Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

Back in the world of manufacturing, China’s electric carmaker BYD is feeling the pain from a domestic price war.

Shares in BYD have fallen 4% today, after it reported a 30% drop in quarterly profits on Friday.

“Last week’s property transaction figures pointed to relatively steady buyer demand, with July seeing 95,580 residential transactions – a 4% increase compared to the same month last year. However, the most recent inflation print has complicated the outlook for interest rates. Mortgage rates have been easing slightly but typical fixed deals remain around 4%, keeping monthly payments elevated, and higher inflation will make the path to lower interest rates even longer.

“Speculation around potential reforms in the Chancellor’s upcoming budget, including possible levies on high-value homes or changes to capital gains tax on primary residences, could also cause hesitation among sellers. This would tighten supply further and paradoxically push prices higher, worsening conditions for new entrants to the market.

“House prices have drifted lower since March as the market digests higher rates of stamp duty and supply continues to outstrip demand.

Steady mortgage rates mean transaction numbers have improved over that time but the recent property tax speculation risks sending both sales and prices lower as buyers and sellers deal with pre-Budget uncertainty for the second year in a row.”

Several villages in Kunar province ‘completely destroyed’, says ministry for public health, as rescue operations take place

• At least 250 dead after 6.0 magnitude quake near Jalalabad

The Afghan Red Crescent said its officials and medical teams have “rushed to the affected areas” of the earthquake and are “providing emergency assistance to impacted families”.

Here is a summary from Afghanistan, where hundreds of people have been killed after an earthquake struck the country’s mountainous eastern region late last night. This is what we know so far:

At least 622 people have been killed and more than 1,500 others injured in the earthquake, Afghanistan’s Taliban-run interior ministry said on Monday morning.

The earthquake struck the rugged province of Kunar at 11.47pm on Sunday and was centred 27km north-east of the city of Jalalabad in Nangarhar province, the US Geological Survey said.

Jalalabad is about 119km (74 miles) away from the capital city, Kabul. A 4.5 magnitude quake occurred 20 minutes later in the same province.

The Kunar Disaster Management Authority said deaths and injuries had been reported in the districts of Nur Gul, Soki, Watpur, Manogi and Chapadare.

The earthquake reportedly shook buildings from Kabul to Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

Rescuers rushed to reach remote areas in the country’s eastern provinces in the aftermath of the earthquake but limited communications and the region’s narrow mountain roads have complicated rescue efforts.

Officials from the Taliban-run government have asked for aid from international organisations.

Afghanistan is prone to deadly earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.

Racheal Cain’s debut feature feels derivative, with plotlines that are forced together and cartoonish reductions that sell its characters short

Hard on the heels of The Substance comes another film about a dodgy Los Angeles experimental clinic and showbiz obsession – only this medical outfit, Somnium, is a shonky mind-fixing operation à la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Wannabe actor Gemma (Chloë Levine) lands a “sleep-sitting” job at the firm, watching over patients in pods who are hoping to improve their lives by having helpful dreams injected into their subconsciouses. Already working the audition circuit hard, she doesn’t appear to need that kind of assistance – but flashbacks to the idyllic relationship she ditched in Georgia hint at a festering inner wound.

Appealing though its crisp sci-fi premise makes it, Racheal Cain’s debut feature nonetheless feels as if it has been directly imprinted with far too many secondhand pop-cultural memories: some decaying Eternal Sunshine relationship detritus here, a mysterious producer svengali (Johnathon Schaech) and a transformative audition-room scene straight from Mulholland Drive over there. Even one of the key performances feels derivative: Will Peltz as Noah, Gemma’s creepy, aviator-specs colleague, xeroxes Cillian Murphy’s supercilious distaste.

Two versions of the Guitar Player to hang alongside each other at Kenwood in London for first time in 300 years

Two almost identical paintings have been at one time attributed to the great Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer – but what is the relationship between them?

Visitors to a new display at Kenwood in London will be invited to draw their own conclusions on this intriguing question when two versions of a 17th-century painting, titled the Guitar Player, hang alongside each other for the first time in 300 years.

Double Vision: Vermeer at Kenwood runs from 1 September 2025-11 January 2026 at Kenwood in London.

Slim, lightweight and with a bright 4K picture, Sky’s low-cost TV shines because of its software and service

Sky’s latest streaming TV aims to be a good, all-in-one budget option for your sitting room – and it achieves all those aims, leaving it standing strong in a field of mediocre, similarly priced appliances.

