There is no solid scientific proof, but it would do us all good to cut back on sweet treats

It’s a warning passed down the generations: give a child too many sweets and they’ll be bouncing off the walls. But is there any scientific proof that sugar sends us into overdrive? Not yet, says Amanda Avery, an associate professor in nutrition and dietetics at the University of Nottingham.

She says there are theories linking sugar to behavioural changes. One stems from how sugar activates the body’s reward system, triggering a burst of dopamine – the “feelgood” neurotransmitter. “Increases in dopamine levels can be linked to behavioural changes, which can include periods of hyperactivity,” says Avery.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Opec+ pauses oil output hikes beyond December amid fears of a crude glut

October was another strong month for markets, thanks to the US-China trade truce, strong economic data and decent earnings releases.

Those positive factors outweighed concerns around private credit and fears of a potential AI bubble, explain Deutsche Bank’ analysts Henry Allen and Jim Reid.

Meanwhile in Japan, the Nikkei had its strongest month since October 1990 as the new government led by Sanae Takaichi came to office.

In fixed income, sovereign bonds advanced despite the Fed’s hawkishness towards month end, with the 10yr Treasury yield (-7.3bps) seeing its lowest monthly close in over a year, at 4.08%.

Halt the flow of precursors used to make fentanyl into the United States.

Effectively eliminate China’s current and proposed export controls on rare earth elements and other critical minerals.

End Chinese retaliation against U.S. semiconductor manufacturers and other major U.S. companies.

Open China’s market to U.S. soybeans and other agricultural exports.

Hamas says remains found in tunnel as other bodies yet to be recovered amid fragile ceasefire

Israel has announced that the remains of three hostages have been handed over from Gaza and would be examined by forensic experts, as a fragile month-old ceasefire holds.

A Hamas statement earlier said the remains were found on Sunday in a tunnel in southern Gaza.

Koya Kamura’s debut film is about shared identities at the centre of quiet, chilly drama as an enigmatic French writer visits the eponymous town

Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive but bracing drama sees guesthouse worker Sooha (Bella Kim) drive French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) out to the demilitarised zone just north of the South Korean city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model gunning for a move to Seoul. But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. Initially conforming to her prejudices about rude French men, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to prise the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.

A sharp, funny and engaging autobiography from one of the towering literary figures of our age

Margaret Atwood didn’t want to write a literary memoir. She worried it would be boring – “I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book …” Alcoholic excess, debauched parties and sexual transgressions would have perked things up, but she hasn’t lived that way.

In the end what she has written is less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works, 85 years. Where most such backward looks are cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying, hers is sharp, funny and engaging, a book you can warm to even if you’re not fully au fait (and few people are) with her astonishing output, which in the “also by” contents list here fills two pages.

Photographer Didier Bizet has spent time documenting life in the self-proclaimed autonomous republic, which is not recognised by the international community. Its status raises complex questions about the identity of its inhabitants – Ukrainians, Russians, Moldovans and Bulgarians – in a land searching for direction and lacking a clearly defined national identity

Amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and between the fragile borders that crisscross the former Soviet Union, the self-proclaimed Republic of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova more than 30 years ago after a brief but bloody conflict, remains locked in deep political and diplomatic isolation.

Home to about 450,000 people, Transnistria is a narrow strip of land wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, along the eastern bank of the Dniester River. Its de facto capital, Tiraspol, lies less than 60 miles from the Ukrainian port city of Odesa. Though small in size – about 125 miles long – the region holds outsized strategic importance, sitting on a key corridor between the Black Sea and central Europe.

A new museum in Mödlareuth tells the story of how a settlement of only 50 people straddled Bavaria in West Germany and Thuringia in the east

A creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of local people set about memorialising their history. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the (big) Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Camera-equipped sports shades have secure fit, open-ear speakers, mics and advanced Garmin and Strava integration

The Oakley Meta Vanguard are new displayless AI glasses designed for running, cycling and action sports with deep Garmin and Strava integration, which may make them the first smart glasses for sport that actually work.

They are a replacement for running glasses, open-ear headphones and a head-mounted action cam all in one, and are the latest product of Meta’s partnership with the sunglasses conglomerate EssilorLuxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban, Oakley and many other top brands.

Northern provinces of Balkh and Samangan worst hit by magnitude 6.3 quake with hundreds injured, while Mazar-i-Sharif’s Blue Mosque reportedly affected

A powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake that struck northern Afghanistan overnight has killed more than 20 people and injured about 320, the health ministry said on Monday.

The preliminary tolls of deaths and injuries were recorded in the Balkh and Samangan provinces, which have suffered most of the damage, a ministry spokesperson, Sharafat Zaman, said in a video message shared with journalists.

