US President Donald Trump said the deal had been negotiated over the last four to five months.

United States President Donald Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese have signed an agreement on rare earth and critical minerals as China tightens control over global supply.

The two leaders signed the deal on Monday at the White House.

Trump said the agreement had been negotiated over four or five months. The two leaders will also discuss trade, submarines and military equipment, Trump said.

Albanese described it as an $8.5bn pipeline “that we have ready to go”.

A copy of the agreement, provided by the prime minister’s office, said the two countries will each invest $1bn over the next six months into mining and processing projects. They also set a minimum price floor for critical minerals, a move that Western miners have long sought.

China has the world’s largest rare earths reserves, according to the US Geological Survey data, but Australia also has significant reserves.

The two leaders also planned to discuss the $239.4bn agreement, reached in 2023 under then-US President Joe Biden, in which Australia is to buy US nuclear-powered submarines in 2032 before building a new submarine class with Britain.

US Navy Secretary John Phelan told the meeting the US and Australia were working very closely to improve the original framework for all three parties “and clarify some of the ambiguity that was in the prior agreement”.

Trump said these were “just minor details”.

“There shouldn’t be any more clarifications, because we’re just, we’re just going now full steam ahead, building,” Trump said.

Australian officials have said they are confident it will proceed, with Defence Minister Richard Marles last week saying he knew when the review would conclude.

China’s rare earth export controls

Ahead of Monday’s meeting between the two leaders, Australian officials have emphasised Canberra is paying its way under AUKUS — a trilateral military partnership between the US, Australia and the United Kingdom, contributing $2bn this year to boost production rates at US submarine shipyards, and preparing to maintain US Virginia-class submarines at its Indian Ocean naval base from 2027.

The delay of 10 months in an official meeting since Trump took office has caused some anxiety in Australia as the Pentagon urged Canberra to lift defence spending. The two leaders met briefly on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York last month.

Australia is willing to sell shares in its planned strategic reserve of critical minerals to allies including Britain, as Western governments scramble to end their reliance on China for rare earths and minor metals.

Top US officials last week condemned Beijing’s expansion of rare earth export controls as a threat to global supply chains. China is the world’s biggest producer of the materials, which are vital for products ranging from electric vehicles to aircraft engines and military radars.

Resource-rich Australia, wanting to extract and process rare earths, put preferential access to its strategic reserve on the table in US trade negotiations in April.

Hamas has handed over a body that it says is a hostage, the Israeli military has said.

The body was transported by the Red Cross to Israeli forces in Gaza, and will now be returned to Israel for formal identification.

Before Monday, Hamas had handed over all 20 living hostages and 12 out of 28 deceased hostages under the first phase of a US-brokered ceasefire deal that began on 10 October.

There has been anger in Israel that Hamas has not yet returned all the deceased hostages, with the Israeli military saying the Palestinian armed group “is required to uphold the agreement and take the necessary steps to return all the hostages”.

Hamas has said it faces difficulty finding bodies under rubble in Gaza.

Under the agreement, Israel has also freed 250 Palestinian prisoners and 1,718 detainees from Gaza, and returned 15 bodies of Palestinians in return for every Israeli hostage’s remains.

The first phase has also seen an increase of aid into the Gaza Strip, a partial withdrawal of Israeli forces, and a halt in fighting – though deadly violence flared up on Sunday as both sides accused one another of breaching the deal.

Israel said it struck dozens of Hamas targets across the Strip after accusing Hamas of an attack that killed two of its soldiers in Rafah. Hamas had said it was “unaware” of any clashes in the area, which is under Israeli control.

At least 45 Palestinians were killed in the strikes, local hospitals said.

On Sunday evening, Israel said it was resuming enforcement of the ceasefire, adding that it would “respond firmly to any violation of it”. Hamas had earlier said it remained committed to the agreement.

