Cool, cloudy, windless weather cutting renewables output, with natural gas futures and power prices across Europe reaching their highest levels since December 2022

Marc Spautz insists potential changes would only take place under a collective work agreement

Cool, cloudy, windless weather cutting renewables output, with natural gas futures and power prices across Europe reaching their highest levels since December 2022

Marc Spautz insists potential changes would only take place under a collective work agreement

More than 500 passengers were on board the trains when the incident occurred in the province of Toledo, south of Madrid.

Survivors of the train crash in Spain have spoken of their shock, panic and anger at the accident in Toledo province on Wednesday.

LONDON — Andy Burnham became Britain’s prime minister 100 days ago on a pledge to end 40 years of neoliberalism. His first budget announced he wouldn’t do that on the front page. Wednesday’s 150-page red book was titled “breathing space for today, fresh hope for the future”, a confession, with true British modesty, that it was a stepping stone to bigger pledges downstream. Burnham’s top finance minister, Chancellor John Healey, unveiled 98 changes, including help for most households’ energy bills, which are due to spike this winter because of Donald Trump’s war with Iran, and a £10 billion defense package to support Ukraine. Many of the tax tweaks were limited and technical, including an 8% cut to tariffs on soy milk. Healey’s ambition was reined in by surging global oil prices and a political choice by his boss not to blow the doors off yet. Burnham has reviews on the creaking welfare system, devolving power to the regions and a “10-year plan” all coming before Christmas. Only then can he grind out the numbers for next year’s spending review. The Labour MP Darren Jones, who served in the Treasury until Burnham arrived in July, called it a “steady-as-she-goes budget” that was to be expected. Many Labour MPs were happy, cheering measures for their area and pointing toward a bigger bang later on. Industry lobby groups could grasp onto something in their area of expertise. Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, Darren Jones, arrives at Downing Street for Keir Starmer’s final cabinet meeting on July 15, 2026 in London. | Carl Court/Getty Images But with U.K. growth struggling, others were less generous. Joe Shalam of the Conservative-aligned Centre for Social Justice think tank called it the “fudge-it budget.” Tory leader Kemi Badenoch asked: “Is that it?” Perhaps the trickiest response for Burnham was from Mainstream, the left-wing campaign group that helped propel him to the Labour leadership this year. “Ending 40 years of neoliberalism can only be delivered by radical action,” read a statement by the group’s interim council. POLITICO looks at five other takeaways from Wednesday’s budget. 1) We’re in the holding pen The chancellor’s big bazooka was to slap a much-anticipated tax rise on banks — but he surprised many by saying it will last only 15 months. It will raise less than £1 billion in its peak year. It wasn’t the only temporary measure Healey unveiled on Wednesday. He extended existing cuts to fuel duty, a tax cut on household energy bills and a £2 cap on bus fares, but only until 2027. They will all need to be reviewed again before his next annual budget. Likewise, some of Healey’s spending plans thin out after a few years, which suggests they may need topping up later. This applies even to the areas closest to Burnham’s heart. Budget documents suggest support to end rough sleeping will total £1.1 billion in the two years from April 2027 but only £270 million in the three years after that. People pass through the Bank area of the City of London on May 29, 2024 in London. | Carl Court/Getty Images There were plenty of changes, of course, such as to writing-down allowances, property income taxes and tax on savings. Whitehall will have to find more administration cuts while tax inspectors hunt down another £3.2 billion a year. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a non-partisan economic think tank, called it all a “hodgepodge” of “fiddly measures” that would do little to affect growth. Many of the more fundamental decisions were kicked down the road. Healey has committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on defense by 2035, but will only spell out how to fund it in a spending review at some point in 2027. Major reforms to the welfare system — spending on which is still rocketing — will only be decided after two reports by the Labour grandees Stephen Timms and Alan Milburn are published in November. Healey published a “fiscal devolution roadmap” that spelled out a path to handing regional mayors full control of the business rates raised in their areas by the end of the decade, but this has an element of wait-and-see too. Healey had a narrative for his cautious approach. “I decided on an early budget to give the country a bit of breathing space and to provide stability and direction in the face of speculation,” he told MPs Wednesday. “We’ll continue to map out that direction for Britain through the prime minister’s 10-year plan and the spending review.” This is not the Burnham who complained Britain was “in hock to the bond markets” last year. 2) Everything is terrible, so blame the White House. Burnham and Healey can blame Trump — up to a point. The chancellor said the headwinds that once faced Britain are now “global economic storms,” fueled above all by the U.S. conflict with Iran. “We did not want this war,” Healey told MPs. U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media after disembarking from Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on October 28, 2026. | Kent Nishimura/AFP via Getty Images Journalists spent Wednesday trawling through the usual gloomy parade of numbers about the U.K. economy produced by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. Britain’s projected growth in 2027 was cut from 1.6% to 1% (though Treasury officials insisted GDP per person will rise overall by the end of the decade). Healey chose to leave himself with a smaller fiscal buffer than his predecessor Rachel Reeves, telling MPs he had used it to “absorb the impact of the Iran war.” He also raised net taxes by £7 billion a year, though this was far less than the £26 billion in Reeves’ last budget. But the situation is so volatile that these numbers, based on market energy prices in mid-August, are probably already out of date. The OBR’s “severe shock scenario” had oil prices peaking at around $115 a barrel in the first half of 2027. They already hit that level this week. Healey insisted that Britain is doing well in the circumstances; his ministers all point to an International Monetary Fund prediction that the U.K.’s deficit will be the lowest in the G7 by 2029. Opposition parties, however, paint a picture of a nation where everything is just getting gloomier. The tax take was already on course to rise to a record high; Healey broke that record again on Wednesday. (It is now due to reach 38.6% of GDP.) Britain’s spending on debt interest has almost tripled since 2020. 3) Defense spending is still a big, big headache Healey resigned as defense secretary under former Prime Minister Keir Starmer in June to protest the lack of military spending — but now faces mounting unanswered questions about his own plans. Healey did two big new things on defense spending on Wednesday. First, he confirmed an open secret in Westminster: he plans to reach 3% of GDP by 2030 — on a path to NATO’s 3.5% by 2035 — but repeated that the details of how he’ll pay for it will only be spelled out in next year’s spending review. Secondly and more significantly, he outlined his plan to plug a ​​£1.8 billion-a-year gap in Starmer’s defense investment plan — but provided only scant details.  The Treasury said it will be paid for by shaving 1% off each Whitehall department’s capital budget in the coming years. However, those departments have not yet worked out what they will cut; that is a problem for another day. These questions will dog Healey for the next year. At least one person was delighted: Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president said the chancellor “made my day” with a £10 billion package of economic and military support to Kyiv. Part of the package needed special sign-off by ministers because civil servants warned they could not guarantee it would provide value for money. 4) There was something to make Labour MPs happy Much of what Healey did unveil appeared to be aimed at preserving the “Burnham bounce” in the polls and with his own MPs.  The chancellor called it a “budget for the working people of Britain” and Treasury analysis says it was redistributive, handing the biggest boost to the poorest households (albeit only raising their incomes by 0.6%). A woman makes her way through a snow flurry, the first significant snow fall in Cheshire this Winter on December 10, 2022 in Northwich. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images Central to this was Healey’s closest thing to a “rabbit out of the hat” — a £100-per-household cash payment to people living in homes below a certain value this winter. One Labour MP enthused that the criteria for the payment (which Treasury officials say will capture 88% of the poorest households) was “absolutely brilliant” because it will capture working households and those on benefits at the same time. There was another £1.5 billion for social and affordable housing, a “covenant” to govern new AI data centers and changes to mileage rates for self-employed workers. Burnham has prided himself on being a grassroots politician; it was a grassroots package. How much voters will notice is another question. The IFS warned the package of “breathing space” measures was still “relatively small.” It could be swallowed by a rise in annual energy bills in January — predictions of which have recently ranged from £276 to £469. The OBR warned there has been “virtually no growth” in real household disposable income per person over the last decade or so, and predicted “no real earnings growth in 2027” despite Burnham and Healey’s efforts to help. 5) MPs won’t stop chattering about an election Burnham only has to call an election by mid-2029 and keeps trying to snuff out talk of going earlier — but every prime minister does this until they don’t. His MPs were studying the budget Wednesday to work out if it makes an early general election more or less likely. It’s fair to say they couldn’t agree. On the one hand, this cautious budget of temporary measures might suggest Burnham — who needs his own mandate for more radical changes to the electoral system or Britain’s relationship with the EU — is holding out for the country’s backing. Others would say a cautious stepping-stone budget is hardly the eye-catching approach you would take if you were about to sell yourself to voters. Growth is set to be slow next year; Burnham needs time to turn the economy round and show he can change things. Burnham told journalists on Wednesday: “I don’t know how many times I’ve done this now, but yes, I can rule out calling a general election in the next 12 months.” The speculation will continue anyway. Esther Webber, Emilio Casalicchio and Sam Blewett contributed reporting.

