Archaeologists uncover jewellery, cosmetics and coins in cabinet sealed since eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79
Fragments of personal objects, from makeup tools and a perfume bottle to coins and a child’s necklace, have been found tucked away in a wooden wardrobe sealed off for almost 2,000 years in the ruins of Pompeii.
The artifacts provide an intimate glimpse of daily life in the ancient Roman city before it was devastated by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD79. The wardrobe was discovered in a room of a home on Via dell’Abbondanza, which was one of the most bustling streets in Pompeii.
Street protests sweeping Europe are expected to spread to Germany and reignite in France on Saturday, with police mobilised to stop potential looting and rioting on the fringes of what organisers hope will be peaceful rallies.
Weeks of, at times violent, student demonstrations have rocked Italy, Spain, Portugal, Albania and France, where activists on Halloween have again called for people to make their anger over the cost of living and deficient public services felt across the country.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has admitted “trust in high-speed rail has been broken” after Wednesday’s train collision that killed at least 69 people, injured more than 100 and prompted a national debate on the safety of the country’s rail network.
Sánchez said Spain was “working tirelessly” to provide information as quickly as possible to the families of the victims – who include people from at least 23 different foreign countries – adding his government was committed to finding what had caused the country’s second deadly train collision this year.
The prime minister has suggested that he wants a public debate on the UK’s partnership with the EU.
Downing Street has paid tribute to Patrick Stewart following the actor’s death. At the daily lobby briefing, the PM’s spokesperson gave a comment that was a bit more extensive than the usual No 10 contribution when a great British celebrity dies. The spokesperson said that was because Andy Burnham feels strongly about the importance of actors.
The spokesperson said:
The prime minister was very sad to hear of the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart.
As a former culture secretary he knows how much Britain’s greatest actors mean to the country, and Sir Patrick was one of the very best.
Just a reminder that when it comes to Wales, we are not comparing like with like. The term ‘region’ in an English context typically refers to an area covering between 1.5 and 3 million people. In Wales, regions cover much less dense areas. The Swansea Bay city region captures some 700,000 people, and similarly North Wales around 690,000 people. In Mid-Wales sheep outnumber people by 7:1. Only the Cardiff city region is comparable to English tiers, and even then at the lower end: around 1.5 million people.
Transposing an English mayoral worldview onto a very different political geography just doesn’t work. Wales may be a similar population size to the PM’s old manor but that’s where the parallel ends.
Andy Burnham talks about the regions of England and Wales interchangeably but the role the new prime minister champions for metro mayors is, in many respects, already performed by the Welsh government. Powers over skills, employment support, economic development, housing investment and major spending programmes sit at an all-Wales strategic level (covering a similar population size to Greater Manchester.)
His argument for England is that powers should flow from Westminster to city regions because they operate at an economically meaningful scale. Yet when the PM turns to Wales, he seems to suggest that powers already devolved to Cardiff Bay should be dispersed further down the system.
But notably he is not calling on his successor as the mayor of Greater Manchester, Bev Craig, to fragment the powers of the Greater Manchester combined authority and redistribute them amongst its ten constituent councils. On the contrary, the whole logic of the Greater Manchester model rests on concentrating strategic authority at a regional level.
Yet the implication of his comments is that Wales should move in the opposite direction.
The Rotterdam band are a riot of sound, look and attitude led by Eva Kah, who is as much a living artwork as she is a phenomenal live performer
From Rotterdam, the Netherlands
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Debut album Big Enemy out now via Tartarus, playing Le Guess Who festival
Rotterdam’s Bombstrap are a riotous and theatrical fusion of sound, look and attitude. An embodied version of John Milton’s Pandæmonium with the amp turned up to 11, the band revel in hardcore alternative living, internet wormholes, art-school pretensions and a gungy form of hardcore. Based in and drawing succour from one of the most famous squatted centres in the city, Het Poortgebouw, Bombstrap are a noisy counterblast to the increasing and overwhelmingly witless “circuses-and-bread” gentrification of Rotterdam.