US President Donald Trump said the truce remained in place, as his envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner travelled to Israel.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) currently holds about half of Gaza, demarcated by a so-called Yellow Line.

With Palestinians expressing confusion about the exact location of the line, the IDF has put out a video showing bulldozers towing yellow blocks into place to mark it out.

On Monday, Palestinian health officials said Israeli fire killed three people east of Gaza City. The IDF said its troops fired towards “several terrorists” who crossed the Yellow Line in the Shejaiya area.

The Israeli military launched a campaign in Gaza in response to the 7 October 2023 attack, in which Hamas-led gunmen killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel and took 251 others hostage.

At least 68,216 people have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza since then, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, whose figures are seen by the UN as reliable.

In just under 10 minutes, thieves stole “priceless” jewelry from the Apollo Gallery after using a truck-mounted ladder to break into a second-floor window of the Louvre Museum.

The Break-In

To get to the second floor, two robbers climbed up a monte-meubles, a truck-mounted electric ladder that is a common sight on the streets of Paris, where it is used to ferry bulky furniture through the windows of apartments.

They then used power tools to break the glass of the balcony window and enter the gallery, setting off a security alarm.

Grabbing the Jewels

Once inside the gallery, the thieves smashed two display cases and snatched eight precious objects, setting off additional alarms. The items included a royal sapphire necklace, a royal emerald necklace and a diadem worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, France’s 19th-century ruler.

In their haste to leave, the robbers dropped a ninth item, which the authorities recovered later: Empress Eugénie’s crown, which features 1,354 diamonds, 1,136 rose-cut diamonds and 56 emeralds.

Five museum staff members were either in or near the gilded Apollo Gallery. Following the Louvre’s security protocol, they contacted the police, “prioritizing the protection of people,” according to a statement by the French ministry of culture.

Security guards evacuated the museum.

The Escape

The thieves left the museum by climbing back down the ladder, where they made their getaway with two other members of the team who were waiting on motor scooters.

Police were still searching for the thieves on Monday. Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said that 60 investigators were questioning witnesses, combing through forensic evidence and reviewing footage from surveillance cameras in the museum and on the street.

Health officials in the United States are reviewing whether to remove aluminium from some common vaccines, as part of the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on vaccines.

The Department of Health and Human Services has reduced some vaccine access. The agency scaled back COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, approved COVID-19 vaccines for fewer people and aimed to remove the preservative thimerosal from US vaccines. Experts told PolitiFact scientific research did not support its removal.

During a September 22 news conference, in which US President Donald Trump told people not to take Tylenol during pregnancy, he also mentioned another objective. “We want no aluminium in the vaccine,” he said. The administration was already in the process of removing aluminium from vaccines, he added.

About two weeks later, on October 8, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, announced a new working group focused on the childhood vaccine schedule. Its discussion topics include vaccine ingredient safety and aluminium adjuvants.

Robert Malone, an ACIP member who has opposed COVID-19 vaccines, told Axios he expected the ACIP would determine there was “a lot of evidence” of “issues” with aluminium in vaccines. The committee would likely vote to re-categorise vaccines containing aluminium adjuvants so that people would have to discuss with their doctor before getting them, Malone told Axios.

That could have far-reaching ramifications. Here’s what to know about aluminium in vaccines.

A: Small amounts of aluminium are sometimes included in vaccines as adjuvants, or substances that boost the body’s immune response to the vaccine to ensure protection from infection.

That boost means people can get fewer vaccine doses in smaller quantities.

Q: When used, how much aluminium is in a vaccine?

A: Vaccines with aluminium adjuvants usually contain less than 1mg aluminium per dose, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

That is a pretty abstract number. To help make it more concrete: a milligram is one-thousandth (1/1,000th) of 1g. One gram is about the weight of a raisin or a stick of gum. Imagine cutting one of those items into 1,000 equal pieces. One of the pieces would be about 1mg.

Here is another way to think about it.

