent, where all her properties are, in Thanet and Medway.

Melissa buys her homes outright, which are collectively worth around £2,000,000, and she’s never had any issues purchasing with sex work funds. She currently has seven tenants in situ, but has previously let her properties to sex workers who find it harder to rent.

David Smith, partner and specialist in residential property law at Bishop & Sewell, tells Metro sex workers and OnlyFans models can struggle to rent because most residential tenancies have a clause prohibiting work or operation of a business from the property.

‘An Onlyfans model would find themselves at risk of breaching this if they were shooting films in the premises,’ he explains. ‘It’s common to find clauses prohibiting immoral use and, while such clauses were historically targeted at prostitution, they would likely be breached by filming sexual content as well.’

David adds courts have been harsh on sex workers and OF creators because they believe it’ll lead to the property’s reputation being ‘tainted’.

So Melissa helps out sex workers in a bind. ‘I also prefer to rent to people on benefits, the homeless, the self-employed,’ she explains. ‘Partly because I feel like a horrible human being for being so wealthy, and helping people makes me feel less guilty. I also charge vastly under market rates.’

In total, Melissa earns about £5,000 a month from her properties, but she has no plans to purchase other homes in the future – although she encourages other sex workers to do so.

‘Invest your cash while it’s coming in thick and fast,’ she adds. ‘It’s getting harder to make money from porn, and I suspect it will get harder still.’

‘Estate agents told potential buyers who I was’

Lily Phillips, who famously had sex with 101 men in a single day, has acquired two properties at the age of just 24 – one is her home in Cheshire and the other a rental property in Derbyshire, near her hometown.

‘I bought my rental property outright at 20 for £110,000,’ Lily tells Metro. ‘It’s a small house but I get £700 a month from it. I purchased it purely for investment purposes.’

She doesn’t disclose her identity to her tenants and it’s her parents who manage the tenancy for her.

But when Lily bought her £1,025,000 Cheshire home — a Georgian four-floor, five-bedroom house — with cash in July 2025, her privacy was invaded by estate agents.

She’d moved there after living in Kensington and Chelsea for three years, looking for somewhere ‘homey’ where she could walk her dog and not have to worry about getting any ‘trouble’.

‘When my neighbours moved in they told me the estate agent had said, “Lily Phillips is living next door, she’s a porn star, we need to disclose that for legal reasons”,’ Lily says.

Property lawyer David clarifies it’s legal to declare to a potential buyer that the neighbour is an OnlyFans model but giving their name is a breach of GDPR.

‘I question whether an agent should have disclosed this, it depends on what she was doing and whether it would affect them,’ David says. ‘Many agents massively over interpret their duties to disclose material information.’

Lily’s neighbours weren’t put off by it, but she was taken back by the invasion of her privacy.

‘It felt really invasive,’ she explains. ‘The buyers could’ve been anyone like a superfan who was obsessed with me and that’s why he wanted to move next door. It could’ve been someone who wanted to terrorise me, or who didn’t like what I do and wanted to make my life hell.

‘I found it ridiculous. I’m a normal human being, I just do an adult job. I don’t really work in the house. I’m not running around naked on the street. Everything is behind closed doors and in the privacy of my own home.’

So, is it time the property market caught up to sex workers and their budding property portfolios? Probably.

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BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — A polarized Colombia gave conservative political outsider Abelardo de la Espriella a razor-thin lead in a runoff election that will be challenged in the coming days by the ruling party’s progressive candidate.

De la Espriella, a business owner and lawyer who earned U.S. President Donald Trump’s endorsement despite never having run for office, led progressive lawmaker Iván Cepeda taking 49.7% of the votes, with 99.9% of results released by electoral authorities. Cepeda, Petro’s ally, earned 48.7% support. Election officials have not formally announced a winner.

A victory by de la Espriella is expected to usher in policies that will reverse the agenda of outgoing President Gustavo Petro, including a controversial plan to hold parallel peace negotiations with illegal armed groups. Petro’s protégé, lawmaker Ivan Cepeda, had pledged to push forward that strategy and other social reforms if he won Sunday’s vote.

The election was colored by people’s fears of a renewed internal conflict.

“I will govern for all Colombians,” de la Espriella, nicknamed “The Tiger,” told thousands of supporters as he stood behind bulletproof glass in the northern city of Barranquilla on Sunday night. But his conciliatory tone changed as he spoke.

