Spain is reeling from its worst flooding in decades, after a year’s worth of rain fell in just hours this week in the country’s southern and eastern regions.

The storm began on Tuesday and has so far killed at least 95 people while dozens more remain missing. It has also flooded towns and roads, caused rivers to burst their banks and left thousands without power or running water.

Valencia, the worst-struck region, saw its heaviest rainfall in 28 years with people caught off guard and trapped in basements and lower floors of buildings. Vehicles abandoned in traffic were swept away by the rising water.

Emergency workers are still fighting to rescue those who are trapped, with operations underway to recover bodies and clear debris.

Here’s what we know.

Where is the worst damage?

Spain’s eastern and southern regions often see autumn rain, but this year’s downpour was unprecedented. Most of the deaths occurred in Valencia, which is located along the Mediterranean coast and is home to more than 5 million people.

The flash flooding in the region, a tourist hotspot during summer months, saw rural villages submerged in water and rendered main highways unusable on Tuesday night and into Wednesday.

A courthouse was turned into a temporary morgue in the region’s capital, the city of Valencia.

At least 40 people, six of whom were in a retirement home, died in the town of Paiporta in Valencia, Spanish state news agency EFE reported, citing its mayor.

Trains have been suspended in Valencia, as have other major public services in other affected regions. Schools, museums, and public libraries were closed into Thursday, according to the local government.

Flooding was also reported in and around the cities of Murcia and Malaga with more than 100 mm (4 inches) of rain falling in some areas. In Malaga, in the region of Andalusia on Spain’s southern coast, a 71-year-old British man died from hypothermia, the city’s mayor said.

What has the response been?

More than 1,000 members of the military have been deployed to assist in rescue efforts, Spain’s Defense Minister Margarita Robles said. Some areas can only be reached by helicopter.

Valencia’s regional leader Carlos Mazon told reporters early Wednesday that bodies were found as rescue teams began to reach areas previously cut off by the floods. As of Thursday morning, emergency services said they had reached all the affected areas.

The Spanish government sent emergency alerts on Tuesday asking people to stay indoors or seek high ground. Extreme rain warnings were put in place for some areas including around Valencia, according to Spain’s Meteorological Agency, AEMET. These warnings called for the potential of 200 mm (8 inches) of rain in less than 12 hours.

In some locations, the rainfall estimates were exceeded in even shorter periods of time. Chiva, which is east of Valencia, received 320 mm of rain in just over four hours, according to the European Severe Weather Database. The Valencia area averages 77 mm (3 inches) for the entire month of October.

However, many people were caught off guard, leaving it too late for them to seek safety. Some took to social media to vent their frustrations, claiming that they received the emergency alert in the midst of the storm.

Hannah Cloke, a professor of hydrology at the UK’s University of Reading, said the high death toll suggests Spain’s regional emergency alerts system failed.

“This suggests the system for alerting people to the dangers of floods in Valencia has failed, with fatal consequences. It is clear that people just don’t know what to do when faced with a flood, or when they hear warnings.”

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez offered support, pledging his government would do all it could to help flood victims, as he urged people to remain vigilant.

Sanchez visited Valencia on Thursday, where he instructed people to “please, stay home, don’t leave,” adding that “the damage continues” and the priority is to save as many lives as possible.

The Spanish government has also decreed three days of official mourning, starting on Thursday.

Thousands in Valencia’s suburbs were still without power and running water on Thursday, as search operations and debris clearing continued.

The Spanish Securities and Emergencies department has issued weather warnings for many regions. Orange and yellow alerts remained in place in isolated parts of Valencia, while rain continues in Castellon, a province to the north.

Extreme weather warnings continue for portions of eastern and southern Spain, according to AEMET, with more rain expected.

What caused the disaster?

The torrential rain was likely caused by what Spanish meteorologists call a “gota fría,” or cold drop, which refers to a pool of cooler air high in the atmosphere that can separate from the jet stream, causing it to move slowly and often lead to high-impact rainfall. This phenomenon is most common in autumn.

Figuring out the precise role climate change played in Spain’s devastating floods will require further analysis, but scientists are clear that global warming, driven by fossil fuel pollution, makes these types of extreme rainfall events more likely and more intense.

Hotter oceans fuel stronger storms and the Mediterranean hit its highest temperature on record in August. Warmer air is also able to hold more moisture, soaking it up like a sponge to wring out in the form of torrential rain.

“We can’t say anything on the fly,” said Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, senior state meteorologist and a member of the Spanish Meteorological Association. He added though that “in the context of climate change, these types of intense and exceptional rare rainfall events are going to become more frequent and more intense and, therefore, destructive.”

How does this compare?

This week’s floods are the most deadly Spain has suffered in decades.

