Some supporters believe race and gender were underlying reasons many won’t admit to for why the vice-president lost

In the hours after Joe Biden’s decision to end his re-election bid and endorse Kamala Harris as the democratic nominee for president, 40,000 Black women – leaders in politics, business and entertainment – met on a Zoom call to rally around the vice-president.

“We went from that call to organizing our house, our block, our church, our sorority, and our unions,” said Glynda C Carr, president and co-founder of Higher Heights, an organization that works to help Black women get elected to political office. “That is what we did for the 108 days that she ran for office. Black women used our organizing power around a woman that we knew was qualified, that had a lived experience.”

Facing a severe drought and reliant on hydropower, the country is enduring relentless blackouts. But experts say opportunities have been missed to adapt and diversify

It’s 6.30pm in Quito, and Anamary Mazorra Vázquez’s flat has fallen into darkness after weeks of government-mandated power cuts to manage Ecuador ’s electricity crisis. She puts clothes away by the light of her phone while her husband, Roberto Vaca, seated on the bed by the window, uses the streetlights to help feed their two-year-old son, who has special needs.

With a newborn and two toddlers to care for, Vázquez’s life has been turned upside down by the blackouts, she says. These past weeks have been particularly challenging, with power cuts from 4am to 11am, then again from 3pm to 10pm, leaving her with only four hours of electricity during the day.

• Springboks head coach expects ‘very, very tough game’
• England looking for first win of Autumn Nations Series

Rassie Erasmus expects England to bring a sense of frustration to their match against South Africa on Saturday and labelled them “desperate” for a win after two defeats from two in their autumn campaign.

Erasmus’s world champions returned to the world No 1 ranking with a patchy 32-15 victory over Scotland on Sunday as they kicked off their own run of Tests in the northern hemisphere. They now travel to Twickenham to take on Steve Borthwick’s side, who are reeling after suffering two late losses to New Zealand and Australia, 24-22 and 42-37 , respectively, having expected to win both on home soil.

Anarchist chronicler of ‘Paraguayan sorrow’ – once known only in radical Latin American circles – is finally being recognized in his adopted country and has now been translated into English

When the Spanish anarchist writer Rafael Barrett was smuggled back into Paraguay near the small town of Yabebyry in 1909, he was unrecognisable as the young newspaper correspondent who had arrived in the troubled nation five years earlier to cover an armed revolution.

Physically, he was being consumed by a tuberculosis infection that would kill him the following year. Ideologically, he had been transformed by immersion in what he called “Paraguayan sorrow”, shedding the remnants of his youth in Madrid’s bourgeois elite to embrace anarchism and the labour movement.

Hundreds turn up at Hampshire industrial estate to grab cut-price cast-iron cookware

One hundred years after two Belgian industrialists first “cracked the code” to enamelling cast-iron and created the first Le Creuset cocotte, the highly covetable cookware brand continues to grace the middle-class kitchen.

With prices reflecting its status, however, fans are always on the lookout for bargains for the colourful range, which is still made in the original foundry established in 1925 in the village of Fresnoy-le-Grand, about two hours north of Paris.

Inter midfielder never fails from 12 yards. This weekend he did – and now the top of the table is tighter than ever

Would it be too dramatic to portray a November missed penalty as a sign to let go of everything we thought we knew about the Serie A title race? Well, yes, OK, probably it would. But seeing Hakan Calhanoglu’s spot-kick carom back off a post in the second-half of Inter’s 1-1 draw with Napoli was at the least a shock to the system.

He had converted all his previous 19 attempts since joining the Nerazzurri from Milan in 2021. “It had to happen sooner or later,” said the player. Were the rest of us ready, though, to live in a world shorn of such certainties? As the commentator Patrick Kendrick put it: “With Calhanoglu missing, we’re just left with the misery of death and taxes”.

A Dutch publisher has announced that it will use AI to translate some of its books – but those in the industry are worried about the consequences if this becomes the norm

As anyone who has tried pointing their phone’s camera at a menu in a foreign country lately will know, machine translation has improved rapidly since the first days of Google Translate. The utility of AI-powered translation in situations like this is unquestionable – but the proposed use of AI in literary translation has been significantly more controversial.

Dutch publisher Veen Bosch & Keuning’s announcement that it would use AI translation for commercial fiction has outraged both authors and translators – despite attempts to reassure them with promises that no books will be translated in this way without careful checking and that authors will have to give consent.

Tom Homan has previously said he would ‘run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen’

US president-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday that Tom Homan , the former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), will be in charge of the country’s borders in his new administration.

Homan’s areas of control will include “the southern border, the northern border, all maritime, and aviation security”, Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. Trump added that “border czar” Homan will be in charge of the deportation of illegal immigrants .

Workers face being targets in what could be Environmental Protection Agency’s biggest upheaval since its founding

After several years of recovery after the tumult of Donald Trump’s last administration, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now bracing itself for even deeper cuts to staff numbers and to work protecting Americans from pollution and the climate crisis as Trump prepares to return to the White House.

When he was last president, Trump gutted more than 100 environmental rules and vowed to only leave a “little bit of the EPA” left “because you can’t destroy business”, prompting hundreds of agency staff to leave amid a firestorm of political interference and retaliation against civil servants. An even greater exodus is expected this time, with staff fearing they are frontline targets in what could be the biggest upheaval in the agency’s 50-year history.