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In electing a new prime minister, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic party could have opted for generational change in the form of 43-year-old Shinjiro Koizumi. It could have chosen a return to the nationalistic conservatism of former leader Shinzo Abe — and with it a first female prime minister — in the shape of Sanae Takaichi. Instead it went through door number three, an unexpected one, and selected 67-year-old Shigeru Ishiba, something of an outsider within his own party, who triumphed and won the top job at the fifth time of asking.

Ishiba is widely respected as an expert in defence policy and an honest, conscientious leader who is close to his rural constituents in Tottori prefecture. He has served as minister of defence and minister of agriculture, among other posts. Yet he is a singular figure, more popular with the public than with his parliamentary colleagues, who has spent the past decade sitting outside the main currents of Japanese politics. On economics, on the US-Japan alliance and in the management of his own party, some of Ishiba’s past positions will make it harder to run a successful administration. The new prime minister has his work cut out for him.

Ishiba’s most immediate challenge will be to form a cabinet. Given his enmity with power brokers such as former prime minister Taro Aso, it will be tricky to get the balance right. Ishiba’s path to victory relied on support from regional party members, who catapulted him into a run-off among parliamentarians with Takaichi, the candidate of the right. Ishiba was the second choice of enough of his fellows to emerge as a narrow victor, by 215 votes to 194, but his base of support in the parliamentary party is small. Ishiba is likely to call a general election quickly. Victory will strengthen his position. But he will have to watch his back for internal rivals at least as carefully as he handles the official opposition.

On the economy, Ishiba has signalled he will stick for now to the policies of his predecessor, Fumio Kishida, which are still, in essence, the policies of Abe. That is sensible. Ishiba favours the continued normalisation of the Bank of Japan’s monetary policy, which is desirable, provided it is consistent with keeping inflation at the 2 per cent target.

In the past, however, he was a fierce opponent of Abe’s stimulus. He has talked about raising taxes on business. He is ardently in favour of economic revitalisation for regional Japan, although how he might achieve this is unclear. None of his rhetoric is obviously supportive of economic growth. The yen rose and stock futures fell on news of his victory.

During the leadership campaign, Ishiba talked about creating an Asian Nato, presumably to defend its members against China. Yet it is not clear who, other than Japan, would want to join. He is likely, at least, to maintain Japan’s improved relations with South Korea.

Ishiba has often objected to the inequality of the US-Japan alliance, under which Washington protects Tokyo, but Japan is obliged to host US troops on its soil. It is an uneasy thought to imagine Ishiba — an earnest, serious man — discussing his desire to reshape the alliance with a mercenary, isolationist Donald Trump, should the latter regain the US presidency in a few weeks’ time.

After defeats in 2008, 2012, 2018 and 2020, Ishiba’s achievement of the premiership is a testament to the power of perseverance. His genuine personality and obvious respect for the voters give him public appeal. To succeed as the leader of a divided party, however, he will need to show a strong streak of pragmatism, at least for an initial phase, rather than pursue his own, long-held political projects.

A FLIGHT attendant has revealed the £1.50 item that is a game-changer when sitting next to smelly passengers.

Enduring a long-haul flight next to a smelly traveller is a nightmare for any passenger.

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Susannah Carr, a flight attendant for a major US airline, advises wearing a mask if you find yourself in that unfortunate situation.

She said: “Throw one of those disposable masks in your bag.

“Even if you’re not afraid of germs, that can be a barrier to one of those smells.”

Travellers can purchase disposable masks for just £1.50 from Nursecall Matts.

Alternatively, Boots is offering a pack of five for £2.99, reduced from its original price of £5.99.

The seasoned flight attendant also suggested that applying a dab of Vicks VapoRub beneath your nose could be another effective solution.

Susannah claimed that this method is a common practice among crew members when they are assigned to collect rubbish.

She added that flight attendants regularly use essential oils such as peppermint to help shield themselves from odours in the cabin.

Vicks Vaporub can be bought on Amazon for just under £5.

Travellers who would prefer to use essential oils can purchase the items from Superdrug starting at just £4.99.

It comes after a savvy flight attendant revealed the £1.20 item she always takes with her whenever she boards a plane.

TikTok star Destanie Armstrong has shared the clever way she avoids having to eat unappetising plane food by packing her own quick and easy snack which can be made onboard almost all planes.

