NEED TO CATCH up? The Journal brings you a round-up of today’s news.

IRELAND

Affordable housing banner hanging over the offices at Sinn Féin party head office in Parnell Square today. Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie / RollingNews.ie

• A monument commemorating Irish soldiers killed in the last 40 years on peacekeeping duty in Lebanon has suffered damage in recent bombing raids by Israel that have also devastated an Irish funded orphanage in the village of Tibnine.
• A coalition between Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and Independents is preferred, according to a new opinion poll by the Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks released in the run-up to the election. 
• Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman has received a report from Tusla about the child and family agency’s engagement with missing boy Kyran Durnin and his family.
• Families of the Disappeared victims of the Northern Ireland Troubles have urged those who know where they are buried to end their pain.
• People in Derry are “very concerned” after a number of recent sexually motivated attacks, a local representative said, as a young woman was attacked last night by a man with a knife.
• Passengers were evacuated from a bus after it caught fire on the M1 motorway in north County Dublin in the early hours of the morning.
• ‘I never had a teacher that didn’t assault me’: Readers’ stories of violence in the classroom. Around 200 readers shared their stories of being beaten and humiliated by their teachers in their school years.

INTERNATIONAL

Britain's Member of Parliament Kemi Badenoch, left, embraces her husband Hamish Badenoch after being elected as the new leader of the opposition Conservative Party, in London. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

#NEXT TOP TORY: Kemi Badenoch has been announced as the new leader of the UK’s Conservative Party, beating out Robert Jenrick for the job.

#MIDDLE EAST: Iran’s supreme leader has threatened Israel and the US with “a crushing response” over attacks on the country and its allies.

#VALENCIA: Spain is deploying 10,000 more troops and police officers to the eastern Valencia region devastated by historic floods that have killed 211 people, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said today.

#NORTH KOREA: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged its allies to stop “watching” and take steps before North Koreans troops deployed in Russia reach the battlefield.

PARTING SHOT

WHO KNEW SOCIETY’S apparently inexorable descent into fascism would be so wacky?

With only days to go until the US public elects a new president, the race has taken the form of a toss-up suspended in mid-air, with most of the polls from the six or seven states that actually matter producing results that show Donald Trump and Kamala Harris separated only by the margin of error or less.

The Journal’s Carl Kinsella talks deepfake endorsements of Michael Healy-Rae, American politics, and Halloween hoaxes in this week’s Surrealing in The Years.