Rob Jetten’s party now leading by 15,122 votes, putting it back in the pole position to lead the talks on forming the next government

In terms of managing our expectations as to when the new Dutch government could be formed, Joost Eerdmans of the right-wing JA21 party – a potential coalition partner in the new administration – has offered a bit of guidance on timing.

Speaking to reporters earlier today, he confirmed the party “can definitely do business” with other parties, but insisted that he would “rather have a stable cabinet in a few months than a messy cabinet before Christmas.”

IDF said it was attacking Hezbollah infrastructure when it fired at a ‘suspect’ and the incident is under review

Israeli troops have killed a Lebanese municipal worker while carrying out a raid in the south of the country, prompting Lebanon’s president to order the army to confront future incursions.

Lebanese state media identified the slain man as Ibrahim Salameh, an employee of the Blida municipality, a village near the border with Israel. The Israeli military confirmed the raid and said it was attacking Hezbollah infrastructure when it fired at a “suspect”, and said that the incident was under review.

The BBC have confirmed that the long-running sci-fi show will return to our screens. But with ratings falling and its Disney partnership ending, questions hang over its future

Sometimes the answer to one mystery only prompts more questions. That may well be the case with this week’s announcement from the BBC that Doctor Who will return to BBC One with a 2026 Christmas special and a new series to follow, but that the show’s international streaming partnership with Disney+ will end.

There was no indication of who might play the Doctor in next year’s special, which will be written by Russell T Davies and produced by Bad Wolf with BBC Studios.

By confronting imagined terrors, we rehearse for the real ones, learning that courage, wisdom and empathy are the true charms that keep the darkness at bay

Here is one of my earliest memories: I was around four years old, standing in a playground somewhere in Preston, staring in wonder at three big rocks, each one splattered with red spray paint. I asked my nan about it. She could have told me the truth, that the paint was graffiti.

Instead, she told me the rocks were a species of monster called bloodsuckers, and that at night they came alive to eat children who were foolish enough to stray outside after dark. I believed her with all my heart. Why wouldn’t I? She was my nan!

If you want permission that it’s OK to hurt a good person: it is, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. There is a life he could have without you

• Read more Leading questions

How do I break up with a man who loves me, is super kind and generous, and provides stability but who leaves me feeling cold and irritated most of the time?

I’m a 36-year-old woman and we’ve been together for four years. During this time his stability has provided me with a base to grow and expand in the most wonderful ways. Now I feel suffocated. He is a wonderful person but has no interest in ever leaving his home town to try something new (I’m an immigrant). His only interests are pubs and football and when we go abroad he wants to spend most of his time in the pub, which infuriates me.

As the band return with their sixth album, Big Whoop, frontman Toby Martin reflects on fatherhood, mortality and their love-hate relationship with their biggest hit

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Twenty years ago, Youth Group recorded Forever Young, a bittersweet anthem that’s wired as tightly to the hearts of gen X indie kids as a pacemaker. The 1984 original, from German band Alphaville, was a gloriously histrionic ode to cold war anxiety. But in Youth Group’s hands, synths were replaced by mellow guitar and the song was set to footage of kids skateboarding in Sydney in 1978. It was pure sun-dappled nostalgia that shot to No 1 on the Aria charts in 2006 after it was used on The OC.

So how does the band, now middle-aged, regard their biggest hit with the passing of time?

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

The Irish actor has revealed that energetic birthday celebrations caused problems on the set of Spielberg’s 2002 film

Colin Farrell has said that he once showed up so drunk to a film set he needed almost 50 takes to convincingly get through a line of dialogue, angering co-star Tom Cruise.

Speaking to Stephen Colbert on his late-night talk show, Farrell recalled “one of the worst days” he’d ever experienced on set, both hungover and freshly intoxicated on Steven Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi drama Minority Report.

The Shiva Baby and Bottoms star gets her own glossy sitcom which offers us a bumpy ride until it begins to take shape in the final stretch

For most of its public existence, I Love LA, HBO’s new comedy series created by Rachel Sennott, was known online as Untitled Rachel Sennott Project. One wonders if they should have kept the temporary moniker, which befits the show better than its actual title; though I Love LA does go to Erewhon, it’s less a love letter to the city, nor a portrait of its precarious creative class, than a glossy, prestige brand bet on Sennott, an internet It Girl with a distinctly modern indistinction between actor and celebrity, and the popular, chaotic, very online sensibility that she embodies.

The logic of the project flowed downhill: Sennott, one of the few internet-bred comedians with real movie mettle (see: Shiva Baby, I Used To Be Funny and Bottoms), given eight whole episodes; HBO, continually losing younger viewers to YouTube, appealing to extremely online zillennials; the chattering class, starved for a truly good young-adult comedy – FX’s Adults, released earlier this year, didn’t cut it – eager for a successor to the messy, self-absorbed and totally absorbing women of Sex and the City, Girls and Insecure. All can agree: nothing gets people talking like a confident and maddening woman on TV.