The Philadelphia-based flight attendant has racked up 70,000 followers online for her tips and tricks on how to best prepare for a flight.

With viewers being left amazed at her latest suggestion on how to keep your taste buds happy even when you’re up in the air.

The 25-year-old air stewardess says she would never board a plane hungry just in case you end up fancying food during the long haul journey.

But on the rare occasion where she forgets to fuel up her body or even on extra long flights, Destanie says she will always pack a handy snack.

She told her TikTok followers: “You can’t depend on these flights to have food and even if they do, a lot of the times the options aren’t food.”

The seasoned flyer said she always packs two pots of noodles in her hand luggage.

Almost all planes have hot water onboard, according to Destanie, meaning it is a great option to have.

It is even more useful if you either don’t want to pay the high price for snacks or don’t feel like eating any of the food options available.

Most noodle pots cost around £1 meaning they are a great and cheap option.

Family favourite brand Batchelors Super Noodles can be found in supermarkets for only £1 and come in a whole variety of flavours.

Six people have died from an outbreak of Marburg virus in Rwanda, the health minister has announced.

Sabin Nsanzimana said most of the victims were healthcare workers in the intensive care unit.

Twenty cases have been identified since the outbreak was confirmed on Friday.

Marburg, with a fatality rate of up to 88%, is from the same virus family as Ebola. It spreads to humans from fruit bats and then through contact with bodily fluids of infected individuals.

Symptoms include fever, muscle pains, diarrhoea, vomiting and, in some cases, death through extreme blood loss.

There are no specific treatments or a vaccine for the virus but a range of blood products, drug and immune therapies are being developed, according to the World Health Organization.

Rwanda says it is intensifying contact tracing, surveillance and testing to help contain the spread.

Authorities are urging the public to stay vigilant, wash their hands with clean water and soap or sanitiser and report all suspected cases.

Neighbouring Tanzania reported an outbreak in 2023, while three people died in Uganda in 2017.

In its 2006 war with Hizbollah, Israel tried to kill Hassan Nasrallah three times.

One air strike missed — the leader of Hizbollah had earlier left the spot. The others failed to penetrate the concrete reinforcements of his underground bunker, according to two people familiar with the attempted assassinations.

On Friday night, the Israeli military fixed those mistakes. It tracked Nasrallah to a bunker built deep below an apartment complex in south Beirut, and dropped as many as 80 bombs to make sure he was killed, according to Israeli media.

“We will reach everyone, everywhere,” bragged the pilot of the F-15i warplane that the Israeli army said dropped the lethal payload, destroying at least four residential buildings.

But the confident swagger of the Israeli military and security establishment, which has in the past few weeks delivered a steady drumbeat of devastating blows to one of its biggest regional rivals, belies an uncomfortable truth: in nearly four decades of battling Hizbollah, only recently has Israel truly turned the tide.

What changed, said current and former officials, is the depth and quality of the intelligence that Israel was able to lean on in the past two months, starting with the July 30 assassination of Fuad Shukr, one of Nasrallah’s right-hand men, as he visited a friend not far from Friday’s bombing site.

These officials described a large-scale reorientation of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts on Hizbollah after the surprising failure of its far more powerful military to deliver a knockout blow against the militant group in 2006, or even to eliminate its senior leadership, including Nasrallah.

For the next two decades, Israel’s sophisticated signals intelligence Unit 8200, and its military intelligence directorate, called Aman, mined vast amounts of data to map out the fast-growing militia in Israel’s “northern arena”.

Miri Eisin, a former senior intelligence officer, said that required a fundamental shift in how Israel viewed Hizbollah, a Lebanese guerrilla movement that had sapped Israel’s will and endurance in the quagmire of its 18 year-long occupation of south Lebanon. For Israel that ended in 2000 in an ignominious retreat, accompanied by a significant loss of intelligence gathering.

Instead, Eisin said, Israeli intelligence widened its aperture to view the entirety of Hizbollah, looking beyond just its military wing to its political ambitions and growing connections with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Nasrallah’s relationship with Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad.

“You have to define, in that sense, exactly what you’re looking for,” she said. “That’s the biggest challenge, and if done well, it allows you to look at this in all its complexity, to look at the whole picture.”

