UK inflation unexpectedly held steady at 3.8% in September, below the 4% expected by economists. The figure, largely driven by easing food prices, has prompted traders to increase bets that the Bank of England will cut interest rates again this year. Peace talks between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have been called off after Russia refused to accept America’s terms for a ceasefire in Ukraine. On a phone call yesterday, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, told US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that freezing the front line in Ukraine would still leave most of the country ”under Nazi rule”. Eurostar could start running double-decker trains from London as soon as 2031. The lofty locomotives, which can carry more than 1,000 passengers, will be the first of their kind to operate either in Britain or through the Channel Tunnel and will be part of plans for direct services to Frankfurt and Geneva.

A Chinese “dagger” aimed at the West

For all the White House bluster, says Simon Nixon on Substack, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the US cannot win its trade war with China. The reason is simple: rare earth minerals. The global market for these crucial materials is tiny – just $8.42bn, around 30 times less than the $256bn coffee market. But they are used in everything from consumer products like headphones and microwaves to advanced weapons systems such as F-35 fighter jets and Tomahawk missiles. China has an unbelievable chokehold on supply, controlling around 70% of mining capacity and more than 90% of processing. And earlier this month Beijing announced crippling new curbs on exports – “a dagger aimed at the heart of Western advanced technology manufacturing”.

It’s not like the West had no warning. As far back as 1987, the then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared: “the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths”. When Beijing withheld supplies of the materials to Japan over a territorial dispute in 2010, it “brought the Japanese car industry to a standstill”. Yet whereas Japan moved to make itself less vulnerable – its manufacturers have built up two years’ worth of spare inventory – the West largely ignored the problem. That’s changing, with the US government recently taking a 15% stake in the owner of America’s only rare earths mine. But that can only produce as many magnets in a year as China pumps out in a day. The best hope is that Beijing’s new curbs are just a bargaining chip for trade talks – its exporters still need access to the US market, after all. Either way, the West won’t be able to wean itself off China’s rare earths for years. Until then, Beijing has “huge leverage”.

Boris Johnson’s talk of “levelling up” came to little, says Anoosh Chakelian in The New Statesman. But Keir Starmer is going great guns. In his first year as prime minister, the Labour leader invested £4.5bn, a whopping £2bn more than Johnson did in his first year. Investment in the North East is on track to be seven times higher than under Johnson, and five times higher in the North West and Yorkshire and Humber. Overall, Starmer is due to invest £36bn in these schemes, triple the level under Johnson. In other words, he is actually levelling up. If only he’d thought to tell someone.

Precocious teens are using AI to prank their parents, says Terence O’Brien in The Verge. In one popular trend, kids send faked photos of a grimy homeless man in the family home, saying they let him in to go to the loo, have a glass of water or even take a nap. Parental reactions (all caught on camera) are predictably explosive, with several calling the cops. One police chief warned that home invasions regarding children are a top priority, so could easily result in SWAT teams being deployed.

Imagine if Trump had toothache in 2011

As intellectually disreputable as it is to confess, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, I have lately been won over by the Great Man theory of history, “and Donald Trump is the reason”. Take free trade, support for which used to be “so commonsensical as to be unspoken”. Today, it is “fighting for its life”, and that is disproportionately the work of the US president. There were no shy protectionists just waiting for their moment – polls show Americans solidly supporting trade agreements and even registered Republicans only soured in 2015, when Trump launched his campaign. If anything, before Trump, American populism was of the small-government, maximum trade “Tea Party” variety. So how did we get here? One man pursued a life-long obsession “until it changed the world”.

Obviously “great” means important rather than good. Protectionism makes me shiver, and many of Trump’s biggest impacts have been “thermostatic”: woke took off in response to his first term; elections were lost in Australia and Canada this year by candidates seen as too close to him. “Repelling people is still shaping them.” And it should really be the Great Person theory, not merely out of good manners. If Margaret Thatcher hadn’t “restored Britain to basic governability” there’s no suggestion grand historic “forces” would somehow have done so. It works the other way too. Britain’s present malaise can be straightforwardly explained by having had several unusually bad prime ministers in a row (“call this Crap Person theory”). Singaporeans understand how much national destiny can hinge on randomness: what if all-important first prime minister Lee Kuan Yew stayed in London as a successful barrister? Well, what if Trump had toothache the night Barack Obama mocked him at that 2011 press dinner?

The YouTube channel Inside Japanese Factories has produced an extremely pleasing video tour of a screw factory in Saitama, just outside Tokyo, says The Browser. A bewildering array of clanking machines churn out 400,000 screws a day, all overseen by a single employee. “Incredible,” says one user. “So happy to know that tiny but mighty factories like this still exist.” Watch the whole eight-minute clip here.

Nick Clegg made a decent wedge shilling for Facebook, says Richard Eden in the Daily Mail: a whopping £117m over six years, by some counts. But he didn’t immediately click with his subordinates. In a bid to break the ice with his earnest millennial colleagues, the former Lib Dem leader made a joke about the bland corporate clichés – “bring your authentic self to work” – adorning posters around the office. “Please don’t bring your authentic self to work,” he said. “Bring your inauthentic self to work. I’ll bring my inauthentic self to work… and we’ll all get on perfectly well.” He was met, he says, with “absolute stony silence”.

It’s Kim Kardashian, says Shane O’Neill in The Washington Post, who has “officially kicked off spooky season” by turning up at this year’s Academy Museum Gala in Los Angeles wearing a creepy piece of cloth on her head. The Maison Margiela look, which also included a beige draped dress with a “severely boned bodice” and a chunky necklace holding the head-bag in place, is apparently a thing – the fashion house’s 2025 “artisanal collection” is full of weird masks to reflect the luxury of anonymity, or something. But not everyone was a fan. It was “terrifying”, says designer Ryan Lobo. “And honestly, a trip hazard.”