Swansea City are closing in on the loan signing of West Ham United defender Kaelan Casey.
The 20-year-old Hammers academy product has made two substitute appearances in the Premier League, but will head out on loan in search of first-team experience.
Casey could well make his Swansea debut in their Championship opener at Middlesbrough next Saturday, with Alan Sheehan short of options as things stand.
Club captain Ben Cabango is doubtful for the Boro trip having been troubled by a calf injury during pre-season.
Fellow centre-back Ricardo Santos is also sidelined by injury, as is youngster Filip Lissah.
Cameron Burgess, another of Swansea’s summer recruits, is Sheehan’s only fit senior centre-back at present, with under-21 player Arthur Parker and midfielder Jay Fulton used at the heart of defence at times during pre-season.
Swansea are still looking for a number of new signings following a raft of summer departures, with a striker another top priority following the exits of Jerry Yates and Florian Bianchini last week.
The British government has announced a national inquiry into organised child sexual abuse following the release of a damning report by Baroness Louise Casey that criticised decades of institutional failure to protect children from so-called “grooming gangs”.
It marks a remarkable U-turn by the Labour Party government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, which had resisted months of calls for an inquiry, stating that it was focusing on recommendations already made in an earlier seven-year probe.
But what exactly is the Casey Report, and what drove Labour’s abrupt change of course?
What is the Casey Report?
Commissioned earlier this year by Starmer, the Casey Report is a review of how United Kingdom institutions have tackled child sexual exploitation.
The review focused on “grooming gangs” – groups of men who targeted vulnerable girls for sexual abuse, often over extended periods of time.
What does the report say?
The report identified an institutional failure to protect children and teenage girls from rape, exploitation and serious violence.
Among its recommendations, the Casey Report suggested a change in the law so adults in England and Wales face mandatory rape charges if they intentionally penetrate a child under age 16.
In her report, Casey concluded that too many grooming cases have been dropped or downgraded from rape to lesser charges because a 13- to 15-year-old is perceived to have been “in love with” or have “consented to” sex with the perpetrator.
Her review also highlighted reluctance by the authorities to “examine the ethnicity of the offenders”, saying it was not racist to do so.
In the local data that the audit examined from three police forces, they identified clear evidence of “over-representation among suspects of Asian and Pakistani-heritage men”.
However, the review also criticised the ongoing failure to collect ethnicity at a national level, with it not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, making it impossible “to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data”.
Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper answers questions on the Casey Report in the House of Commons in London on June 16, 2025 [Handout UK Parliament via AFP]
Were the recommendations accepted?
Yes.
The UK’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper confirmed the government would accept all 12 recommendations in the Casey Report.
This means the police will launch a new national criminal operation targeting grooming gangs, overseen by the National Crime Agency (NCA).
This operation would be overseen by an independent commission with powers to compel witnesses to provide evidence.
It would also go ahead with a national inquiry, with Starmer stating that he had read “every single word” of the report and would accept Casey’s recommendation for an investigation.
What led to Labour’s U-turn?
Richard Scorer, the head of Abuse Law and Public Inquiries at Slater and Gordon, a law firm, told Al Jazeera that the sheer size of the scandal and the fact that it had affected thousands of children made it “inevitable” that there would need to be a public inquiry about it at some point.
US billionaire Elon Musk’s online references to the grooming scandal that emerged a decade ago in several towns and cities in northern England had also pushed the “issue up the political agenda”, he said.
In June 2022, an independent review found that the police and local council had failed to prevent sexual exploitation of young girls by gangs in Oldham, a town in Greater Manchester in England.
Two years later, political leaders in Oldham Council called for the government to investigate further, but then-Home Office Minister Jess Phillips rejected the council’s request, saying it should lead an investigation itself.
In January this year, Musk threw his weight behind far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson and had been outspoken on the issue.
He called for Robinson, a controversial political figure, then serving an 18-month jail term for contempt of court, to be freed, writing on his own social media platform X, “Why is Tommy Robinson in a solitary confinement prison for telling the truth?”
Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, arrives at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in central London on April 22, 2024 [Adrian Dennis/AFP]
Musk also accused Starmer of failing to prosecute child rapists when he was director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.
He also took aim at Minister for Safeguarding Jess Phillips, calling her “a rape genocide apologist”.
Starmer responded at the time, without mentioning Musk by name. “Those that are spreading lies and misinformation as far and as wide as possible are not interested in victims, they are interested in themselves,” the PM said.
Will this report bring about change?
Experts say it’s certainly a positive step.
William Tantam, a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Bristol, who has worked on a previous independent inquiry into child sexual abuse, said that from a researcher’s perspective, the main positive was that there would be more consistency and clarity in data.
