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This is a good time to face Belgium. Not only are they stuttering in front of goal, but also missing Romelu Lukaku. Leandro Trossard was selected as the striker in the goalless draw against North Macedonia, with Michy Batshuayi and Lois Openda left on the bench. Belgium manager Rudi Garcia has included Charles De Ketelaere in the starting XI tonight but responded to criticism over his selection choices in his pre-match press conference.

From time to time, some of you make me laugh,” Garcia said to journalists. “When a player is on the list, he shouldn’t be there. And the same player should have been included, even though you didn’t even want him. I make my choices based on what I see. When you win, you’re always right, and when you don’t win, it’s the coach’s lot. Everyone becomes a coach in those moments. I have enough experience not to pay attention to it and stay focused on the next match.”

Tonight will have a big say with what happens in the group. Hopefully we can be the ones on top. I want to see intensity, with an without the ball. This is tough game, but it has to be. The reward is so great. We know we are going to have to through pain, but we have to be prepared to do that.

• Blue Sharks beat Eswatini 3-0 to top qualifying group

• Cameroon second in Group D after draw with Angola

Cape Verde have booked their place as debutants at the 2026 World Cup after a 3-0 home victory over Eswatini secured top spot in their African qualifying group.

With a population of just under 525,000, the tiny Atlantic island nation will become the second-smallest country by population to play at a men’s World Cup finals, behind only Iceland, who qualified in 2018.

More to follow

Universities, law firms and businesses that have changed course should have stood by convictions, says ex-president

Barack Obama took aim at institutions and businesses who made deals or worked out settlements with the Trump administration, noting on a new podcast episode: “We all have this capacity, I think, to take a stand.”

In a talk with Marc Maron on the comedian’s last edition of his long-running WTF With Marc Maron, the former US president said institutions – including law firms, universities and businesses – that have changed course during the Trump administration should have stood by their convictions.

Third film adapted from the romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish, feels clunky and cliched

This is the third film in a series, after My Fault in 2023 and Your Fault in 2024, that have been adapted from the Culpable trilogy, romance novels by Mercedes Ron, originally written in Spanish. It’s obviously aimed at a specific market that expects a certain blend of melodrama, softcore sex and lush lifestyle porn, and (more importantly) is invested already in the trilogy’s story. Given those parameters, it probably delivers – although the dialogue, at least judging by the subtitles, is super clunky and cliched.

Complete outsiders coming to this cold may be a little baffled by what’s going on, since this concluding instalment makes no effort to fill in any blanks. But even total newbies will get the gist that heroine Noah (Nicole Wallace) still has feelings for her ex Nick (Gabriel Guevara) – who also, somewhat disturbingly, was once her stepbrother, although their respective parents didn’t marry until Noah and Nick were well into adulthood. At the Ibiza-set wedding of comic relief best friends Jenna (Eva Ruiz) and Lion (Victor Varona), Noah and Nick bump uglies before having the inevitable row that will separate them for most of the narrative until the final-act rapprochement. In the middle part, Noah hooks up with nice (and therefore doomed to romantic failure) Simon (Fran Morcillo), and Nick goes around offices wearing suits and issuing orders in boardrooms. There’s a bad guy, Michael (Javier Morgade), who looks almost identical to Nick but with more perma-stubble, and he tries to wreak havoc on our central lovers.

Hostage and prisoner releases are bringing joy to families. But there is no guarantee that the ceasefire will end Palestinian suffering

The reprieve brought by the end of fighting in Gaza is immense. In Israel, the release of the living hostages has led to widespread elation. In Gaza and the West Bank there are also celebrations, as up to 2,000 Palestinian detainees start to be released – though there is distress, too, due to uncertainty about who is being freed and where they will be sent. In northern Gaza, people can finally return to dig through rubble for the remains of an estimated 10,000 missing people.

As recently as three weeks ago, the likelihood of a ceasefire appeared remote. But it has taken effect, and on Monday Donald Trump travelled from Jerusalem, where he was cheered in the Knesset, to Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. There, he joined a high-powered peace summit of more than 20 world leaders, including Sir Keir Starmer. The plan for peace begun there is due to be continued at a conference in the UK. The US president, acting with international partners, did make this deal happen – despite, not because of, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

A lucrative sector is spreading fast as criminal enterprises force abused and trafficked workers to cheat others

A Chinese court last month sentenced 11 people to death over their roles in a illegal scam empire along the border with Myanmar. But it won’t end a noxious multibillion-dollar industry that devastates the lives of two sets of victims. The first are those cheated out of money, often by people posing as potential romantic or business partners in what are known as “pig‑butchering” schemes. The second are those who are forced to cheat them, working in conditions amounting to modern slavery.

The recent study, Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds, by Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li and Mark Bo, paints a terrifying picture of the sector. Workers are trafficked into heavily guarded, prison-like compounds, where they are routinely abused and tortured for failing to meet targets, or extorted for ransoms. Others take the jobs willingly, but find that they cannot repay ruinous charges for food and accommodation. Their work requires them to be connected to the outside world round the clock, yet they are too terrified to seek help because of the surveillance and violence they endure.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

• Reports have said coach wants out of UNC contract

• Tar Heels have lost three of first five games this season

Bill Belichick has denied reports that he has been considering an exit strategy from his role as North Carolina’s head coach.

