WeekDay AM: 10 Things you need to know this morning
Israeli air strikes, a Europol sting, and why it's hard to leave shopping centres

 
today's international story

Israel strikes Lebanon after Hezbollah retaliation threat

What happened 
The Israeli military said it had carried out dozens of attacks in southern Lebanon soon after Hezbollah's leader vowed that "retribution will come" for explosions in the militant group's pagers and radios this week.

Who said what
Israel “will face just retribution and a bitter reckoning", said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, but added: "I will not discuss time, nor manner, nor place." After the televised remarks the Israeli Defense Forces said they had carried out more than 70 air strikes to "degrade Hezbollah's terrorist capabilities and infrastructure" and "bring security to northern Israel".

Israel's "multi-front battle … is now shifting northwards from Gaza to Lebanon", said Richard Kemp in The Telegraph. After this week's device explosions "it is winning its war against Hezbollah". "We should celebrate," added Kemp. Yet the BBC's Jeremy Bowen cautioned, this might look like a "tactical triumph for Israel", but "Hezbollah won't be deterred".


What next? 
Experts are divided over whether the wireless device attacks in Lebanon this week were legal, said The New York Times, but "in practice, no one is likely to be prosecuted under international law" given the "secretive nature of the operation".

Israel has already "deeply humiliated Hezbollah", which "shrinks the group's space for manoeuvre", said Lina Khatib in The Guardian. And while the Lebanese group is "seriously hobbled", it is also under "unprecedented pressure to strike back".

 
 
today's prisons story

Some prisoners set free early were not tagged

What happened
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said a number of prisoners released early in a bid to ease the overcrowding crisis in English and Welsh prisons had not been fitted with electronic tags.

Who said what
Releasing people without tags means they are "able to act without being monitored", said the BBC's Sima Kotecha, "increasing the risk of reoffending and danger to the public".

Prisons and Probation Minister James Timpson blamed Serco, the company that took over the MoJ's tagging contract in May.

"We are holding Serco to account to address delays in fitting some offenders with tags and will apply financial penalties against the company if this is not resolved quickly," said an MoJ spokesman in a statement.

What next?
Hundreds more prisoners are due to be freed next month in the second stage of the government's early release scheme. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood recently said the measures were necessary as overcrowding had pushed prisons to the "point of collapse".

 
 
Today's crime story

Police sting on encrypted app leads to 50 arrests

What happened
Police arrested more than 50 people in four countries after teaming up to hack an encrypted messaging app named Ghost. Investigators intercepted communications by Australian biker gangs, Middle Eastern drug smugglers, Italian mafia bosses and Irish crime syndicates, thwarted 50 murders and seized more than €16 million worth of drugs and €1 million in cash, said officials.

Who said what
"This was a truly global game of cat and mouse, and today the game is up," said Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, deputy executive director at Europol, which co-ordinated the operation.

Police monitored 1,000 messages a day sent by several thousand users that were organising crime "on an industrial scale". They also arrested Ghost's alleged creator Jay Je Yoon Jung at his home in Australia.

What next?
Ghost has fewer users than the larger encrypted phone networks it replaced when they were hacked by police, as the market became "fragmented", said Lecouffe. But "sometimes the smaller networks get the most important criminals".

 
 

It's not all bad

Surfers are joining the fight against climate change after a recent study found that nearly 90 million metric tonnes of carbon is stored around surf breaks globally, making these areas crucial for climate action. Conservationists analysed more than 4,800 surf spots in 113 countries, finding that ecosystems within one kilometre of waves hold 88 million tonnes of irrecoverable carbon. In response, Conservation International and surfers from the Save the Waves Coalition have helped set up 30 surf protected areas in Indonesia, Costa Rica and Peru that seek to safeguard not only surf breaks, but the ecosystems that surround them including coastal forests, mangroves, beaches and coral reefs.

 
 
under the radar

Why it's getting harder to leave shopping centres

If you've ever got lost in a shopping centre you shouldn't beat yourself up about it because they're designed to disorient you, according to an expert.

Escalators are positioned in shops "simply to make people get lost", David Gianotten, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, told The Sydney Morning Herald, and this is just one of many tricks used by retailers to get you to spend more.

Gianotten, who's been exploring the ways of retail, noticed that there was "always an extra bank of escalators" to divert shoppers so they "spend more money". This was done to disorient visitors and "slow them down enough" so they "looked at the merchandise nearby, distracting them from their target", said the newspaper.

Experts say "nothing" has "revolutionised shopping" and "cemented" the role of the shopping centre as much as "the invention of the escalator", which was launched in the 1850s to make it "effortless" for customers to reach upstairs floors.

Yet escalators are not the only feature of the shopping experience carefully designed to part you from your money. Shopping centres rarely have clocks in them and this is for a "manipulative reason", said Metro. The lack of clocks means "time seems to evaporate", so a "twenty-minute in-and-out trip" could "easily turn into an hours-long spending sesh".

It's also "an open secret" that shops and supermarkets "use techniques to entice people into spending more money", added Metro, including making shopping trolleys larger so shoppers can fit more inside and, in an "age-old favourite", it's "quite common for pricier products to be placed at eye level".

 
 
on this day

20 September 2011

The US military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, which only permitted gay people to serve if they kept their sexuality secret, was repealed. In 2016 Barack Obama lifted restrictions barring transgender people from the military – until Donald Trump reversed those changes two years later. In 2021 Joe Biden overturned Trump's de-facto ban. Now all LGBTQ+ people can enlist.

 
 
Today's newspapers

"Shop of Horrors" says The Mirror after the BBC found more than 20 female ex-employees say the late billionaire and Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed sexually assaulted or raped them. Metro says the tycoon "was a monster". The Middle East has stepped closer to a "regional war", says the i paper. Meanwhile, the Daily Express features RAF veteran Jack Barlow who says he survived atomic bomb tests but now wonders if he will survive the coming months due to his winter fuel payment being "snatched away".

See the newspaper front pages

 
 
tall tale

Baby driver

An eight-year-old in Ohio is probably grounded after she hit a mailbox while driving her mother's car to a store 11 miles away. Her family reported her missing last Sunday, while a neighbour's doorbell camera filmed her getting into the family's SUV alone. Officers in the neighbouring town spotted the vehicle in the car park of a Target store and told her family to come and get her. "We did let her finish her frappuccino," police wrote on Facebook. "We're not mean."

 
 

Morning Report was written and edited by Arion McNicoll, Harriet Marsden, Sorcha Bradley and Chas Newkey-Burden.

Image credits, from top: Anwar Amro / AFP via Getty Images; In Pictures Ltd. / Corbis via Getty Images; Phil Nijhuis / ANP / AFP via Getty Images; Shutterstock.