When some of the worst flash floods in decades in eastern Spain hit, Diego Hernandez was passing the city of Valencia on his way to his mother’s funeral.

As he and his wife drove on Tuesday night, a thin stream of muddy water started to appear under their tires. Soon, it was almost three feet high and nearing the top of their seats. Within seconds, another car piled on top of theirs.

The couple fled their vehicle, initially hanging onto a tree as trash cans, car wheels, sofas and chairs streamed by in the raging floodwaters.

“It was like an apocalypse,” he said.

They were hardly alone. Thousands of people found themselves trapped in one way or another — in cars, in trucks and in homes — as heavy rainfall pounded southern Spain this week.

The death toll jumped to 158 people on Thursday. Others are still missing, but how many remains unclear. Rescuers feared finding more bodies, said Margarita Robles, Spain’s defense minister, as they dug deeper into the mud.

Some areas received anywhere from a month’s to a year’s worth of rain in a single day, or even in eight hours. Rain continued to fall overnight and into Thursday morning in eastern and southern Spain, as cities and towns in eastern Spain surveyed the damage.

In Castelló, the country’s weather agency warned that rivers and streams could overflow. Some districts of Valencia and Catalonia remained on high alert, with more rain expected during the day, the weather agency said.

Thousands of households were still without electricity or a phone connection, the authorities said. More than a dozen municipalities reported having no clean drinking water, emergency services in Valencia said.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Valencia and visited some of the worst affected areas, after the government declared three days of national mourning. His opponent, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, also visited the areas.

“We are not going to leave the people of Valencia on their own,” Mr. Sánchez said after visiting an emergency coordination center there. He also urged people to stay home, “because in that way we will be saving lives.”

Members of the Emergency Military Unit, civil guards and police officers were participating in the search-and-rescue operation, Mr. Sánchez said. Vehicles including helicopters were aiding the effort.

King Felipe VI of Spain also instructed the Royal Guard to join the search-and-rescue operation. “All of us join this shared pain,” the king said.

At least 155 people had been confirmed dead in the Valencia region alone, as the authorities continued searching for and identifying victims, the emergency coordination center in Valencia said in a statement. Regional governments in Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia said a total of three more people had died in those regions.

In and around the city of Valencia, water had gushed into ground-floor apartments, trapping some people. It flooded shopping centers, dog shelters and even a nursing home, killing some of its residents. Other victims died in places where it did not rain, swept away by roaring waters.

On Wednesday, as coroners worked to identify the bodies, some of the hardest-hit villages remained cut off, the roads and bridges that connected them to the rest of the country broken or inundated by the flash floods.

Dozens of roads remain closed, including major highways, the Civil Guard said. Three of Valencia’s subway lines have collapsed, and train service, including a high-speed link to Madrid, may be suspended for as long as three weeks, said Óscar Puente, the transport minister.

Assessing the damage in Valencia, Mr. Puente said “the entire regional road network is seriously damaged.”

As communities remain cut off, the authorities have deployed security forces to guard against looting. The national police said they had arrested 39 people in an operation in which the authorities recovered “a multitude of stolen items.”

Thousands of trucks and cars were abandoned on streets and highways, buried in thick layers of mud, as underpasses were filled with water. Their owners were stranded in makeshift shelters, unable to make it home. Dead bodies were trapped in some vehicles, the Transport Ministry said.

Victims of the flooding in Valencia will receive a minimum of 6,000 euros, about $6,500, as part of a €250 million aid package announced by Carlos Mazon, the leader of the Valencia region.

Toni Zamorano, 59, sat on the ground outside a basketball hall in Valencia that had been turned into a dormitory. He was driving home when his car filled with water on Tuesday night. He pushed his door open and jumped into the water. Within a few minutes, he saw that his car had been completely covered in water and was floating away.

“I started swimming, walking, swimming,” he said. He was alone on a stretch of flooded highway, with the water up to his chest, as sofas, computers and cars floated by.

“Cars were like boats,” he said. “I honestly thought it was all over.”

Mr. Zamorano lives in the village of Sedavi, a few kilometers south of Valencia. He has not been able to make it home yet.

