Morning Brief, Thursday 29 October

A Renfe AVE train struck the rear of a stopped Iryo train at kilometre 118 near Urda, in Toledo province, at 8.54am on Wednesday. The AVE was carrying 397 people and the Iryo 147, including a newborn. By Wednesday evening, Spanish authorities counted at least 68 dead and 107 injured, with 18 in serious condition, while dozens were still listed as missing.

Transport minister Oscar Puente said a fault on three network computers at about 8.30am knocked out the LZB automatic safety system across roughly 63km and stopped six trains. With the system down, Adif's control centre at Madrid-Atocha took over. Audio published by El País and TVE shows the AVE driver was cleared at 8.36am to restart at normal speed, although the Iryo remained ahead at a red signal and the degraded-system protocol required movement at no more than 40km/h.

• Degraded-system protocol limit40
• AVE speed before collision200

Investigators are now focused on the 17 minutes between the restart order and the collision. Italy's foreign ministry said three Italian women were missing, five Italian passengers had been recovered in stable condition and a sixth was in hospital in Toledo. Town halls across Spain held a minute of silence, while Málaga mayor Francisco de la Torre called for action to prevent another crash.

“We have to work together to make sure this never happens again.”

Flávio Bolsonaro, a 45-year-old senator and son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, left Brazil after losing Sunday's presidential runoff to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Argentina's migration authority said he and three relatives crossed into Misiones province at 22:50 on Tuesday, then boarded a Baires Fly private jet whose flight plan listed Guayaquil. The aircraft landed near Miami on Wednesday, and reporters said it matched the Argentine description.

The trip sharpened a legal problem. AP reported that Brazil's Supreme Court had labelled Flávio Bolsonaro a flight risk in pending corruption investigations and ordered his passports seized. ANSA said Justice Alexandre de Moraes had ordered him to surrender the documents in a money-laundering probe, which the senator denies.

After landing, Bolsonaro called himself Brazil's "true president-elect" and alleged fraud without evidence. About 20 minutes later, a corrected version withdrew that proclamation but kept the attacks on Brazilian institutions. He said extended voting hours let Lula gain more than 10m votes; official figures cited by ANSA and Brazil's electoral court put the number of late votes at about 34,000 to 35,000 and said the extension did not change the result.

Bolsonaro's Liberal Party accepted the result on Monday. The Carter Center and the Organization of American States sent observers and found no irregularities. More than 128m people voted, and Lula is due to begin his term on 5 January.

Israel's polling-station ballots have now been counted, and Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc remains short of power. ANSA gives his bloc 53 seats, Gadi Eisenkot's Change bloc 48 and Arab parties 19 in the 120-seat Knesset. Those polling-station votes make up about 86% of the total, leaving roughly 650,000 double envelopes from soldiers, hospital patients, diplomats abroad and others still to be checked.

The arithmetic leaves Netanyahu well below the 61 seats needed for a majority after his religious and ultranationalist alliance held 68 in the previous parliament. Likud still appears to be the largest party, which could put Netanyahu first in line to try forming a government. Most opposition parties have promised not to join him, although he could still try to lure defectors with concessions.

Likud also accused Arab parties of stealing the election through bribery, threats, violence, fraud and illegal software, and said it would hand evidence to police, the Shin Bet and the Central Elections Committee. The sources report no finding by any of those bodies. The allegation raises the temperature around Raam and the Joint List, whose 19 seats would make them central to any attempt to replace Netanyahu.

Michael Milshtein of the Moshe Dayan Center expects the full picture by Friday morning. He sees another election as the likeliest outcome and says an interim government may still have to make strategic decisions on Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and Syria. Channel 12 reported that Eisenkot's bloc wants to use its votes and those of the Arab parties to replace Likud's Amir Ohana as Knesset speaker.

John Healey used his first Budget as chancellor to send a one-off £100 payment to about 20m households in council tax bands A to D. The winter measure costs £2.6bn, can be used from January and should reach 80% of households in England. Healey also extended the fuel-duty freeze to July and removed import taxes on more than 100 products, tying the package to the economic damage from the war in Iran.

