Ukrainian leader expresses hope for progress amid Trump’s Gaza deal, saying ‘it brings more hope for peace in other regions’

The European Union is seeking to coordinate with the United States and other G7 partners a response to tighter Chinese controls on the export of rare-earth minerals, trade ministers and officials from the bloc said on Tuesday.

China, the world’s largest rare-earth producer, dramatically expanded controls last week, adding new elements, refining technology and extra scrutiny for semiconductor users before planned talks between presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.

But we also need to be realistic. This is actually an area of common interest with our friends in the US. If we stick together we can much better pressure China to act in a fair way.

Of course these projects take time, but with this signal we got from China it’s clear we have to focus on accelerating these processes as much as possible.

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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Netflix’s animation mangles and sentimentalises Dahl’s black comedy about a gross and detestable married couple – relocating the action to Texas and introducing a plucky orphan heroine

This animated Netflix adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Twits is only fractionally less gruelling than eating wormy spaghetti or finding a toad stuffed in the bottom of your bed. Dahl’s story about one of the most dysfunctional marriages in fiction is not exactly burdened with plot: the 95-page original is essentially a series of mean pranks, all monstrously mangled here and tortuously added to.

There has been some outrage that Netflix have Americanised the story, but that is the least of this film’s problems. In the fictional city of Triperot, Mrs Twit (voiced by Margo Martindale) is a Texan in blue denim cowboy boots, unhappily married to Mr Twit (Johnny Vegas, keeping his Lancashire accent). The couple have built a rickety amusement park called Twitlandia, with rides made out of toilets and old mattresses, all powered by the magical tears of the Muggle-Wump monkeys. When authorities close down the amusement park on the grounds of health and safety, the gruesome twosome go to war with the city.

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© Photograph: Netflix/PA

© Photograph: Netflix/PA

© Photograph: Netflix/PA

It took an American president unbound by traditional domestic constraints to get this done and provide the parties with what they could accept

Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza demands atonement from Palestinians for the horrific acts of 7 October, not from Israel for the barbarity that followed. It calls for Gaza’s deradicalization but not an end to Israel’s messianism. It micromanages the future of Palestinian governance while saying nothing about the future of Israel’s occupation.

It is riddled with ambiguities, devoid of timetables, arbiters or consequences for inevitable eventual violations. If all goes according to plan – if the deal’s vagueness is not exploited to torpedo it; unavoidable clashes over subsequent phases do not get in the way of the first stage; Arab and Muslim states maintain pressure on the United States and the United States gets Israel to comply – life for Gazans will transition from utter hell to mere nightmare. Their condition will shift from defenceless prey to twice-dispossessed refugees in their own land. And still, it would be a momentous achievement.

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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

Even Donald Trump’s staunchest supporters might be surprised to see the U.S. president bring — possibly — peace to the Middle East. But the fact is that the bloody conflict that began when terrorists swarmed from Gaza into Israel on October 7, 2023, is on hold and there’s real potential for a long-term settlement that could reduce the threat to Israelis while bringing stability to Gaza. It’s early days yet, but even a glimmer of hope is more than the region usually sees. That said, there’s a long way to go from a ceasefire to ending the threat posed by Hamas and its international enablers. Read More

On Thursday, the Toronto District School Board had planned to put more than 2,600 students in an Arabic calligraphy workshop run by a niqab-wearing woman who uses her art to call for the obliteration of Israel. It was cancelled just in time, but questions remain: Why was such an event approved in the first place? And why isn’t the school board reviewing its vendor screening procedures? Read More

After four straight playoff seasons, the Philadelphia Phillies are at a crossroads deciding just how much to double-down on age and costs.

The gunman who unleashed chaos in a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper this summer is a stark reminder of how little we know about a devastating brain disease typically associated with NFL players — which can only be definitively diagnosed after death. Shane Tamura targeted the league’s Park Avenue headquarters, murdering NYPD Officer Didarul Islam and three bystanders...

In the words of Cole Porter, “Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?” “Art Fraud: 50 Fakes That Fooled the Art World,” the new book by Susie Hodge, will leave you wondering whether any work of art is the real McCoy. “Art fraud is rife,” Hodge begins. “Many experts believe that as...

"I'm really having trouble understanding why residents are being put in the position that a private business is dictating our day-to-day lives."

• Wales’s World Cup qualifying loss to Belgium interrupted

• ‘It’s something I’ve not seen in my 36 years at Cardiff City’

Cardiff City have defended their pest control policy after a rat halted play during the second half of Wales’s World Cup qualifier against Belgium.

