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15-year-old loses hand during French schools protest as clashes with police continue – Europe live

The euro has fallen to its lowest level against the US dollar since May 2025 amid concerns over France’s burgeoning public debt and a continued sell-off in government bonds. Monday’s trade saw the euro drop as much as 0.9%, after four straight weeks of falls against the dollar. 1 euro is currently worth US$1.12. The yield on France’s 10-year government bonds – the benchmark used to price fixed-rate mortgages, credit cards and other consumer loans- is now also nearing 5%, meaning the government is having to pay a significantly higher interest rate to borrow money. That multi-decade high will also affect consumer loans. Spain’s snap election called this morning too is adding to some of the uncertainty and volatility in the eurozone. The euro has also dropped further against the pound. It’s now worth 85p.

Schoolboy, 15, loses hand after picking up police stun grenade during French school protests

Hundreds of schools in France remained fully or partly closed on Monday as teenagers continued to blockade buildings and the government struggled to contain the biggest youth protest movement in years. A 15-year-old protesting against what the demonstrators say are France’s dilapidated ⁠and understaffed schools ‌had his hand ‌blown off on ‌Monday in the northern town of Lens, the local prefect François-Xavier Lauch ‌said. A local newspaper, La Voix du Nord, reported that the teenager lost his hand after ⁠picking up a police stun grenade. Lauch said an investigation into ‌the incident had been opened. The French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, had earlier attempted to calm the protests by accepting schoolchildren’s grievances as “legitimate” and saying the government must listen. Lecornu ordered ministers to tackle the students’ five major demands. These include organising the replacement of absent teachers, in recognition that pupils in some areas miss months of teaching because of staff absences – even in key exam years. Lecornu also called for a review of France’s lengthy school days, which are among the longest in Europe. The government will also look at repairs to dilapidated school buildings. Children on blockades across France have described water leaking into classrooms during class, cockroaches, collapsing ceilings and unbearable heat in summer. Lecornu said ministers must come up with proposals by the end of the month. Sophie Binet, the head of the leftwing CGT trade union, said the government was late in offering to tackle the schoolchildren’s demands. She said the number of absent teachers who were not replaced had doubled in 10 years and class sizes were at a record high. “Amid such anger, a few measures just for show aren’t going to satisfy demands,” Binet said. She called for the government to instead stop all budget cuts as well as cuts to teachers’ positions. Student unions have called for a national day of protest on Tuesday with more schools expected to be barricaded. Thousands of trade unionists, teachers, public sector workers and parents’ groups are expected to join marches of support in cities and towns across France. Binet said trade unionists would march to ensure there was no violence on the edge of any protests on Tuesday, as she criticised heavy policing. “We’ve been appalled by what we have seen over the past 10 days and by the unprecedented crackdown that the government has organised against the protests by high school students,” she said. University students continued to support the school protests on Monday, with up to 40 university buildings blockaded across France. Philippe Baptiste, the minister for higher education, told French radio he felt student and high school protests could intensify with the national protests on Tuesday. Between 400 and 500 high schools are expected to remain completely or partly closed on ⁠Monday out of a total of 3,700, the education minister said. “Our priority is to restore order,” ‌the government spokesperson Maud Bregeon told CNews television on Monday. The protests began in late September ‌at a high school ‌in a Paris suburb over teacher shortages. The government was taken by surprise as protests then spread nationwide, amid anger at social inequality and a lack of investment in the education system. Since last Monday, about 5,000 people, mostly ‌teenagers, have been arrested across France and dozens injured. The family of a 16-year-old school pupil in Tours has filed a complaint for police violence after he lost sight in his right eye. The state prosecutor said the boy’s injuries were in line with the impact from a of police rubber bullet. A police investigation is under way. Teachers have also been injured. Damage to property is estimated in the tens of millions of euros.

Will Pedro Sánchez’s gamble to call snap general election in Spain pay off?

