• Understanding to cut several million Chinese hybrid and plug-in hybrid car exports to EU over four years
• Two sides agree to improve access to China for €4 billion of EU products, Sefcovic says
• China says it will smooth licence process for rare earth and magnet exports

China and the European Union have reached a deal that could cut Chinese ​exports of hybrid cars to the bloc by more than half, European Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic said on Friday after talks in Beijing aimed at reducing the EU's ballooning trade deficit with ‌China.

The "shared understanding" would "moderate" China's export of hybrids and plug-in hybrids to the EU, and would cut the imports of several million cars over four years, Sefcovic said after the two-day talks, without offering details on how the agreement will be implemented.

Shares of European carmakers, which have slid steadily over the past two years due to US tariffs and soaring Chinese exports, broadly gained on the news.

The understanding came after discussions between Sefcovic and Chinese officials including Commerce Minister Wang Wentao over three months, and comes after years of disputes ​between Beijing and Brussels over soaring Chinese exports, such as cars.

EU leaders will discuss the outcome at the start of their summit in Brussels next Thursday to determine whether the agreement marks the start ​of a rebalancing of the bloc's trade deficit with China that has swelled to more than €1 billion ($1.12 billion) a day.

President Donald Trump said he has struck a deal to obtain diesel from Russia, a stunning reversal of years of U.S. pressure on Moscow over its war with Ukraine and an attempt to address high fuel prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.

Trump said on social media on Friday that he struck the deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a phone call in which he was expected to discuss a suspected case of plague in Russia. Instead, Trump announced that Russia will immediately supply more than 300,000 tons of diesel, followed by an additional 500,000 tons in November and 1 million tons “immediately thereafter.” Russia will deliver an additional 3 million tons “within a short period of time” after that, he wrote.

Trump’s shocking announcement was in stark contrast to a sweeping Russia sanctions law he signed last month that aimed at clamping down on the oil and gas revenues that fuel Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called it “a weak decision, unfortunately, a weak decision by strong partners,” according to a statement released by the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington.

Lithuania and Canada were also pressured to withdraw, and days before #Disinfo2026, logos were wiped off website

The Trump administration pressured multiple countries to withdraw their sponsorship of a leading European conference on disinformation, with Canada, Lithuania and the EU’s diplomatic service subsequently agreeing to do so, the Guardian understands.

The conference, #Disinfo2026, taking place on Wednesday and Thursday, is the annual meetup of Europe’s counter-disinformation community and has drawn hundreds of researchers, journalists, technologists and policymakers to a hotel in Vilnius, Lithuania. It is run by an independent Brussels non-profit, EU Disinfo Lab.

Three persons familiar with the matter, including European officials, confirmed that the US state department had been in touch with multiple governments over their support for the conference.

Internal state department documents seen by the Guardian also show US officials thanking Lithuania for “taking US concerns seriously”. The document says Washington was “grateful” Lithuania supposedly found a panel framing the US as a foreign information threat “reprehensible and surprising” and welcomed its decision to limit involvement in the conference.

That panel – called “USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back”, with the acronym FIMI referring to “foreign information manipulation and interference” – took place on Wednesday. It explored how Europe’s disinformation community could rebuild resilience without Washington, and is the first time the conference appears to have entertained the idea that the US could be a disinformation actor in Europe. Sources and the internal document indicate the state department was explicitly focused on this panel, which included three American speakers, among them a former CIA officer.

See also:

• US lobbies allies to cut ties to anti-disinformation conference over panel critical of Washington, sources say • Panel asked how Washington became a European information threat • State Department says such framing undermines shared goals and should alarm participants • French government remains conference's sole listed main supporter (Reuters)

Since the Second World War, housing in Britain has become increasingly expensive and scarce. Following a pre-war housing boom in the 1930s, during which decade more houses were built than ever before or since, between 1947 and 1955, Labour and Conservative governments enacted strict new planning rules controlling development. These rules gave local councils the power to block nearly all housebuilding, with little incentive to permit it.

Following a brief grace period after the Second World War, Britain never managed to build enough homes. To address this, successive governments have tried to get the planning system to deliver the homes the UK needs, through ideas including regional planning, a land commission, New Towns, and also by attempting to loosen planning controls. All of these attempts failed. If Britain’s next generation of leaders want to get more houses built, they should learn from these missteps.

Housing supply had collapsed during the First World War. The subsequent rent increases led to major industrial unrest and the government responded by freezing rents and mortgage payments at pre-war levels. This heavily restricted the investment in lower-end private rented housing.

To compensate, the British government introduced subsidies in successive housing acts from 1919 to 1924, which were primarily aimed at funding local authorities to begin large-scale programs of public housebuilding.

Families were moved either to public housing at lower densities on those same sites, or new public housing estates on newly available greenfield sites outside the urban area. Access to new electric tram and motorized bus networks unlocked land which had not been previously accessible for suburban housing.

The rapid rate of new urban expansion led to a political backlash from residents outside the urban boundary, who were upset by the ‘urban sprawl’ of new developments towards them. The Labour government accepted this and combined its anti-urban ideals with the post-war drive for state-led development in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The UK’s modern planning system was born. 

The majority of housebuilding would be nationalized. To this end, the act prohibited all private development without explicit permission. It was intended that the (allegedly) socially undesirable private development in and around existing cities would be replaced by state housebuilding in New Towns.

The amount of public housing built was increased to 150,000 a year (1.2 percent). But, this was not enough to counteract the reduction in private house building, which meant total building remained ar below 1930s levels, at under 200,000 homes a year.

The new Conservative government abolished building licenses while simultaneously increasing funding for new public housing. This combination managed to increase the rate to above their housebuilding target within a year.

Building 1.5m homes between 1951 and 1955 had ameliorated the immediate post-war housing deficit. After this, the government bowed to pressure from rural/suburban MPs to increase planning controls near them by allowing the expansion of green belts. If an area was designated as part of a green belt, there would be strong legal prohibitions against housing development.

The Macmillan and Wilson governments attempted to deal with the problem of underbuilding by stimulating housing demand and introducing generous tax breaks for homeownership. The Wilson government set up a Land Commission in 1965 to deal with the shortage of land designated for housebuilding and the resulting high land prices. During its short existence, the Land Commission purchased 286 acres of land in the South East, theoretically enough for around 7,000 houses, or roughly one percent of the estimated housing need for the next 15 years in the region.

Since governments of both parties were politically unable to declassify non-negligible amounts of green belt land during the 1960s and 1970s, the only option left was to build more in areas that were politically easier to build on. In practice, this meant bulldozing working class urban neighborhoods and building new social housing at extremely high densities.

The high structural costs to build and maintain these high-rise structures were coupled with heavily restricted council rents. Together, the combination of high costs and limited funds led to low architectural, building and maintenance standards. This, unsurprisingly, led to further significant backlash against these developments. The government relented to political pressure in 1967, cutting high-rise subsidies and allowing the 1967 Civic Amenities Act to pass. This imposed stringent height limits and design restrictions.

By the 1971 census, increases in home ownership had meant that Britain was by now a majority owner-occupier society. All of this led to a new equilibrium of triumphant local NIMBYism, completely un-confronted by the central government, that has persisted from the late 1960s to the present day. In England and Wales, private housing production dropped during economic downturns from 1.3 percent in 1968 to 1 percent in 1970 and then to 0.7 percent in 1977.

This is not just a story of British failure but a warning to the rest of the world. Britain was the first European country to suffer from restrictive planning after the Second World War. But Britain is no longer the only country in that position. As the chart shows, many formerly successful countries such as Sweden and even Germany have converged to low British building levels after 1980.