The UK government has approved the development of a controversial new gas field in the North Sea. Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh says Jackdaw will go into production before Christmas, boosting Britain’s energy supplies this winter and helping to protect jobs and energy security over the long term. She says a decision on the similarly contentious Rosebank oilfield will be made “in due course”. Inflation and government borrowing have surged to their highest level so far this year, just a week before Chancellor John Healey’s first budget. The Office for National Statistics says inflation rose more than expected to 3.5% in September, up from 3.1% in August, while government borrowing hit £24.5bn in the month, £1.9bn higher than forecast. Losing weight in your fifties could make your heart just as healthy as if you had never put on the pounds in the first place, a new study suggests. Researchers from UCL found that overweight women and men who had lost at least 5% of their body weight in their fifties had a similar level of heart health as those who maintained a healthy weight all along.

The riots across France on 17 October may well come to symbolise the “final collapse of Macronism”, says Solenn de Royer in Le Monde. Elected on the promise of “horizontal governance” that would restore trust between leaders and citizens and improve social mobility, Emmanuel Macron has spent most of his presidency “out of step with the people”. After the Gilets Jaunes crisis, he listened to protesters’ grievances but did little about them. He promised referendums that never came, bypassed the unions, and lost his parliamentary majority by refusing to share power. Faced with a weekend marked by yet more street violence, he once again offered “nothing concrete” to quell the unrest, instead addressing the nation with a combination of incomprehension and powerlessness that carried a “funereal air”.

These riots are bigger than just one “supposedly reformist” president, says Bret Stephens in The New York Times. They are scenes from a country “unglued”. France’s youth unemployment is about 20%, almost three times the rate in Germany. Employers are discouraged from hiring by statutory social costs higher than anywhere else in Europe. The last time the World Bank published its “ease of doing business” rankings, in 2020, France came 32nd, just ahead of Turkey and Azerbaijan. A succession of prime ministers have tried to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, to bring it more in line with the EU average and address the “crushing fiscal burden” of the country’s bloated pension system. No dice. American liberals often used to tout France as a model of what life should be like in the US: universal health care, strong worker protections, lower economic growth but “lots of joie de vivre”. Not any more.

🇫🇷💪 The one clear winner from all this, ahead of next year’s pivotal presidential election, is far-right leader Marine Le Pen, says Paul Taylor in The Guardian. While France has a long revolutionary tradition, the present anarchy is the work not of earnest schoolchildren or “working-class warriors” but masked ultra-left nihilists and opportunistic looters. Le Pen, “looking presidential”, issued a stern message: millions of French people are furious about “anarchic immigration” and in six months they can vote for “restored authority and security”.