Morning Report
Lebanon braces for exodus, Tories head to Birmingham, and the war on polar bears

 
today's WORLD story

Lebanon's PM warns of displaced people crisis

What happened 
Israel's air strikes may have already forced as many as one million people from their homes, according to Lebanon's prime minister. Najib Mikati said repeated attacks had seen people flee the capital Beirut and other parts of the country. "It is the largest displacement movement that may have happened."

Lebanon has a population of between three and four million Lebanese people, 1.5 million Syrian refugees and 250,000 Palestinian refugees, so the estimated figure is a large proportion of its residents.

Who said what
Lebanon is "in a very critical moment", Nasser Yassin, the country's head of emergency disaster management, told Sky News. "We are on the verge of coming to a catastrophic humanitarian situation," he added, accusing Israel of "the professionalisation of genocide".

But Israel insists it is targeting Hezbollah members who are launching rocket attacks against the north of its territory. "We need to keep hitting Hezbollah hard," said Israel's military chief of staff Herzi Halevi.

What next? 
Now all eyes are turning to the border, where hundreds of Israeli tanks are gathering amid speculation of an imminent ground invasion. Israeli reservists, "savouring a final takeaway" at petrol stations near the Lebanese border, were "resolved to their task", said The Times.

The US has issued a last-minute appeal to both sides for restraint, but there were reports of an Israeli attack on central Beirut early this morning in what would be "the first time Israel’s military had struck the centre of Lebanon’s capital city since 2006", said The Guardian.

 
 
today's POLITICS story

Tory leadership race heats up in Birmingham

What happened
The Conservative Party conference has kicked off, with the leadership contest the hottest topic at the ICC in Birmingham. The four remaining candidates – Robert Jenrick (pictured above with his wife, Michal Berkner), Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat – are making their case to members before they are whittled down to two by MPs on 9 and 10 October.

Who said what
Those of us "fearing we would find ourselves participating in the funeral rites of a once great party" have been "pleasantly surprised", said Andrew Gimson for Conservative Home. The conference is "enlivened by the race for the leadership, which has suddenly become frantic".

There is talk of a "David Cameron moment", said Sky News. The former prime minister "surprised the 2005 conference with his casual, youthful, no-notes speech", allowing him to beat frontrunner David Davis and become the Conservative leader.

What next?
All four leadership candidates will face on-stage questions and give separate stump speeches before the conference concludes on Wednesday. The winner is due to be announced on 2 November.

 
 
Today's ENVIRONMENT story

The end of an era for coal

What happened
Britain's last coal-fired power station ceased operations today, marking the end of an industry.

Who said what
Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire, the country's "last bastion of coal", shut down at one minute past midnight, said The Times. The "national milestone" brings down the curtain "on nearly a century and a half of a polluting fuel that powered Britain's industrial revolution".

The UK will be the first G7 nation to phase out coal, a "testament to a remarkably successful drive to stamp down on the dirtiest source of carbon emissions", said The Economist. This is "partly due to luck" (the discovery of "abundant gas in the North Sea"), but is also the result of "deliberate policies".

What next?
The iconic cooling towers at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, which has been producing energy since 1967, are due to be demolished and its 125 staff will stay on for two years to decommission the site, tipped to one day become a green energy hub.

 
 

It's not all bad

A Spanish microbiologist has helped to restore a number of 18th-century paintings by Antonio Palomino using bacteria. Pilar Bosch was able to remove animal collagen glue that had been stuck on the frescoes since the 1960s by feeding bacteria samples of the glue to train them to produce enzymes to degrade it. She then spread the bacteria on to the paintings using a special gel. Once the gel was removed a few hours later the paintings were glue free. Bosch's next challenge is to train up bacteria to clean walls of spray-painted graffiti.

 
 
UNDER THE RADAR

The war on polar bears

A polar bear has been shot dead by police in a remote Icelandic village, the latest casualty of growing tensions between humans and the Arctic mammals.

Polar bears are not native to Iceland, but they occasionally travel there via ice floes from Greenland. Even that is "relatively rare", said The Associated Press – a polar bear was last seen in Iceland in 2016.

And despite being the world's largest land carnivore, attacks on humans are extremely uncommon – only 73 were recorded between 1870 and 2014, in Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia and the US. But the  frequency of them is increasing: 15 of those attacks took place this century. The rapid loss of sea ice due to climate change is "driving hungry bears to land and putting both at risk".

Another "fatal encounter and sightings in unusual locations" in Canada "foreshadow what experts say is a looming clash between polar bears and northern communities as climate change upends the habitat and food sources of the apex predator", said The Guardian.

Residents of Nunavut and Canada's Northwest Territories are taking the fight back to the bears. Killing one can be "financially lucrative", as governments spend "thousands of dollars in subsidies for pelts".

Encounters will increase and "get a lot worse", but eventually "it's going to get better" – at least from a human perspective, said Andrew Derocher, a biology professor at the University of Alberta. "This population of bears isn't expected to persist past mid-century."

 
 
on this day

30 September 1938

The leaders of Britain, Italy and France signed the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler, allowing the Third Reich to annex part of what was then Czechoslovakia. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain claimed it would prevent a Second World War, but it is widely seen as an act of appeasement that emboldened Nazi Germany. This year some European leaders cited the treaty as a warning against delaying support for Ukraine and similarly enabling Russia.

 
 
Today's newspapers

Israeli tanks are "at the border" with Lebanon, says The Times as it warns a ground invasion "looms" . The Financial Times reports that the Lebanese health ministry says Israel's offensive has already killed more than 1,000 people across the country in the past fortnight. The Mirror says Chancellor Rachel Reeves will divert "spare cash" into the NHS to mend what it describes as damage from years of cuts under the last Tory government. An insider says reducing waiting lists is a "priority". The Telegraph leads on comments by Tory leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch suggesting maternity pay has "gone too far", remarks she said were taken out of context.

See the newspaper front pages

 
 
tall tale

Ozempic chic

American online retailer Yandy has "cashed in" on the Ozempic drug craze with a "sexy" Halloween costume inspired by the increasingly popular weight-loss injections, said the New York Post. For $39.95 you can dress up as an "anti-flab jab" with a blue pillbox hat and "skimpy, body-hugging, blue and orange, tanktop-style dress" fashioned to look like an Ozempic syringe.

 
 

Morning Report was written and edited by Chas Newkey-Burden, Rebecca Messina, Hollie Clemence, Sorcha Bradley and Harriet Marsden, with illustrations by Julia Wytrazek.

Image credits, from top: Fadel Itani / AFP / Getty Images; Ian Forsyth / Getty Images; fantail / Getty Images; Illustration by Julia Wytrazek / Getty Images.