Leader of Spanish region’s People’s party had clung to power despite calls for him to stand down over 2024 disaster

Carlos Mazón, the embattled president of the eastern Spanish region of Valencia, has bowed to public fury and political pressure by resigning over his botched handling of the deadly floods that killed 229 people in the area just over a year ago.

Mazón, a member of the conservative People’s party (PP), had hung on despite calls for him to stand down after it emerged that he spent more than three hours having lunch with a journalist as the floods hit and people were drowning in their homes, garages and cars.

Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as Opec+ pauses oil output hikes beyond December amid fears of a crude glut

Student accommodation provider Empiric has reported a drop in bookings from students from China.

Empiric Student Property, which is currently being taken over by rival Unite Group, told shareholders this morning that its occupancy levels have dropped to 89% at the start of this academic year, compared with 95% in October 2024.

“The booking cycle for academic year 2025/26 has seen an increase in reservations from UK students and a reduction in the number of Chinese students staying with us, potentially the result of geopolitical events.

Rental growth remains in line with guidance and we are well positioned for January sales activity. All the while, we have continued to improve the quality of the portfolio whilst delivering on capital deployment commitments.”

Heidi Alexander says security review after Cambridgeshire train stabbings will consider all other options

Metal-detector scanners at train stations would “make life impossible” for passengers, the transport secretary has said, adding that a review into security after a mass stabbing on a high-speed train would examine all other options.

A member of train staff who intervened to protect passengers as the service approached Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire remained critically ill in hospital but his condition was now stable, Heidi Alexander also told Sky News.

Buffalo extended their regular season domination over Kansas City. But they know that the playoffs are another matter altogether

Of course Josh Allen didn’t take a breath in the final seconds of the latest Chiefs-Bills classic. “You never know with Pat [Mahomes],” Allen told reporters after Buffalo eked out a 28-21 win on Sunday. Bills kicker Matt Prater had earlier missed a 52-yard field goal with 27 seconds remaining that would have sealed the win for Buffalo. Even the miss was dramatic, with Prater doinking his kick off the right upright. Allen wasn’t alone in thinking Mahomes could lead the Chiefs 58 yards down the field with 22 seconds left and no time outs. One Chiefs fan in Buffalo certainly reminded the home crowd of Buffalo’s 2021 divisional round collapse in which Mahomes hit Tyreek Hill and then Travis Kelce with 13 seconds remaining to set up a game-tying field goal and eventual overtime win.

Are these two teams capable of a producing a boring contest when they meet? Sunday had looked like it would go down that route, given the statement made by Buffalo’s defense, before the Chiefs threatened a comeback in the fourth quarter. The Bills had responded to questions about their depleted defense by stymying Mahomes for most of the game. This sandwich sack by Greg Rousseau and Michael Hoecht showed the tenacity of Buffalo’s defensive line. They needed it: Mahomes converted on fourth and 17 at the beginning of the fourth quarter, a reminder that no matter the situation, he is always capable of tormenting the Bills.

Arsenal’s run without conceding goes on, Thomas Frank plays down tensions, and Eddie Howe’s gamble backfires

First the P45, then the pints. Vítor Pereira could be excused for having a drink on Sunday after his departure from Wolves, with the silver lining for the Portuguese being a decent payout. It is the fourth mid-season dismissal this campaign. There have never been more permanent sackings in Premier League history at this stage of the year (2 November). And while Evangelos Marinakis might have something to answer for, trigger-happy owners and directors are becoming increasingly erratic: that Pereira lasted just 45 days into a new three-year contract reflects as badly on the Wolves board as on the manager, just as Erik ten Hag’s sacking this time last year, coming less than three months after his own contract extension, reflected badly on the Manchester United hierarchy. Backing a manager and then pulling the rug so quickly is baffling, while a board’s desire for a “new manager bounce” so early in the season stinks of desperation and should be seen as an admission of guilt. Michael Butler

Match report: Fulham 3-0 Wolves

Match report: Burnley 0-2 Arsenal

Match report: Nottingham Forest 2-2 Manchester United

The dominant jumps racing trainer has another huge Flat prize in sight after Ethical Diamond’s sparkling success

If five wins from the seven turf events, one short of the record, felt like a standard return for European runners at the 2025 Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar, then the identity of the biggest winner of all was a huge, and very refreshing, surprise.