Israeli intelligence had for nearly a decade referred to Hizbollah as a “terror army”, rather than as a terrorist group “like Osama bin Laden in a cave”, she said. It was a conceptual shift that forced Israel to study Hizbollah as closely and broadly as it had the Syrian army, for instance.

As Hizbollah grew in strength, including in 2012 deploying to Syria to help Assad quell an armed uprising against his dictatorship, it gave Israel the opportunity to take its measure. What emerged was a dense “intelligence picture” — who was in charge of Hizbollah’s operations, who was getting promoted, who was corrupt, and who had just returned from an unexplained trip.

While Hizbollah’s fighters were battle hardened in Syria’s bloody war, the militant group’s forces had grown to keep pace with the drawn-out conflict. That recruitment also left them more vulnerable to Israeli spies placing agents or looking for would-be defectors. 

“Syria was the beginning of the expansion of Hizbollah,” said Randa Slim, a programme director at the Middle East Institute in Washington. “That weakened their internal control mechanisms and opened the door for infiltration on a big level.”

The war in Syria also created a fountain of data, much of it publicly available for Israel’s spies — and their algorithms — to digest. Obituaries, in the form of the “Martyr Posters” regularly used by Hizbollah, were one of them, peppered with little nuggets of information, including which town the fighter was from, where he was killed, and his circle of friends posting the news on social media. Funerals were even more revealing, sometimes drawing senior leaders out of the shadows, even if briefly.

A former high-ranking Lebanese politician in Beirut said the penetration of Hizbollah by Israeli or US intelligence was “the price of their support for Assad”.

“They had to reveal themselves in Syria,” he said, where the secretive group suddenly had to stay in touch and share information with the notoriously corrupt Syrian intelligence service, or with Russian intelligence services, who were regularly monitored by the Americans.

“They went from being highly disciplined and purists to someone who [when defending Assad] let in a lot more people than they should have,” said Yezid​​​​ Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “The complacency and arrogance was accompanied by a shift in its membership — they started to become flabby.”

That was a departure for a group that took pride in is ability to fend off Israel’s vaunted intelligence prowess in Lebanon. Hizbollah blew up Shin Bet’s headquarters in Tyre not once but twice in the early years of Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. At one point in the late 1990s, Israel realised that Hizbollah was hijacking its then-unencrypted drone broadcasts, learning about the Israel Defense Forces’ own targets and methods, according to two people familiar with the issue.

Israel’s broadened focus on Hizbollah in the region was accompanied by a growing, and eventually insurmountable technical advantage — spy satellites, sophisticated drones and cyber-hacking capabilities that turn mobile phones into listening devices.

It collects so much data that it has a dedicated group, Unit 9900, which writes algorithms that sift through terabytes of visual images to find the slightest changes, hoping to identify an improvised explosive device by a roadside, a vent over a tunnel or the sudden addition of a concrete reinforcement, hinting at a bunker.

Once a Hizbollah operative is identified, his daily patterns of movements are fed into a vast database of information, siphoned off from devices that could include his wife’s cell phone, his smart car’s odometer, or his location. These can be identified from sources as disparate as a drone flying overhead, from a hacked CCTV camera feed that he happens to pass by and even from his voice captured on the microphone of a modern TV’s remote control, according to several Israeli officials.

Any break from that routine becomes an alert for an intelligence officer to sift through, a technique that allowed Israel to identify the mid-level commanders of the anti-tank squads of two or three fighters that have harassed IDF troops from across the border. At one point, Israel monitored the schedules of individual commanders to see if they had suddenly been recalled in anticipation of an attack, one of the officials said.

But each one of these processes required time and patience to develop. Over years, Israeli intelligence was able to populate such a vast target bank that in the first three days of its air campaign, its warplanes tried to take out at least 3,000 suspected Hizbollah targets, according to the IDF’s public statements.

“Israel had a lot of capabilities, a lot of intelligence stored waiting to be used,” said a former official. “We could have used these capabilities way longer ago during this war, but we didn’t.”

That patience appears to have paid off for the military. For more than 10 months, Israel and Hizbollah traded cross-border fire, while Israel killed a few hundred of Hizbollah’s low-level operatives, the vast majority of them within a slowly expanding theatre of the conflict, stretching a few kilometres north of the border.

