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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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

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”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Counter-terror laws being ‘weaponised’ against pro-Palestine groups in UK, US, France and Germany, says FIDH

The right to protest has come under sustained attack in the west, according to a report highlighting the growing criminalisation of pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The study by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) pays particular attention to the UK, the US, France and Germany, where it says governments have “weaponised” counter-terrorism legislation as well as the fight against antisemitism to suppress dissent and support for Palestinian rights in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

• Mosengo-Omba said to run CAF as a ‘proprietorship’

• Employee: ‘Anyone who dares speak up is terminated’

The Confederation of African Football’s general secretary, Véron Mosengo-Omba, has been accused of running the organisation as his “proprietorship” and creating a toxic culture of fear where employees are fired for speaking out against him.

Several former and current members of staff have told the Guardian there is an atmosphere of intimidation and paranoia at the Caf headquarters in Cairo, where Mosengo-Omba is accused of sidelining colleagues and silencing whistleblowers.

I long for physical intimacy and feel ashamed and unattractive when she rebuffs me – but she gets angry when I try to discuss it

My wife and I have been together for more than 10 years and married for four. We have small children. I love her deeply, but our marriage is essentially empty of sex and physical intimacy, and she refuses to talk about it beyond acknowledging there is a problem. I am a woman who values physical intimacy and I am deeply attracted to her. I want to feel more desired and alive. But lovemaking is extremely rare, always initiated by me and follows the same pattern. She does not focus on giving me pleasure. The rest of the time I am rebuffed, leaving me feeling ashamed and unattractive. Even the mildest of playful or suggestive messages I send are met with silence. So I bother less and less.

Naturally, I want to know what is going on for her. We are already having couples therapy, but this is not a subject we have tackled successfully. Outside these sessions, my attempts to discuss it are either avoided or met with anger. Do I simply give up, after so many years of trying and failing to make things better? I cannot forget my needs and desires just because they are not reciprocated.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news

• Why has US-China trade war restarted and how have markets reacted?

A flurry of takeover talk speculation has pushed up shares in budget airline EasyJet this morning.

EasyJet’s shares are up over 7%, leading the risers on the FTSE 100 share index.

“[The group] does not believe the redress methodology proposed by the FCA appropriately reflects actual customer loss or achieves a proportionate outcome.

“...the FCA’s proposed approach to assessing unfairness does not align with the legal clarity provided by the supreme court judgement in respect of the “Johnson” case, which confirmed that the test for unfairness is highly fact specific and must take into account a broad range of factors. The group will continue to engage with the FCA in respect of these points.

“Many motor finance lenders did not comply with the law or the rules. It’s time their customers get fair compensation. Recent court judgments show that liabilities exist no matter what.

“We believe our scheme is the best way to settle the issue for both consumers and firms, and alternatives would be more costly and take longer. We recognise not everyone will get everything they would like. But it’s vital we draw a line under the issue so a trusted motor finance market can continue to serve millions of families every year.”

Defence minister says delay in returning more bodies would be a violation of ceasefire as forces open fire on people approaching troops in northern Gaza

• Israelis and Palestinians celebrate as truce brings hope of ‘era of peace’

Despite the ceasefire agreement, a medical source told Palestinian news agency Wafa today that four people were killed when Israeli drones fired at residents inspecting their homes in Gaza’s eastern Shejaiya neighbourhood. We have not yet been able to independently verify this information.

Israel’s military said it opened fire on Tuesday to remove a threat posed by several suspects who approached Israeli forces operating in the northern Gaza Strip.

Every constituency projected to be at greater risk, with many areas likely to be uninsurable, Guardian investigation finds

• The flood-prone Worcestershire town being abandoned by insurers

• Doors, drains and paving perils: protecting your home from flooding

Millions more homes in England, Scotland and Wales face devastating floods, and some towns may have to be abandoned as climate breakdown makes many areas uninsurable, a Guardian investigation has found.

New analysis from the insurance industry, seen by the Guardian, reveals the extent of concern in the sector, with bosses warning that large swathes of housing and commercial property in densely populated areas will be at greater risk.

In the latest novel from the acclaimed avant garde author, the narrator considers the impact of the relationships she’s left behind

“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way,” Claire-Louise Bennett wrote in her first book, 2015’s Pond, a series of essayistic stories by an autofictional narrator. What was her first language, then? She doesn’t know, and she’s still in search of it. “I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.”

Bennett was concerned then – and remains concerned now – with finding words to make inner experience legible, and to make familiar objects, places and actions unfamiliar. Pond was a kind of phenomenology of 21st-century everyday female experience, concentrating on the narrator’s momentary physical and mental feelings and sensation, isolated from the larger social world. Bennett became an acclaimed avant garde writer, and if acclaimed and avant garde may seem at odds, then that tension has powered her books ever since, as she’s been drawn to working on larger scales. In Checkout 19 she showed this phenomenological vision unfurling across a life. It was a kind of Künstlerroman, a messy, sparkling book that threw together the narrator’s early reading history with her early story writing (she retold the picaresque antics of her first literary protagonist, Tarquin Superbus) and her experiences of menstruation and sex.

Grace Hughes-Hallett’s film focuses on the story of Jim Ambrose, who was raised female after he was born with atypical genitals

Although this documentary spreads its net wide to encompass the recent history of intersex identity in the US, mostly it centres around the story of Jim Ambrose, who until he was 20 years old was called Kristi and raised female. Raised in Baton Rouge, Lousiana, Jim was born in 1976 with XY chromosomes and had atypical genitals. So his parents, under the advice of a local doctor, decided to have surgery performed on the infant to create more female-looking organs, and then raised him as a girl without ever telling him the truth. It wasn’t until he read about intersex people in a university feminism course that he realised who he really was. Although Jim would go through further painful surgeries and much mental anguish, eventually he would find his voice as an activist, a place within the increasingly visible intersex community, and a loving partner.

The emotional climax of the film follows Jim as he prepares to meet the surgeon who operated on him as a baby. The encounter doesn’t go at all as you might expect, given footage earlier in the film where one intersex person talks about getting revenge using a rusty knife. Let’s just say. The phrases “at the time” and “in retrospect” get invoked a lot.

From Rocky Horror to the Muppets, Curry’s extraordinary career made him world-famous. Then, a stroke left him paralysed. The actor talks about his cocaine years, his friendship with David Bowie – and the moment his mother came at him with a knife

‘It’s difficult not to see it as a kind of finale,” says Tim Curry of his memoir, Vagabond. That he’s written it at all is a surprise. Curry has always liked the comfort of privacy – my efforts to persuade him to do an interview with the Guardian began more than five years ago. At 79, he still prefers looking forward, too, which is how he has covered so much ground in his career.

Boundless energy has been the actor’s hallmark. He once exerted so much while filming the murder mystery comedy Clue – in which he plays the frantic, sharp-tongued butler Wadsworth – that a nurse who took his blood pressure on set told him he was at risk of having a heart attack.

I’ve always tried to make my villains amusing. It gives them a bit more edge