In 1959, 144 people were killed by a flood in the Spanish town of Ribadelago. However, that disaster was caused by the failure of a dam, releasing water from the Vega de Tera reservoir, rather than a natural event.

The last comparable natural disaster was in 1996, when floods killed 87 people near the town of Biescas in the Pyrenees mountains.

While Spain has experienced significant autumn storms in recent years, nothing comes close to the devastation wrought over the past few days.

The disaster is on a similar level to flooding seen in Germany and Belgium in 2021, which killed more than 230 people.

In subtle but increasingly vocal ways, Israel’s military leaders are signaling that the country has achieved all it can militarily in Lebanon and Gaza, and it’s time for the politicians to strike a deal.

It comes as Lebanon’s prime minister says that a ceasefire between Hezbollah and Israel could be imminent. Both candidates for the American presidency have also made clear they do not want wars in Gaza and Lebanon to be on the agenda when they take office.

When the Israel Defense Forces’ top general sat down with officers in northern Gaza – who are waging one of the military’s fiercest operations since last year’s invasion – he went further than ever in suggesting the military phases of both conflicts should end.

“In the north, there’s a possibility of reaching a sharp conclusion,” Herzi Halevi, Chief of the General Staff, said, referring to the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. In Gaza, he said, “if we take out the northern Gaza Brigade commander, it’s another collapse…. I don’t know what we’ll encounter tomorrow, but this pressure brings us closer to more achievements.”

What those achievements should be is the subject of much consternation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly pledged “absolute victory.” His defense minister and longtime political tormentor Yoav Gallant has bristled at that goal. In August, he told a closed-door parliamentary committee meeting that the idea of “absolute victory” in Gaza was “nonsense,” according to Israeli media.

Gallant’s dim view of Netanyahu’s war goal was made official when earlier this week he reportedly sent a private memo to the prime minister and the rest of his cabinet saying that the war had lost its way.

In Gaza, he wrote, Israel should ensure the release of the remaining hostages, make sure there is no military threat from Hamas, and promote civilian rule. That’s a far cry from the existing, maximalist war aim of eliminating Hamas’ military and governance capabilities.

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said Wednesday he was optimistic for a potential Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire to be struck “within the next few hours or days,” after speaking with US envoy Amos Hochstein, who arrived in the region on Thursday.

Israel has for the past month carried out a massive, country-wide bombing campaign in Lebanon, and killed Hezbollah’s elusive leader, Hassan Nasrallah. In his interview, Mikati indicated that Hezbollah is no longer insisting that its conflict with Israel will only cease once the war in Gaza ends. That would allow it to accept a ceasefire without an end to the Gaza campaign.

Gallant has said Hamas and Hezbollah have now been rendered totally ineffective as Iranian proxies.

“These two organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah, that were groomed for years as a long arm against the State of Israel, are no longer an effective tool in the hands of Iran,” Gallant said during a memorial service on Sunday. “We know that some goals cannot be achieved by military action alone, and thus, we must honor our moral obligations to bring our captives home, despite the painful compromises involved.”

And yet Netanyahu has remained defiant. When the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, returned from recess this week, the prime minister seemed to repeat his maximalist goal, and indicated he was unlikely to accept a conclusion anytime soon: “The absolute victory is an orderly and consistent work plan that we fulfill step by step,” he said.

The winner of the US presidential election could have a sweeping impact on the contentious relationship between the world’s two largest economies and rival superpowers.

But in China, where election news is filtered through heavily censored state and social media, the focus has been more on spectacle than substance – with a sense that no matter who wins, the tensions of the US-China relationship will remain.

Part of the reason for that may well be a consensus in China – from policymakers down to regular citizens – that the die is cast for a US administration that wants to constrain China’s rise on the global stage, regardless of whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump wins.

Trump’s last term saw the Republican slap tariffs on hundreds of billions worth of Chinese goods, launch a campaign against Chinese telecoms giant Huawei and use racist language to describe the virus that causes Covid-19, which was first identified in China.

The past four years under President Joe Biden have seen a tone shift and effort to stabilize communication. But US concern about China’s threat to its national security has only deepened, with Biden targeting Chinese tech industries with investment and export controls, as well as tariffs, while also appearing to sidestep longstanding US policy in how he has voiced support for Taiwan – a “red line” issue in the relationship for Beijing, which claims the self-ruling island democracy as its own.

Meanwhile, people in China have seen their economic prospects dim as the country has struggled to fully rebound following its stringent pandemic controls amid a wider slowdown and property market crisis, among other challenges.

So, while the presidential campaigns are still playing across China’s daily news coverage and online discussions, interest in the candidates and their policies appears muted compared with past US elections.