The Real Madrid goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois made an unsuccessful attempt to catch the rodent during Belgium’s 4-2 win on Monday night before the Wales substitute Brennan Johnson ushered the rat off the Cardiff City Stadium pitch. The rat then slipped past a ball boy and disappeared behind the VAR monitor and was not seen again.

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© Photograph: Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Getty Images

© Photograph: Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Getty Images

© Photograph: Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Getty Images

Our cartoonist on a smooth journey towards the World Cup for England against a backdrop of flags and uproar

• Buy copies of David’s cartoon in our Print Shop

• David’s latest book, Chaos in the Box: get it now

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© Illustration: David Squires/The Guardian

© Illustration: David Squires/The Guardian

© Illustration: David Squires/The Guardian

Some artists and audiences are boycotting Boiler Room and other events over its parent company’s links with Israel – creating fierce debate about the best way to protest and how to remain uncompromised

Those attending Boiler Room’s two-day festival in London’s Burgess Park in August may have noticed a troubling message spray-painted on the site’s perimeter fence: “Boiler Room is owned by Israeli arms investors.” In nearby Brockwell Park, which hosted Field Day, Cross the Tracks and Mighty Hoopla – three festivals belonging to the same group as Boiler Room – graffiti depicted a bomb with the letters “KKR” emblazoned on it.

In June 2024, the controversial private equity giant KKR acquired Superstruct Entertainment, the company that owns these four festivals and tens of others, many of which were the subjects of boycotts by artists this summer. That’s because KKR has considerable business interests in Israel, including investments in Axel Springer SE, a German media company that runs classified ads for housing developments in the illegally occupied West Bank. Ravers for Palestine, an anonymously run Instagram page that has backed dozens of boycotts, characterised KKR in a recent post as “the beating heart of western capitalism where an insatiable lust for profits and power has no moral boundaries”.

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© Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

© Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

© Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Carrie Elizabeth Romney was discovered dead on a street near a shopping mall parking garage.

In the 1870s, a civil engineer devised early handheld cameras able to capture scenes with more detail than ever. He used the technology to document people on New York streets, from musicians to beggars to paperboys. The work of the innovator, often referred to as the ‘father of instantaneous photography’, has been compiled into a book by Erik Hesselberg called Candid New York: The Pioneering Photography of George Bradford Brainerd, out on 21 October

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© Photograph: The Brooklyn Museum

© Photograph: The Brooklyn Museum

© Photograph: The Brooklyn Museum

It’s actually a euphorbia, and some careful pruning will solve your problem – and result in a more attractive plant

What’s the problem?
I’ve had this cactus for many years, but it keeps getting taller and soon it will hit the ceiling. How can I stop the plant growing without doing it harm?

Diagnosis
The plant in question isn’t a true cactus at all, but a succulent called Euphorbia trigona, also known as the African milk tree. Like many columnar euphorbias, it can shoot up rapidly indoors if it’s happy, often outgrowing its space. Luckily, the plant responds well to pruning if done carefully.

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© Photograph: Gynelle Leon

© Photograph: Gynelle Leon

© Photograph: Gynelle Leon

Drug traffickers gaining influence by stepping in and offering donations after Milei’s sweeping social cuts

In a small colourful room tucked away in the south of Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, four women are making bread and pizza bases, the bright spring sun shining strong outside the windows, which are covered in black metal mesh.

Inside, the radio blast upbeat tunes, but the mood is grim: the neighbourhood has been shaken by the livestreamed torture and murder of two young women and a girl allegedly at the hands of a drug trafficker who lived just a few blocks away.

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© Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

As they flew above Yu Suzuki’s innovative, psychedelic 3D landscapes combating space dragons and alien rock monsters, the moving arcade cabinet would fling players around and physically involve them in the action

During our family’s holidays in the 1980s, most of which were spent at classic English seaside resorts, I spent all my time and pocket money trawling the arcades. From Shanklin to Blackpool, I played them all, attracted by those vast bulb-lit frontages, the enticing names (Fantasy Land! Treasure Island!), and of course by the bleeping, flashing video machines within. And while I spent many hours on the staple classics – Pac-Man, Galaxian, Kung Fu Master – there was one particular game I always looked out for. A weird, thrilling design classic. A total experience, operating somewhere between a traditional arcade game, a flight sim and a rollercoaster. At the time, it seemed impossibly futuristic. Now, it is 40 years old.

Released by Sega in 1985, Space Harrier is a 3D space shooter in which you control a jetpack super soldier named Harrier, who flies into the screen blasting surreal alien enemies above a psychedelic landscape. When designer Yu Suzuki was first tasked with overseeing its development, the game had been conceived as an authentic military flight shooter, but the graphical limitations of the day made that impossible – there was too much complex animation. So Suzuki, inspired by the flying sequences in the fantasy movie The NeverEnding Story, envisaged something different and more surreal, with a flying character rather than a fighter plane and aliens resembling stone giants and dragons. It was colourful and crazy, like a Roger Dean painting brought to life by the Memphis Group.