That appears to have lulled Nasrallah into thinking that the two arch-rivals were involved in a new sort of brinkmanship, with well-defined red lines that could be managed until Israel agreed a ceasefire in Gaza with Hamas, allowing Hizbollah an “off-ramp” that would allow it to agree a ceasefire with Israel.

The group had only started this round of fire with Israel on October 8, in solidarity with Iran-backed Hamas, in an attempt to keep at least some Israeli firepower pinned down on its northern border.

“Hizbollah felt obliged to take part in the fight, but at the same time limited itself severely — there was never really any intention of them taking an initiative where they might have some advantage,” said Sayigh of the Carnegie Middle East Center.

“They seem to have thrown off a few rockets here and there, and taken a few hits in return, and getting lulled into a notion that this was the limit of it — they kept one, if not both, hands tied behind their back and did nothing approaching their own full capability.”

But even the possibility that Hizbollah would attempt the same sort of cross-border raid that Hamas had successfully pulled off on October 7 — killing 1,200 people in southern Israel, and taking 250 hostages back into Gaza — was enough for Israel to evacuate the communities near its border with Lebanon. Some 60,000 Israelis were forced from their homes, turning the border into an active war zone with Hizbollah.

To create the conditions for their return, PM Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have unleashed Israel’s more advanced offensive capabilities, according to officials briefed on the operations.

That included the unprecedented detonation of thousands of booby-trapped pagers two weeks ago, wounding thousands of Hizbollah members with the very devices that they had thought would help them avoid Israel’s surveillance.

It culminated on Friday with Nasrallah’s assassination, a feat that Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, had authorised in 2006 and the IDF had failed to deliver.

In recent months, if not years, Israeli intelligence had nearly perfected a technique that allowed it to, at least intermittently, locate Nasrallah, who had been suspected of mostly been living underground in a warren of tunnels and bunkers.

In the days after October 7, Israeli warplanes took off with instructions to bomb a location where Nasrallah had been located by Israel’s intelligence directorate Aman. The raid was called off after the White House demanded Netanyahu do so, according to one of the Israeli officials.

On Friday, Israeli intelligence appears to have pinpointed his location again — heading into what the IDF called “a command and control” bunker, apparently to a meeting that included several senior Hizbollah leaders and a senior Iranian commander of Revolutionary Guards operations.

In New York, Netanyahu was informed on the sidelines of his address at the UN General Assembly, where he rejected the notion of a ceasefire with Hizbollah and vowed to press on with Israel’s offensive. A person familiar with the events said that Netanyahu knew of the operation to kill Nasrallah before he delivered his speech.

Israel’s campaign is not over, says Netanyahu. It is still possible that Israel will send ground troops into southern Lebanon to help clear a buffer zone north of its border. Much of Hizbollah’s missile capabilities remain intact.

“Hizbollah did not disappear in the last 10 days — we’ve damaged and degraded them and they are in the stage of chaos and mourning,” said Eisin, the former senior intelligence officer. “But they still have lots of capabilities that are very threatening.”

Additional reporting by Chloe Cornish in Dubai

ROYAL Mail is increasing the price of stamps again in just a few days.

The price of first-class stamps will rise by 30p to £1.65, the second rise in a year, the delivery giant has confirmed.

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Royal Mail said the price increase will come into force from October 7.

It comes after first class stamp prices increased by 10p to £1.35 in April and by 10p to 85p for second class.

The company has frozen the cost of second class stamps at 85p until 2029 in a bid to keep the sending of letters affordable.

Royal Mail says it has tried to keep price increases as low as possible in the face of declining letter volumes, and inflationary pressures.

When announcing the price rise earlier this month, it also cited the costs associated with maintaining the so-called Universal Service Obligation (USO) under which deliveries have to be made six days a week.

Postal regulator Ofcom declared in early September that Royal Mail could be allowed to axe Saturday deliveries for second class letters as part of an overhaul of the service.

Ofcom, which has been consulting on the future of the universal postal service since January, said it should keep first class deliveries to six days a week.

Under the plans being considered, second class deliveries would not be made on Saturdays and would only be on alternate weekdays, but delivery times would remain unchanged at up to three working days.

Ofcom said no formal decision had been made and it continues to review the changes, with aims to publish a consultation in early 2025 and make a decision in the summer of next year.

Royal Mail said letter volumes have fallen from 20billion in 2004/5 to around 6.7billion a year in 2023/4, so the average household now receives four letters a week, compared to 14 a decade ago.