After improbable election victory, the unconventional grassroots movement says it will prioritise dismissal of corrupt officials
In Belgrade’s Pioneers Park, just across from the national assembly, a small crowd craned their necks to listen. One woman held aloft a placard reading “Love prevailed for the people and Serbia”. With a bouquet of media microphones in front of them, members of the Student List, the direct democracy movement that won an improbable but decisive victory in Sunday’s election, gathered under the trees.
Having spent days bathing in the euphoria of their unexpected triumph, the candidates’ focus was now clear: the cleaning up of the rotten institutions that had increasingly blighted the lives of Serbs over the 14 years of government by the populist leader Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive party (SNS). They called for the dismissal of many senior law enforcement officials, among them the chiefs of the criminal police, the paramilitary gendarmerie and an anti-terrorism unit.
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Peunte begins by paying tribute to all affected by the incident.
He says that “at present, evidence points to a failure within Adif’s command and control centre,” but adds that investigators are still looking “to clarify what exactly happened.” He says he still has confidence in the system.
Kentridge’s cine-musical creation, made to accompany Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, is a marvel of puppetry, dance and humour, exploring humanity, grief and idealism
The Baku international arts festival in Azerbaijan is showcasing an amazing cine-musical creation, perhaps the most amazing animation I have ever seen. Oh to Believe in Another World is an hour-long collage animation with live-action choreography by the 71-year-old South African artist and film-maker William Kentridge. It is shown with the live orchestral accompaniment of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony, and this event is partly in honour of the 120th anniversary of Shostakovich’s birth this year, and partly to honour Shostakovich’s reportedly unrequited love (and lifelong friendship) for his student, Azerbaijani pianist and composer Elmira Nazirova.
The 10th symphony was inspired by Stalin and premiered shortly after his death, so it seems probable that Shostakovich had been at work on it for some time before this, long enough beforehand for at least some of the composition to have been conceived without any sense of Stalin’s death. Could part of it perhaps have been originally intended as an obediently dramatic tribute to Stalin? Yet the music arguably combines fear, awe, revulsion, and a hysterical reaction to the mad energy of Stalin’s genocidal tyranny, a darkly ambiguous respect for the great dictator whose victory in 1945 was a mainstay of the postwar dispensation; perhaps there is also a feeling in the music’s swirl that a great and terrible era has passed away, and with it a kind of grief at all that had been sacrificed to it.
Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s best-known independent media outlets, has announced it will permanently close next month. The newspaper, whose former editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel peace prize in 2021, cited intolerable pressure, including being stripped of its newsroom, its donation platforms and its legal right to publish.
“This is not just our own story; it is the story of a country and a society that are being systematically crushed,” wrote its editor-in-chief, Sergei Sokolov, on the newspaper’s website.
Andy Burnham must tread cautiously, but Brexit was a very grave act of self-harm – and he is right to address it
Andy Burnham’s opening debate on whether Britain should rejoin the EU is divisive, painful and politically risky. That is why it should be welcomed. To jeopardise his popularity so soon after coming to office might seem reckless, but the issue is urgent and not going away. Brexit is continuing to damage the nation’s economy. The prime minister’s job is to challenge, if not reform it.
The Brexit decade has evoked a bizarre sense of guilt among Britons. Opinion polls show nearly 60% regard it as a mistake, with just a third still in favour. Almost a quarter of those who voted for Brexit now regret it. While early forecasts of economic disaster were proved wrong, the accumulated cost of cutting links with Britain’s biggest trading partner is estimated at 6-8% of GDP.
Next month’s poll no longer the contest it was, as Pedro Sánchez finds himself forced to defend government’s safety record
One of the most dependable cliches of contemporary Spanish politics is that it never pays to bet against Pedro Sánchez. Time and time again – as leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE) and as prime minister – Sánchez has shown an almost preternatural ability to profit from adversity, and to confound expectations and wrongfoot his opponents.
Elections are never enough by themselves, but the stunning results from Serbia, Brazil and Hungary have given us hope in dark times
It is undoubtedly too early to declare victory, but the recent electoral defeats of Viktor Orbán, Aleksandar Vučić and Flávio Bolsonaro make me wonder: is 2026 turning out to be the year democracy slowly, but surely, fought back?