Spaniards will head to the polls on 29 November – months before schedule – after the country’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, announced a snap general election on Monday morning. The vote, which will be Spain’s fifth general election in 10 years, is likely to be dominated by growing anger over the housing crisis Why has Sánchez called the snap general election? Although the next general election was due to be held sometime before the end of next summer, Sánchez has decided to gamble by bringing it forward in the hope that widespread anger over Spain’s housing crisis could work to his advantage and allow him to shore up his fragile mandate. The eviction last month of Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman who was removed from the home in Madrid where she had lived for 70 years, unleashed huge protests. Sánchez’s minority coalition government responded by putting together emergency measures that were put before congress at the end of last week. Despite the evident strength of public feeling, the conservative People’s party (PP), the far-right Vox party and the rightwing, pro-independence Catalan party Junts voted down the measures, infuriating housing campaigners and many ordinary Spaniards. Sánchez, who has a well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, risk-taking and improvisation, has seen his chance. While his critics argue that his eight years in office should have given him time to address Spain’s housing problems, both the protests and the rightwing opposition to his emergency measures offer Sánchez the chance to leverage the issue for electoral ends. How are the polls looking? Not great for Sánchez’s Spanish Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), which has been trailing the PP for months. Although the PP is firmly in the lead, it doesn’t appear to be on course for an absolute majority, meaning it would be forced to rely on the support of Vox to govern – possibly in a coalition. What would such a coalition mean for Spanish politics? If Vox were to take office with the PP, it would be the first time that a far-right party has governed Spain since the country’s return to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975. The PP, which repudiated Vox in 2020, accusing them of being demagogues who practised a politics based on “fear, anger, resentment and revenge”, has since bitten its tongue and repeatedly entered into pragmatic regional coalitions with the far-right party. The price for Vox’s backing in those regions recently has been the adoption of the party’s hard line on immigration, including its “national priority” policy that insists Spanish-born people receive priority over those born abroad for housing and public services. It sounds like quite a gamble, then. Why is Sánchez prepared to risk the early election? The prime minister only just scraped his return to office in the last general election in July 2023 after he won the backing of Catalan pro-independence parties by promising a controversial amnesty law to those involved in the failed, illegal push for independence from Spain in 2017. Sánchez’s minority coalition government with the smaller, leftwing Sumar alliance, has struggled to get legislation through a fraught congress and has not passed a budget since 2023. Junts, which offered him conditional support three years ago, has attempted to extract maximum benefits from the government, only to abandon it when it feels so inclined, as it did with the emergency housing measures. Nor do his problems end there. The government has also been fiercely criticised over its handling of the crisis in Spain’s north African enclave of Ceuta, which was sparked when about 70,000 people crossed into the territory from neighbouring Morocco in the space of 48 hours. Last, but by no means least, Sánchez’s administration, party and inner circle have been mired in corruption allegations over the past two years, which have proved acutely embarrassing for a prime minister who took office vowing to be a scourge of sleaze and graft. Faced with all that, it’s not hard to see why the prime minister may have decided that an early election was preferable to several more months of legislative deadlock, mud-slinging and uncomfortable headlines. What happens now? Sánchez, a politician with an almost feline allocation of lives, will be hoping that his efforts to tackle the housing crisis will contrast sharply with those of his rightwing opponents and thereby mobilise disenchanted voters. He was also careful to remind people in his address on Monday that he has been one of the few political leaders to stand up to Donald Trump, to repeatedly criticise Israel over its actions in Gaza, and to warn of the death and destruction caused by the climate crisis. Perhaps unsurprisingly given what’s at stake, the prime minister is once again pushing to characterise this latest election as a simple choice between progressive and reactionary politics. “You, the men and women of Spain, must decide whether you want to join the far-right wave that drives regression wherever it governs, or to ensure that Spain remains a bastion of openness, social justice, and environmental responsibility,” he said on Monday morning. Sánchez’s opponents, meanwhile, will be hoping that, after eight long years, the public has grown tired and disillusioned, and that the great survivor of Spanish politics has finally lost his lustre.