People come in contact with and consume aluminium all of the time. It is one of the most abundant metal elements in the Earth’s crust, according to the US Geological Survey. It is naturally occurring in soil, air and water. Food is the main way people are exposed to aluminium. The average adult eats 7mg to 9mg of aluminium per day, according to the CDC.

A baby in its first six months might receive a total of about 4.4mg of aluminium from recommended vaccines. In the same period of time, a breastfed infant would ingest about 7mg of aluminium from breastmilk, and a formula-fed baby would ingest about 38mg from formula.

Q: How long have vaccines contained aluminium?

A: Aluminium adjuvants have been used in vaccines for more than 70 years, the CDC said.

“Aluminium is one of our oldest adjuvants; it’s been used in vaccines since the 1920s,” said Dr Peter Hotez, a Baylor College of Medicine professor and codirector of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

Q: How do we know it’s safe to include small amounts of aluminium in vaccines?

A: Every vaccine’s safety and efficacy are tested in animal studies and human clinical trials before the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licenses it for public use. Every vaccine containing adjuvants has been tested, and health agencies continuously monitor their safety, the CDC said.

Over several decades of use, vaccines with aluminium adjuvants have been proven safe, the FDA said.

Vaccines containing aluminium have been “given to billions of people worldwide now”, said Dr Kawsar Talaat, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

A growing body of research has also found that aluminium adjuvants do not cause aluminium toxicity or other adverse outcomes.

Q: Do aluminium adjuvants have any risks?

A: Rarely, some people have allergic reactions to aluminium in the same way they might have allergic reactions to other substances, Talaat said.

In 2022, researchers published a retrospective, observational study on more than 325,000 children that found an association between vaccine-related aluminium exposure and persistent asthma. Association is not the same as causation, meaning the study did not prove a link between aluminium in vaccines and asthma.

Experts from the CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics encouraged more research on the subject because the backwards-looking observational study did not prove causation and also had limitations, including that it excluded many children who developed asthma before they turned two years old.

A 2025 study found no increased risk of asthma associated with childhood exposure to aluminium-absorbed vaccines.

Q: Which vaccines contain aluminium adjuvants?

A: At least 25 vaccines approved for use in the US have aluminium adjuvants, the CDC says. That includes vaccines that protect against HPV, hepatitis A and B and diphtheria, tetanus, and acellular pertussis (whooping cough).

Q: Which vaccines do not contain aluminium adjuvants?

The CDC’s list of vaccines without adjuvants includes vaccines against COVID-19, Ebola, meningococcal, polio and rabies. Additionally, most seasonal flu shots and the vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella do not contain aluminium adjuvants.

Q: Can we remove aluminium from vaccines?

A: Not quickly. If it could be done at all, it would take years to develop, test and license new, aluminium-free vaccines. Many of the vaccines with aluminium adjuvants do not have aluminium-free formulas.

“A vaccine is licensed based on all of its ingredients and the exact manufacturing process,” Talaat said. “If you were to take an ingredient out of a vaccine, you would have to start all over with the clinical trials and the manufacturing, and it is highly possible that some of these vaccines wouldn’t work without the aluminium in there.”

Although other adjuvants exist, they are newer and often more scarce than aluminium, which is abundant.

An immediate ban on aluminium in vaccines would drastically reduce people’s ability to protect themselves and others against numerous diseases.

“I think we’d see outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases,” Talaat said.

Q: Why do people think aluminium in vaccines is causing autism?

A: A 2011 study said vaccines with aluminium adjuvants “may be a significant” contributing factor to the rising number of autism diagnoses in kids, Nature reported.

A year later, a World Health Organization vaccine safety committee called the 2011 study “seriously flawed”. The 2011 study and another by the same authors compared vaccines’ aluminium content and autism rates in several countries, the WHO group said, but that cannot be used to establish a causal relationship.

“We studied aluminium, and have no link between aluminium and autism,” Talaat said.