Even in Israel, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s reigning bloc lost its parliamentary majority and saw the spectacular rise of Arab parties. Though the opposition may not be able to form a government yet, it does have the larger parliamentary bloc.
David Van Reybrouck is a Belgian author and philosopher laureate for the Low Countries. He is the author of Against Elections: The Case for Democracy, and the initiator of Democracy27
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As thousands of datacentres are constructed across Europe, the Guardian and Investigate Europe have uncovered disturbing evidence that some workers building them are exposed to dangerous conditions and living in fear of speaking out
Sandu* checked his watch. He was winding down the last 15 minutes of his shift at a vast Google datacentre site in Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, in March, when the call came in. The 34-year-old electrical tester had already worked almost 10 hours, but says such last-minute jobs were normal: “I had no choice. People have been fired after saying no.”
The task was one Sandu had done many times before and involved a series of tests measuring the safety and integrity of the electrical wiring. A protective suit was locked away in an equipment room. The round trip would have added another 15 minutes to the job, he says, and people were waiting, so he decided not to retrieve the suit.
EU council president calls deadly strike ‘cruel and devastating’; fragile ceasefire holds in Oleshky.What we know on day 1,710
European leaders have reacted with outrage to a deadly attack by a Russian drone that slammed into a busy railway platform in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro on Thursday, as Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Ukraine had intelligence about more ballistic missile strikes to come. French President Emmanuel Macron stressed the need for “far more than a localised ceasefire”, referencing the current truce in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky. The EU council president, António Costa, who described the Dnipro attacks as “cruel and devastating”, called for greater pressure on Russia after the latest strikes against civilians. “The EU will continue to increase the pressure on Russia and to support Ukraine until a just and lasting peace is achieved,” he added. “We call on all our international partners to do the same.”
Later on Thursday, Russian forces launched an attack on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv with ballistic missiles, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram, hitting warehouses and triggering a fire. Emergency services were headed to the scene on the east side of the Dnipro River, he said.
Describing the Dnipro train station attack – which killed at least 14 people and injured another 14 – as “horrific”, the president of Ukraine insisted “sanctions against Moscow and its war machine must not be eased for as long as this Russian war continues”. Zelenskyy warned also that Ukraine had intelligence about preparations by the Russians of new ballistic missile strikes. “We need the means to take out all this Russian evil. We are expecting relevant decisions,” he said. Another attack on Dnipro hit a student dormitory, setting it ablaze, regional governor Oleksandr Hanzha said, adding the assaults had cut power to 350,000 households.
The strikes came as Ukraine and Russia kept to a fragile local ceasefire in the ravaged city of Oleshky and prepared to send a humanitarian convoy to the southern Ukrainian city under Russian occupation since 2022 and where residents have faced months of food, water and medicine shortages. Russia’s human rights commissioner Yana Lantratova said on Friday that local residents had until 2 pm local time (1100 GMT) on 30 October to evacuate, Russian news agency Interfax reported. Two people, including one sapper, were killed while de-mining in Oleshky, she said.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s military has paused its strikes on Russian oil refineries after pressure from US President Donald Trump, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, citing people with knowledge of the operations. Ukrainian units carrying out long-range strikes were told in mid-October that the campaign against refineries was effectively on hold once missions already in motion were completed, the Journal reported. The unofficial pause is expected to last until after the US midterm elections and potentially deeper into November, the newspaper said.
After the Dnipro attack, Zelenskyy renewed his criticism of a deal struck between Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to ease some US sanctions on Russia allowing Moscow to release diesel on to global markets. “How many such terrorist strikes has Russia carried out against our people since sanctions were lifted on some Russian oligarchs and the energy sector, instead of de-escalating?” he asked.
Late on Thursday, Putin said he supported any steps aimed at restoring relations with European countries, saying the outbreak of any conflict would leave a situation with no winners. Commenting on his phone call this week with the leaders of Norway and Finland, Putin told reporters after hosting a summit with African leaders: “And if anyone wants it, let them prepare, but right now they have not achieved their goal – to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. And if things go too far, there will be no winners at all. .”
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