At some point, maybe around the time Joe Biden declared on the debate stage that he “finally beat Medicare,” Washington got the idea that defeating an old man in an election was easy. Not always. Just days before an American election viewed by many voters as an opportunity to neuter an unpopular 80-year-old president, voters in Brazil and Israel delivered a vivid reminder that an old man in his country’s highest office usually didn’t get there by accident. In Brazil, a decisive majority of voters on Sunday returned left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for a fourth term, defying expectations that Brazilians were ready to discard the fiery trade unionist as yesterday’s man. In Israel’s Tuesday election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the longest-serving premier in his country’s history — lost his parliamentary majority but may have thwarted his opponents from electing a viable governing coalition. Lula, 81, and Netanyahu, 77, have almost nothing in common except their age and political resilience. They have towered over their countries for more than a generation, outfoxed prosecutors and humiliated electoral rivals, enraged and entranced Washington. They have done it with the loyal support of voters on the left and right who view each man in heroic terms, as a tireless champion of their interests and a shield against the most fearsome enemies. President Donald Trump has, at times, shared those political traits. If he has one more escape act left in him, it would look more like what we’ve just seen in Israel and Brazil than anything in Trump’s second term so far. Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has failed to deliver policy victories that most voters can feel in their own lives, while shedding some of the most important parts of the political identity that forged his populist base. He ran for president in 2024 pledging to whip inflation and railing against needless foreign wars. Trump’s signature acts this term — passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, waging a global trade war, attempting regime change in Iran — have made health care, consumer goods and energy more expensive. What is his closing message in the midterm election? Trump makes one argument consistently: that Democrats are crazy. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a convincing through line in a series of campaign-trail monologues boasting about the economy, trashing individual Democratic candidates as weirdos and subversives, musing about renaming oceans, defending the Cheesecake Factory and admiring Jon Husted’s rock-hard bod. Compare this to what voters heard in Brazil and Israel: relentless, ruthless, shameless appeals to the political coalitions that Lula and Netanyahu forged over decades. In Brazil, Lula tapped into the regional and class-based divisions that have defined his electoral career, while offering a buffet of new economic promises to voters in his base. He hiked welfare payments, promised voters free public transit on weekends and endorsed a shorter workweek. His 45-year-old opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro, stumbled in the final days with a dismissive comment alluding to an accident Lula suffered as a young metalworker — a remark apparently taken by many voters as a gratuitous sneer at the working class. In Netanyahu’s fight for political survival, the Israeli leader delivered an apocalyptic message aimed at polarizing the electorate to his advantage. He posted an AI-generated image of a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv, branded his challengers as soft on Iran and derided Arab political parties as an enemy within. Israeli and American news outlets have reported that Netanyahu pushed the military for a new wave of attacks on Iran before the election, an escalation that might have reshaped the campaign’s final days. If Trump had approached the midterms with Lula- or Netanyahu-like focus and vigor, he would probably still be a very unpopular president. But he might be a very unpopular president with a firm grip on the red states that control the Senate, instead of scrambling in October to defend Kansas and Mississippi. Trump’s populist campaign tactics have been comparatively slapdash and unresponsive to voters’ real needs. He floated giving away $5,000 checks to Americans if Republicans keep control of Congress, only to see lawmakers from his own party pan the idea as a budget buster. He has handed out locally tailored goodies — new funding pledges for a pipeline in Alaska, tariff exemptions as a gift to Maine — that might make a difference on the margins but can’t substitute for a national message on the cost of living. And Trump has not made a concerted effort to heal the breach within the MAGA base over the war in Iran. He has toggled between Bibi-like warnings about nuclear attacks on Southern California and assurances that the war will end after the November election, all while fuel prices stay painfully high for the people who put him in office. It may add up to the least effective campaign ever for the man who has overwhelmed American politics for 11 and a half years. And yet, the midterms are not the end of the story. Even a broad defeat for Republicans next week would leave Trump with half a term to work with. Two more years to recover his footing, return to political basics, reconnect with his base and fight, fight, fight for relevance and recovery. There is a bag of tricks available to him, if he were to get serious about salvaging his presidency. For Trump’s opponents, the warning from abroad remains: Beware the old man in a hurry.