The number of addresses Royal Mail must deliver to has risen by 4million in the same period meaning the cost of each delivery continues to rise.

Royal Mail said the universal service needs urgent reform, adding: “The minimum requirements of the universal service haven’t changed for over 20 years despite major changes to how people communicate.

“We have no certainty on regulatory reform and the rate of letter decline and ongoing losses means that Royal Mail has had to take the necessary steps within its power to address the very real and urgent financial sustainability challenge the universal service faces right now.

Nick Landon, Royal Mail’s chief commercial officer, said it always considers price increases “very carefully”.

However, he said, as letter volumes have declined by two-thirds since their peak, the cost of delivering each letter has inevitably increased.

He added: “A complex and extensive network is needed to get every letter and parcel across the country for a single price – travelling on trucks, planes, ferries and in some cases drones before it reaches its final destination on foot. We are proud to deliver the universal service, but the financial cost is significant.

“The universal service must adapt to reflect changing customer preferences and increasing costs so that we can protect the one-price-goes anywhere service, now and in the future.”

Other Royal Mail changes

Royal Mail has urged the Government and Ofcom to review its obligations, arguing that it is no longer workable or cost-effective, given the decline in addressed letter post.

In its submission to Ofcom in April, it proposed ditching Saturday deliveries for second class post and cutting the service to every other weekday.

Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s group director for networks and communications, said: “If we decide to propose changes to the universal service next year, we want to make sure we achieve the best outcome for consumers.

“So we’re now looking at whether we can get the universal service back on an even keel in a way that meets people’s needs.

“But this won’t be a free pass for Royal Mail – under any scenario, it must invest in its network, become more efficient and improve its service levels.”

Royal Mail owner International Distribution Services (IDS), which agreed to a £3.57billion takeover by Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky in May, said “change cannot come soon enough” to the UK’s postal service.

Royal Mail also ousted old-style stamps and replaced them with barcoded ones last July.

The business said the move would make letters more secure.

Anyone who still has these old-style stamps and uses them may have to pay a surcharge.

How prices have changed

Royal Mail previously raised the price of first class stamps from £1.10 to £1.25 last October, before boosting them again in April.

Right now, a first class stamp costs £1.35, which covers the delivery of letters up to 100g.

Historically, the cost of stamps has seen a steady increase over the years, reflecting inflation and operational costs. For example, in 2000, a First Class stamp was priced at 41p.

A second class stamp is priced at 85p and also covers letters up to 100g.

The stamps can be bought individually if you buy it at a Post Office counter.

Otherwise, you can typically buy them in sets of multiple stamps.

The first class service typically delivers the next working day, including Saturdays, while the second class service usually delivers within 2-3 working days, also including Saturdays.

For larger letters, the cost of a first class stamp is £2.20 for items up to 100g, and a second class stamp for the same weight is £1.55.

Parcel delivery prices vary based on size and weight, starting from £3.69 for small parcels.

Additional services include the “signed for” option, which requires a signature upon delivery and adds an extra level of security.

The cost for first class signed for is £3.05, and for second class Signed for, it is £2.55.

The “special delivery” service guarantees next-day delivery by 1pm with compensation cover, with prices starting from £7.95.

Royal Mail periodically reviews and adjusts stamp prices, so it is advisable to check the latest rates on their official website or at your local post office.

How to beat the hike

Money guru Martin Lewis advised Brits to buy stamps in bulk before the new prices kick in to save a decent chunk of change for all their posting needs.

He said: “For years, every time stamps go up in price I’ve suggested people stock up and bulk-buy in advance, as provided the stamp doesn’t have a price on it and instead just says the postage class, it’s still valid after the hike.

“So you may as well stock up now, even if it’s just for Christmas cards for the next few Christmases.”

Do bear in mind though, if you stock up on stamps now, be careful to avoid fakes, he said.

Buy from reputable high street outlets and, where possible, hang on to your receipt.

Stamps are also available directly from the Royal Mail online shop, but you have to spend £50 to get free delivery.

Back in April, Royal Mail paused the £5 penalty for anyone who receives a letter with a fake stamp on it while it takes fresh action against counterfeits.

However, you could still be charged if you use a fake stamp when sending something.

To check whether a stamp is genuine, you can use Royal Mail’s new “fake stamp scanner” on the app.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

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