The massacres carried out by the RSF in El Fasher, Darfur, with the support of its UAE sponsors, will only stop when the international community acts

It unfolded in plain sight over 18 months. The city of El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan, besieged by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell to the militia group last week, and what has followed is a catastrophe.

Mass killings are under way. There are reports that in one maternity hospital alone almost 500 people – patients and their families – were killed. The few that managed to escape tell of summary executions of civilians. The RSF has embarked on a killing spree of civilians so severe that images of blood saturating the ground have been picked up by satellite. The speed and intensity of the killings in the immediate aftermath of the fall of El Fasher has already been compared by war monitors to the first 24 hours of the Rwandan genocide.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh describes his survival as ‘miracle’ but says his sibling’s death in disaster has left him broken

The sole survivor of the Air India plane crash that killed 241 people in June has said it is a miracle he is still alive, but the death of his brother “took all my happiness”.

Almost four months on from the crash in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, Briton Vishwash Kumar Ramesh said the incident had left him with constant flashbacks.

Texas-based fossil fuel company financed Atlas Network in attempt to derail UN-led climate treaty process

Exxon funded rightwing thinktanks to spread climate change denial across Latin America, according to hundreds of previously unpublished documents that reveal a coordinated campaign to make the global south “less inclined” to support the UN-led climate treaty process

The documents, which include copies of the actual cheques Exxon sent, consist of internal documents and years of correspondence between the Texas-based fossil fuel company and Atlas Network, a US-based coalition of more than 500 free-market thinktanks and other partners worldwide.

Fragrant with spices, this staple of north African cooking brings a welcome heat to stews and braises

I thought I knew my harissa after nearly two decades of making it from scratch. Then I tasted a spoonful of rich, wine-dark paste from an unmarked jar that arrived on my doorstep from brothers Mansour and Karim Arem. They were on the verge of launching Zwïta, a company focused on celebrating their Tunisian heritage. Whereas western cooks and food writers are familiar with many of the food traditions of nearby Morocco, we’ve largely neglected to learn anything about Tunisia or its culinary history. And, judging by the Arem brothers’ harissa, that’s entirely to our detriment.

Made with mild, sun-dried chillies, the traditional Tunisian version of this pepper paste is layered with garlic, caraway and coriander. Multidimensional in flavour and distinctly thick, it will be a revelation to anyone who has only ever encountered the stuff squeezed from a tube (or any other version similarly doctored with tomato products, hydrated chilli powder or fresh peppers). Once I tasted their harissa, I began to incorporate it into my everyday cooking, stirring it into garlic and herb labneh and drizzling it over roast vegetables. One of my favourite ways to use it is as a rub or marinade for chicken.

Goli Kouhkan, 25, on death row for seven years for killing her abusive husband, has until December to settle with the victim’s family

A child bride faces execution in Iran for the killing of her abusive husband unless she can raise 10bn tomans (about £80,000) to pay off the victim’s family by a December deadline.

Goli Kouhkan, 25, has been on death row in Gorgan central prison in northern Iran for the past seven years. She was 18 when she was arrested over the death of her husband in May 2018, and sentenced to qisas – retribution-in-kind – for participation in the killing.

From publishing falsehoods to pushing far-right ideology, Grokipedia gives chatroom comments equal status to research

The eminent British historian Sir Richard Evans produced three expert witness reports for the libel trial involving the Holocaust denier David Irving, studied for a doctorate under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin, succeeded David Cannadine as Regius professor of history at Cambridge (a post endowed by Henry VIII) and supervised theses on Bismarck’s social policy.

That was some of what you could learn from Grokipedia, the AI-powered encyclopedia launched last week by the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. The problem was, as Prof Evans discovered when he logged on to check his own entry, all these facts were false.

Oxfam warns Trump policies risk driving inequality to new heights – but Democrats have also exacerbated wealth gap

The collective wealth of the top 10 US billionaires has soared by $698bn in the past year, according to a new report from Oxfam America published on Monday on the growing wealth divide.

The report warns that Trump administration policies risk driving US inequality to new heights, but points out that both Republican and Democratic administrations have exacerbated the US’s growing wealth gap.

System rewards soldiers who achieve strikes with points that can be used to buy more weapons in an online store

A computer game-style drone attack system has gone “viral” among Ukrainian military units and is being extended to reconnaissance, artillery and logistics operations, the nation’s first deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has told the Guardian.

Drone teams competing for points under the “Army of Drones Bonus System” killed or wounded 18,000 Russian soldiers in September, with 400 drone units now taking part in the competition, up from 95 in August, Ukrainian officials said.