Lab worker ‘possibly’ dies of plague in Siberia, prompting quarantine measures

Several hospitals in Siberia have been placed under quarantine after the death of a woman who worked at an anti-plague institute. Darya Shipilova, an employee at an institute in the eastern city of Irkutsk, died on the night of 2 October at a regional hospital in the nearby town of Shelekhov two days after falling ill. It remains unclear how she became unwell. Unconfirmed reports circulating in Russian media have suggested Shipilova, who was in her late twenties, may have been infected at work after an accident at the laboratory. Officials have not publicly confirmed that account. The uncertainty has been compounded by conflicting messages from politicians. Alexey Tsydenov, the head of the Buryatia region, which neighbours Irkutsk, initially wrote that she had died of plague, before editing his post to say she had “possibly” died of the disease. Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s health watchdog, said Shipilova died from “pneumonia of unknown aetiology”. It insisted that tests found no micro-organisms linked to her professional work and described the “sanitary and epidemiological” situation in the area as stable. Authorities in the nearby city of Baikalsk briefly urged residents to avoid travelling to Shelekhov and surrounding settlements after what they described as unofficial information about a possible plague infection. They later deleted the post from social media. “There are no obvious changes to daily life on the streets, but people are worried and anxious. Locals are angry that they are not being told anything,” said Elena Trifonova, a journalist with People of Baikal, an exiled Russian media outlet specialising on Siberia. Despite the lack of a confirmed diagnosis, a series of precautionary measures appear to have been introduced across the region. The US-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported on Monday that several hospitals in Irkutsk had been placed under quarantine. The outlet said staff at the Irkutsk Anti-plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East had reportedly been isolated inside the institute since 2 October. Patients at Irkutsk city clinical hospital No 1 and the Ivano-Matreninskaya children’s hospital said relatives were not being allowed to visit and people inside were not permitted to leave. Only the delivery of food and personal items is allowed. Local media also reported quarantine measures at hospitals No 3 and No 10 and at least one maternity hospital. The restrictions have reportedly been imposed for three weeks. Elsewhere in the region, a mask requirement was introduced at the Irkutsk aluminium smelter in Shelekhov. The plant’s director, Artyom Fominykh, called it a preventive measure, saying: “Better safe than sorry.” Over the weekend several public events in Irkutsk were cancelled. The incident also prompted intervention from senior federal health officials. Anna Popova, the head of Rospotrebnadzor and the country’s chief sanitary doctor, travelled to Irkutsk last Friday. She attended an emergency meeting of the regional sanitary and anti-epidemic commission convened over what officials called a suspected case of a “particularly dangerous infection”. Igor Kobzev, the governor of the Irkutsk region, urged residents to remain calm after meeting Popova to coordinate the response. “All identified contacts have been placed under medical observation. As of today, none is showing signs of illness and laboratory tests have returned negative results,” he wrote on Telegram. Kobzev made no reference to reports that a laboratory worker had died. Several US representatives have called for sweeping bans on flights from Russia. “We are aware of reports of a fatal case of suspected pneumonic plague in Irkutsk oblast, Russia,” the US Department of State told Radio Free Europe, adding that it was closely monitoring the situation together with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US health agency. It urged the Russian authorities to “share accurate information quickly and openly”, while noting that plague was treatable with commonly available antibiotics, particularly when treatment began early. Plague remains endemic in parts of Siberia and the Russian far east, where the bacterium persists naturally among wild rodents and their fleas. But human cases in Russia are rare. Before the suspected Irkutsk case, the country’s last recorded human infection was in 2016, when a 10-year-old boy in Siberia’s Altai Republic contracted plague after helping butcher a marmot.

