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Thousands of angry leftwing protesters took to French streets on Saturday two days after Emmanuel Macron appointed a conservative prime minister.

Demonstrators accused the president of a “denial of democracy” after his decision to name the former EU Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, 73, as leader of the government.

The appointment came two months after a snap general election left France with a hung parliament formed of three roughly equal blocs – the New Popular Front (NFP), a leftwing alliance; the centre, including Macron’s Renaissance party and the centre-right; and the far-right National Rally (RN) – none of which had a majority.

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Western leaders should not be intimidated by Kremlin threats of nuclear escalation, the head of the CIA said on Saturday, and be willing to consider allowing Anglo-French Storm Shadow missiles to be used inside Russia.

Bill Burns, on a visit to London alongside the head of MI6, said the US had brushed off a previous Russian nuclear scare in autumn 2022, demonstrating that threats from Moscow should not always be taken literally.

“Putin’s a bully. He’s going to continue to sabre rattle from time to time,” Burns said. “We cannot afford to be intimidated by that sabre rattling … we got to be mindful of it. The US has provided enormous support for Ukraine, and I’m sure the president will consider other ways in which we can support them.”

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Telegram has become a global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement, according to a four-month investigation by The New York Times that analyzed more than 3.2 million Telegram messages from over 16,000 channels. The company, which offers features that enable criminals, terrorists and grifters to organize at scale and to sidestep scrutiny from the authorities, has looked the other way as illegal and extremist activities have flourished openly on the app.

The degree to which Telegram has been inundated by such content has not been previously reported. The Times investigation found 1,500 channels operated by white supremacists who coordinate activities among almost one million people around the world. At least two dozen channels sold weapons. In at least 22 channels with more than 70,000 followers, MDMA, cocaine, heroin and other drugs were advertised for delivery to more than 20 countries.

Hamas, ISIS and other terror groups have thrived on Telegram, often amassing large audiences across dozens of channels.

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If any voters had forgotten that Donald J. Trump was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, he spent roughly 45 minutes reminding them on Friday, eight weeks before Election Day.

At a lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, Mr. Trump, flanked by seven of his lawyers, laid out years-old allegations from the women in detail as he denied that they were telling the truth. He had just attended a federal appeals court hearing related to a civil case in which he was found liable of sexually abusing and defaming a New York writer, E. Jean Carroll, decades earlier. Mr. Trump was not required to attend the hearing, but decided he wanted to.

When the hearing was over, he went to his eponymous building for what the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign called a “press conference.” But he ended it without taking questions, and the session — during which Mr. Trump criticized his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, for avoiding reporters — was more like a venting exercise over his frustrations about his legal travails.

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The far-right media outlet at the centre of a US Department of Justice indictment over an alleged foreign influence campaign involving covert funding from Russia also produced dozens and dozens of videos this year focused on Canada.

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Tenet Media’s YouTube channel, which counted 316,000 subscribers, went offline Thursday afternoon, nearly a day after the indictment was announced.

However, an analysis of Tenet Media YouTube content preserved by PressProgress prior to its takedown has identified at least 51 videos focused on topics relating to Canada, including videos focused on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other hot button right-wing culture war topics.

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A 20-year-old Pakistani citizen was arrested in Canada this week and accused of plotting to kill “as many Jewish civilians as possible” in New York City on or near the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israelis, according to a Justice Department complaint unsealed Friday.

Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, who lived in Canada, tried to cross the border with the intention of traveling to New York City, where he planned to carry out a mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn, in support of the Islamic State, prosecutors said.

“New york is perfect to target jews,” he wrote to an associate, according to the filing, adding, “We could rack up easily a lot of jews.”

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Iran has sent short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 6, citing unnamed U.S. and European officials.

Washington informed its allies about Tehran's move in the past few days, sources told the WSJ. The exact type and number of the missiles handed over to Moscow were not specified.

Reuters reported in August, citing unnamed intelligence sources, that Russia may receive "hundreds" of Fath-360 short-range missiles and other ballistic missiles from Iran.

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Volodymyr Zelenskiy has complained that it has become increasingly difficult to use Storm Shadow missiles against Russian targets in occupied Ukraine because of a lack of supplies and reduced cooperation from the US, UK and France.

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Zelenskiy said Ukraine needed to be able to threaten targets inside Russia’s internationally recognised borders with Anglo-French Storm Shadow/Scalp cruise missiles and US Atacms ballistic missiles, repeating a demand he has made on several occasions previously.

But he then went further and suggested it was even becoming difficult in practice to strike Russian targets on occupied Ukrainian territory, which has been permitted by supplying countries for months.

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The judge overseeing Donald J. Trump’s criminal case in Manhattan postponed his sentencing until after Election Day, a significant victory for the former president as he seeks to overturn his conviction and win back the White House.

In a ruling on Friday, the judge, Juan M. Merchan, rescheduled the sentencing for Nov. 26. He had previously planned to hand down Mr. Trump’s punishment on Sept. 18, just seven weeks before Election Day, when Mr. Trump will face off against Vice President Kamala Harris for the presidency.

While the decision will avert a courtroom spectacle in the campaign’s final stretch, the delay itself could still affect the election, keeping voters in the dark about whether the Republican presidential nominee will eventually spend time behind bars.

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As the talks for a cease-fire and the release of hostages have stalled and sputtered in recent months, Qatar has leveraged its influence with Hamas in an effort to break through myriad impasses, according to interviews with more than a dozen officials with knowledge of the negotiations, including ones from the region and from the United States. Most of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity so they could share details of the closed-door discussions.

Since the war began, Qatar, along with Egypt, has emerged as a crucial mediator between Israel and Hamas, hosting marathon discussions with Palestinian representatives in air-conditioned rooms in downtown Doha, the Qatari capital, and channeling messages from the Biden administration to Hamas. The Qataris have also been working with the Israelis, even though the countries do not have formal diplomatic relations.

The Qatari efforts have taken on more urgency as the negotiations appear at a standstill. Hamas and Israel remain far apart on a deal — and the goal posts seem to be constantly shifting.

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On the day Ukraine launched its daring incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, the Federal Security Service, the Russian agency most responsible for protecting the border, played down the seriousness of the operation. Calling it “an armed provocation,” the agency said its forces were working to push the Ukrainians back.

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President Vladimir V. Putin has said an assessment of the failures in Kursk would be made only after the situation in Russia’s border region had stabilized, but intelligence experts say that a large measure of the responsibility rests with the Federal Security Service. Despite its sprawling networks of agents and vast budget, the agency, known as the F.S.B., first failed to anticipate the Ukrainian incursion and is now struggling along with the Russian army to dislodge a sizable Ukrainian fighting force.

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But the agency is hindered by infighting, rivalries with other security agencies and an aversion to delivering bad news to Mr. Putin. Particularly since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the F.S.B. has also been distracted by a large-scale crackdown on internal dissent.

As a result, the agency has suffered a series of damaging intelligence failures since the start of the war, Western officials and experts say. Kursk was just the most recent.

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The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution for interference in the 2020 election issued a series of deadlines on Thursday that will see prosecutors have the last word just days before the November election on whether the charges should be kept against the former president.

In a brief order, the US district judge Tanya Chutkan decided that prosecutors could file the first brief explaining how the charges against Trump in a slimmed-down indictment complied with the US supreme court’s ruling granting former presidents broad immunity from prosecution.

That means prosecutors – over the Trump team’s objections – will also have the final word on why they believe all of the conduct in the superseding indictment is not covered by immunity in a filing that is due on 29 October, just one week before the presidential election in November.

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