Willie Mullins blew into Del Mar with Ethical Diamond, his first ever runner at the meeting, and left with the $2m first prize in the Turf, nearly five times as much as he banked when Nick Rockett landed the Grand National in April. And the style of his win was equally memorable. Punters who backed the proven Group One form of Minnie Hauk and Rebel’s Romance might beg to differ, but it gladdened the heart to see an Ebor Handicap winner leave the pair of them standing with a stretch run for the ages.

There is no solid scientific proof, but it would do us all good to cut back on sweet treats

It’s a warning passed down the generations: give a child too many sweets and they’ll be bouncing off the walls. But is there any scientific proof that sugar sends us into overdrive? Not yet, says Amanda Avery, an associate professor in nutrition and dietetics at the University of Nottingham.

She says there are theories linking sugar to behavioural changes. One stems from how sugar activates the body’s reward system, triggering a burst of dopamine – the “feelgood” neurotransmitter. “Increases in dopamine levels can be linked to behavioural changes, which can include periods of hyperactivity,” says Avery.

Hamas says remains found in tunnel as other bodies yet to be recovered amid fragile ceasefire

Israel has announced that the remains of three hostages have been handed over from Gaza and would be examined by forensic experts, as a fragile month-old ceasefire holds.

A Hamas statement earlier said the remains were found on Sunday in a tunnel in southern Gaza.

Koya Kamura’s debut film is about shared identities at the centre of quiet, chilly drama as an enigmatic French writer visits the eponymous town

Adapted from a novel by Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, this elusive but bracing drama sees guesthouse worker Sooha (Bella Kim) drive French writer Yan (Roschdy Zem) out to the demilitarised zone just north of the South Korean city of Sokcho. Metaphor alert: Koya Kamura’s debut film also camps in a no man’s land of the soul, with Sooha, abandoned by her French father while she was still in utero, caught between two cultures. After the francophone hostess is forced to chaperone the enigmatic author, she loiters uncomfortably between tetchy friendship and Oedipal attraction.

When she’s not digging into spectacular-looking seafood prepared by her fishmonger mother (Park Mi-hyeon), Sooha is lolling about with her boyfriend (Gong Do-yu), an aspiring model gunning for a move to Seoul. But this comfy routine is overturned when the foreigner settles in for a long-term stay. Initially conforming to her prejudices about rude French men, he turns out, on Googling him, to be critically lauded graphic novelist Yan Kerrand. Coming to Sokcho in search of inspiration, he manages to prise the story of Sooha’s absent parent from her. She spies on him through a vent – but it remains to be seen whether he’s a proxy father, or something else.

A sharp, funny and engaging autobiography from one of the towering literary figures of our age

Margaret Atwood didn’t want to write a literary memoir. She worried it would be boring – “I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book …” Alcoholic excess, debauched parties and sexual transgressions would have perked things up, but she hasn’t lived that way.

In the end what she has written is less a memoir than an autobiography, not a slice of life but the whole works, 85 years. Where most such backward looks are cosily triumphalist or anxiously self-justifying, hers is sharp, funny and engaging, a book you can warm to even if you’re not fully au fait (and few people are) with her astonishing output, which in the “also by” contents list here fills two pages.

Photographer Didier Bizet has spent time documenting life in the self-proclaimed autonomous republic, which is not recognised by the international community. Its status raises complex questions about the identity of its inhabitants – Ukrainians, Russians, Moldovans and Bulgarians – in a land searching for direction and lacking a clearly defined national identity

Amid the ongoing war in Ukraine and between the fragile borders that crisscross the former Soviet Union, the self-proclaimed Republic of Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova more than 30 years ago after a brief but bloody conflict, remains locked in deep political and diplomatic isolation.

