What happened
The Home Office has announced that military camps will be used to temporarily house about 900 migrants – “the first of up to 10,000”, according to The Times. The policy reverses the government’s stance on housing migrants after it vowed in August to stop using hotels for the purpose.

Who said what
A Home Office spokesperson said the government was “furious” at current migrant housing arrangements, pledging to “close every asylum hotel”.

Liberal Democrat MP Angus MacDonald, whose constituency includes Inverness, the site of one of the barracks proposed for the scheme, voiced concerns about the proposal. “I very much thought the idea of putting them in army camps was to have them out of town and make them less of an issue for the local population,” said McDonald.

What next?
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is prepared to use disused military sites over hotels in the future “even if the costs increase initially”, said The Times. There are also plans to build “pre-fabricated, modular units similar to Portakabins” on certain sites.

What happened
Prunella Scales, best known for her role as Sybil in “Fawlty Towers”, has died at the age of 93. In a statement, her sons Samuel and Joseph West said their mother, who battled dementia for more than a decade, had been watching the classic ’70s sitcom the day before she died.

Who said what
A classically trained actor, it was as the long-suffering wife of Basil Fawlty that Scales achieved “worldwide fame and recognition”, cementing her place as “one of the most successful and popular comedy actresses of her generation”, said Sky News.

Her performance was one of “truly magnificent awfulness”, one critic wrote at the time, but what she achieved was “nonetheless a superb comic creation” and “the perfect foil to John Cleese’s manic, snobbish Basil”, said The Times.

A spokesman for Keir Starmer said Scales had been part of “a golden era for British comedy”.

What next?
Funeral plans have yet to be announced. Scales is survived by her two sons with actor Timothy West (who died late last year), along with seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

In the first half of this year renewable energy overtook coal power to become the largest source of electricity in the world. But production rates of energies like solar and wind “fluctuate according to the weather, the time of day and the season”, said energy news site Oil Price, and so supply doesn’t always sync up to demand. So-called “megabatteries” could bridge the gap.

Megabatteries soak up extra power generated through the day and “discharge energy as the sun sets and demand rises”, said the Financial Times. “Breakthroughs in battery design have played a major role in improving efficiency” and making batteries a viable option for mass energy storage. The increase in AI data centres and concerns over energy grid reliability mean that “batteries are expected to become a crucial cog in energy systems across the world”.

“Battery storage today is what wind and solar were a decade ago,” a London-based infrastructure investor told European Business Magazine. “The risk is lower, regulation is clearer and capital is flooding in.” The “core appeal of batteries is flexibility”, said the magazine. They “store power when it’s cheap and abundant, then release it when it’s scarce or expensive”, which makes them “invaluable for stabilising grids”.

Megabatteries are “quietly redefining what energy security looks like”, said the European Business Network. In the past “it meant barrels of oil or cubic meters of gas”, but now it is “measured in megawatt-hours of flexible storage – the ability to shift electricity from when it’s produced to when it’s needed”.