Quebec poised to elect separatists to power for first time more than decade

Voters in Quebec are going to the polls in provincial elections which will probably result in victory for a party that has promised to hold a referendum on independence from Canada within the next two years. If polls are correct, the Parti Québécois (PQ) will form the government of the province of roughly nine million, the first time that the separatist movement will have gained power in the French-speaking region for more than a decade. A PQ victory in Monday’s election would also be likely to trigger a return to pitched battles over questions of language and identity between Quebec and the federal government. Long considered a declining force in Quebec politics, the PQ owes its resurgence to party leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon. The 49-year-old Oxford-educated lawyer and polyglot has positioned himself as a TikToking gen-X rebuttal to François Legault, Quebec’s long-serving Premier until he resigned early this year. Analysts say that St-Pierre Plamondon’s electoral success is not because he is a separatist – the majority of voters do not support an independent Quebec – but because of his rightwing take on red-meat identity issues. He has blamed immigrants for Quebec’s overflowing schools, increased crime and skyrocketing housing prices, while promising to slash immigration levels and ban “conspicuous” religious symbols from the bodies of teachers and their students. He has derided his critics from the leftist Quebec Solidaire party as “woke”, and has taken to repeating the talking points of hard-right columnists. Many in the province agree with St-Pierre Plamondon’s rhetoric, even though it strays from PQ’s social democratic roots, according to radio host Patrick Lagacé. “Most Quebecers traditionally see themselves as being on the left. Increasingly, though, they are on the right when it comes to social issues like systemic racism and accommodation of religious behaviour. They’ve hardened on these issues, and don’t see themselves in the left’s recent fixation on identity issues,” Lagacé said. The biggest drag on St-Pierre Plamondon’s popularity has been his oft-repeated promise to hold a referendum during the first mandate of a PQ government. An overwhelming majority of Quebecers don’t want such a thing any time soon – particularly with Canada locked in a trade war with the US. The province mostly voted for Liberal leader Mark Carney over the separatist Bloc Québécois in last year’s federal election, expressly because of Carney’s “elbows up” posturing against the Trump administration. But for the PQ, Donald Trump was at first a curse, then a gift. Early in the campaign, St-Pierre Plamondon said he wouldn’t hold a referendum as long as Trump was in power, defusing the issue and allowing St-Pierre Plamondon to concentrate on attacking immigration and immigrants. The party has also benefited from a four-way race for the right-leaning nationalist vote beyond the reliably Liberal fiefdom of Montreal – particularly around Quebec city, where the upstart Parti Conservateur du Québec has made significant inroads. “The Parti Québécois is benefiting from a massive vote split because those who don’t like the PQ don’t agree on who to vote for,” said poll analyst Philippe Fournier. Though the PQ will probably form the next provincial government, it remains unclear what sort of mandate it will have. Polls have the party hovering at roughly 30%, somewhat below the likely threshold for a majority government. In any case, St-Pierre Plamondon is laying the groundwork for confrontation with the federal government. He has mused about defunding the office of Quebec’s lieutenant-governor (the British Crown’s representative in the province) and promised to introduce a law to abolish the province’s ties with the monarchy, which separatists see as the ultimate symbol of oppression of Canada’s French minority. St-Pierre Plamondon also tore into Carney, after the prime minister said the government will probably increase immigration rates in the country. Doing so, St-Pierre Plamondon said, was an “abuse of power” that would have further nefarious effects on French-language services in Quebec. For a man who trades on his relative youthfulness, St-Pierre Plamondon’s attacks on the monarchy have the whiff of anachronism – the kind of thing the PQ did in its 1970-era heyday. Attacking the federal government is similarly outdated, and potentially risky for St-Pierre Plamondon. Carney remains popular in Quebec, and is likely to remain so, at least until the existential threat of Trump recedes.

Alleged flydubai attacker left Australia without finishing engineering course, university says

