Luton airport closed last night after a large fire, and all flights were suspended. The fire ripped through a multi-storey car park, causing it to collapse. All flights at the airport are suspended until 3pm, it said in a statement. It is Britain’s fifth-busiest airport after Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted and Manchester, and it handled 13.3 million passengers last year, according to the Civil Aviation Authority. Today Birkenstock, the orthopaedic 250-year-old German shoe brand, is to float on the New York stock market. The sandal maker priced its shares at $46 before its first day of trading, giving the company a market valuation of $8.6bn (£7bn). The shares start trading later today. In financial markets, the FTSE 100 index in London is broadly unchanged at 7,632, up only four points. The other main European bourses are in the red, with Germany’s Dax down 0.3%, France’s Cac losing 0.8% and Italy’s FTSE MiB flat. Oil prices are pushing higher on concerns that the war between Israel and Hamas and rising tensions in the region could affect the output of major producers. Brent crude hit $89 a barrel on Monday and is trading 0.6% higher at $88.17 a barrel at the moment. US crude is up 0.6% at $86.46 a barrel. Gas prices have also retreated after yesterday’s increase, when UK gas jumped 15% and European gas soared 16% after the gas pipeline “Baltic Connector” between Finland and Estonia started leaking. Extensive damage to an undersea gas pipeline and communications cable connecting Finland and Estonia “could not have occurred by accident” and appears to be the result of a “deliberate … external act”, Finnish authorities have said. The agenda • IMF/World Bank annual meetings in Marrakech • 1.30pm BST: US producer price index for September • 7pm BST: US Federal Reserve minutes of last meeting We’ll be tracking all the main events throughout the day ...
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