“Pack your bags and prepare to exercise the opposition,” he added. “Make no mistake, Mr. Cepeda. You already know how fiercely the tiger roars.”

Speaking from Bogota after the vote count was tallied, Cepeda told supporters that his campaign considers the count “unofficial and non-binding” and that his team will challenge results from more than 30,000 voting stations. No recount has flipped the results of a presidential election in Colombian history.

“We will not allow … the rollback of the social gains we have achieved,” Cepeda said. “We will not allow democracy to be violated.”

Petro also vowed to challenge the outcome. Sunday’s winner will begin a four-year term Aug. 7.

The two candidates pitched voters widely different strategies to prevent the South American country from experiencing the nonstop violence, such as car bombs, kidnappings, disappearances and forced displacements, that Colombians lived with in previous decades.

De la Espriella, 47, promised a heavy-handed approach to crime-fighting, including drug trafficking. He also said he plans to end Petro’s attempts to establish dialogues with multiple armed groups — an effort that has largely failed — and build mega-prisons, emulating Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s aggressive policies. Those tactics have lowered homicide rates in the Central American country but have fueled accusations of human rights abuses.

De la Espriella holds dual Colombian and U.S. citizenship. He’s a Trump supporter and a member of the Republican Party.

“He Won, BIG!” Trump said on his social media platform.

‘It’s always the same violence’

Yolanda Hernández, who recycles trash for a living, voted for Petro in 2022, but cast her ballot for de la Espriella this time. While she acknowledged that Petro was unable to deliver on promises meant to help the poor because of congressional gridlock, she said Colombia cannot afford another four years under his vision for the country.

“We want change in Colombia because it’s always the same violence, always the same thing,” Hernández, 49, said. “(Petro) said he was going to lower the cost of services, that he was going to lower the price of food, and everything is more expensive.”

Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Sunday’s result shows the country “has not shifted overwhelmingly or decisively” against Petro’s project or for de la Espriella’s outsider “iron fist showmanship.” Freeman added that the result also underscored Colombia’s regional divisions.

“It’s regional not just ideological polarization; or rather, the two overlapping,” he said. “Ironically, de la Espriella’s iron-fist message performed best in the core of the country, not the periphery, which bears the brunt of Colombia’s violence.”

Colombia’s illegal groups have more than 27,000 members.

Last year, authorities recorded 14,780 homicides, the most since at least 2015, driven by clashes among illegal armed groups. Among those killed was conservative presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe.

The world number two still has huge prizes on offer this season, starting at the Open next month at Birkdale where he will chase that seventh major

Rory McIlroy shot a final round of 73, his worst of the week, to blow any hopes of adding the US Open to his trophy cabinet this year.

The Holywood man admitted ‘the wheels came off’ twice earlier in the week, which left him chasing things over the weekend.

McIlroy’s hopes of salvaging something in the fourth round evaporated over the space of his first five holes after three bogeys. The Holywood man showed his frustrations and turned the air blue, forcing Sky Sports to apologise.

Ironically, after his troubles on the previous two days, he birdied 10 and 11, which were playing easier with the wind direction, but two bogeys and one further birdie saw him sign for a 73.

“You try to come out and put a good one out there and I felt I maybe had a tiny chance, but I got off to a bad start,” said McIlroy.

“I guess it was a week of what could have been, which is pretty frustrating, but I’ll dust myself off and go again.”

The final round of three over left McIlroy on six over par for the week. That was only good enough for a joint 32nd place finish at Shinnecock.

That means McIlroy takes home $134,583, or £101,912 in UK currency. That’s slim pickings by McIlroy and golf’s standards.

However, he still has huge prizes on offer this season, starting at the Open next month at Birkdale where he will chase that seventh major.

The Open purse sat at $17 million in both 2024 and 2025, with Xander Schauffele earning $3.1 million at Royal Troon in 2024 and Scottie Scheffler taking the same winner’s share at Royal Portrush in 2025.

The R&A are due to announce the final 2026 number in the coming weeks. All to play for..

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The Utah judge in the murder case over Charlie Kirk‘s killing says he will rule Monday whether prosecutors could face sanctions for comments to the media about a bullet fragment recovered from the conservative activist’s body.