An Australian university has confirmed a flydubai co-pilot who allegedly tried to hijack an Israel-bound flight studied at its Melbourne campus, but left before completing his qualification. Disaster was narrowly averted on 30 September when passengers and crew intervened to stop the alleged attempt of the co-pilot, identified by media outlets as Hammam al-Hammami, to take control of a flight to Tel Aviv with 182 people onboard. The United ⁠Arab Emirates’ prosecutor general said the co-pilot allegedly used a crash axe in the attempted “terrorist attack”, in which the pilot was stabbed mid-air. Numerous media outlets have named the co-pilot al-Hammami, an Omani national. On Monday, the RMIT university in Melbourne said in a statement that it “is aware of media reporting of a former student alleged to be involved in the Flydubai flight incident”. “The individual was enrolled at RMIT but did not successfully complete an engineering qualification,” the university “As this is an ongoing investigation, the University is unable to provide further comment.” Former RMIT engineering students contacted by Guardian Australia said they did not remember al-Hammami. RMIT university’s confirmation came after the Australian federal police (AFP) on Sunday said agencies were investigating the man’s time in the country. A source familiar with the case, but not authorised to speak publicly, has said the man was granted an Australian student visa in 2014, before arriving in the country to commence a university course the next year. He left Australia in 2017, and his visa was cancelled in 2019 after authorities confirmed he was no longer enrolled in the course, the source said. The AFP on Sunday said multiple agencies – including the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) – were probing the man’s connections to the country. “The Victorian Joint Counter Terrorism Team (VIC JCTT), comprising the AFP, Victoria Police and ASIO, can confirm it is investigating the man’s links to Australia,” an AFP spokesperson said. “An update will be provided at an appropriate time.” Court records and previous media reporting show that a number of Australians charged with terror offences or suspected of Islamic extremism studied at RMIT around the same time as al-Hammami, but there was no indication he knew any of these individuals. A British university, Buckinghamshire New University, has confirmed a student named Hamam al-Hammami had “previously completed a distance-learning course in aviation management”. It added: “He did not undertake any pilot training at the university.” A flydubai spokesperson on Saturday said the circumstances surrounding the incident were still ‌under investigation and the airline was not in a position to comment further. The airline’s flights between Dubai and Tel Aviv were suspended after the attack. The Omani co-pilot and the flight’s Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, were taken to the UAE, as it leads the investigation. Officials have said a number of countries including Israel are participating. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the co-pilot had been barred from flying by Oman over concerns he had adopted extremist views. He was then moved to an administrative job at Oman Air, according to the official, before being hired by the UAE-based budget airline flydubai.

Monday briefing: You asked, we answered – how will the US midterms go?