He said that another positive is that inquiry panel will have the authority to compel agencies to participate.
Scorer noted that bringing in the NCA to investigate cases that haven’t progressed in the past is also a very welcome outcome of the report.
He said in the UK, different police forces have not always succeeded in coordinating their efforts to tackle grooming gangs, so a more centralised overview from the NCA might secure “a better coordination of police activity”.
Cooper told Parliament on Monday that more than 800 cases have now been identified for formal review, and she expects that figure to rise above 1,000 in the coming weeks.
But Scorer warned that the government would need to assign an additional budget for the implementation of the changes recommended by Casey.
“If you are asking the NCA to reopen and investigate, potentially up to 1000 cases, that’s going to require a huge amount of resources,” he said. “Who’s going to pay for that? That’s one of the questions that the government is going to need to answer.”
On Oct. 29, 2022, the universe told Dr. Casey Means her fate lay in Los Angeles.
President Trump’s new pick for surgeon general wrote in her popular online newsletter of her epiphany, which came during a dawn hike among the cadmium-colored California oaks and flames of wild mustard flower painting the Topanga Canyon: “You must move to LA. This is where your partner is!’”
Los Angeles has been a Shangri-La for health-seekers since its Gold Rush days as the sanitarium capital of the United States.
Today, it’s the epicenter of America’s $480-billion wellness industry, where gym-fluencers, plant-medicine gurus and celebrity physicians trade health secrets and discount codes across their blue-check Instagram pages and chart-topping podcasts.
But by earning Trump’s nod, Means, 37, has ascended to a new level of power, bringing her singular focus on metabolic dysfunction as the root of ill health and her unorthodox beliefs about psilocybin therapy and the perils of vaccines to the White House.
The surgeon general is the country’s first physician, and the foremost authority on American medicine. Means’ central philosophy — that illness “is a result of the choices you make” — puts her in lockstep with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and in opposition to generations of U.S. public health officials.
Means declined to comment. But interviews with friends and her public writings track a metamorphosis since her move to L.A., from a med-tech entrepreneur and emerging wellness guru to the new face of Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, or MAHA for short.
If confirmed, America’s next top doctor will bring another unconventional addition to the surgeon general’s uniform: a baby bump. Friends told The Times Means and her husband, Brian Nickerson, are expecting a baby this fall.
“[The pregnancy] will definitely empower her,” said Dr. Darshan Shah, a popular longevity expert and longtime friend of Means. “It might create even more of a sense of urgency.”
On this, both supporters and critics agree. Fertility is a primal obsession of the MAHA movement, and a unifying policy priority among otherwise heterodox MAGA figureheads from Elon Musk to JD Vance. In this worldview, motherhood itself is a credential.
“She’s going to say, ‘I’m a mom, and the reason why you can trust me is I’m a mom,’” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an infectious disease epidemiologist and an outspoken critic of Means.
Mothers have long been the standard-bearers for Kennedy’s wellness crusade. “MAHA moms” flanked him at the White House during a roundtable in March, where they filmed themselves struggling to pronounce common food additives. Many flocked to Trump after the president vowed to put Kennedy in charge of the nation’s healthcare.
Deena Metzger at her Topanga home. Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over fifty years.
(Al Seib/For The Times)
“It’s such a radical change that’s required [in medicine],” said the writer and healer Deena Metzger, 88, whom Means has called one of her “spiritual guides.” “It’s wildly exciting that she might be surgeon general, because she’s really thinking about health.”
Her outsider status gives her a clear-eyed perspective, her supporters say.
“The answer to our metabolic dysfunction is through lifestyle,” said Dr. Sara Szal Gottfried, an OBGYN and longtime friend of Means. “Seventy percent of our healthcare costs are due to lifestyle choices, and that’s where she starts.”
Means’ 2024 bestseller “Good Energy” touts much the same message: Simple individual changes could make most people healthy, but the medical system profits by keeping them sick.
“Moms (and families) will not stand anymore for a country that profits massively off kids getting chronically sick,” Means posted on X on Jan. 30. “Nothing can stop the frustration that is leading to this movement.”
Critics say that elides a more complex reality.
“This is what we call terrain theory — it’s the inverse of germ theory,” said Rivera, the epidemiologist. “Terrain theory has a very deeply racist and kind of eugenic origin, in which certain people got sick and certain people didn’t.”
She and others point out that Means is being elevated at the same time the administration guts public health infrastructure, slashing staff and research funding and aiming to cut billions more from public safety net programs.
“MAHA is why we are defunding the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health],” Rivera said. “Thirteen million people could be uninsured because of [Medicaid cuts].”
But trust in those institutions — and in physicians generally — has tanked in the past five years, surveys show.
