Violent protests in France, settler attacks in the West Bank, Russian strikes on Kyiv and wildfires in California – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalistsWarning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing Continue reading...
Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst answered your questions about the recent protests in France, the role of the French police, foreign influence and the upcoming presidential election.Michael Wolfcarius asks: I cannot understand why the Guardian is selecting dots instead of joining them.
France may have developed into the big story for many reasons, many of which have yet to be discussed, but it is not the only place where seemingly small incidents grew into massive protests, some also quite violent; Spain, Italy, Serbia and Albania come to mind.
The crystallising reason may be different but the conditions leading up to it are quite similar. Can you put all these events into perspective, context and relation? There are obviously underlying currents making it difficult for people to refrain from making themselves ‘heard’.Rokhaya: I agree that these movements deserve to be considered together, while at the same time, recognising their different specific national contexts.
Housing in Spain, living costs and public services in Italy and France, and corruption in Serbia and Albania are bringing people onto the streets. These concerns touch the foundations of a decent life and people’s ability to shape their future.What connects them, in my view, is the widening gap between what people need and what political institutions seem willing to deliver.
These incidents that have led to protests are not “small .” Serbia’s movement began after a deadly railway-station canopy collapse, which became a focus for anger over corruption and accountability. My reading is that these protests express a crisis of political responsiveness.Alexander: I think people in all these places – Albania, Spain, France – feel that the political systems that exist aren’t capable of dealing with the sheer scale and nature of the crises facing us, and they’re responding to a sense of ‘loss of control’ (the Brexit campaign really did strike upon a brilliant slogan) over where their societies are headed.
There is a general social sense that has flipped from “this is broken, but things can and will get better”, which gives people a stake in the institutions around them, to “this is broken and things can and will get worse”.The impact of the arrival of AI has been understated.
Not just on labour markets, or on the environment, but ontologically. The investment pitch of the most powerful companies in the world, the ones amassing trillion dollar valuations, isn’t just that X-subset of jobs are replaceable, it’s that human beings themselves are replaceable. That the things we do fundamentally don’t matter, and that their goal is to bring this into being.
I think that feeling is there even if we don’t immediately put our finger on it in those terms. Continue reading...
France's deepening fiscal crisis is testing the sustainability of current sociopolitical and economic policy. For Oliver Davies, Professor and Head of the Department of French at University College Cork, the crisis is not simply the consequence of deteriorating public finances. It is also the product of President Emmanuel Macron's political choices, particularly his decision to dissolve the National Assembly in June 2024. Davies describes the resulting parliamentary deadlock as a "self-inflicted crisis", warning that the market confidence on which Macron has long relied "now seems to be evaporating."
An aerial view of scorched grass in London, the UK, on August 11, 2026. - Dan Kitwood/Getty Images More than 50,000 people are estimated to have died across Europe’s cities during the brutal heat waves that roiled the continent this summer — making this year’s heat the region’s deadliest on record, according to a new analysis.
About two-thirds of the deaths, more than 32,600, are directly attributed to climate change, driven by fossil fuel pollution, according to the findings, published in two peer-reviewed papers in the journal Nature Health. “I think we can be quite confident in stating that the summer of 2026 is likely to have been the worst on record for heat-related mortality across much of Europe,” said Clair Barnes, an author on the reports and an extreme weather and climate change researcher at Imperial College London.
This stark death toll is revealed just weeks before international leaders gather in Turkey for the annual UN climate talks, and days after a UN report warned the world’s chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels has now vanished. “We’re well off-track to limit the worst consequences of climate change, and governments need to realize that without faster action and coordination, things will only get worse,” Barnes said.
Europe is the fastest-warming continent and extreme heat, the deadliest form of extreme weather, is already becoming unbearable. Unprecedented high temperatures scorched the continent from late May until the end of August this year. It was western Europe’s hottest summer on record, with temperatures about 2.9 degrees Celsius (5.2 Fahrenheit) above the 1991-2020 average.
Individual days, however, saw much larger anomalies, with temperatures more than 12 degrees Celsius (21.6 Fahrenheit) higher than usual in some countries. A tourist attempts to cool down near the Colosseum during a heatwave in Rome, Italy, on June 20. - Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters To calculate the death toll, scientists compared the temperatures in 854 cities across 30 European countries this summer with those that would have been expected in a world without climate change.
They then used peer-reviewed research on the relationship between high temperatures and daily deaths to model the likely number of heat-related deaths between the start of June and the end of August. It’s a method that has been found to produce death toll estimates broadly in line with those later produced by national health authorities, the scientists said.
