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  • WeekDay AM: 10 Things you need to know this morning
    PM slams Farage, Congo sentences Kabila to death, and why the Moon is rusting

     
    today’s politics story

    Starmer targets Farage at Labour conference

    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.

     
     
    today’s international story

    Congo court sentences ex-president Kabila to death

    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.

     
     
    Today’s entertainment story

    Trump threatens tariffs on overseas-made films

    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.

     
     

    It’s not all bad

    Scientists in the US have created human eggs from skin cells, raising hopes of new fertility treatments for women unable to produce viable eggs and for same-sex male couples seeking to have genetically related children. The Oregon team adapted the cloning techniques first used to create Dolly the sheep, but acknowledged that major hurdles remain. “This is proof of concept,” said lead researcher Professor Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who warned that it could be a decade before safe, effective treatments were available.

     
     
    under the radar

    The Moon is rusting

    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.

     
     
    on this day

    1 October 1891

    Stanford University opened its doors after being founded by Leland and Jane Stanford, who donated an eyewatering $40 million in memory of their son. It still holds the legal name of Leland Stanford Junior University. Herbert Hoover, future 31st president of the United States, was in the first graduating class. The university recently topped The Wall Street Journal College Pulse rankings for this year.

     
     
    Today’s newspapers

    ‘Common enemy’

    Keir Starmer’s conference speech “sought to unite the Labour Party” against the “common enemy” of Reform and “end questions over his leadership”, says The Times. Yesterday was “the day Labour dragged politics into the gutter”, says the Daily Mail, after the prime minister described Nigel Farage as an “enemy” of Britain. “Who’s the nasty party now?” it asks. The Daily Express leads with an interview with Kemi Badenoch. The Tory leader said she is the only politician with the “backbone” to take the “toughest” decisions Britain needed, predicting that Labour would leave an “almighty mess”.

    See the newspaper front pages

     
     
    tall tale

    Ruff road ahead

    A dog in Canada was successfully signed up to an online driving course in a bid to show gaps in the identity verification process on the Alberta Motor Association (AMA) site. Phoebe, the nine-year-old pug, “didn’t complete” the course herself, said Global News, but her owner managed to do it under her name, apparently with no identification check. But the AMA said the certificate could only be validated in person so the “false profile” would not have worked.

     
     

    Morning Report was written and edited by Arion McNicoll, Elliott Goat, Will Barker, Ross Couzens and Chas Newkey-Burden.

    Image credits, from top: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images; John Wessels / AFP / Getty Images; David Swanson / AFP / Getty Images; Jose A. Bernat Bacete / Getty Images.

    Morning Report and Evening Review were named Newsletter of the Year at the Publisher Newsletter Awards 2025
     

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