Home to about 450,000 people, Transnistria is a narrow strip of land wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, along the eastern bank of the Dniester River. Its de facto capital, Tiraspol, lies less than 60 miles from the Ukrainian port city of Odesa. Though small in size – about 125 miles long – the region holds outsized strategic importance, sitting on a key corridor between the Black Sea and central Europe.

A new museum in Mödlareuth tells the story of how a settlement of only 50 people straddled Bavaria in West Germany and Thuringia in the east

A creek so shallow you barely got your ankles wet divided a community for more than four decades. By an accident of topography, the 50 inhabitants of Mödlareuth, a hamlet surrounded by pine forests, meadows and spectacular vistas, found themselves at the heart of the cold war. They had the misfortune to straddle Bavaria, in West Germany, and Thuringia in the East, a border that was demarcated first by a fence and then by a wall. American soldiers called it Little Berlin.

Months after their own wall was breached, and even before their country had reunified in 1990, a group of local people set about memorialising their history. The work is about to come to fruition: on 9 November, the 36th anniversary of the fall of the (big) Berlin Wall, the German-German Museum Mödlareuth will open. It was officially inaugurated by the federal president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in early October, but the exhibition wasn’t quite ready. Addressing the villagers who lived through the old days, Steinmeier said: “You were witnesses of an inhuman division, which ripped families apart and turned neighbours into aliens.”

Camera-equipped sports shades have secure fit, open-ear speakers, mics and advanced Garmin and Strava integration

The Oakley Meta Vanguard are new displayless AI glasses designed for running, cycling and action sports with deep Garmin and Strava integration, which may make them the first smart glasses for sport that actually work.

They are a replacement for running glasses, open-ear headphones and a head-mounted action cam all in one, and are the latest product of Meta’s partnership with the sunglasses conglomerate EssilorLuxottica, the owner of Ray-Ban, Oakley and many other top brands.

Northern provinces of Balkh and Samangan worst hit by magnitude 6.3 quake with hundreds injured, while Mazar-i-Sharif’s Blue Mosque reportedly affected

A powerful 6.3 magnitude earthquake that struck northern Afghanistan overnight has killed more than 20 people and injured about 320, the health ministry said on Monday.

The preliminary tolls of deaths and injuries were recorded in the Balkh and Samangan provinces, which have suffered most of the damage, a ministry spokesperson, Sharafat Zaman, said in a video message shared with journalists.

Texas-based fossil fuel company financed Atlas Network in attempt to derail UN-led climate treaty process

Exxon funded rightwing thinktanks to spread climate change denial across Latin America, according to hundreds of previously unpublished documents that reveal a coordinated campaign to make the global south “less inclined” to support the UN-led climate treaty process

The documents, which include copies of the actual cheques Exxon sent, consist of internal documents and years of correspondence between the Texas-based fossil fuel company and Atlas Network, a US-based coalition of more than 500 free-market thinktanks and other partners worldwide.

Actor says Harris ‘was given a very tough task’ because ‘she had to run against her own record’, and extends an olive branch to Hunter Biden

George Clooney has said he feels it was a “mistake” for Kamala Harris to replace Joe Biden in the 2024 US presidential election, adding that he had no regrets about the New York Times opinion piece in which he called on the Democrats to find a new presidential nominee.

Speaking on CBS’ Sunday Morning, the actor and activist, who is a prominent financial donor to the Democratic party, said he would write his op-ed again if given the chance, and that he wished the Democrats had held a new primary to elect a presidential candidate. Instead, Harris was nominated by a virtual vote of party delegates.

Reform UK leader to set out ‘pro-entrepreneurship’ agenda while rowing back on tax cuts pledge

Nigel Farage will promise a bonfire of business regulation as he spells out his party’s economic policies in more detail than ever in an attempt to bolster its reputation for fiscal credibility.