The Glass Air is a lighter, slimmer and cheaper version of the Glass gen 2 and is arguably the low-cost TV Sky should have launched first, coming in three sizes starting at £309 or just £6 a month on 48-month interest-free credit with £20 upfront.

A selection of some of the best exhibited work from Visa Pour l’Image, the annual festival of photojournalism in Perpignan in the south of France

In this remarkable memoir, the Booker-winning novelist looks back on her bittersweet relationship with her mercurial mother

Twelve minutes into an interview with Allen Ginsberg for the BBC’s Face to Face, Jeremy Isaacs asks him about the extraordinary long poem he wrote about his mother: “In Kaddish, you mourn your mother. What was the effect on you of living with a mother who was mad?” Ginsberg’s answer, mildly inflected by a laugh, is: “It gave me a great sort of … tolerance for eccentric behaviour.”

Arundhati Roy, whose memoir is partly an account of her life with her mother Mary Roy, might recognise this insight. Arguably, all mothers appear to their children as mad: madness here meaning an unbounded force, at odds with what society imagines normal parenting to consist of. The manifestations of this madness are as disparate as those of love, and these two aspects – the abnormal, the overbearing, and the protective, the nurturing – can be, in our mothers, intimately intertwined (“She was my shelter and my storm,” writes Roy). It is through loving and depending on the mysterious and incomprehensible that we come to “tolerate”, even embrace, the strangest thing of all: life itself.

A world away from the country’s beach resorts is a mountainous region of dense forests, hilltop villages and hairpin bends – perfect to explore by car

A rainy part of the world where locals’ tea-drinking habits verge on obsessive. That may sound familiar, but a shared love of tea is where similarities between Turkey’s Rize province and the UK start and end. In fact, this corner of the country feels more like a mythical land, a fairytale mix of mist-shrouded mountains and dramatically plunging valleys cloaked in impenetrably deep, dark forests.

Despite the dramatic landscapes, international tourism has never really taken off here. Running between the eastern edge of the Black Sea and the rugged Pontic Alps, just shy of the Georgian border, it’s been a tricky spot to reach, historically (a bus journey of about 19 hours from Istanbul – though an airport opened in 2022, which cuts this to two hours).

Samin Nosrat from Netflix’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat creates an essential resource for food heads. Plus, a Grey’s Anatomy character goes under the microscope in a super-fun show about dubious people called Elizabeth

Exclusive: Data gathered by Generation Rent shows 37 councils spent £31m in 2024-25 in one-off payments to individual landlords

Councils across England are increasingly spending millions of pounds a year in incentive payments to private landlords to persuade them to house homeless families, with campaigners describing it as a “senseless waste of public money”.

Data gathered by the campaign group Generation Rent via freedom of information requests showed that 37 councils spent more than £31m on one-off cash payments to private landlords on 10,792 occasions in 2024-25.

The facts and the numbers are irrelevant: Donald Trump and Nigel Farage just find new excuses and increase the toxicity

A few weeks after the Brexit referendum, a leave-voting friend of mine told me what the biggest benefit would be. “We will never hear about immigration again,” he said. If you give the people the control over the border they want, the logic went, then Brexit will finally dissolve immigration as an issue that politicians can exploit, and the country can crack on with all the other important stuff that needs doing. And, well, let’s just say that this prediction did not pan out on such a colossal level that no follow-up conversation has been necessary.

Because that’s just not how the whole immigration thing works. The goalposts always move. Nothing clarifies that more than Nigel Farage getting everything he has said he ever wanted, the country heaving itself out of the EU and ending free movement, only for another boil to fester around the issue of immigration – and guess what, only Reform UK can lance it! Nothing is ever enough. One only needs to look at the escalating crackdowns in the US to see how the net keeps getting wider and wider. In a matter of months, immigration crackdown has expanded so rapidly that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are afraid to leave their houses to buy groceries or go to work, as the national guard patrols the streets.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

Fragrant, vegetable-led cooking for nourishing one-person feasts

Celery divides people, perhaps because most of us are introduced to it in the form of batons dipped into hummus, which I don’t feel is its best form. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy raw celery – it has an earthy pepperiness that I find quite moreish – but I adore it in cooked form, especially with soy and garlic, and today’s recipe is a take on a wok-fried celery dish that we often eat at large banquets in Malaysia. But first, a silky, fragrant curry with tender baby aubergines and a golden coconut base that’s perfect with hot steamed rice and a scattering of fresh herbs. These baby purple aubergines are perfect for one person, and hold their structure well in a curry. I adore them.