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© Photograph: Sega/MobyGames

© Photograph: Sega/MobyGames

© Photograph: Sega/MobyGames

Firms too scared to take a chance on youngsters when taxes and minimum wages are higher, expert says

• UK labour market shows signs of stabilising after job losses

• Business live – latest updates

So much about the UK jobs market is influenced by Rachel Reeves. Without overdoing the blame, say many experts, the chancellor’s tough budget last year and the likelihood of a repeat next month hangs over employers and how they recruit and pay staff.

The latest official figures show a rising number of young people out of work in the three months to August. More broadly, unemployment rose to a four-year high and the number of vacancies fell. And then there was the stubborn increase in the public sector wage bill, which outpaced the much more modest increase in private sector wages.

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© Photograph: John Sibley/Reuters

© Photograph: John Sibley/Reuters

© Photograph: John Sibley/Reuters

Reeves paid tribute to Keaton, his co-star in the 2003 romcom Something’s Gotta Give

• Diane Keaton obituary

• Peter Bradshaw on Diane Keaton

The actor Keanu Reeves has paid tribute to Diane Keaton following her death in California on Saturday aged 79.

Speaking on the red carpet at a screening in New York of his latest film, Good Fortune, Reeves told E! News: “She was very nice to me. [A] generous, generous artist and a very special, unique person.”

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© Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy

© Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy

© Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy

OTTAWA — Two separate paths to party renewal — and three very different contenders — have emerged as the race to choose the next leader of the federal NDP begins to take shape. Read More

OTTAWA — When Prime Minister Mark Carney took the stage on Parliament Hill for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30, he mentioned a piece of art that he requested be installed in the corridors of power shortly after he took office. Read More

Clambering up bell towers, dancing the night away and falling in love – how ‘saint’ Malala forged a new identity

Lying in her Birmingham hospital bed in the weeks after she’d been shot in the head by a Taliban assassin, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai used to imagine the conversation she would have with Taliban leadership. “If they would just sit down with me … I could reason with them and convince them to end their reign of misogyny and violence,” she writes in her new memoir.

Malala kept a notebook by her bed, filled with rhetorical strategies and talking points – the names of journalists who might be able to broker a meeting with the Taliban, the Qur’an verses she could cite to show that girls do have a right to education in Islam, the things she could say to establish her own credentials as a God-fearing Muslim. Of course, that conversation never happened. Much later, after the fall of Afghanistan in 2021, it made her wince to recall her naive belief that the Taliban would ever listen to her.

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© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for IMDb

© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for IMDb

© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for IMDb

Activists call for fresh demonstrations this weekend with three people killed and more than 500 reportedly arrested since unrest started in late September

Ayoub Oubalat shares a picture of what he says is his younger brother covered with a white blanket. The man’s eyes are closed and his left eye is bruised blue. At the crown of his head a hole is visible within his dark curly hair, the entry point where the bullet pierced, now shaved and stitched with blue and black thread.

A recently graduated film-maker, Abdessamade, 24, and two others were allegedly killed on 1 October when security forces opened fire on protesters in the town of Lqliâa, near the Atlantic coastal town of Agadir.

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© Photograph: Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP

© Photograph: Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP

© Photograph: Mosa’ab Elshamy/AP

There are plenty of laughs and a fair bit of trauma to process when a depressed man takes a monkey woman across country

It is perhaps an unexpected development that one of the most erotic moments in cinema this year is a frottage scene involving a woman half-dressed as a monkey. By this point in comedian Nina Conti’s directorial debut, there is already a heady backlog of sexual tension inside a camper van between suicidal radio host Roy (Shenoah Allen) and the monkey (Nina Conti) who saved him from stringing himself up in a New Mexico motel room. He’s understandably curious to find out who’s underneath the get-up and the persona that comes with it – a profane blowhard who holds forth on everything around them in the stuffy middle-England tones of Anne Robinson.

The simian lets some stuff slip about her inner human: she used to be Jane, who worked as nightclub mascot for her abusive stepfather Wade (Bill Wise) and began to associate too much with her costume. After her mother’s death from cancer, she then self-destructively shacked up with Wade; having decided to flee his clutches, she insists Roy take her to a Colorado lake where she plans to set up a banana pontoon business. He has his own reckoning planned: going to the graveyard and digging up his hated father to recover a luxury watch with which he will finance her lake-leisure dreams.

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© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image