New York mayor Mamdani posts video playing ‘office basketball’ with Spain’s PM, Spanish director Almodóvar visits Madrid housing protest camp and more news on Monday September 28th.
Spanish director Almodóvar visits Madrid housing protest camp
Oscar-winning Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar visited a protest camp in central Madrid on Sunday, voicing support for protesters demanding urgent action on the country’s housing crisis and calling the situation “unbearable”.
Demonstrators set up around 100 tents in the capital’s busy Puerta del Sol square after tens of thousands took to the streets on Saturday to demand action to lower housing costs and protect tenants.
The protest movement was triggered by the police eviction on Wednesday of an 87-year-old woman, Maricarmen Abascal, from the Madrid apartment where she had lived for decades.
“Maricarmen is the last straw,” said Almodóvar, 76, a prominent figure on Spain’s cultural left, during an interview with public broadcaster RTVE at the camp.
“It is absolutely unbearable for Spanish society to have this problem for another day. And politicians have to fix it because they are the ones who govern us,” he added.
Soaring housing costs and a shortage of homes are pricing many Spaniards out of the market. Real-estate website Idealista estimates that rents have nearly doubled over the past decade.
“The housing problem is paralysing Spanish life itself,” Almodóvar said, adding that the crisis was preventing many young people from starting their own lives.
NY mayor Mamdani posts video playing ‘office basketball’ with Spain’s PM
New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has posted a staged video of himself with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez playing basketball with balls of paper and a waste paper basket.
The video starts with Sánchez telling Mamdani that “you know that being a leftist means taking big shots”, to which the mayor of the ‘Big Apple’ replies, “And making them”.
Being a leftist means taking big shots. And making them. pic.twitter.com/obp9yRlcJp
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) September 26, 2026
Sánchez and Mamdani are arguably the most popular progressive leaders in the world currently, although the Spanish premier is facing plenty of problems domestically.
Mayor Mamdani is known for regularly posting humorous and viral videos of himself on social media as a way of engaging with his voters, while the Spanish PM is following in his footsteps but not quite with the same panache.
Education protest in Madrid ahead of school strikes in October
Some 10,000 people demonstrated on Sunday in defence of public and secular non-university education and against budget cuts, a protest that serves as a warm-up for the indefinite strike called by the unions and educational assemblies for October 14th in Madrid.
Led by a huge banner with the slogan “We defend public education, we defend the future,” the protesters marched from Atocha to Cibeles Square wearing green t-shirts that demanded “public education for all, by all”.
They carried signs against budget cuts and against Madrid’s right-wing regional leader Isabel Díaz Ayuso, demanding fewer teaching hours and lower student ratios in the classrooms.
The protest is a prelude to an indefinite strike to demand salary and working condition improvements for teachers across Spain, as well as the reduction in teaching hours and class sizes, together with more resources to address classroom diversity.
Spain’s government partner demands new maps showing Africa’s true size
Sumar, the ruling Socialists’ junior coalition partner, have demanded that traditional world maps be replaced with projections that show the real size of Africa and correct historical distortions.
This comes after the United Nations General Assembly adopted in September 2026 a non-binding resolution encouraging governments, schools, and organisations to move away from the traditional 16th-century Mercator projection and instead use proportionally accurate equal-area maps like the Equal Earth projection.
Sumar gave as an example the common representation of Greenland, which on many maps appears with an area almost equivalent to that of the entire African continent, when in reality Africa is 30 million square kilometres larger and about 14 times bigger.
It’s a similar situation with Alaska, which is often depicted with a size comparable to that of Brazil, even though the South American country is up to five times larger.
According to the hard-left party, “this type of representation, beyond its technical inaccuracy in relation to the actual surface area of the continents, has been transmitting and consolidating a hierarchical vision of the world, contrary to the principles of equity and global justice that should govern international relations and educational systems in the 21st century.”