The online portal MyMinfin and several other services have been temporarily taken offline as a precaution while officials investigate and secure their systems.

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that "the whole of Spain is in mourning" following the accident and expressed his solidarity with the victims, their families and the injured.

In tonight's edition, a summit with nearly two dozen African leaders opens in Moscow with the Kremlin describing their countries as natural allies against the West. Also, Nigerian investigators say that dozens of detained miners who died in a crowded jail cell screamed for help as jailors ignored their suffering. And ahead of the Youth Olympics in Senegal, Kenya's ramping up support of its women's sportspeople. 

Two Arab-majority parties are set to win a historic 19 seats in total, amid a record turnout at the polls in Israel on Tuesday. Voters from the community, descendants of Palestinians who stayed after Israel's creation and who make up around 20 percent of the population, have been enraged by the Netanyahu government's ultra-nationalist Jewish vision for the country and the Palestinian territories. FRANCE 24's Emerald Maxwell reports.

The far-right ally of US President Donald Trump has fled to Miami with his wife and children.

US points to increase in abstentions in General Assembly as evidence that push to isolate Cuba is slowly succeeding.

Decision marks stunning downfall for near-century-old law firm that was among America’s largest and most prestigious

Central bank to vote on monetary policy seven times next year in shift from longstanding practice of eight such meetings

The accident, the second in less than a year on the same busy rail line, was one of the deadliest in the country’s history.

Fernando Seco, 62, said he and others moved at least a dozen wounded passengers from the crash site, using parts of the wreckage as makeshift stretchers.