The blurring of personal pathos and professional authority at a moment of crisis for institutional medicine is central to MAHA’s influence and power, public health experts say. They point to the movement’s broad appeal from cerulean Santa Monica to crimson Gaines County, Texas, as evidence that health skepticism transcends political lines.
“[MAHA] has sucked in a lot of my blue friends and turned them purple,” Rivera said. “I have people doing the mental gymnastics of ‘I’m not MAGA, I’m just MAHA.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t think you realize those two things are one thing now.’”
Means’ own celebrity is similarly vast, uniting Americans fed up with what they see as a sclerotic and corrupt medical system.
Her opposition to California’s stringent childhood vaccine mandates, enthusiasm for magic mushrooms, and obsession with all things “clean” and “natural” have endeared her to everyone from raw milk fans to anti-vaxxers to boosters of Luigi Mangione, the accused killer of a healthcare chief executive who regularly receives fan mail while awaiting trial in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
“We’ve never had anyone in that role [of surgeon general] who almost anyone knew who they were,” Dr. Joel Warsh, a Studio City pediatrician and fellow MAHA luminary, whose book on vaccines “Between a Shot and a Hard Place” came out this week. “We know the public loves her.”
That adoration may yet outshine concerns over Means’ medical qualifications — despite her elite education, she left just months before the end of her residency as an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Oregon Health & Science University. Her Oregon medical license is current but inactive and her experience in public health policy is limited.
And while the nominee vigorously defends the brand partnerships that often bookend her newsletters and social media posts, others see the dark side of L.A. influence in the practice.
“L.A. is its own universe when it comes to wellness,” Rivera said. “You can convince anybody to buy a $19 strawberry at Erewhon and say it’s worth it, the same way you can sell people colonics and detox cleanses and all kinds of wellness smoke and mirrors.”
Means made her name as CEO of a subscription health tracking service whose distinguishing feature is blood sugar monitoring for non-diabetics — a practice she touts across several chapters of her book. Her newsletter readers are regularly offered 20% off $1.50-per-pill probiotics or individually packaged matcha mix promising “radiant skin” for its drinkers.
More recently, she’s partnered with WeNatal, a bespoke prenatal vitamin company whose flagship product contains almost the same essential molecules as the brands offered through Medicaid — the insurance half of pregnant Californians use. Taking it daily from conception to birth would cost close to $600.
“So many of the companies that she supports, so many of the companies selling snake oil have some connection to or presence in Los Angeles,” Rivera went on. “It is the mecca for that kind of stuff.”
Even some in the doctor’s inner circle have misgivings about the world of influence that launched her, and the administration she’s poised to join.
Deena Metzger is at the center of a web of influence surgeon general nominee Dr. Casey Means found when she moved to L.A.
(Al Seib / For The Times)
“I’m not sure the obsession with wellness is really about wellness,” Metzger said, her husky Gentle Boy lying at her feet in her home in Topanga. “There’s wellness, which is maybe even a social fabrication, and there’s health.”
The writer and breast cancer survivor has spent decades convening doctors and other healers on this mountaintop as part of her ReVisioning Medicine councils, probing the question posed variously by Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov and American humanitarian Dr. Paul Farmer, Jewish philosopher-physician Moses ben Maimon and fictional heartthrob Dr. Robby on “The Pitt”: Can we create a medicine that does no harm?
“How do you believe in that? Or associate with it?” she wondered about the MAHA movement her friend had helped to birth. “But If she’s there and she has power to do things, it will be good for us.”
While mainstream medical authorities and wellness gurus agree that pesticides, plastics and ultraprocessed foods harm public health, they diverge on how much weight to give MAHA’s preferred targets and how to enact policy prescriptions that actually affect them.
“We have people forming a social movement around beef tallow — let’s get that focused on alcohol reduction, tobacco reduction,” said Dr. Jon-Patrick Allem, an expert in social media and health communication. “I don’t disagree with reducing ultraprocessed foods. I don’t disagree with removing dyes from foods. But are these the main drivers of chronic disease?”
They said in a joint statement: “After much thoughtful consideration, Gabby and Casey have decided to go their separate ways romantically.
“This decision was mutual, and they both remain on good terms as friends with a shared respect for each other.”
“Gabby is grateful for the memories they’ve created together and wishes Casey nothing but the best as they both move forward on their individual journeys.
Love Island star Gabby reveals she is FINALLY Casey’s girlfriend two months after winning show
A source said: “Both have confided in quite a few friends about this and so it’s not really a secret in their circles, but they’ve made the decision to part ways this week.”
They added: “They had a really good relationship and enjoyed each others’ time but the reality is that they are focusing on different things and they both have realised that.
“Neither of them have parted ways badly but they just knew it wasn’t going to work anymore.”
