What happened
Kemi Badenoch has unveiled plans to reduce the benefits paid to some long-term unemployed people and restrict how they can spend the money, saying welfare should not become a “lifestyle choice for those who can’t be bothered”. Under the proposed changes, people who have been out of work for more than six months and have not built up enough employment history would receive only 70% of the standard Universal Credit allowance, with payments made through a “back to work” card that could block spending on alcohol, cigarettes, cash withdrawals and betting.

Who said what
Badenoch said the system should reward people who had paid into it, arguing that “if you can work, you should work”. The Conservatives estimate that the changes would save £538 million a year and affect up to 1.1 million people in the “searching for work” category. Labour described the proposed card scheme as unworkable.

“Some Labour MPs had hoped Andy Burnham would use his honeymoon period” to address the “spiralling” issue, said Nick Gutteridge in The Telegraph. But the PM “is thought to be wary of suffering the same fate as Sir Keir Starmer, who was fatally undermined by a welfare rebellion”.

What next?
The Conservatives are expected to develop the policy further ahead of their party conference.

What happened
The BBC is to axe sports bulletins on its news channel and will have to make more senior journalists redundant, the corporation has told its employees.

BBC Sport workers were told that 41 roles would be scrapped and were warned of the risk of compulsory redundancies. Corporation chiefs confirmed to The Telegraph that five new positions would be created, meaning a net loss of 36 jobs.

Who said what
Some departments “face losing up to a third of their staff”, said The Times. Insiders told the newspaper that “as a result of the cuts, the number of fresh stories on the BBC Sport website will drop by about 50%, to somewhere in the region of 20 a day”.

The axing of sports bulletins “has been seen as part of a wider shift in how sports news is consumed”, said The Guardian. Senior BBC figures “believe that many sports fans have already seen crucial goals and developments on social media long before they appear on bulletins”.

What next?
It is believed that strike action “is being considered” by corporation staff, added The Telegraph. The cuts have been imposed as part of wider plans by the broadcaster to lay off 10 per cent of its workforce by 2028.

A war is being waged over the future of Argentina’s Andean glaciers as environmentalists warn of the dangers posed by heavy resource mining and the construction of vast new data centres.

These might be a boon for the country’s fragile economy, but geologists fear that they could lead to severe water shortages and devastating flash-flooding – similar to the disaster that killed more than a thousand people in Nepal and Tibet last month.

President Javier Milei has looked to attract major oil ⁠and mining investments to Argentina through tax breaks and regulatory reforms, including changes to the 2010 Glacier Law banning damaging commercial activity on the country’s nearly 17,000 documented glaciers.

The amendments, passed by MPs in April this year, transferred responsibility for defining protected glacier areas to provincial governments, something Milei said would “empower” them to permit exploitation in glacial zones where they judged there was “nothing to protect”, reported the BBC.

But the changes to the Glacier Law have sparked widespread public protest in areas reliant on them for water. Scientists and geologists have warned that glacial development will further accelerate the retreat of Andean ice sheets, creating unstable conditions that expose Argentina – as well as neighbouring Chile and Peru – to the risk of catastrophic floods and mudslides.

In November 2005, the collapse of the Laguna de los Erizos reservoir in San Juan province unleashed a 1.1 billion cubic feet mudslide that stretched for 155 miles, although its remote location prevented any deaths. “What happened in Nepal has already happened in Argentina,” Juan Pablo Milana, a researcher with Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, told Argentinian news site Infobae.