Afternoon.

It’s Tuesday 8th September: Britain is restricting trade with Israeli settlements, spending billions on space, and England's teenagers have done rather well in the world's biggest school test.

Kettle on.

📅 On this day: In 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, aged 96. She had reigned for 70 years, longer than any British monarch, and was succeeded by her eldest son, King Charles III.

The UK government is set to ban imports of goods produced in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, a significant toughening of British policy towards Israel.

A bit of context helps here. The West Bank is territory Palestinians want as part of a future state, but hundreds of thousands of Israelis live in settlements built there since Israel captured the territory in 1967. The UK, along with most of the international community, considers those settlements illegal under international law. Israel disputes that interpretation.

Until now, Britain has discouraged businesses from trading with the settlements. The new policy would go further by prohibiting those goods from being imported into the UK. It is not a ban on Israeli goods generally, and settlement products make up only a small part of the roughly £6bn traded between Britain and Israel each year.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband says the move is intended to protect the possibility of a two-state solution, where Israel and an independent Palestinian state exist alongside each other. Israeli ministers have reacted angrily. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for Britain's ambassador to be expelled, while other Israeli officials have threatened retaliatory measures.

The government has unveiled a new UK space strategy, setting out how it plans to spend £7.8bn on space programmes between now and 2030.

Satellites help run things we use constantly, including phone networks, navigation, banking and weather forecasting. The government says nearly 20% of UK GDP relies on satellite services, while losing GPS could cost the economy around £1bn a day.

The strategy therefore focuses heavily on making those systems harder to disrupt. Britain plans to develop a more resilient national satellite communications network, improve its ability to track objects and threats in orbit, and strengthen its ability to launch satellites from the UK.

There are more earthbound benefits too. The government says space technology could help provide better phone signals and internet connections on trains, which may finally let train wifi live up to the promise it's been making since roughly 2009.

The £7.8bn isn't all new money announced today. It brings existing and planned government space spending together through 2030, including defence programmes. Among the new commitments is another £30m for the SaxaVord spaceport in Shetland.

England's 15-year-olds have performed strongly in the latest PISA international education tests, outperforming pupils in most participating countries in reading, maths and science.

PISA is basically the World Cup of school statistics. Run by the OECD every three years, it tests hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds around the world, not simply on whether they remember what they were taught, but whether they can use their reading, maths and science knowledge to solve problems.

England performed above the international average across all three subjects, with particularly strong results in reading and science. The results come as performance has been falling across many countries, particularly in reading.

There is a sizeable difference within the UK, though. England and Northern Ireland performed more strongly, while Wales remained the lowest-performing UK nation and was slightly below the international average in all three subjects.

As ever with international league tables, they aren't a definitive ranking of who has the “best” schools. Different education systems and pupils aren't perfectly comparable. But they are one of the biggest attempts we have to measure what teenagers around the world can actually do with what they've learned. And on that measure, England received a pretty good report card.

More than 40 major retailers have joined a new government-backed push to support 100,000 young people into retail employment by 2029. The first part is Opening Shift, offering two-to-four-week work placements to 18-to-24-year-olds who aren't in work, education or training. More than 11,300 placements have already been pledged by companies including Aldi, Amazon, Asda, Tesco, M&S and Primark.

Participants will continue receiving Universal Credit and get an interview when they finish. The scheme is aimed at breaking the familiar problem of needing experience to get a job, while needing a job to get experience. There are currently almost one million 16-to-24-year-olds in the UK who aren't in employment, education or training.

Next has won an appeal allowing it to continue paying warehouse workers more than shop-floor staff, despite the jobs previously being judged to be of equal value. Thousands of mostly female shop workers argued they were being paid less than predominantly male warehouse workers. Next said warehouse wages needed to be higher because it was harder to recruit and retain people for those jobs.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal has now accepted that market conditions can justify the difference in basic pay in this case. The ruling does not mean employers can simply pay men and women different amounts for work of equal value, and some disputes over other benefits remain unresolved. The decision could matter well beyond Next, with similar equal-pay cases involving other major supermarkets and retailers.

England and Wales's police inspectorate says investigating crime remains one of the weakest areas of policing, with too many forces failing to consistently get basic investigations right. Inspectors have previously identified problems including crimes being handed to officers without the right skills, reasonable lines of inquiry not being followed and victims not being kept properly informed.

The latest inspection cycle isn't complete, so this isn't a verdict on every police force in England and Wales. But among the forces assessed so far, crime investigation has been the poorest-performing area. 

A US nuclear company backed by Bill Gates wants to start generating electricity in Britain by 2034. TerraPower is developing Natrium reactors, a newer nuclear design that uses liquid sodium rather than water for cooling and can store heat to increase electricity output when demand rises.

Its first reactor is being built in Wyoming, and the company is now putting the design through Britain's regulatory approval process. There isn't a UK site yet, so we're some distance from Gates flicking the big nuclear switch. But Britain is actively trying to attract newer reactor technologies as it looks for more low-carbon electricity that doesn't depend on whether the wind happens to be blowing.

Australia is proposing new rules for social-media feeds that are pleasingly easy to understand: platforms would have to let you choose whether the algorithm decides what you see. Under the proposed “My Feed, My Way” rules, users could choose between the usual personalised recommendations or a feed made up of posts from friends and creators they actually follow.

Platforms would also face tougher requirements to explain how they're reducing harmful content, with potential fines of up to A$109.2m for breaking the rules. It's only proposed legislation for now, but given that social-media algorithms tend not to respect national borders, the experiment may be worth watching.

A social network showing you the people you deliberately asked to follow. Revolutionary stuff.

Turns out British waters have more sharks than you might expect. More than 40 species of shark occur around Britain, ranging from little catsharks and dogfish to blue sharks, porbeagles and enormous basking sharks. The problem is that scientists know surprisingly little about many of them.

So University of Exeter researchers are starting a three-year project to study three particularly vulnerable species: porbeagle, tope and blue sharks. They'll use DNA samples, decades of fishing records and electronic tags to work out where the sharks feed, mate and migrate. Recreational anglers will help too, reporting sightings and catches before releasing the sharks back into the water.

Some of the tags will stay attached for around a year, recording where a shark travels and how deep it dives.

But don't worry, you don't need to reconsider that dip next summer. Porbeagles may look rather like smaller great whites, but researchers say they're not considered dangerous to people. Remember that when one is swimming towards you.

Have a great day.

See you tomorrow.