A grassroots student-led coalition threatens to upend Serbia’s political landscape as the EU-candidate country heads to the polls on Sunday
Serbia’s 6.5 million voters go to the polls on 25 October in a watershed parliamentary election characterised by civil unrest, a new political landscape, allegations of irregularities, an uncertain outcome and the potential of far-reaching consequences.
Company ordered to stop work at two sites in country, which has found itself at forefront of tech firms’ latest push
Behind a wire fence lies a vast gaping wound of earth. Before Google’s arrival a few months ago, an estimated quarter of a million trees occupied the 330 hectares (815 acres) of forest near the town of Muhos in rural northern Finland. Now they are all gone.
After the tech company illegally stripped the entire area to build a datacentre – taking even the top soil with it – all that remains is a vast expanse of mud indented with the trail marks of machinery, puddles and mounds of earth, roots and branches. Residents say that brown water flowing off the site is going into a stream that feeds the Oulujoki River.
Awa, 18, stood in the dock in the tribunal de Paris, a small, mute and bewildered figure seeming unable to understand, let alone answer, the simplest of questions.
The court was told she had joined young people who looted an Yves Saint Laurent store on Boulevard Saint Germain in Paris’s Left Bank late on Sunday and stripped it bare within minutes.
Fox News and others have toed president’s line – seemingly hoping unrest abroad will make people vote Republican
Donald Trump sought to capitalize on the scenes of unrest in France, telling a crowd in Kansas on Monday that “migrants” and “communists” were responsible, and that the scenes were “what the radical ‘Dumocrats’ want to do to America”.
As Republicans struggle to convince voters across the country ahead of November’s midterm elections, Trump’s allies in the conservative media have followed suit, seemingly hoping that the scenes in France can scare people to the polls.
Europe’s leaders can no longer trust a word that comes out of Washington. No more slaps on the wrist – we need concrete steps to punish Trump
Historical comparisons are always inexact. No one conflict precisely mirrors another. Yet Donald Trump’s shameless appeasement of Vladimir Putin carries more than a noxious whiff of Neville Chamberlain’s failed attempt in Munich in 1938 to head off war with Nazi Germany. To be fair to the former UK prime minister – and history largely hasn’t been – his peacemaking efforts had the enthusiastic backing of most people in Britain and France who, like him, were desperate to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the first world war. Trump enjoys no equivalent public support for his treachery. Nor does he face the prospect of a US war with Russia. His betrayal of Ukraine is cynically self-interested, globally dangerous and utterly contemptible.
US-Russian talks on agreeing the shoddy terms of a precedent-setting American sell-out of Ukraine are at an advanced stage, after meetings in St Petersburg this week. Trump has zigzagged over the war ever since returning to office. Now, panicked by record-low poll ratings, he seems determined to scapegoat Ukraine and force its de facto capitulation. Recent steps – his shocking decision to fund Putin’s war machine by buying Russian diesel, his waiving of tougher sanctions, his mysterious, lethal interruptions in US satellite and intelligence sharing with Kyiv, and his renewed attempt to oust Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy – mark Trump out as the skulking Judas, the craven Brutus of the modern age. He makes Chamberlain look like a man of iron principle. All that’s lacking is an umbrella.
Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
Russia has carried out a massive “demonstrative” attack on Ukraine, bombarding Kyiv with ballistic missiles just hours after Vladimir Putin said he had agreed to resume trilateral negotiations after talks with the US envoy Steve Witkoff.
Overnight, Moscow pounded the Ukrainian capital, killing at least two people and wounding 22, including four children. Targets included the southern bridge over the Dnipro River, civilian houses, energy infrastructure, an ambulance station, office buildings and a monastery.
The Cali Fund, set up to raise $1bn a year for biodiversity from drug companies, remains near empty
Big pharmaceutical companies have been accused of “free-riding on nature”, after a landmark biodiversity fund that invites businesses to put some of their profits back into conservation was left virtually empty.
The Cali Fund set out to raise $1bn (£750m) annually, by asking companies that profit from nature’s genetics to contribute towards conservation in low-income countries. But more than 18 months after the fund was launched, it remains far below this target.
French government will show ‘absolute’ determination to stop the riots, Macron says
As we are waiting for Macron, first details of the planned police response to this weekend’s protests are emerging.
Junior interior minister, Jean-Didier Berger, said that the police presence will be “20% higher” than last weekend, with reinforcements from the army, elite police forces and gendarmerie.
French borrowing costs continued to rise on Thursday, as investors fret that France’s government is struggling to pass a federal budget after public protests gripped the country.
France’s bond market was hit with another bout of selling, with the difference between French and German 10-year borrowing costs – a metric for the risk premium attached to French debt – rising to its highest level in almost 15 years.
Each country’s protesters have distinct grievances. Listen to them, not the voices telling us Europe is ungovernable
Last Saturday night, the town hall of Limoges in west-central France was set ablaze. By Sunday, images of the fire destroying a symbol of the French republic, and other scenes of unrest across France, were everywhere, but being used to tell very different stories about what is happening in Europe.