Banks will pay for part of it. The surcharge on bank profits rises by three percentage points to 6% for 15 months from January 2027, taking the effective rate to 31% once corporation tax is included. The increase was smaller than investors had feared, and shares in Lloyds, NatWest and Barclays rose after the announcement. Gambling taxes also rise to fund business-rates relief for 70,000 businesses, while the OBR warned that a 4% tax rise on rental income is likely to be passed to private renters.

The Office for Budget Responsibility cut next year's growth forecast to 1% and expects inflation to peak near 3.8%, driven by energy bills. Debt-interest costs are £14bn higher this year, and welfare spending is forecast to be £8bn higher by 2030 than the March estimate. Healey told MPs the government could not wish away the shock.

“Those are the storms we face. We can't wish them away. We must choose the course we steer through them.”

The OBR's figures leave real household disposable income per person barely above its pre-pandemic level by the end of the decade. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the many small measures would do little to raise growth, while residents in the North East and Cumbria told the BBC the help was too thin.

A local ceasefire around Oleshky, a Russian-occupied town on the Dnipro in Ukraine's Kherson region, took effect at 3am Kyiv time on Tuesday and is due to run until 22:59 on Sunday. Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said mine clearance on routes into the town had begun, calling it a necessary step for aid deliveries and for civilians who want to leave. US first lady Melania Trump brokered the arrangement, and Lubinets said he was coordinating with Russia's human-rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova.

Evacuations have not officially started. An unnamed Ukrainian coordinator told DW that the sides still had no agreed place, time or routes, although the operation could last several days, possibly from 30 October to 1 November. Volodymyr Zelensky said he did not know where evacuees would go, while reports said residents might first pass through Russian-controlled territory, Crimea or Russia before returning to Ukrainian-held areas. Save Ukraine Foundation lawyer Myroslava Kharchenko described the process as tightly controlled.

“Everyone involved in this operation has been asked to maintain strict confidentiality.”

Estimates of the number of people still in Oleshky range from about 1,700 to 2,000, including 50 children in one account. Former residents describe hunger, shortages of medicine and little or no electricity or water. Drones and mines have restricted movement around the town, which lies about 4km from Ukrainian-held Kherson on the opposite bank of the Dnipro.

The truce also quieted Kherson city for a day. More people went into the streets, and municipal workers repaired anti-drone netting. Police warned that there were still no safe zones in the province because all areas could be mined.

Alphabet reported a 25% rise in quarterly revenue to $127.6bn, just below Wall Street's expectations, but investors focused on the cost of the AI race. Net profit fell about 25% to roughly $26.2bn, and earnings per share came in at $2.12 against a FactSet consensus of $3.02. The company also took an $8.7bn accounting hit tied mainly to the value of its SpaceX holdings (df48fcd-4b14-aa0d-0923b1-bd44-4cac-8d11-1700924d9d76).

Google's advertising business slowed. Search advertising reached $63.35bn, short of the roughly $65bn analysts expected, while overall advertising growth undershot forecasts. Google Cloud revenue reached $30.7bn and more than doubled in one report, helped by demand from AI companies renting computing power. On the call, an analyst asked whether AI agents could bypass Google's search engine, which is the question investors increasingly attach to the company's richest business (df48fcd-4b14-aa0d-0923b1-bd44-4cac-8d11-1700924d9d76).

Free cash flow fell to about negative $9bn, far worse than the small deficit analysts had expected, as Alphabet poured money into AI infrastructure. One report put planned spending on new data centres this year at $205bn. Alphabet shares fell about 9% to 10% after hours, and Nasdaq 100 futures dropped in early Asian trading. Sundar Pichai tried to hold the line.

“We're excited by the range of big opportunities ahead of us.”

Microsoft offered the easier version of the AI story. Its revenue rose 19% to $92.3bn, Azure grew 48% to $33.2bn, and its shares climbed after hours. That contrast leaves investors rewarding cloud growth when cash flow survives the bill.