The Reform leader will give a speech in London putting deregulation at the heart of his economic agenda, while also dropping a commitment made at the last election to deliver £90bn of tax cuts.

Vogue magazine thinks so – but there are other relationships that are much more embarrassing. I should know, I’m in one myself

Is having a boyfriend embarrassing? Yes, British Vogue made the ruling recently in a gently provocative piece, declaring it “quite culturally loser-ish” and “more of a flex to pronounce yourself single”. Heterosexuality, #couplegoals, being proudly loved-up or posting even the subtlest “soft launch” – a teaser shot on socials of the hairy back of a hand on the other side of a table, or a buff-looking shadow – have all, apparently, become deeply uncool.

This diktat has been widely and enthusiastically welcomed by singletons online, thrilled that their life choices have been endorsed by the style bible (sample comment: “what a time to be alive”).

When they met, Joe awakened Jess’s sexuality. Now, after his cancer diagnosis, Jess is helping Joe enjoy his body, ‘the way he taught me to find pleasure in mine’
• How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously

When Jess squeezes my ass in passing, it’s like she’s reaffirming my humanity

The massacres carried out by the RSF in El Fasher, Darfur, with the support of its UAE sponsors, will only stop when the international community acts

It unfolded in plain sight over 18 months. The city of El Fasher in the Darfur region of Sudan, besieged by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), fell to the militia group last week, and what has followed is a catastrophe.

Mass killings are under way. There are reports that in one maternity hospital alone almost 500 people – patients and their families – were killed. The few that managed to escape tell of summary executions of civilians. The RSF has embarked on a killing spree of civilians so severe that images of blood saturating the ground have been picked up by satellite. The speed and intensity of the killings in the immediate aftermath of the fall of El Fasher has already been compared by war monitors to the first 24 hours of the Rwandan genocide.

Vishwash Kumar Ramesh describes his survival as ‘miracle’ but says his sibling’s death in disaster has left him broken

The sole survivor of the Air India plane crash that killed 241 people in June has said it is a miracle he is still alive, but the death of his brother “took all my happiness”.

Almost four months on from the crash in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, Briton Vishwash Kumar Ramesh said the incident had left him with constant flashbacks.

Fragrant with spices, this staple of north African cooking brings a welcome heat to stews and braises

I thought I knew my harissa after nearly two decades of making it from scratch. Then I tasted a spoonful of rich, wine-dark paste from an unmarked jar that arrived on my doorstep from brothers Mansour and Karim Arem. They were on the verge of launching Zwïta, a company focused on celebrating their Tunisian heritage. Whereas western cooks and food writers are familiar with many of the food traditions of nearby Morocco, we’ve largely neglected to learn anything about Tunisia or its culinary history. And, judging by the Arem brothers’ harissa, that’s entirely to our detriment.

Made with mild, sun-dried chillies, the traditional Tunisian version of this pepper paste is layered with garlic, caraway and coriander. Multidimensional in flavour and distinctly thick, it will be a revelation to anyone who has only ever encountered the stuff squeezed from a tube (or any other version similarly doctored with tomato products, hydrated chilli powder or fresh peppers). Once I tasted their harissa, I began to incorporate it into my everyday cooking, stirring it into garlic and herb labneh and drizzling it over roast vegetables. One of my favourite ways to use it is as a rub or marinade for chicken.

Goli Kouhkan, 25, on death row for seven years for killing her abusive husband, has until December to settle with the victim’s family

A child bride faces execution in Iran for the killing of her abusive husband unless she can raise 10bn tomans (about £80,000) to pay off the victim’s family by a December deadline.

Goli Kouhkan, 25, has been on death row in Gorgan central prison in northern Iran for the past seven years. She was 18 when she was arrested over the death of her husband in May 2018, and sentenced to qisas – retribution-in-kind – for participation in the killing.