Good morning. Later today, Donald Trump will be in the state of Nebraska to rev up supporters as he kicks off a campaign blitz of rallies ahead of the midterm elections on 3 November. If his early speeches are anything to go by, cornhuskers can anticipate poll denial, accusations of veganism and an expletive ratio that my nine-year-old would love. And Nebraskans may love it, too: aside from one “blue dot” district in Omaha, Republicans argue their support is steady in the state that has easily backed Trump three times. This campaign is set against the president’s plummeting approval ratings, the unravelling of his Maga movement and an affordability crisis escalated by his unpopular war on Iran. But Trump supporters are also among the most motivated to vote, and Republicans have far deeper coffers to mobilise their base. I asked First Edition readers what you really want to know about the US midterms. Today, in a happy exercise in newsletter cross-pollination, I put your questions to our Washington editor Ankita Rao, who runs our US elections newsletter The Stakes. First, the headlines. Weekend roundup UK politics | The Greens in England and Wales have formally adopted a policy that equates Zionism with racism and calls for Israel to be replaced by a single Palestinian state. Schools | Lawyers and campaigners have condemned the “horrifying” scale of child-on-child sexual abuse in schools after a Guardian investigation revealed thousands of sexual offences against under-13s are reported to police each year. Brazil | Brazil’s presidential race will go to a second round after the far-right candidate, Flávio Bolsonaro, beat the incumbent leftwing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, but failed to secure the outright majority he needed to avoid a runoff. Environment | A study of Europe’s summer paints a grim picture for the future, with doctors and climate scientists calling on governments to stop burning fossil fuels, shade buildings, green cities, and install air conditioning in hospitals, schools and care homes. US military | The US Air Force has pulled its bombers from RAF Fairford following an investigation into an alleged planned terror attack at the base. In depth: ‘We are prepared for anything’ You’d be forgiven, readers, if the state of US politics is perplexing you. On the one hand, there are voters who have little faith in the president’s war in the Middle East and are increasingly angry about his inability to make daily life more affordable at home. On the other, Trump has promised a “big surprise” come 3 November – and polls have predicted the wrong results for previous elections. As Ankita Rao set out in The Stakes in September, her team of reporters across the US are hearing the same things in almost every community they’ve spent time in: • Americans feel their lives are dictated by an elite class that goes beyond political parties – best summed up by Democratic senator Jon Ossoff’s use of the term “Epstein class”. • People are exhausted by an ongoing crisis in affordability of childcare, healthcare, food and gas. • Many have lost trust in institutions, from hospitals to schools. With this deep knowledge of the mood of the country, she is the woman to answer your questions. Over to you. *** Who still believes in Donald Trump? Johanne, Quebec, Canada Ankita’s short answer is that it might be the other way around: a lot of Americans don’t feel they’ve been presented with a better option yet. This was evident during primary season, when both Democrats and Republicans went for candidates “who they felt would actually stick it to the man”, says Ankita, rather than regurgitating established party platforms. After all, that was what so many hoped to get with Trump – but those voters who had flocked to him as the anti-establishment leader, or the man who represented something beyond the two-party system, now see him aligning himself with big tech and other corporate interests, particularly this last term in office. There’s a serious disconnect between Trump and his supporters, Ankita tells me. His previously impressive political instincts have faltered “partly because he can’t see beyond his own fixations” – be that his ballroom, the war in Iran, or the unfettered growth of AI. As one Ohio voter told us at the weekend: “I’m sorry, but I don’t give a shit whose name is on the Kennedy Center.” *** Has Trump got a decisive ‘dirty trick’ up his sleeve? Bron Purkiss, England A big concern for First Edition readers is election interference: how Trump has already restricted voting and what dirty tricks he might still try. Will he try to ignore the election results – and how would the Guardian report that? Ankita joined Guardian US seven years ago as voting rights editor, launching our multiyear democracy project. “We had four reporters on that, but now they’re part of the larger politics team, and election integrity has become essential to our coverage,” she says. In the months leading up to the midterms, Trump signed executive orders seeking to assert more control over voting methods, and in a Time magazine interview last week, he refused to rule out declaring a national emergency around elections to implement them. “So we are prepared for anything,” says Ankita. Legal challenges in individual races are “almost inevitable”, she says. “We know the states where the election systems are fully controlled by Republicans, and we’re ready to move everybody there if we see anything strange happening”. Fear of election rigging is high in the communities Guardian reporters are visiting. “We hear this a lot from Democrats who are worried about making sure their vote counts, and more nervous about using mail-in ballots.” This September edition of The Stakes covers Trump’s attempts to restrict postal voting – which is how almost one-third of Americans vote. Ankita suggests this could result in higher turnout. Early data in the deeply red state of Florida, for example, showed voter registration among Democrats already very high. “There’s a sense that ‘we need to go out in droves and make sure that all of these wins are very decisive, so that nobody can question them’.” *** Would Republican losses limit Trump’s excesses? Peter Alexander, England Ankita tells me she doesn’t make predictions any more – a lot can change in a few short weeks – but if an election was called tomorrow “it looks as if the Democrats will absolutely win the House and most likely win the Senate”. The mechanics of voting mean that it will take a decisive majority in both chambers to act as a genuine bulwark against Trump, says Ankita, before adding the weighty caveat that Trump sidestepped congressional authorisation altogether ahead of the Iran war. Nonetheless, she anticipates a slew of investigations after