They estimated a total of 50,391 heat-related deaths across the cities, which make up about 40% of the population of the countries studied. The death toll is the highest for 26 years and substantially higher than that of previous major European heat waves in 2022 and 2003, the researchers found.
Southern and western Europe were worst affected, but typically cooler northern regions, including the UK, also experienced thousands of deaths. The highest death rates were among people 85 or older, but heat can affect anyone, and more than 800 people between the ages of 20 and 44 died from heat-related reasons, according to the findings.
This summer is “likely to have been the most dangerously hot summer that Europe has experienced to date,” the report concludes. The scientists also found the role of climate change in heat deaths is becoming more pronounced. Earlier this century, fossil fuel pollution was responsible for about 40% of heat deaths compared to around two-thirds today.
Raquel Nunes, an associate professor in health and environment at the University of Warwick, who was not involved in the research, said the findings contribute to “growing evidence of how deadly extreme heat can be, despite being described as a ‘silent killer’ due to its impacts not always being immediately visible.”
One of the most concerning aspects was that the death toll was also high among younger people, with thousands under 65 estimated to have died, Nunes added. The modelled death estimates should be treated with caution “as they involve several uncertainties and assumptions,” said Lasse Vestergaard, chief physician at the European Mortality Monitoring Network, known as EuroMOMO.
Despite this, he added, the researchers’ estimates are “overall broadly in line” with those reported over the summer by EuroMOMO. “Until we kick the fossil fuel habit, we will continue to see increasingly hot and dangerous summers,” Barnes said. And that means even deadlier summers on the horizon.
“These numbers are a stark reminder that our hotter, more extreme summers are having an increasingly severe impact on public health,” she added. “Behind these statistics are real people whose lives were lost and real families who grieve for them.” For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.comThis article originally appeared on CNN at https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/22/climate/europe-heat-wave-deaths-50000
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial newsGood morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of business, the financial markets, and the world economy.A fresh wave of selling hit AI stocks around the world overnight, as investor grow increasingly anxious around the sustainability of AI-fuelled returns.As storm Austen hits these shores this morning, clouds kept darkening for markets yesterday, as the wobbles of recent weeks all collided at once.
First, there was mounting stress around France, with the Franco-German 10yr spread (+14.8bps) seeing its biggest daily widening since the initial pandemic turmoil in March 2020.Second, AI fears continued to gather pace, with the Philly semiconductor index (-6.72%) falling to its lowest level since July, which dragged down equities more broadly.
And third, the latest geopolitical fears meant oil prices kept rising as well, with Brent crude (+4.00%) hitting a 5-month high of $113.17/bbl.…In the midst of all these market pressures, an interesting theme was the flight to US Treasuries, which returned to its traditional risk-off role in periods of turmoil.
In fact, the 10yr yield fell -16.6bps to 4.95%.Moreover, that came despite some strong US data, demonstrating how the financial stress was weighing on sentiment rather than the fundamentals. For instance, the weekly initial jobless claims fell to a 3-month low of 194k in the week ending October 17 (vs.
200k expected). And in turn, that pushed the smoother 4-week moving average to its lowest since September 2022, back when the unemployment rate was just 3.5%.Given the more than 50% retreat in memory chipmakers’ share prices from their peaks, we could now argue that their exponential rise was a bubble, and that the bubble has burst.These memory chip companies continue to benefit from strong AI-related demand, and they’re trading at very low forward earnings multiples: Samsung and SK Hynix at around 3–4× — yes, 3–4 times! Alas, buyers are nowhere to be found.The drop in retail sales in September and sharp fall in consumer confidence in October raises the risk that the economy’s recent run of resilience might be coming to an end.At least part of the drop in retail sales in September can be attributed to warm weather dampening demand for winter clothing, which might reverse in October.7am BST: British retail sales9am BST: Flash PMI for Eurozone9.30am BST: Flash PMI for UK, construction statistics for Great Britain 202511.30am BST: Russia’s interest rate decision3pm BST: Flash PMI for US, University of Michigan’s US consumer confidence index Continue reading...
The deaths include two women found drowned in a cellar in the Bouches-du-Rhône region.
In an interview with FRANCE 24, exiled former Tibetan leader Lobsang Sangay said any successor to the Dalai Lama appointed by China "is going to be a fake one". He also likened Beijing's ethnic unity law to "an ethnic erasure", said Tibetan concerns had been "downgraded a bit" in US-China talks and accused China of failing to warn of the deadly August floods on the Nepal-Tibet border.