Lawyers for defendant Tyler Robinson have asked Judge Tony Graf to block the death penalty in the case, claiming the prosecutors’ comments could sway potential jurors regarding his guilt.

But criminal law expert Paul Cassell said it would be extraordinary for Graf to grant the defense request. Their concerns could be addressed in other ways, such as more closely questioning jurors to ensure they aren’t biased, the University of Utah law professor said.

“A standard defense attorney maneuver is to avoid talking about the guilt or innocence of your client. The theory is that as long as you’re talking about anything other than whether the defendant is guilty, you’re winning as a defense attorney,” Cassell said. “This seems to be an extreme example of that.”

Representatives of the Utah County Attorney’s Office said they were compelled to speak publicly about the case following speculation in some media outlets.

The speculation began after the defense team publicly disclosed that initial tests were inconclusive to determine whether the bullet was fired from the suspected murder weapon.

Conjecture over the evidence in Kirk’s killing has fueled unsubstantiated conspiracy theories that there might have been a second shooter, or that his death was staged. The case has attracted enormous media attention and concerns from both sides about misinformation tainting the potential jury pool.

Robinson has not yet entered a plea. Prosecutors have said they intend to seek the death penalty if he is convicted.

The 23-year-old from southwestern Utah is charged with aggravated murder in the Sept. 10 killing of Kirk, a close ally of President Donald Trump who was shot in the neck while addressing a crowd of thousands at Utah Valley University.

Judge Graf held a hearing last week over whether prosecutors should be held in contempt for their comments about the bullet.

Robinson’s attorneys accused prosecutors including Deputy Utah County Attorney Christopher Ballard of trying to influence potential jurors by going on a “media tour” to talk about ballistics evidence in the case.

Ballard argued at the June 12 hearing that he didn’t speak to the media about case specifics, and he only remarked generally about how ballistics testing can be inconclusive.

The defense team also pointed to another Utah criminal case in which prosecutors were accused of contempt and suggested that one potential remedy would be to bar the state from seeking the death penalty.

While the judge in that earlier case disagreed that an order barring the death penalty was merited, Robinson’s attorneys noted that “the court did not conclude that such a remedy was beyond its authority where the facts support it.”

A key hearing in Robinson’s case is scheduled for July 6-10, when prosecutors must show they have enough evidence to warrant a trial.

___

Brown reported from Denver and Boone from Boise, Idaho. Associated Press reporter Hannah Schoenbaum contributed from Salt Lake City.

The applicant said there could be a ‘degree of visual harm’ with the development

Nearly 50 new homes could be built in a town where there is an “overriding need” for houses. Mr and Mrs Meneeley and Radcliffes Land have proposed to build 49 new homes on land west of Buckworth Road in Alconbury Weston.

If approved, the homes would be built on a piece of agricultural land that joins the countryside village of Alconbury Weston. The applicant added that homes on this site would produce “genuine opportunities for journeys on food, by cycle and by public transport, in addition to private car use”.

The development would also meet the “overriding need” for housing as part of planning policies. The plans added: “The proposed development would introduce a moderate amount of built development onto undeveloped, open land, which would be visible from a number of public vantage points.”

The applicant acknowledged that there would be a “degree of visual harm to the landscape”, but they added it would “continue the existing residential development to ‘round off’ this part of the settlement”.

The plans have already gained some objections from nearby residents. One resident in Wheatsheaf Road said the development would “significantly harm” the village as it is “already struggling with the current traffic levels”.

They added: “It will introduce more vehicles and further strain. Buckworth Road is already hit on a regular basis by diverted traffic from the A14 causing significant noise and disruption to the village. Major construction would exacerbate this issue.”

Another person in West Close is also concerned about traffic. They said: “Alconbury Weston Buckworth Road is already struggling with current traffic levels and is hit regularly by diverted traffic from the A14 causing major noise and disruption which will only be exacerbated by major construction.

“Buckworth Road is not suitable for heavy construction traffic as the road is in poor condition and the current speed control humps have no effect on speeding vehicles.”

The same resident had additional concerns about noise and pollution. They added: “The eastern boundary to West Close will impact our privacy, light and also concern regarding pollution and noise from the construction activities. Noise pollution will also increase with the potential 49 buildings.”