“Some of the reports out last week about my looking for a buyout and trying to leave here and all that, it’s just categorically false,” Belichick said on Monday during his first public comments since a blowout loss to Clemson at the start of the month. “Glad I’m here. Working toward our goals and the process.”

During the second of two off weeks in a three-week span, the subject of Belichick’s status and future with the Tar Heels was a hot topic, so much so that last Wednesday the university released brief statements from the coach and athletics director Bubba Cunningham reaffirming commitments between Belichick and the school. Reports had said the 73-year-old wanted to return to the NFL as a coach or in the media.

On a powerfully emotional day, 20 Israelis went home, hundreds of Palestinians were freed from prison and Trump had his perfectly scripted moment

The estimated 65,000 people in “hostages square” in Tel Aviv heard it before they saw it. Like so many sunflowers, their faces turned up to search the clear blue morning sky for the source of the sound. Then it swept into view from the west, from the direction of Gaza.

A helicopter, military brown, was on the way to Ichilov hospital a few hundred metres away. But it diverted. It circled around the crowd giving each person below a view, and then tilted to its right, in an apparent salute to the cheering, waving, smiling faces below.

• Captain could return for November’s north London derby

• Eberechi Eze and Ethan Nwaneri to deputise

Arsenal expect Martin Ødegaard to miss another six weeks with the knee injury he sustained before the international break.

The Arsenal captain went down clutching his left knee after clashing with Crysencio Summerville in the first half of a 2-0 victory against West Ham that sent Mikel Arteta’s side top of the table. Ødegaard twice attempted to carry on after treatment before being replaced by Martín Zubimendi, and Arteta said the 26-year-old had left the ground with his knee in a brace.

Online marketplace paid just $18m in corporation tax, leading campaigners to call for government action

The Chinese online marketplace Temu’s EU operations more than doubled pre-tax profits last year to just below $120m (£90m) despite employing just eight people, accounts show.

They rose 171% in the 12 months to December 2024 compared with the $44.1m the year before, as shoppers snapped up its low-cost goods, which are widely promoted on social media.

It was a brutal killing spree that gripped Italy – yet so little is still known. Why were lovers murdered in their cars? Why were their sexual organs often targeted? Author Tobias Jones sifts the evidence

Some criminal cases are so vast that even the number of victims is uncertain: in the case of the unsolved “Monster of Florence” crimes that have gripped Italy for half a century, it is known that seven couples were murdered. But some say it’s eight, and at least another 16 murders have been connected to the case. The number of suspects almost matches that of the victims. First there was the pista sarda, the Sardinian line of enquiry into the swinging, pimping Vinci brothers who probably had a hand in the “first” murder in 1968. In the 1990s, a rapist, Pietro Pacciani, was convicted and then cleared. In 2000, Pacciani’s co-accused, Mario Vanni and Giancarlo Lotti, were sentenced to life and 28 years respectively for the murders committed between 1981 and 1985.

Gianluca Monastra, author of Il Mostro di Firenze, writes that it’s a case in which “there’s a seductive and ever more abstract ballet of hypotheses … it’s a story in which everything can seem true, as can its contrary.” Filled with intrigue and sex (most of the victims were young couples making out in the countryside), it has spawned its fair share of obsessives, who have come to be known as monsterologists. The frequency with which evidence suddenly appeared or disappeared has persuaded some monsterologists to suspect that elements within law enforcement were involved.

• Leeds half-back won the 2025 Man of Steel award

• First Test against Australia at Wembley on 25 October

The England head coach, Shaun Wane, has said the decision to leave Super League’s Man of Steel, Jake Connor, out of his squad for the Ashes was “not really difficult”. He added that he does not understand the obsession surrounding the exile of the Leeds Rhinos half-back.

Connor is by far the most notable omission from the 24-man squad to take on Australia in the first Ashes series since 2003. It begins on 25 October at Wembley, with Tests at Everton and Headingley to follow on successive Saturdays. There are a number of surprise inclusions, including a returnfor Hull KR’s Joe Burgess after his two-try performance in the Super League Grand Final on Saturday. The winger has been out of the national side for a decade.

Ferrer, who has been imprisoned repeatedly, says he opted for exile after facing ‘torture’ behind bars in Cuba

The prominent Cuban dissident José Daniel Ferrer has been freed from prison and put on a plane to the US where he will live in exile with his family, the communist country’s foreign ministry has said.

Ferrer, who has been imprisoned repeatedly as the long-term leader of the island’s pro-democracy movement, announced this month he had opted for exile after facing “torture” and “humiliation” behind bars.

Lindsey Graham says closure won’t push him to meet Democrats’ demands on Obama-era healthcare subsidies

Republican and Democratic senators Lindsey Graham and Mark Kelly have dug their heels in over the government shutdown – which is now approaching two weeks, with the former saying that the closure won’t push him to meet Democrats’ demands for a restoration of Obama-era healthcare subsidies.