Theatre director and founder of Talawa, the company that champions writers and actors of African and Caribbean heritage

By the time she founded her influential and still thriving Talawa theatre company in 1986, Yvonne Brewster, who has died aged 87, had made waves in her native Jamaica as an actor and director, worked on British TV versions of plays by Jimmy Cliff and her compatriot Trevor Rhone, run a small touring company, Carib, for black actors, and served for two years as a drama officer on the Arts Council.

She had good contacts and knew the ropes, and set about a dynamic programme of work – new plays and classics by Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka and Shakespeare – often seen in the Tricycle (now the Kiln, in Kilburn), the Lyric Hammersmith and the Riverside Studios, all in London.

New EV models are offsetting a slump in demand but Europe’s carmakers are bracing for shutdowns

Volkswagen has signalled that its annual profit targets are at risk without sufficient computer chips, in the latest sign that an expected shortage of semiconductors from China could hit carmakers across Europe.

The struggling German automotive firm said a series of cost cuts and new model launches were helping to offset a slump in Chinese demand, but it added that forecasts were based on the “adequate availability of semiconductors”.

How Arsenal-supporting family put the youngster on road to history-making appearance at Emirates on Wednesday

There was never a question about which club Max Dowman wanted to join after he was spotted playing up an age group for Billericay Town’s colts in 2015. In the Essex town best known these days for being one of the backdrops for the popular BBC comedy series Gavin and Stacey, and where allegiances have often been split between Tottenham and West Ham, Dowman had caught the eye of scouts from London’s biggest academies at the age of six.

“He had the pick of clubs,” says Nick Hutt, the chair of Billericay’s youth section, who saw a four-year-old Dowman play. “But the whole family are Arsenal supporters, so they chose Arsenal.”

A Halloween screening doesn’t have to mean being scared witless. From serene sushi-making to a shell with shoes on, we run down the finest films for those of a nervous disposition

Just so we’re all clear on the brief, tomorrow is Halloween. But some people do not like scary films. Some people do not like films where there are any intense emotional moments whatsoever. This is mostly a list of those films. So, for example, Up cannot be included in the lineup because its first 10 minutes are genuinely traumatising. Similarly, Finding Nemo cannot be included because it is a film about a grief-stricken father searching for a son he believes might be dead. But Cars, a film about some cars, can. The scariest that Cars gets is when a car has a near-miss with a train. Other than that, barely any jeopardy at all.

The discovery that affluent neighbourhoods have more diversity of nature has implications for human wellbeing – and sheds light on the structural injustices in cities

For a long time, ecology tended to ignore people. It mostly focused on beautiful places far from large-scale human development: deep rainforest or pristine grassland. Then, in the late 1990s, in the desert city of Phoenix, Arizona, scientists shifted their gaze closer to home.

A team of ecologists went out into their own neighbourhood to map the distribution of urban plants in one of the first studies of its kind. Equipped with tape measures and clipboards, they documented trees and shrubs, sometimes getting on all fours to crawl through bushes under the curious watch of local people.

From Mamdani-style visual branding to basketball clips, Catherine Connolly found her audience and spoke in a language they understood

Last weekend, Ireland elected as its next president a leftwing pacifist in the latest example of how Ireland has bucked the global trends of rightwing populism.

This was not a parliamentary election – although Catherine Connolly, an independent candidate, managed to unite leftwing parties, some previously at loggerheads – behind her. And presidential elections in Ireland are different. The office itself is largely ceremonial, but the figurehead is seen as the conscience of Irish society. The Irish electorate – at least since 1990, when Mary Robinson became Ireland’s first female president (she was followed by Mary McAleese and Michael D Higgins) – has a tendency to choose progressive presidents with intellectual heft. My own theory of who emerges victorious in Irish presidential elections is that they are thematic to the vanguard of prevailing social values: Robinson the feminist, McAleese the bridge builder between north and south, Higgins the socialist poet, and now Connolly, the anti-war president.

Una Mullally is a columnist for the Irish Times

A unique show at Khanenko Museum, opening three years after a Russian missile hit, is inspiring Ukrainians to think about art and empire in new ways

On a quiet street in central Kyiv, where monuments are wrapped in sandbags and shrapnel shields, the Khanenko Museum has opened an exhibition about Africa. Its title, Africa Direct, is a statement and a method: a call to approach the continent not through inherited filters (Soviet, colonial, or western) but through direct engagement with its histories, philosophies and living cultures.

The museum, which holds one of the most distinguished private collections of the 19th century in eastern Europe, was badly damaged when a Russian missile struck nearby in October 2022. Windows and show cases were shattered and the glass ceiling collapsed. Yet the museum’s collections were unharmed: Byzantine icons, Islamic artwork, and old master paintings had already been secured, some of them safely evacuated to partner institutions in Paris, Vilnius, Warsaw and The Hague.