For some, the flames announced a pan-European youth revolt, proof that a single movement was sweeping the continent. Donald Trump, who had already insisted that the French schools protests were not about schools but about migration and Islam, urged Europeans to “close the borders”. The mayor of Limoges saw the fingerprints of an alleged ultra-left insurrection.
Alberto Alemanno is the Jean Monnet professor of EU law at HEC Paris and the founder of The Good Lobby
France readers Q&A: Guardian Europe columnists Rokhaya Diallo and Alexander Hurst will be live taking questions from our readers about the unrest in France from at 1500 BST / 1600 CEST on Friday 23 October. Send your questions by email now to conversations@theguardian.com or post questions in the comments from 0900 BST here.
Author withdrawn from France’s Prix Goncourt last month has repeatedly denied using artificial intelligence to write novel
The publisher of top-selling Haitian Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien, who was removed from France’s most prestigious literary prize list last month, has confirmed the author used artificial intelligence to help write his novel C’était ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die).
Orélien has denied allegations that he used AI on his breakthrough novel and, last week, Canadian publisher Les Éditions du Boréal said it was standing by the 38-year-old writer.
Steve Witkoff’s flattery of the Russian leader could be just the start of a mendacious stratagem from a US president who says Moscow ‘has been fine on Ukraine’
They say the first casualty of war is truth. For the Trump administration, the road to peace with Russia now encompasses some extraordinary lies.
Steve Witkoff delivered one as he sat down with Vladimir Putin in St Petersburg on Wednesday, aiming to close the deal on Russia’s land grab in Ukraine with the White House’s strategy of maximum pressure on Kyiv and saccharine flattery of the Kremlin.
Measures would remove some penalties for those helping women access abortion but are ‘small-scale step’, say campaigners
Poland’s lower house of parliament has approved two bills aimed at loosening a near-total ban on abortions, in what campaigners have described as a “small-scale step” ahead of protests calling on the government to fulfil its promises to overhaul the country’s laws.
The new measures, which are likely to be vetoed by Poland’s nationalist president, would remove some of the criminal penalties for those who help women to access abortion care and allow terminations in cases of foetal abnormalities.
European Commission calls accommodation website’s approach to fraudulent listings and phishing scams as ‘absolutely substandard’
EU regulators have opened an investigation into Booking.com, alleging that the accommodation website has not done enough to protect consumers from fake listings and scams.
The European Commission, which regulates the world’s biggest tech companies operating in the EU, said Booking.com may have breached the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) with its “absolutely substandard” approach to tackling fraudulent listings and phishing scams, where criminals impersonate a third party to trick people to hand over money.
Leaders criticised for spreading misleading information as France prepares for further protests this weekend
Emmanuel Macron has accused Donald Trump and other foreign leaders of making “stupid comments” about France’s street unrest for political gain, as the country prepared for more protests this weekend.
Speaking during a visit to Qatar, the French president did not name names but said “manipulation of information” after Saturday’s riots had led to “comments that are as unacceptable as they are stupid, from many people, including foreign leaders”.
Nationalist leaders are framing unrest as consequence of failed liberal governance and open borders
Europe’s far-right leaders have jumped on the violence that rocked numerous cities last weekend, framing it as the inevitable consequence of failed liberal governance and open-border policies and insisting only they can restore law and order.
Months away from key elections in Spain, France and Italy, authoritarian nationalists are eager to weaponise the wave of street unrest, originating in peaceful protests over the cost of living and deteriorating public services but hijacked by violent rioters.
As US support ebbs away, looming European elections and growing financial strains across the continent could fracture the precious coalition that has kept Ukraine afloat
Europe woke up last Friday to another belligerent outburst from Donald Trump – this time berating Ukraine’s wartime leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy again. Just a few days after his diesel deal with the Kremlin, the US president said Zelenskyy was more difficult to deal with than Vladimir Putin and blamed Ukraine’s leader for rocketing oil prices – without any reference to the impact of his own war on Iran.
The contrast in Europe was obvious. When Zelenskyy walked into the multi-coloured summit room of the European Council headquarters in Brussels that Friday morning, the EU’s 27 leaders burst into applause, getting to their feet to offer big hugs and brisk handshakes. European Council president António Costa told Zelenskyy and the media: “This is no time to withdraw the support to Ukraine,” calling instead for increased pressure on Russia. Zelenskyy was thankful, pointedly saying he was happy to have “huge support” from “real leaders”.
Yield on 10-year government bonds passes 5% amid failure to pass budget and fallout from violent street protests
France’s borrowing costs have climbed above 5% for the first time in 24 years as political concerns and the government’s failure to agree a much-delayed budget spook the financial markets.
With some civic buildings still smouldering from recent riots, a fresh bout of selling pushed up the yield – or interest rate – on bonds issued by the second largest economy in the eurozone.
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