“I don’t know what I’m going to find,” he said. “My whole town must be devastated, and I don’t know what my home is like.”

Mr. Hernandez, 56, did not make it to his mother’s funeral. His wife eventually managed to cling onto a lamppost, but he did not, and was carried away. He tried to grab floating tires and poles until he managed to enter a bus that was stuck in the stream. The upper part of the bus was still dry, and he took off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in its curtains.

At about 4 a.m. on Wednesday, rescuers came for him. For hours, he had no idea what had happened to his wife.

He did not have his cellphone, and none of the emergency workers he spoke to had any information. Mr. Hernandez and his wife have known each other since they were both children, and they had been married nearly 30 years.

Finally, on Wednesday morning, he called his brother, and got the news he was waiting for: She was alive. She also blamed him for not holding onto the lamppost as she did, and drifting away in the current, his brother said.

If she was complaining about him “It’s a sign she is doing well,” Mr. Hernandez said with a laugh, as he stood smoking outside a sports hall while wearing a sweater from the local basketball team that the rescuers had given him.

Inside, the eight courts had been turned into a dormitory, with dozens of mattresses laid geometrically below the backboards still bearing a score from the last game played there, 24.

In Madrid, Ana de la Cuadra frantically exchanged text messages with members of her family, who were trapped in Catarroja, a town in southern Valencia.

“They’ve warned that another wave of water may come,” Cristina de la Cuadra, her sister, said via text messages, accompanied by videos of rivers water gushing down the street. “We are in bad shape, without water or electricity. We don’t when we will be able to leave the house.”

Soon after, she switched off her phone to conserve its battery.

Mark A. Walsh contributed reporting.

Top Biden administration negotiators were back in the Middle East on Thursday for a last diplomatic drive before the American election, though hopes were not high for quick agreements to pause the fighting.

With Israel battling Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director and top American negotiator, was expected to meet with officials in Cairo on Thursday, according to a U.S. official who spoke anonymously to discuss sensitive negotiations. At the same time, President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, Brett McGurk, and his de facto envoy on the conflict with Hezbollah, Amos Hochstein, held talks in Israel, the U.S. official said.

The head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Michael E. Kurilla, was also traveling to the region and was scheduled to visit Israel for discussions with counterparts there as well as with U.S. military personnel in the country, the U.S. official added.

The goal of all of these visits is to support the Biden administration’s policy of “de-escalation backed by deterrence,” the U.S. official said. But progress in cease-fire talks seems unlikely in coming days, with the election looming on Tuesday in the United States.

Officials briefed on Israel’s internal thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, have said that the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is waiting to see who will succeed President Biden before committing to a diplomatic trajectory.

In his meetings with officials in Egypt, Mr. Burns was expected to discuss proposals to secure the release of hostages held in Gaza in exchange for a cease-fire, according to a U.S. official and another person briefed on the talks. About 100 hostages captured in the Hamas attack in Israel last October remain in Gaza, and Israeli officials believe about two-thirds are still alive.

Earlier in the week, during talks among envoys from Israel, the United States and the two countries that mediate for Hamas, Egypt and Qatar, possible proposals emerged for an initial, temporary cease-fire in Gaza that would lead to the return of a small group of hostages.

Mr. Burns’s discussions in Cairo were expected to focus on refinements to those scaled-down proposals that American officials hope will prod both Israel and Hamas to at least soften their positions and allow bargaining to resume in earnest after months of false starts.

Multiple versions of a potential Gaza proposal are still under discussion. One would release female hostages along with male captives over 50 in return for a set number of Palestinian prisoners, according to a person briefed on the discussions, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. In that version, the fighting in Gaza would pause for some time, but likely less than the six weeks envisioned in a previous deal negotiators had been pushing.

Officials in Washington are pessimistic that Hamas will take any of the new deals on offer, however. A senior Hamas official, Osama Hamdan, has already rejected an idea Egypt proposed over the weekend for a 48-hour cease-fire in Gaza, during which Hamas would release four Israeli hostages in exchange for some Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Mr. Hamdan said on Sunday that Hamas would agree only to a permanent cessation of hostilities.