From her assistance with crosswords to a wink that set a career in motion, Guardian readers share favourite memories of the actor

In the 70s I wrote radio plays. Prunella Scales was in one of them. During a break I was doing a crossword and getting stuck. She sat down next to me and had a look at the mess I was making. “Silly boy!” she said (I was perhaps 30 at the time). “It’s ‘surprise’, not ‘suprise’!” and we soon finished it off. In the end I did around 25 plays, but that’s the only conversation with an actor I remember. Lovely lady. James, Sussex

Banyana Banyana squeeze through but assistant Thinasonke Mbuli insists they must learn from countries such as Malawi

The Women’s Africa Cup of Nations will welcome two new participants next March after Malawi and Cape Verde qualified for the first time. For Cape Verde, the island archipelago with a population of just over half a million people, it’s a double celebration after their men’s team qualified for the World Cup for the first time. The women’s team was only founded in 2018 and in seven years have enjoyed a rapid rise. As far as records show, no other team has progressed as quickly from formation to major tournament.

They will play in a field that includes hosts Morocco, 10-time champions Nigeria, Kenya and Burkina Faso, who have both qualified for just the second time in their history, and six other teams who were involved at the 2024 edition: Zambia, Tanzania, Algeria, Senegal, Ghana and 2022 champions South Africa, who required a 91st-minute winner against the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to confirm their spot.

Katie Lam spoke ‘imprecisely’ in stating large number of people would ‘need to go home’, says Conservative leader

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The Conservative MP Katie Lam spoke “imprecisely” in stating the party would deport large numbers of legally settled families from the UK, Kemi Badenoch said, adding she had no plans to make tougher immigration rules retrospective.

Badenoch’s comments to reporters after a speech in London end days of confusion over Tory migration policy, particularly over whether many thousands of people who have made lives in the UK could lose their status of indefinite leave to remain (ILR) under a future Conservative government.

Former Liverpool and Sunderland forward on buying Ed Woodward’s house, his padel business and how his new coach is similar to Ancelotti

Fabio Borini’s house witnessed a major disagreement over football but it was not related to his recent move to Salford City. The forward bought the property from the former Manchester United executive vice-chair Ed Woodward, who had fans at the gates showing their displeasure during his time at Old Trafford. “Because of the protest outside, everybody was worried, so I said: ‘Don’t worry I’ll buy it, get the price down,’” Borini jokes.

The former Italy international has a business mind and knows a good deal when it comes along. Joining Salford, however, was certainly not about the money. After leaving Sampdoria, where he endured a difficult final season after being ostracised, Borini wanted to play for the love of the game. He returned to his wife Erin’s native north-west, where they had their Cheshire home, and searched for work.

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The Swedish experimental musician pivots from drones to spectacular pop melodies, with guest spots from Iggy Pop and Ethel Cain

Anna von Hausswolff’s sixth studio album is being trailed as the 39-year-old Swede’s pivot towards pop, which you could say is all relative. For the last decade, Von Hauswolff has dealt in music that is solemn, echo-laden, heavy on the drone of her beloved pipe organ and fully deserving of the adjective gothic.

Her work has elicited comparisons to Nico and Diamanda Galás; 40 years ago, it might have been packaged in a hauntingly abstract Vaughan Oliver sleeve and released on 4AD. She has collaborated with Swans, Sunn O))) and the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room. Her last album, 2020’s All Thoughts Fly, was a collection of instrumentals, recorded on a replica of a 17th-century German baroque organ in a church in Gothenburg: you can perhaps get some idea of its emotional tone from the fact that it was released on a label best known for releasing doom metal.

• Brook bemoans world class batters’ lack of performance

• England eighth in ODI rankings with tough tests to come

Harry Brook has admitted that he is flummoxed by England’s inability to get consistent results in recent one-day internationals, saying that some of the supposedly stellar talents in his squad – which includes up to seven batters he insists “would get into any team in the world” – “just haven’t performed well enough”.

“It is disappointing, isn’t it?” England’s white-ball captain admitted, as he looked ahead to the third and final fixture in an already-lost series against New Zealand. “You go round every single player there and you think: ‘Bloody hell, there isn’t many teams that they don’t get into in the world.’ It’s disappointing we haven’t performed as well as we could. Sometimes you’ve got to hold your hand up and say they’ve been the better team.”

Liberal Rob Jetten edges ahead of rightwing populist in race to form next government with 2% of votes still to count

Geert Wilders is almost certain to be shut out of the next Dutch government after a knife-edge general election in which support for his far-right Freedom party (PVV) slumped and the liberal-progressive D66 party made spectacular gains.

With more than 98% of votes counted from Wednesday’s election, the two parties were neck-and-neck on a projected 26 seats each in the Netherlands’ 150-seat parliament, with the difference between them only a couple of thousand votes.

With ticket sales phases under way and prices reaching eye-watering levels, my experience raised a crucial question: who is this World Cup for?

For months, people in my life had been asking me when and where to get World Cup tickets. In the absence of any actionable information from Fifa before the first round of the pre-sale opened up, they hoped, I guess, that I had inside knowledge.

In truth, I only knew that Fifa would be using the universally despised dynamic pricing model, and that the bid book for the 2026 World Cup had promised an average group stage ticket price of $305. Mind you, that was seven and a half years ago and an awful lot of inflation has happened since then. In the bid, Category 4 tickets for the group stage – the cheapest seats available – were priced at $21. (As we would soon learn, the actual price would start at $60, and category 4 tickets are almost non-existent.)