the midterms, launched in the House and then requiring the Senate to move them forward. For example, there are already calls for an investigation into revelations that a Russian oligarch bankrolled part of Donald Trump Jr’s recent wedding in the Bahamas. *** How will democratic socialists influence policy decisions after the midterms? Feride Hekimgil, Turkey This is a “huge question”, Ankita agrees, as progressive candidates capture the enthusiasm of voters desperate for radical change. While the number of Democratic Socialists actually elected is likely to only be a handful, it could become a “very vocal group”. What’s not clear yet is how they will act once in the Congress. Ankita points to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the country’s most prominent democratic socialists: “She was very clear about her affiliation when she ran, but she hasn’t been that type of lawmaker where she exists to stop the party from doing certain things. She has been much more strategic and collaborative with establishment Democrats.” It remains to be seen whether an augmented group after 3 November takes a similar route or choses a more hardline stance, in particular on Israel’s decimation of Gaza, which has already created gaping divisions in the Democratic party. *** One more thing In an early edition of The Stakes, Ankita described her morning bike ride to the Guardian’s Washington office, navigating National Guard trucks and reflecting on the militarisation of her city since the last election. I wanted to ask her, as a citizen as well as a journalist, how that influences the way she approaches this election. It can’t be overstated, she tells me, how it changes your day-to-day life: “It adds a layer of subtle fear. I’m not actively scared about walking around DC, but it feels as if things could escalate really quickly.” Will it hold people back from voting, or at least displaying their preferences? Quite the opposite, she tells me. “Places where we see this military presence – in Minneapolis, or LA, or DC – are such vocal, largely Democratic cities that people are undeterred.” “There are double the number of lawn signs,” she says. “It’s defiant.” • For more from Ankita and the Guardian US politics in the run-up to the midterms, sign up to The Stakes 2026 here The week to come Tuesday | ABC News is suing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over its licence review, and on Thursday its hearing will take place. The broadcaster claims the review, ordered by Donald Trump in April over comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s comments about the US president, is a “retaliatory campaign” in violation of its first amendment rights. Wednesday | Kemi Badenoch is to speak at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham. This day also marks the third anniversary of the 7 October attacks by Hamas. In London, the Met are asking organisers of a pro-Palestinian student march to move the event. Thursday | Holborn and St Pancras will hold its byelection. The seat belongs to former prime minister and Labour party leader Keir Starmer, who held it from 2015 until his resignation in September. What else we’ve been enjoying Helena Horton’s sweeping interview with the Royal Horticultural Society boss Clare Matterson is an absorbing conversation about everything from her high hopes for Andy Burnham, the roles of gardens in public health and the RHS’s £2.3m roadworks compensation. “Who is gardening for in the 21st century?” Matterson asks. “Is it for a small elite band of people, or is it for everybody?” Craille Maguire Gillies, newsletters team If you didn’t catch it yesterday, our interview with the actor John Boyega, recounting the impact of seeing his close friend Damilola Taylor die when he was a child, is deeply moving. Poppy Noor, newsletters team Who doesn’t love images of funny animals? This photo gallery of laughing bears, a sexy mantis and a truly angry bird is worth a look and chuckle. Craille Sport Football | Manchester City came from behind on two occasions to beat Arsenal 4-2 ⁠in the Women’s Super League on Sunday, keeping the champions top of the table. Racing | Formula One drivers have issued a damning condemnation of the sport’s engine regulations that caused the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia to open with scenes of cars stopping on track and unable to accelerate because of software problems. Max Verstappen got his first win of the season at the chaotic race. Football | The Republic of Ireland’s manager Heimir Hallgrímsson has called on Uefa to keep his side away from Israel in future draws after a pair of fixtures he admitted “has been tough on us all”. The front pages The Guardian leads with “Horryfying scale of child-on-child sexual abuse in schools revealed”. The Times splashes with “Badenoch to pledge a bonfire of green laws” and the Mail has “Kemi’s common sense blueprint”. The Mirror, on Badenoch’s pledges to cut benefits, goes with “Bad to the future”. The Telegraph has “Andrew takes police to court over arrest” and The Financial Times says “Hopes for record year in dealmaking punctured by interest rate increases”. The i Paper runs with “Man City owners’ link to Burnham’s No 10 North site after ‘sweetheart deal’ with UAE firm”. And the Sun leads with a story on the romance between Mark Chapman and Kelly Cates, headlined “Love match of the day”. Today in Focus Colonialism for clicks? The influencers targeting uncontacted tribes Features writer Elle Hunt and Indigenous activist María José Andrade Cerda on the growing phenomenon of influencers around the world trying to reach uncontacted tribes. Cartoon of the day | Tom Gauld The Upside A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad Five years ago, Barbara Scully sat in her car crying. Trying to find work after taking time to raise her children, she found herself facing closed doors. “I presume it was the fact that I was 50 and had a 10-year gap where my career used to live [while she was raising children],” she says. “I sat in the car on the driveway in tears, thinking: that’s it, I’m washed up, I’m done.” Then something changed. “Once I pulled myself together, I thought: OK, if this were one of my kids, what would I tell them? … Look at what it is you enjoy doing and try to make that work for you.” Scully relaunched her career for the sixth time, as a broadcaster and comedian, and feels happier than ever. “I am on a mission to try to tell women in particular not to fear getting older; to embrace it, to push back against all the bullshit about how you should be fighting ageing,” she says. Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday Bored at work? And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow. Quick crossword Cryptic crossword Wordiply