Some U.S. officials believe that Hamas leaders, like some officials in Israel, see waiting as advantageous. Israel’s longstanding conflict with Hezbollah, which reignited when the Lebanon-based armed group began firing on Israel last October in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, has ballooned from a regular but relatively restrained exchange of fire into an Israeli military ground operation and airstrikes inside Lebanon.

Hezbollah has also continued its attacks targeting Israel. On Thursday, local officials in Metula, in northern Israel, said that projectiles fired from Lebanon had struck an agricultural area, killing four foreign workers and an Israeli farmer.

In Israel, Mr. McGurk and Mr. Hochstein were expected to discuss the war in Gaza and the hostages, Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon and the related conflict with Iran. On Wednesday, a draft cease-fire proposal to address the fighting with Hezbollah in Lebanon was published by Israeli news media, prompting a National Security Council spokesman, Sean Savett, to warn that such reports should be viewed with skepticism.

“There are many reports and drafts circulating,” he said in a statement. “They do not reflect the current state of negotiations.”

Nor did the published draft appear likely to gain traction. Kassem Kassir, a Lebanese expert on Hezbollah who is close to the group, noted that the document appears to call for Hezbollah’s withdrawal from Lebanon’s border area with Israel and for the Lebanese authorities to prevent the group from rearming.

“It’s too early to discuss these points, and I think it won’t be accepted by Hezbollah,” he said.

Myra Noveck and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.

Flash flooding across Spain killed at least 158 people this week after torrential rain left towns and villages submerged and turned streets into rivers in the eastern and southern parts of the country. In some areas, several months’ worth of rain fell in a single day.

Since Monday, when the deluge began, residents in affected areas have struggled to clear mud and tree-covered streets. Cars and trucks were swept away and dumped in piles, blocking roads. Rescuers have carried out evacuations by helicopter and boat, and wide swaths of the country have been left without electricity.

Most of the deaths occurred in the region of Valencia, on Spain’s eastern coast. With roads impassable and bridges broken, some communities were completely cut off.

The death toll is expected to rise as some people are still missing, and more rain is forecast.

North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile off its east coast on Thursday, shortly after the United States and South Korea condemned the country for deploying troops near Ukraine to join Russia’s war effort.

The missile was fired from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, at a deliberately steep angle so that it reached an unusually high altitude but did not fly over Japan, the South Korean military said in a brief statement. The missile landed in waters between North Korea and Japan.

The military said it was analyzing data to learn more about the missile, but that it believed it was an ICBM. North Korea last tested a long-range missile​ in December, when it test-fired its solid-fueled Hwasong-18 ICBM.

North Korea confirmed later Thursday that its military had launched an ICBM, saying that its leader, Kim Jong-un, had been present. North Korea “will never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The launch on Thursday was the North’s first major weapons test since September, when it fired a new type of Hwasong-11 short-range ballistic missile, which it said could carry a “super-large” conventional warhead weighing 4.5 tons.

On Wednesday, South Korean defense intelligence officials told lawmakers that North Korea might conduct long-range missile tests before the American presidential election next week. They also said that the North was preparing to conduct its seventh underground nuclear test, in a bid to raise tensions and gain diplomatic leverage with the next U.S. president. North Korea conducted its last nuclear test in 2017.

In recent weeks, North Korea has posed a fresh security challenge to Washington and its allies by sending an estimated 11,000 troops to Russia to fight in its war against Ukraine. Thousands of them, outfitted with Russian uniforms and equipment, have moved closer to the front lines, preparing themselves for possible battle against Ukrainian troops, South Korean and American officials said.

The U.S. secretary of defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, and Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun of South Korea met in Washington on Wednesday for annual defense talks between the allies. They said they “condemned in the strongest terms with one voice” the cooperation between Russia and North Korea that “has expanded beyond transfers of military supplies to actual deployment of forces.”

Mr. Austin said he was increasingly concerned that President Vladimir V. Putin planned to use the North Korean soldiers to support Russia’s combat operations in its Kursk region, where Ukraine has held territory since invading in August.

