China confirms details amid efforts to end trade war but reiterates it will continue to approve export permits

The US has reached an agreement with China to speed up rare earth shipments into America, a White House official has said, amid efforts to end a trade war between the world’s biggest economies.

President Donald Trump said on Thursday that the US had signed a deal with China the previous day, without providing additional details, and that there might be a separate deal coming up that would “open up” India.

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(Blue Note)
The US saxophonist pulls back the vocals of his last record to present a new ensemble and all-original repertoire, resulting in an ideal balance of ingenuity and rapport

Joshua Redman has been such a brilliant saxophone improviser for more than three decades that his unerring flawlessness at a spontaneous art almost becomes a tic. But his playful delight in music-making, a quality that swept from his eponymous debut release in 1993, has never faded. Redman’s 2023 first album for Blue Note was the covers-packed Where Are We, his first predominantly vocal venture, featuring the frail, borderline-tearful voice of young New Orleans-based singer Gabrielle Cavassa, herself a new Blue Note signing.

Perhaps to deflect this from looking like a label-steered career reset, Redman has cannily entitled its successor Words Fall Short, and included only one Cavassa vocal. Even more smartly, he has introduced a terrific new young road band on an all-original repertoire, and added acclaimed Chilean saxophonist Melissa Aldana and 19-year-old west coast trumpet phenomenon Skylar Tang as guests. The result is an album that feels more like an ideal balance of Redman’s own ingenuity and his ensemble rapport.

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The much-loved painter, designer of stamps and creator of anti-war posters shares tips from a 90-year career

You know the art of David Gentleman even if you don’t know you know it. Anyone who’s passed through London’s Charing Cross tube station has seen his life-filled black-and-white mural of medieval people, enlarged from his woodcuts, digging, hammering, chiselling to construct the Eleanor Cross that once stood nearby. His graphic art has graced everything from stamps to book covers to Stop the War posters in a career spanning seven decades. He says he’s been making art for 90 years, since he was five.

His parents were also artists, and in his latest book he reproduces a Shell poster by his father to show he follows in a modern British tradition of well-drawn, well-observed popular art. Perhaps it is because he learned from his parents as naturally as learning to speak – “Seeing them drawing tempted me to draw” – that Gentleman dislikes pedagogy. He’s proud that he never had to teach for a living, always selling his art. So his guide to the creative life, Lessons for Young Artists, is anything but a how-to manual or didactic textbook.

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It offers the silhouette of a vest top but with more structure and looks good when you layer (just don’t use a cardie)

What with being neither a page boy nor a snooker player, I had not given much thought to waistcoats until recently. I guess I thought of them as belonging to a wardrobe that didn’t concern me: a world of braces, cravats and flat caps. Of Guy Ritchie films, wedding rentals and carnation buttonholes.

Well, I guess the joke’s on me now, because waistcoats aren’t novelty or naff any more. They are happening, and I need to get up to speed on how to wear them. The waistcoat has entered the fashion chat in the slipstream of the trouser suit. Women have been wearing them for decades, but until the last decade it remained a slightly niche move – not weird or eccentric, just a bit of a statement. It is only in the past few years that suits on women have become unremarkable.

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(Bella Union)
The US singer’s seventh album takes his meta-theatrical style almost into showtune territory, with songs about repression, depression and anger

‘Some people face the music,” Brian Christinzio sings on The Tent. “Some people face the floor.” On this outlandish seventh album, the Manchester-based US singer-songwriter makes a bold bid for the former. That song alone excavates childhood memories, with Christinzio crunching leaves and finding caterpillars, cutely illustrated by twinkling piano, only for abrupt tonal shifts (siren-like drones, distorted vocals, heavenly choirs) to crash in like intrusive thoughts. It’s a queasy, visceral introduction to a record which confronts the summer he was abused, as a child, by an adult camp counsellor.

A Sober Conversation is an eccentric rock opera about repression, depression and anger told with the meta-theatrical, tragicomic style that has won Christinzio a cult following. The title track veers into showtune territory, shimmying in double time as he employs a kooky variety of voices to tease a “big secret”, but also has a gorgeous, melancholy vocal melody that Sufjan Stevens would be proud of. Single Two Legged Dog, a glam piano-pop duet with the Last Dinner Party’s Abigail Morris, sticks a middle finger up to pity and culminates in a howling crescendo. Best (or most galling) of all is Where You Taking My Baby?, a chilling, jaunty confrontation of his abuser with sparse, lovely guitar underpinning the song’s gut-churning question.

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Steve Bunce runs the rule over the weekend's fights, with Deontay Wilder and Jake Paul at the top of a double-header.

History-making British juniors Hannah Klugman, Mika Stojsavljevic and Mimi Xu are in the Wimbledon main draw - who are they and are they ready?

The west African country seems to be a dumping ground for thousands of people pushed back from north Africa after trying to reach Europe

There is no shade from the sun nor protection from sandstorms in the deserts of Niger and so, for almost 300 days, the refugees stranded there have stood in protest with a single message: “We don’t want to stay here.”

About 15km (8 miles) from the nearest town of Agadez, the 2,000 refugees in the camp feel they have been isolated from the world, kept out of sight and earshot and abandoned by those they feel should be helping them – the Nigerien government, the EU and the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR.

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After singing with everyone from Tina Turner to the Small Faces, she takes your questions on her Glastonbury plans, life as an Ikette and getting a leg up from Mick Jagger

You’ve played with a lot of incredible artists – Tina Turner, the Small Faces, Nick Drake, Dr John, George Harrison, Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters, the KLF, Ocean Colour Scene and so many more. If you could collaborate with absolutely anyone, who would it be? Harrison1986
I love to collaborate – basically, I like collaborating with people who want to collaborate with me. I’ve just worked with Paul Weller and Cast, but a lot of people I’d love to have worked with are no longer with us. Top of my list on a production level would be Quincy Jones. Vocally, how about something with Prince?! And I love Mavis Staples, who’s still with us; I’ve met her. It would be great to do something with Mavis.

Of all the artists you’ve collaborated with, who stands head and shoulders above the rest? Aubrey26
Tina Turner. Simply the best – and what a joy to have her start a career I never planned on. I was in a very abusive teenage marriage. I said a prayer to ask God to take me out of that situation and a couple of hours later I was in Tina’s living room, singing Dancing in the Street. I’d gone there to help some other ladies – Gloria Scott and Maxine Smith – get the gig, but another girl didn’t show up for the audition. Maxine remembered I used to sing in church and the rest is history. My whole career is all about the unexpected. It think it has a lot to do with manifesting dreams, although being called a “legend” doesn’t pay the bills.

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After a wild new player is forced to join the game without consent, the action gets even more operatic and bloodthirsty. But if you can get on board with the twists – and that’s a big if – you will not believe what happens in the last minute

The two main talking points of the third and final season of Squid Game are both massive spoilers. This means that I won’t be able to mention the final minute of the whole thing, which contains a moment so WTF and genuinely surprising that I bet my editor a serious amount of money she wouldn’t be able to guess what happens. She couldn’t, thankfully, but such reckless gambling is the sort of behaviour that would land me in Squid Game in the first place, so it just shows that nobody here has learned any lessons from it whatsoever.

Nor should I talk about another key development, though in this case, it becomes so central that it needs to be mentioned somehow. So, vaguely speaking, a new player is forced to enter the games, without being capable of giving their consent, and becomes the focus of later episodes. It is odd to criticise Squid Game for not being credible, given that it is a hit show about an underground tournament in which children’s games are played until many or most of the participants die, but introducing this new player is completely out there, even by the standards of “hide-and-seek … but with knives?”

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