What happened
Keir Starmer used his Labour Party conference speech to launch a direct attack on Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, calling him a “snake oil merchant” who “doesn’t like Britain”.

Who said what
Starmer rejected Farage’s claim that Britain was “broken”, pointing instead to the country’s cultural and entrepreneurial vitality, from “the swagger of Oasis” to “the grit of the Lionesses”. Farage responded by accusing the prime minister of inciting the “radical left” and endangering Reform campaigners, calling Starmer’s remarks “an absolute disgrace”.

Starmer’s claim that Farage hates Britain is “his biggest own goal yet”, said Gordon Rayner in The Telegraph. “Rather than putting an arm around Reform voters worried by migration, the PM has punched them in the face.” Yet the “bigger issue” is that Starmer’s policies for reversing the UK’s “decline” are “barely different from those that caused it in the first place”, said David Edgerton in The New Statesman. He may have delivered on his pledge to change the Labour Party, but he has simply turned it into a “Blue Labour-washed version of the Tories”.

What next?
Starmer vowed to “fight with everything we have” against Farage’s brand of politics, framing the Reform leader as an obstacle to “national renewal”. While his address contained few new policies, the PM did announce plans for “virtual hospitals” and the scrapping of Tony Blair’s target of sending half of all young people to university, shifting the focus towards apprenticeships and vocational training.

What happened
A military court in Kinshasa has sentenced former Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila (pictured above) to death in absentia for treason, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Judges ruled that Kabila conspired with the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel group, which seized Goma, Bukavu and key airports this year. He was also ordered to pay $33 billion in damages. Kabila, who ruled Congo from 2001 to 2019, has denied the allegations. His whereabouts remain unknown.

Who said what
Kabila has dismissed the case as “arbitrary” and an “instrument of oppression”. His People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy called the ruling “a political, unfair decision”, while party secretary Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary accused the government of seeking to “eliminate” a rival.

What next?
It was “not immediately clear how the sentence could be carried out”, said the Associated Press’s Saleh Mwanamilongo, because Kabila’s whereabouts remain unknown since he last was seen in public in rebel-controlled Goma this year. Meanwhile, the conflict in eastern Congo continues despite a July ceasefire, with millions displaced and accusations of foreign involvement still unresolved.

What happened
Donald Trump has announced that he will put a 100% tariff “on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States”. The US president made the statement on Truth Social, but offered no further information.

Who said what
If he follows through on his threat it would mark the first tariff “on a service rather than a good”, said CNN. The US leader said the film industry had been stolen from the US like “candy from a baby”.

Such a move could “prove particularly damaging to the British film industry”, which relies heavily on international investment, said The Times, although the president previously told the paper that James Bond had “nothing to worry about”.

It would also “upend Hollywood’s global business model”, said Reuters. It shows “Trump’s willingness to extend protectionist trade policies into cultural industries” and raises “uncertainty for studios that depend heavily on cross-border co-productions and international box-office revenue”.

What next?
It is “unclear” how the levy would work in practice, said The Times. The UK government is still awaiting any details.

Like pipes, statues and nails, the Moon can rust. Such rusting has occurred despite a seeming lack of necessary components – but all signs of blame point to the Earth. A new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters posits that the relevant rust-forming particles are coming from the Earth’s atmosphere during a short period in the lunar cycle.

Hematite, also known as rust, was first found on the Moon in 2020 during India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission. The discovery puzzled scientists because rust is formed through the process of oxidation, which, like the name suggests, requires oxygen as well as water. But there is no oxygen on the Moon and water is extremely limited. “It’s very puzzling,” Shuai Li, a researcher at the University of Hawaii, told Nasa in 2020.

The Earth and the Moon are usually “bathed in a stream of charged particles emanating from the sun”, said the journal Nature. But for approximately five days out of the month-long lunar cycle, “the Earth passes between the sun and the Moon, blocking most of the flood of solar particles”. When this happens the “Moon is exposed mainly to particles that had been part of Earth’s atmosphere before blowing into space”. This is called Earth wind.

The Earth wind contains ions of nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen from the planet’s atmosphere. These charged particles can “then embed themselves in the lunar soil and cause the chemical reactions required to create rust”, said The Independent.

These findings “provide valuable insights into the widespread distribution of lunar hematite and indicate a long-term material exchange between the Earth and the Moon”, said the study.