“Putin has gone tin-cupping to get weapons” from North Korea and Iran, Mr. Austin said. “Turning to a pariah state like North Korea for troops just underscores how much trouble he is in.”

Besides the troops, North Korea has sent 16,000 shipping containers full of artillery shells, rockets and missiles to Russia since the summer of last year, according to Washington and Seoul. When Mr. Putin met with Mr. Kim, the North’s leader, in Pyongyang in June, they restored a Cold War-era treaty of mutual defense and military cooperation between their countries.

That agreement raised fears in Washington and Seoul that Mr. Kim was forming an alliance with Russia to counter the one between South Korea and the United States, which also features a mutual defense treaty. In return for providing weapons and troops to Russia, North Korea was also seeking to get advanced technologies from Moscow to improve its missiles and satellite-launch programs, U.S. and South Korean analysts said.

Days after Mr. Putin’s visit to Pyongyang, North Korea said for the first time that it had tested technology for launching several nuclear warheads with a single missile.

South Korean defense officials said that the launch appeared to indicate some improvement in North Korea’s ICBM capabilities. The missile fired may have been a new solid-fuel ICBM, said Lee Sung-joon, a spokesman for the South Korean military. When North Korea’s leader visited a munitions factory in September, state media released photos showing what looked like a new and bigger ICBM.

Thursday’s ICBM flew for a longer time than any previous one North Korea has launched — approximately 86 minutes, according to Japan’s Defense Ministry.

North Korea has launched several ICBMs in recent years, including ones with solid propellant that are easier to move and hide, and faster to launch, than its old liquid-fuel versions. But all of those missiles were fired at steep angles, rather than being sent across the Pacific.

North Korea has never demonstrated an ability to fire an ICBM on a normal, flatter trajectory. Another technological hurdle the North has yet to show it has cleared is so-called re-entry technology. After soaring into space, an ICBM warhead must endure intense heat and friction as it crashes back into the earth’s atmosphere and toward its target.

On the list of topics best avoided by China’s comedians, some are obvious. Politics. The Chinese military.

Now add: Men’s fragile egos.

That, at least, was the message sent this month, when a major e-commerce platform abruptly ended a partnership with China’s most prominent female stand-up comic. The company was caving to pressure from men on social media who described the comedian, Yang Li, as a man-hating witch.

Speaking up for women’s rights is increasingly sensitive in China, and the stand-up stage is the latest battleground. Growing numbers of women like Ms. Yang are speaking out about — and laughing at — the injustices they face. On two hugely popular stand-up shows this fall, women were among the breakout stars, thanks to punchlines about the difficulty of finding a good partner, or men’s fear of talking about menstruation.

But a backlash has emerged, as men balk at being the butt of the joke. They have attacked the comics on social media; Ms. Yang has described receiving threats of violence. The women’s new visibility can also be easily erased. Not long after the e-commerce company, JD.com, dropped Ms. Yang, it deleted posts on its official social media account featuring two other female comedians.

The battle over women’s jokes reflects the broader paradox of feminism in China. On the one hand, feminist rhetoric is more widespread than ever before, with once-niche discussions of gender inequality now aired openly. But the forces trying to suppress that rhetoric are also growing, encouraged by a government that has led its own crusade against feminist activism and pushed women toward traditional roles.

On guancha.cn, a nationalistic commentary site, an editorial declared: “The fewer divisive symbols like Yang Li, the better.”

Even before the JD.com controversy erupted, Ms. Yang, 32, had addressed the perils of poking fun at men. On one of the recent shows, she said young female comics had asked her whether they should make certain jokes.

“I didn’t have an answer,” Ms. Yang said. “If I told them to do it, I’d worry what would happen to them afterward. If I told them not to, I’d worry about how good their performances would be.”

Ms. Yang, who declined an interview through a representative, was one of the first Chinese comedians to demonstrate the possibilities for women in stand-up.

The daughter of pig farmers in Hebei Province, Ms. Yang was a former graphic designer and aspiring comedian when she shot to fame in 2020, with a routine about her dating woes. “How can men look so average, and yet be so confident?” she said, a one-liner that went viral.