Graham said on NBC News’s Meet the Press on Sunday that he was in favor of the Senate voting to reopen the government and prepared to “have a rational discussion” with Democrats – but not with the government shut down.

European Commission spokesperson says Olivér Várhelyi denies knowledge of his country targeting staff

Hungary’s EU commissioner has denied any knowledge of alleged attempted spying by his government during his time as the country’s top diplomat in Brussels, according to a commission spokesperson.

Olivér Várhelyi sat down with European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on Sunday to discuss the allegations reported by a consortium of investigative journalists last week.

Company apologises and says network ‘recovering’ after many customers say there were unable to access services

Tens of thousands of Vodafone customers in the UK have reported they could not access services including the internet and making mobile phone calls.

Consumers started reporting problems on the website of the outage monitor Downdetector from about 3pm on Monday.

Sarkozy must go to La Santé prison in Paris after conviction over scheme to obtain election funds from Gaddafi regime

The former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been ordered to go to jail in Paris next week after a court last month sentenced him to five years in prison for criminal conspiracy over a scheme to obtain election campaign funds from the regime of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Sarkozy, who was the rightwing president of France between 2007 and 2012, was summoned to meet state prosecutors on Monday. They told him he must present himself at the entrance of La Santé prison in the south of Paris on 21 October to begin his sentence.

Far-right activist is accused of refusing to comply with counter-terrorism police request at Channel tunnel

Tommy Robinson claimed Elon Musk was paying his legal costs, as he went on trial for refusing to comply with a request made by counter-terrorism police as he tried to leave Britain last year.

The far-right activist, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley Lennon, refused to give police the pin for his phone because it had “journalistic material on it” after they stopped him at the Channel tunnel on 28 July 2024, a court heard.

Union says growing numbers of its members have made complaints about infringements of copyright in AI material

The performing arts union Equity has threatened mass direct action over tech and entertainment companies’ use of its members’ likenesses, images and voices in AI content without permission.

The warning came as the union said growing numbers of its members had made complaints about infringements of their copyright and misuse of their personal data in AI material.

Nearly 2,000 people, including about 1,700 seized from Gaza and held without charge, set free from Israeli jails

• Gaza ceasefire – live updates

The police could not hold the crowds back. As soon as they saw the Palestinian prisoners and detainees through the windows of the bus, hundreds of people gathering in front of a theatre in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank rushed forward, chanting the names of loved ones they had not seen for years and in some cases, decades.

Their faces were gaunt, the sharp angles decorated by freshly scabbed-over wounds. Loved ones hoisted them up on their shoulders with ease. One, swaddled in a Palestinian keffiyeh and splaying his fingers into a V for victory, was dropped before his mother, whose feet he began to kiss.

Fiona Benson was invited to Lviv’s BookForum by Ukrainian poet-soldier Artur Dron’. She recounts falling in love with the city and its thriving literary culture, before an air raid siren sounds

I had been working on Exeter University’s Ukrainian Wartime Poetry project for two years when the invitation came to travel to the country’s largest literary festival. I didn’t exactly relish the prospect of a journey to a war zone, but I was assured that visiting BookForum in Lviv, a city so far west it’s practically in Poland, would be safe. I had been leading poetry workshops with exiles and editing translations of Ukrainian poetry, including soldier Artur Dron‘’s collection We Were Here, published last November. So, when Artur and his translator – the incredible poet Yuliya Musakovska – asked me and language professor Hugh Roberts to attend, I couldn’t say no.

What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with the city: its gorgeous architecture, its cafes, its parks full of trees, and its writers. Lviv’s inspired, robust literary culture puts the UK’s own underfunded, last-gasp scene to shame. On the first night of the Forum, Hugh and I attended a nonstop music and poetry event in a nightclub at which both Artur and Yuliya read their poems, and revealed what utter rock stars they truly are. I don’t know why I was surprised; We Were Here, written on the frontline before Artur was even 22, is a masterpiece. It is full of lucid, clear-eyed accounts of his experiences in the trenches and on the battlefield, elegies for his comrades, humane portraits of the suffering of bereaved civilians and furious adaptations of liturgies and prayers. One of his poems is published below.

French president says opposition has not ‘risen to the moment’ after reappointment of Sébastien Lecornu as PM

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has accused rival political parties of fuelling instability as he brushed aside calls by the opposition for him to resign amid France’s worst political crisis in decades.

“Many of those who have fuelled division and speculation have not risen to the moment,” Macron said of French opposition parties, as he arrived in Egypt on Monday to attend a summit on Gaza. He said rival “political forces” were “solely responsible for this chaos” after they “instigated the destabilisation” of the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu.

Overflowing rivers swept through entire villages, triggered landslides and swept away roads and bridges

The death toll from flooding in central and eastern Mexico has risen sharply to at least 64, with another 65 still missing, authorities said on Monday.

The flooding, caused by intense rainfall, was focused mostly in the Veracruz, Hidalgo and Puebla states, said Laura Velázquez, the head of Mexico’s civil defense authorities.