Nigel Farage has announced his resignation as the MP for Clacton, triggering a byelection in which he intends to stand as a candidate. The Reform UK leader is under scrutiny over his finances, with two investigations by the parliamentary standards watchdog over undeclared gifts.

During a 15-minute press conference, he accused the media of a ‘pile-on’ over his personal finances, and harassment of his family. He said his decision was part of ‘sticking two fingers up at the establishment’ and would prove the public want him to stay on as an MP.

Lucy Hough speaks to policy editor Kiran Stacey

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Three vessels, including a Qatari LNG carrier, struck within hours close to Oman

Qatar has warned Iran it will bear full legal responsibility after three tankers, including a Qatari LNG vessel, were struck within hours in the strait of Hormuz.

All three vessels were struck close to Oman which had suggested a new shipping corridor close to its coastline – a proposal opposed by Iran, which wants to charge ships using the waterway.

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The Reform UK leader’s ruse to head off scrutiny by forcing a byelection may work, but it’s all about him: no one else gains anything from it

Most people who closely follow British politics probably know the basics about Jaywick, an enclave of Clacton, on the Essex coast. A sprawling tangle of tracks, paths and old holiday shacks repurposed as permanent homes, it has been ranked as England’s poorest area several times since 2011, most recently in October last year.

I first visited in 2014, during the byelection campaign that would see the former Tory Douglas Carswell – remember him? – chosen as the UK Independence Party’s first MP. “Look at us,” one man told me. “We’re a backwater no one gives a shit about.” He was one of many Nigel Farage fans I spoke to; in 2024, when local people elected the Reform leader as Clacton’s new MP, many presumably did so with hopes of Jaywick’s neglect coming to an end. I suspect, unfortunately, that Farage’s extra-parliamentary earnings and international gallivanting have rather been giving them the impression that Jaywick remains a backwater no one gives a shit about.

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Over the past few centuries, humans have decimated bird populations — you can hear it in the thinning of the dawn chorus — but it’s difficult to notice sometimes because of shifting baseline syndrome.

Prins Harry zei dat de tabloid Daily Mail het leven van zijn vrouw Meghan Markle tot een „absolute misère” had gemaakt. De Britse rechter acht echter onvoldoende bewezen dat de krant op een onjuiste manier aan zijn informatie kwam. De uitgever zegt zo’n 50 miljoen pond aan proceskosten te willen verhalen op de prins en zijn mede-eisers.

Ruim een week reed er geen enkele trein vanaf Rotterdam naar het zuiden. Eén van de belangrijkste spoorverbindingen van Nederland kwam stil te liggen door een brand in een kabelgoot langs het spoor. De oorzaak? Een knik in een kabel, mogelijk als gevolg van uitzetting door de hitte.

Ruim een week reed er geen enkele trein vanaf Rotterdam naar het zuiden. Eén van de belangrijkste spoorverbindingen van Nederland kwam stil te liggen door een brand in een kabelgoot langs het spoor. De oorzaak? Een knik in een kabel, mogelijk als gevolg van uitzetting door de hitte.

After four years of operations around the Moon, NASA's CAPSTONE mission has bitten the lunar dust, in a manner of speaking. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) was launched in 2022, with a primary mission to validate the near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) intended for NASA's "paused" Gateway space station. Launched in June 2022 on a Rocket Lab Electron rocket, CAPSTONE had a troubled start to life, briefly giving controllers the silent treatment before slipping into lunar orbit in November 2022. The diminutive spacecraft was the first US commercial mission to orbit the Moon and spent an initial six months checking out the NRHO planned for the Gateway before its mission was extended and the spacecraft became, according to NASA, "a testbed for advanced communications, networking, autonomous navigation, and software-defined satellite technologies." The spacecraft was used to try out autonomous navigation software, which is useful when NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) has limited availability. During the Artemis II mission, for example, communications passes dropped to just a few per week. CAPSTONE was also used to test delay/disruption-tolerant networking (DTN), designed to handle lengthy communications delays and frequent signal gaps. "CAPSTONE became the first to fly the latest DTN protocols beyond Earth orbit and the first to run them in NASA's core Flight System, an open source framework that can be implemented on any spacecraft," NASA stated. However, continued NASA funding appears to have required justification after CAPSTONE completed its primary mission. On July 6, the agency announced that its CAPSTONE activities ended last month. While the spacecraft had a productive second life, hosting new applications and experiments, uncertainty around Gateway's future could have put a question mark over continued operations, although NASA has not stated that this was the case. It is unclear what a NASA-free future looks like for CAPSTONE. The spacecraft was designed and built by Terran Orbital and is owned and operated by Advanced Space. "Advanced Space will continue to use the spacecraft as a technology development testbed," NASA said. ®