“(It) doesn’t matter who it is (that wins),” one social media user wrote in a popular comment on China’s X-like platform Weibo. “Their containment of China won’t ease.”

Watching the ‘turmoil’

As the campaigns unfolded over recent months, Beijing’s state media has honed in on social discord and polarization in the US.

In recent days, the top post under the “US election” hashtag on Weibo has been about American concerns over potential post-election violence. The post, by an arm of state broadcaster CCTV, cites survey data from US media.

A recent cartoon from state-owned newspaper China Daily circulated in domestic media showed the Statue of Liberty being crushed in the jaws of a dragon labeled “political violence.”

“All walks of life in the United States are highly nervous, and public opinion is in turmoil,” reporters from state-run news agency Xinhua wrote in a recent dispatch, which also noted that “as political polarization and divisions in public opinion intensified in this year’s US election, political violence has also intensified.”

A magazine affiliated with Xinhua has alternatively portrayed the elections as “lacking hope,” being ultimately decided by “invisible forces” of power, like Wall Street.

Some nationalist bloggers have published videos and posts at times gleefully playing up what they describe as the potential for a post-election American “civil war” – rhetoric echoed in chatter on social media platform Weibo, which is heavily censored and largely dominated by nationalist voices.

While picking up genuine concerns reported by American and international media in what has been a contentious and violent US election cycle, the coverage and conversation appears geared to telegraph the superiority of China’s own political system. There, China’s ruling Communist Party has an iron grip on political power and discourse.

But despite the coverage, many in China have also keenly observed the democratic process – and pointed out the contrast to their own.

“There’s no perfect system, but at least they allow people to question them,” one social media user said on Weibo.

Candidate of choice?

Both Harris and Trump have been hot topics on Chinese social media platforms.

Harris appeared to be relatively unknown to Chinese social media users prior to becoming the Democratic candidate after Biden’s July withdrawal from the race.

Since then, many posts and videos on Tiktok’s sister video app Douyin have mocked the vice president, for example picking on her laugh – in line with what is often a chauvinistic tone on China’s social media platforms and echoing comments made by Trump himself.

Some posted clips of Harris’ speeches have a positive spin, however. Those point to her middle-class background and rise to the second-highest American office, a contrast to today’s China where the top echelons are stacked with men who often hail from politically elite families.

“This is a true ordinary person’s story,” read one comment with hundreds of likes posted under a video with a clip of a recent Harris speech.

Trump has at times captured tongue-in-cheek admiration across the Chinese internet. As president he earned the nickname Chuan Jianguo, or “Trump, the (Chinese) nation builder” – a quip to suggest his isolationist foreign policy and divisive domestic agenda were helping Beijing to overtake Washington on the global stage.

But after the tumult of the past eight years, Trump fever appears to have cooled.

“People are not optimistic about these two candidates … as their image and abilities can’t compare to those of past figures,” said Wu Xinbo, director of the Center for American Studies at Shanghai’s Fudan University. That’s one reason why the level of Chinese public interest in this election appears lower than in the previous two votes, he said.

View from the top

Whoever wins the US race, Communist Party leaders likely expect there will be little improvement in tense ties, analysts said.

“Looking to the future, regardless of whether Harris or Trump becomes the next US president, the continuity in US policy toward China will almost certainly outweigh any potential major shifts,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University in Beijing.

Beijing is careful not to directly comment on any views of the election, but likely sees Trump as bringing more uncertainly – and thus risk – into the relationship. The former president has threatened upwards of 60% tariffs on all imports from China and is known for his volatile foreign policy.

But Beijing could see benefit in that if it weakens US overseas partnerships, observers say. The Biden administration has sought to work more closely with allies in Europe and Asia to counter what it sees as the “most serious long-term challenge to the international order” – China, while Trump has repeatedly questioned traditional US alliances.

Chinese leaders will also be closely watching how a Trump presidency would handle the war in Ukraine – with Beijing likely wary of him taking steps to mend US relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin, a critical ally for Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the global stage. The end of that war – which Trump has claimed he can quickly achieve – would also likely bring more US focus back to Asia-Pacific, which China doesn’t want to see.

But Trump is still seen in Beijing’s policy circles as likely to drive a more fractious relationship with China than Harris would.

The vice president is expected to tread a similar path to that laid by Biden – maintaining pressure on China to limit the development of its technology and military, but trying to keep some exchange and dialogue open.

“That means it will be a mixture of tension, friction, and some limited degree of exchanges and cooperation … (while) Trump would present greater challenges to US-China relations. The main issue is that (Trump) handles US-China relations in an unconventional manner, lacking a sense of proportion and boundaries,” said Wu in Shanghai.

“The most you can say is that the challenges to the relationship will vary depending on who is in office.”