Donald Trump hailed his talks with Xi Jinping this morning as a “great success”, saying a trade agreement would be signed “pretty soon”. The US president reduced from 20% to 10% the tariffs he imposed over the trade of fentanyl, which China has promised to crack down on. Beijing will also continue rare earth exports and purchase “tremendous amounts” of soybeans. Moments before the meeting, Trump ordered his military leaders to start testing America’s nuclear weapons for the first time since 1992. Rachel Reeves has referred herself to an independent ethics advisor for failing to obtain a necessary licence to rent out her Dulwich home after moving into No 11. Keir Starmer says an investigation will not be necessary and that the chancellor’s apology was a “sufficient resolution” to the matter. A spider thought to have vanished from the UK has been rediscovered on a remote part of the Isle of Wight. Aulonia albimana, better known as the “white-knuckled wolf spider”, was last spotted in Britain in 1985.

Sudan’s “descent into hell”

“Sudan’s descent into hell continues inexorably,” says Le Monde. Four years after a military coup led by General al-Burhan, the major city of El Fasher has fallen to paramilitaries that are now opposed to him, further perpetuating the “fratricidal war” ravaging the country. This means the whole of Darfur is now controlled by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) led by al-Burhan’s second-in-command turned arch-rival General Hemedti. There are no good guys here: Darfur is the site of “near-continuous inter-ethnic massacres”, carried out using advanced weaponry bought with the proceeds of increasingly lucrative gold exports. The toothless UN is a “powerless bystander”, bleating about “ethnically motivated violations and atrocities” that other observers have been reporting for months. Meanwhile, 25 million Sudanese are starving.

To their great misfortune, this battle for power and resources is being inflamed and sustained by the intervention of regional powers – shamelessly claiming to be “concerned for the fate of the Sudanese people” – which have turned Sudan into a proxy battleground for their rivalries. Al-Burhan, a member of the traditional ruling elite class, is backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia. His opponent and former underling, who hails from the long-marginalised Darfur tribes, has benefited from “decisive military aid” supplied by the United Arab Emirates. The UAE, in particular, has clearly “violated a UN arms embargo” by delivering massive quantities of weaponry to the paramilitaries. It is only 14 years since South Sudan seceded to form its own nation. Unless a great power intervenes to end the current conflict, Sudan is heading down the path towards another partition.

🇸🇩 I’ve been a war crimes investigator for 26 years, says Nathaniel Raymond, head of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, on CNN. From what we can see in satellite images of El Fasher, the RSF appears to be carrying out mass killings, of “genocidal scale”, at probably the fastest rate “I’ve ever seen in my career”.

The initiation rituals that got Cardiff University’s cricket team into trouble earlier this month sounded pretty tame, says The Upshot: recruits were apparently pressured to “eat raw onions” and even “down pints of alcohol”. It’s a far cry from the old days. In 1982, England’s rugby players were each given a bottle of aftershave at a post-match dinner in France. After one jokester secretly emptied his, refilled it with wine and drank from it, prop Colin Smart fell for the trick and necked his entire bottle of eau de parfum. He had to have his stomach pumped, but as scrum-half Steve Smith said, he “had the nicest breath I’ve smelt”.

Donald Trump’s administration has asked officials at the Pentagon dealing with Venezuela to sign non-disclosure agreements, says Phil Stewart in Reuters, even though they are already bound by normal secrecy laws. The highly unusual step is raising concerns in Congress, which says it has been kept in the dark about key details of the massive build-up of US military kit and personnel off Venezuela’s coast. Last week the USS Gerald R Ford carrier group was deployed to the Caribbean, taking the total number of troops in the region to more than 10,000 and adding enormous firepower to a force that already included destroyers, F-35 fighter jets and a nuclear submarine. Probably nothing.

The “low-level terrorising” of Britain

On Monday afternoon, in the west London suburb of Uxbridge, Wayne Broadhurst was murdered in the most “savage manner imaginable”, says Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator: violently, randomly stabbed to death as he walked his dog. A 45-year-old man and a 14-year-old boy were also stabbed. The suspect is a 22-year-old Afghan asylum seeker who came to Britain in the back of a lorry. This “barbarism in suburbia” comes immediately after the Ethiopian asylum seeker Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, who sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl days after arriving in Britain, was accidentally released from prison. Abdul Shakoor Ezedi, the Afghan who carried out a horrific chemical attack on a mother and her daughters in Clapham last year, also came here illegally, as did the Moroccan man who slaughtered a pensioner in Hartlepool in 2023 in “revenge” for Gaza, and numerous others currently on trial for assault or rape.

It is “perfectly normal” for Brits to feel unsettled by all this. “Even irate about it.” The politicians and commentators who dismiss such sentiment as “irrational” or even xenophobic have no idea of the “depths of the public’s contempt for them”. Because it’s not just the criminal attacks; it’s the sense that the establishment doesn’t care. The vast chasm between the “grand talk of our useless rulers” and the brutish reality on our streets – the “low-level terrorising of Britain” – is pushing many voters to the “edge of fury”. People are sick of feeling like “lab rats” in the social experiments of the higher classes; of suffering the consequences of the “post-borders ideology” that has so much of the establishment in its grip. Which politicians will be brave enough to acknowledge this issue for what it really is? “Millions are watching, quietly, to see who speaks and who does not.”

Young people are falling for oysters, says Lara Wildenberg in The Times. Bars and restaurants say Gen Z are increasingly drawn to the moreish molluscs, largely thanks to their health benefits (low in calories, high in protein and nutrients) and their environmental credentials (they clean the surrounding water and trap carbon in their shells). Wright Brothers, a leading supplier of the littoral luxury, has seen sales grow 10% in the past year, and when one influencer posted a viral video of her slurping down 50 of the bounteous bivalves in Bentley’s Oyster Bar & Grill, the restaurant went from selling 400 a week to 2,500. Yum.

Halloween always makes me think of dating, says Candice Gallagher on Substack, because they share so many of the same characters. You’ve got the vampires, who “suck the life out of your optimism, one voice note at a time”, and the zombies, who are technically alive but emotionally gone, “the walking dead of dating”. The ghosters, obviously. Worst of all are the Frankenstein monsters: fantasy partners, “built from the best bits of our past infatuations”, which unfortunately don’t exist.

It’s Aisha Gaban, Britain’s first AI-generated TV presenter, who hosted an entire episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches entitled Will AI Take My Job? before revealing that she herself wasn’t real. Sure, she was “dead behind the eyes”, says Stuart Heritage in The Guardian, but she looked basically human and “nailed the stilted cadence of the television documentarian”. The whole thing felt like a stark warning to the channel’s human presenters, such as Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Kevin McCloud: behave, boys, or “you’ll be sacked in favour of a blinking mannequin”.