What happened
Kemi Badenoch has kicked off the Conservatives’ annual conference with a series of policy pledges and a 100-page document setting out the party’s key values and priorities. The Tory leader vowed to expand free childcare for people earning more than £100,000, promised 50,000 new prison places and hinted at inheritance tax changes.

Who said what
Speaking in Birmingham yesterday, Badenoch said the Conservatives needed to be ready to govern from “day one”, which is why she has published “The Right Way”, a principles pamphlet inspired by Margaret Thatcher’s 1976 “The Right Approach” essay.

The Tory leader “is in a bullish mood”, said Tim Shipman in The Spectator, and she’s “not frightened of the ‘nasty party’ sobriquet which used to be tossed around”.

She will frame this as a “foil to the people-pleasing tendencies” of Andy Burnham, said Anne McElvoy in The Independent. “Being ‘more aggressive’, as she puts it, may also be a risk worth taking for a party which needs to show it can chip away at the appeal Reform exerts.”

What next?
Shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith is expected to outline broader changes that the Conservatives might make to the tax system in his keynote speech to the conference later today.

What happened
A Russian drone has hit Kyiv’s Northern Bridge over the Dnipro River for the second time in two days. Two people were said to have been injured in the fireball explosion on Sunday. The city’s Southern Bridge has also been struck multiple times in recent days.

Who said what
The bridges “still stand”, but daily life has been “severely disrupted” as local authorities restrict traffic due to the damage and threat of further attacks, said The New York Times. The capital is “bisected by the broad Dnipro River”, meaning that many Ukrainians rely on the structures to get to work and back.

Moscow is ramping up attacks on the capital’s critical infrastructure in response to Ukraine’s threats to increase its strikes on Russian oil refineries, said the BBC. Sunday’s attack came as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz arrived in Kyiv for a “show of support against Russia’s continuing full-scale invasion”.

What next?
As teams worked to repair the bridges, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Germany would provide a new defence and energy support package worth more than €1.3 billion (£1.1 billion).

Authorities in South Africa’s capital city have set out plans to round up and remove about 60 chacma baboons.

The animals are increasingly coming “into conflict” with the city’s human residents, said Reuters. They can be “intimidating” – males grow up to one metre tall and weigh about 50kg – and this urban primate population has adapted to city life, raiding bins, cars and houses for food.

But plans to move the baboons to a newly built sanctuary have “triggered a bitter dispute” over ‌whether they should be “confined, culled or allowed to co-exist with residents”. Protests are ongoing, and the issue could play a major role in Cape Town’s upcoming municipal elections.

Problems with baboons in the city stretch back decades, but they have “reached boiling point” over the past two years, said The Guardian. In the early 2000s the city authorities stopped the culling of baboon troops in response to public pressure, but that has since seen the population swell by a third – to roughly 500.

Geography is “partially to blame” as the baboons are “boxed in” between the steep landscape of the Table Mountain National Park and “the sprawling urban development that stretches to the Atlantic Ocean”.

“The best solution to resolving conflicts is to prevent them,” said US anthropology professor Shirley C. Strum on The Conversation. Preventing undesirable baboon behaviour, such as raiding food, is easier than trying to tackle it once it’s become engrained. Translocation and culls are not perfect solutions. “Conflict between baboons and humans won’t change unless human behaviour and attitudes change.”