To many women, she became an icon. But many men viciously denounced her, accusing her of inciting “gender antagonism” — a term state media often uses to denounce feminism — and even reporting her to the government. When Intel and Mercedes-Benz featured her in ad campaigns in 2021, online fury prompted Intel to drop her and Mercedes-Benz to limit the ad’s visibility.

Ms. Yang was unapologetic. And gradually, more women joined her. A female contestant on one of this year’s shows thanked Ms. Yang, who was the show’s chief screenwriter, for acting as an “older sister” in a male-dominated field.

Those women have been blazing their own trails, with jokes that sometimes go further than Ms. Yang’s or broach new aspects of women’s daily indignities. Several performers talked about men commenting on their weight, or their parents’ preferences for sons. Another contestant, named Cai Cai, told a story about ordering menstrual pads and her male delivery driver’s refusal to even say the word.

“What is there to hide? Will you get thrown in jail for buying pads?” she said.

Jenny Zhang, a 30-year-old I.T. worker and stand-up fan in Shanghai, said watching the female comedians had helped her recognize injustices in her own life.

“After you hear it, you feel yourself becoming more aware of your own emotions,” she said. “Some things that you just thought were a little uncomfortable, you realize there’s a problem behind it.”

Still, even as the performers have broached once-taboo topics, they have not explicitly called themselves feminists. And they have left potentially more sensitive issues, such as domestic violence or sexual harassment, largely untouched.

But even if the jokes stay within the realm of the mundane, what matters is their appearance on mainstream platforms, said Xiaowen Liang, a feminist activist in New York who has participated in a popular Chinese-language feminist stand-up show there.

“Young women have already been talking about this a lot,” she said of topics such as period shame. But “to let your male partners, elders, bosses, those kinds of people understand your experience — that’s extremely precious.”

The emphasis on personal stories has also helped to keep references to gender inequality alive in pop culture, even as more overt activism has been crushed, said Dan Chen, a professor of political science at the University of Richmond who studies Chinese stand-up. Government censors are less likely to see such stories as political statements, she said.

“But if others resonate with you, then the message is sent,” Professor Chen said, adding that stand-up, with its humor, allows women to deflect accusations of lecturing.

Still, even the relatively cautious approach has not been enough to stave off controversy, as shown when Ms. Yang appeared in an ad for JD.com’s online pharmacy services this month.

Infuriated commenters called her an “extreme feminist,” citing her 2020 joke about average-looking men. They promised to boycott the platform and filed customer service complaints claiming that the company didn’t respect men.

Some pointed to JD.com’s chief executive, a woman, as proof that toxic feminists had infiltrated the company. (The company’s chairman, Richard Liu, was accused of rape in a U.S. court; the case was settled out of court in 2022.)

Four days after posting the ad with Ms. Yang, JD.com deleted it. “Recently, the participation of some stand-up comics in JD’s promotional events attracted online attention. If this has brought you a bad experience, we deeply apologize!” it said in a statement. “Going forward, we have no plans to collaborate with the relevant performers.”

JD.com also deleted posts featuring two other female comedians who have made jokes about men. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

To Ms. Yang’s defenders, the controversy was not really about her, but about men’s insecurity about women’s rising status.

“Women’s buying power and self-awareness are getting stronger and stronger. Appealing to this group is a very simple business decision,” said Cheen Qin, a 40-year-old manager at an internet company in Shenzhen. But “men can’t handle it,” she said.

After she posted in support of Ms. Yang online, Ms. Qin said, a male former classmate called her stupid.

Still, many women said they hoped that female performers and audiences alike would continue to find an outlet in stand-up. (The genre can be fraught, no matter the performer’s gender. Last year, stand-up shows across China were canceled after a male comedian made a joke that some nationalists online considered an insult to Chinese soldiers.)

Ms. Yang herself had already said, before the ad controversy, that she planned to focus more on smaller-scale shows, rather than television appearances. But she encouraged other women to ignore exhortations to talk about something other than gender.

“I just want to say, on behalf of people after me who may encounter the same problems: Going forward, this is all we’re going to talk about!” she said. “If you’re really offended, go watch something else.”