Exclusive: Leading professor at Sheffield Hallam was told to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China after demands from authorities

A British university complied with a demand from Beijing to halt research about human rights abuses in China, leading to a major project being dropped, the Guardian can reveal.

In February, Sheffield Hallam University, home to the Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, ordered one of its best-known professors, Laura Murphy, to cease research on supply chains and forced labour in China.

Hospital specialists report cases of missed health problems, misdiagnosed conditions, and women erroneously told their babies had died

High street clinics offering pregnancy scans could be putting unborn babies and their mothers in danger through a lack of properly trained staff, UK experts have warned.

According to the Society for Radiographers (SoR), high street clinics have seen a huge growth in numbers. However, hospital specialists say they have seen cases of missed health problems, misdiagnosed conditions, and situations in which women were erroneously told their babies were malformed or had died.

Researchers to investigate whether environmental factors may have affected female animal’s pigmentation

An amateur photographer in southern Spain has captured unprecedented images of a white Iberian lynx, prompting researchers to investigate whether environmental factors could be at play as wildlife watchers revelled in the rare sighting.

Ángel Hidalgo published the images on social media, describing the singular animal as the “white ghost of the Mediterranean forest”.

Breaking dancefloors, recording in the dark, crying at I Know It’s Over, winning in court, splitting over chips … the musician relives his tumultuous years in ‘the best British band ever’

‘It was terrifying,” says Mike Joyce, sitting in the palatial suite of the Stock Exchange hotel in Manchester. The drummer is talking about his favourite gig with the Smiths: the night in July 1986 when The Queen Is Dead tour hit Salford Maxwell Hall. “They weren’t taking ticket stubs off people coming in. So they were giving their tickets back out through the bog window.” The show ended up at double capacity. “They had to evacuate the bar downstairs because the sprung dancefloor was collapsing. Delirium! There were people crying their eyes out, strangers hugging each other – and that was before E!”

Joyce, garrulously upbeat company, has just written a warm, engaging memoir, The Drums, celebrating the Smiths. It’s a “right place, right time” story of his memories as the great indie band tore down the boundaries of British guitar music, with Johnny Marr’s beautifully intricate playing merging immaculately with Morrissey’s words, resulting in devastating, romantic and witty vignettes that perfectly captured everyday life.

Three years after explosion that crippled Russian-German gas link, Polish court’s refusal to extradite Ukrainian suspect reignited old tensions

Chunky steel pipes run through one of the exhibition rooms at Warsaw’s Museum of Contemporary Art, part of an installation that purports to show “how gas flows, propaganda and conspiracy theories intertwine”.

The exhibit is an artistic nod to Nord Stream 2, the undersea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, which was completed in 2021 but had not entered service when mysterious underwater explosions took it out of action in September 2022.

As the actor approaches his 90th year and publishes an autobiography, he reflects on his early years on stage, being inspired by Laurence Olivier, becoming a Hollywood star and conquering his demons

‘What’s the weather like over there?” asks Anthony Hopkins as soon as our video call begins. He may have lived in California for decades but some Welshness remains, in his distinctive, mellifluous voice – perhaps a little hoarser than it once was – and his preoccupation with the climate. It’s a dark evening in London but a bright, sunny morning in Los Angeles, and Hopkins is equally bright in demeanour and attire, sporting a turquoise and green shirt. “I came here 50 years ago. Somebody said: ‘Are you selling out?’ I said: ‘No, I just like the climate and to get a suntan.’ But I like Los Angeles. I’ve had a great life here.”

It hasn’t been all that great recently, actually. In January this year, Hopkins’ house in Pacific Palisades was destroyed by the wildfires. “It was a bit of a calamity,” he says, with almost cheerful understatement. “We’re thankful that no one was hurt, and we got our cats and our little family into the clear.” He wasn’t there at the time; he and his wife, Stella, were in Saudi Arabia, where he was hosting a concert of his own music played by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They’re now in a rented house in the nearby neighbourhood of Brentwood. “We lost everything, but you think: ‘Oh well, at least we are alive.’ I feel sorry for the thousands of people who have been really affected. People who were way past retirement age, and had worked hard over the years and now … nothing.”

President’s remarks, made during CBS interview released on Sunday, come as the US amasses military units in Caribbean

Donald Trump has sent mixed signals about potential US intervention in Venezuela, playing down concerns of imminent war against the South American nation but saying its leader Nicolás Maduro’s days were numbered.

The president’s remarks, made during a CBS interview released on Sunday, come as the US amasses military units in the Caribbean and has conducted multiple strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels, killing dozens.