I was 12 in this picture, and closing in on the peak of my sporting career. I’ll always look back fondly on the fun and community of growing up in a football family

My dad made sure my two younger brothers and I were raised in a Chelsea household; the shed at the back of the garden was, we were told, where Arsenal supporters belonged. Growing up, we went to all the games at Stamford Bridge, competed in our local little league as though it were the Premier League, and followed Dad to the pub to watch Sunday matches (the cheeky chips and J2Os were at least half of the allure).

I’m pretty sure I’m 12 years old in this photo and closing in on the peak of my sporting career, as I got ready to play football at a nearby park with my siblings Jevan (then nine) and Kiran (just four). Although we didn’t always have the money for the expensive new kits every season (I’m sure you can spot my mismatched camo shorts), we always had something Chelsea to wear. My dad would often dodge the high ticket prices by taking us to watch the women’s team play, as well as the under-21s, where you would witness great talent at a fraction of the cost.

The gathering in Beijing will include the leaders of Russia and North Korea, along with the Iranian president, a grouping dubbed the axis of upheaval

On Wednesday, China is holding a military parade in the capital, Beijing, to mark 80 years since the end of the second world war. But it’s not just about the past, the parade says a lot about the forces reshaping the world today, and in the future.

At the parade, Chinese leader Xi Jinping will be flanked by the leaders of some of the world’s most heavily sanctioned nations – Russia, North Korea, Iran and Myanmar – and a host of other leaders of the global south but notably almost no western leaders.

Police called to Woollahra following reports of ‘unauthorised vehicle’ parked in driveway, with 39-year-old then crashing through gates, police allege

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

A man has been arrested after a police officer was injured when a car ploughed through the gates of the Russian consulate in Sydney.

Officers had tried to speak to the driver of the white SUV when it was parked in the driveway of the consulate in the city’s eastern suburbs on Monday morning.

Before he found fame at 17 photographing Andy Warhol’s Factory, Shore roamed the city with his camera. He talks about the joy of those early 60s pictures – and why they never made him rich

Black-and-white street shots of elegant, unimpressed elderly women. Classic cars in shadows cast by New York’s soaring tenement buildings. Street-corner preachers. Imposing wiseguys too busy posturing to notice the camera. Stephen Shore’s new book, Early Work, is full of such everyday New York moments turned into magic. Though he later won acclaim for the photographs he took at Andy Warhol’s studio/hangout the Factory, the previously unseen Early Work may be some of Shore’s most uninhibited and daring pictures – and they were taken in the early 60s, when he was a teenager.

Perhaps it’s understandable, then, that the photographer, now 77, can’t really remember taking them – though he does recall that he printed them himself, in a DIY darkroom set up in the bathroom of his parents’ home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. “The memory of the prints I made then is hard to separate from the memory of the actual event of taking the photograph,” he admits over the phone. “I don’t remember what was on my mind then, but what I see looking at them now is a kind of formal awareness, which I guess I understood intuitively. I understood from the beginning that a camera doesn’t point, it frames. I also understood the gap between the world of the photograph and the world we experience – the world of the photograph has to make sense on its own, out of context.”

My government pays lip service to Palestine but remains complicit. Like many Irish citizens, I refuse to

Hundreds of people from 44 countries are sailing to Gaza in the Global Sumud Flotilla this week. I am among them. We aim to non-violently break Israel’s illegal siege by delivering much-needed supplies. I joined the mission because, as an Irish person, I have watched my government meet what our taoiseach acknowledges to be a genocide with little more than the occasional round of three Hail Marys.

In fact, that framing is overly generous. The Irish government is not just passively useless in the face of genocide; it aids and abets the perpetrators. US military planes potentially carrying arms to Israel routinely pass through Ireland’s Shannon airport without inspection. A 2018 Occupied Territories bill originally intended to ban all trade with illegal Israeli settlements is now in its seventh year of legislative limbo, with endless dithering as to whether it should include services. By Israel’s choice, Ireland’s central bank is, since Brexit, the sole regulating authority in the EU that approves for trading Israel’s explicitly marketed war bondsfor sale across the bloc. Selling bonds allows Israel to raise cash internationally that it is openly using to fund its campaign in Gaza. In June, the Irish government defeated a motion to end the central bank’s facilitation of the sale of these bonds. There is a dystopian irony in actively choosing to remain Israel’s “home” country for bonds approval – in the financial terminology – while claiming to condemn its forced dispossessions.

Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer

With foreign media barred, Palestinians have reported alone, facing the ‘most deliberate effort to kill and silence’ them ever

He’s a rheumatologist, a standup comedian – and now the author of a memoir. He talks about racism in healthcare, why Covid was the only time urgent care was properly staffed – and his beef with cardiologists

Are You Really the Doctor?, Matthew Hutchinson’s memoir of being a black doctor in the NHS, opens in A&E with a patient suffering from a thunderclap headache and taking time out from his excruciating pain to complain that Hutchinson is “very scruffy”. “I’m wearing scrubs, the pyjama-like, hospital-issue uniform – something pretty difficult to put your own personal flair on,” Hutchinson writes, concluding wearily that the guy must have been reacting to something else: “Skin, hair, or general … vibe.” You couldn’t call it a microaggression, the patient’s assumption that, being black, Hutchinson was unlikely to be an expert. But this anecdote barely registers on the Geiger counter of bigotry in healthcare that Hutchinson writes about trenchantly and acerbically, from the prejudices doctors face from patients and the gender and race blindspots in medical textbooks, to the racism that could endanger a patient’s life (black women are four times more likely to die during childbirth).

Meeting Hutchinson in the Guardian’s offices in London, he emanates forethought and competence. Even in shorts and a T-shirt, he seems like the kind of guy who couldn’t look scruffy if he tried. He says the book he’s written about race had to be done, but “I’ve spoken to people who are non-white and female, and without even prompting, they’ve said: ‘Actually, the thing that is held more against me is being a woman.’” Hutchinson’s wife, Louise, is a GP. “The lack of respect that can be shown to female doctors is outrageous, sometimes by certain other healthcare professionals, not even patients. In the same way, we haven’t really had a book, as far as I’m aware, about being disabled as a doctor and the lack of access to medical school for someone with a disability. I’ve met only one doctor with a hearing impairment in the entire time I’ve been working.”

Ditching sanitary towels and tampons has made my period much less stressful. Crucially, it’s better for the environment too

I was 18 when I tried a menstrual cup for the first time. I was studying at the University of Edinburgh and Scotland had just become the first country in the world to make period products free to those who need them. The university health service was offering menstrual cups alongside the usual sanitary pads and tampons. I picked one up out of curiosity and because I just couldn’t resist a freebie.

I was used to spending £10 to £15 a month on period products, more if I was caught short and had to do a panicked dash to an overpriced off-licence. As an eco-conscious teenager I already bought non-applicator tampons but often wore a security sanitary liner underneath. It was an attempt to keep the endless worry of heavy periods at bay: will I leak, run out of supplies, or find a clean loo in time? Even so, I leaked more often than I cared to admit.

You have time that other countries have squandered. You can be leaders in building the information infrastructure humanity needs

I became a journalist because information is power, and right now we are living through an information armaggedon. Facts are under assault. Truth is being murdered. The casualty? Trust … making it impossible to govern. Only dictatorships thrive when there’s no trust.

And here are the three sentences I’ve said over and over since 2016 when I first said it in Silicon Valley, backed by data and hard-fought experience. Without facts, you can’t have truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality.

At least 50 men, mostly clad in black, approached Camp Sovereignty as sun was setting on Sunday. Four people were injured

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

A group of women in Melbourne have been injured, and a police officer in Sydney was allegedly assaulted, after anti-immigration marches across Australia on the weekend.

A group of men, including some members of neo-Nazi group the National Socialist Network, attacked the standing First Nations protest site, Camp Sovereignty, in Melbourne’s Kings Domain on Sunday evening, according to video footage seen by Guardian Australia.

As an immigrant woman of colour, every day I walk next to the same people who were chanting hate speech. The weekend’s rallies shows how far we still have to go

When I moved to Australia more than five years ago, I experienced for the first time the pleasures and safety of being able to go on a night stroll by myself – something I had never done in my home country. Then, as I heard the stories of violence against women on the streets and homes across Australia (and the world), I realised that as a woman you don’t get to feel a sense of belonging in most places. I learned to accept that.

On Sunday, as I walked the street outside my humble, one-bedroom, overly priced Melbourne apartment in broad daylight, I felt unsafe again. This time not because of my gender but because of another part of my identity that I have no control over, nor did I ever think would be under scrutiny in this beautiful multicultural country: my race.