Siyi Zhao contributed research.

Jun Mizuno’s bar in Toyama, Japan, used to open at 5 p.m. But after Shohei Ohtani began his first season with the Los Angeles Dodgers this year, Mizuno started opening at 8 a.m. so his customers could cheer for the national baseball hero over whiskey highballs and lemon soju sodas.

Thursday morning was no exception. Mizuno turned on the TV in his bar, Otoko Bar Mizuno Sake Store, and his regulars watched Ohtani win his first World Series, as the Dodgers beat the Yankees, 7-6, in Game 5.

“The entire country is thrilled,” Mizuno said, as a banner of Ohtani as tall as his bar hung outside the entrance.

Japan has loved baseball for decades, but Ohtani’s appearances in the World Series alongside his Japanese teammate Yoshinobu Yamamoto elevated the games to soaring levels of popularity.

About 15.2 million television viewers in Japan watched each of the first two games of the World Series on average, compared with 14.5 million in the United States, according to Major League Baseball.

In Japan, the World Series games began at 9 a.m., so people watched over breakfast or during their workdays. Mizuno’s bar in the coastal city of Toyama offered a special morning set for the games: eggs, bacon, cheese toast and black coffee.

Ohtani, a two-time American League Most Valuable Player who in previous seasons excelled both as a hitter and as a starting pitcher, played only as a designated hitter this year after having elbow surgery. After another outstanding regular season, he went just 2-for-19 in the World Series, failing to get on base in Game 5. He also injured his shoulder in Game 2.

Japanese fans watched his every move anyway.

“Ohtani sells,” said Jim Allen, who has covered Japanese baseball for Kyodo News since 2012, adding that Kyodo’s English-language articles about the player were about six times as popular as other articles. “The networks that were broadcasting the World Series games are basically doing nonstop Ohtani coverage.”

At the Tokyo headquarters of Nishikawa, a bedding company that Ohtani promotes, about a hundred employees surrounded a TV screen near the office’s entrance to watch the final inning of Game 5, said Yuna Mori, a company spokeswoman.

“He’s put together an unprecedented season, so everybody’s watching,” said John Gibson, a Japanese-to-English interpreter who lived in Japan for 30 years.

“I imagine the bosses are coming in and putting the TV on themselves and holding the remote,” he added.

It’s no surprise that Japan is watching a lot of baseball. When Ohtani led Japan to the championship at last year’s World Baseball Classic in Miami, more than 42 percent of Japanese households watched their country defeat the United States during the workday on a Wednesday.

M.L.B. has taken notice. It will open the 2025 season with the Dodgers playing the Chicago Cubs in Tokyo. The Dodgers played the San Diego Padres in this year’s season opener in Seoul, where Ohtani drew massive crowds.

Japanese broadcasters are aware, too. The creators of the hugely popular anime “One Piece” pushed back a season premiere ahead of the World Series so as not to compete with Ohtani and the Dodgers.

Ohtani, who is the first M.L.B. player to dominate in both hitting and pitching since Babe Ruth a century ago, last year signed a record-breaking $700 million deal to play with the Dodgers for 10 years. Last month, Ohtani became the first player to record 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases in one season.

Oshu, his hometown in northern Japan, has celebrated his every turn. The city government hosted World Series watch parties this week, and hundreds of residents showed up with Dodgers shirts and noise makers.

The exact size of the television audience throughout the World Series was not available on Thursday. But it’s clear that Japan’s TV viewership figures for the first four games, at least, eclipsed the domestic audience for the Japan Series, the national baseball championship that happened to coincide with the World Series, according to Video Research, a marketing research firm in Tokyo.

“You wouldn’t know that the Japan Series is happening right now,” said Jason Coskrey, a sports journalist in Tokyo who has worked at The Japan Times since 2007.

Coskrey watched the final game of the World Series in his office on his iPad. A co-worker looked over his shoulder to watch the last out.

“Everything’s been about Ohtani,” he said. “He’s front-page news. This is probably going to lead the news broadcast tonight. He’s like a supernova.”