Emmanuel Macron held an emergency cabinet meeting this morning after violent protests swept France over the weekend. Police detained almost 2,400 people, while buildings were set alight and shops ransacked in several cities. In a national address yesterday, the French president blamed the “unprecedented” wave of violence on “ultra-left” rebels seeking to overthrow the state. The UK government has announced a crackdown on “headphone dodgers” on public transport. Councils will be able to hand out £100 fines to bus passengers playing music out loud, while train companies are already allowed to give £1,000 penalties. The announcement, says Politico, is part of a series of “everyday fixes” being unveiled this week to appease voters ahead of the budget. An object suspected to be the crashed plane of pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart has turned out to be a clump of washed-up trees. A US expedition spent four days inspecting the waters of the remote Pacific atoll of Nikumaroro to investigate a “visual anomaly” in satellite images, but concluded it was merely fallen foliage.

European commentators have been foaming at the mouth over Donald Trump’s “betrayal” of Ukraine, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times, pumping $100m into Vladimir Putin’s war machine by buying diesel. It’s a bit rich. If Europe wants Ukraine to win, why has it spent €8bn on Russian liquefied natural gas this year alone? And why did British ministers announce a ban on fuel refined from Russian crude last year, only to drop it the moment it became mildly expensive? Why, over the course of the war, has Europe spent more on Russian fossil fuels (€231bn) than it has given (€200.7bn) in total aid to Ukraine?

As much as Western leaders love welcoming Volodymyr Zelensky with fine words – “we’re standing foursquare behind Ukraine”; “we’ll do everything it takes to win” – while slapping his back and kissing him in front of the cameras, they have consistently failed to give him the weapons he needs to defeat Putin. But the risk of escalation is “infinitely higher” if the bully senses weakness. “Why do you think the grey war in Europe is escalating?” An astonishing reminder of Europe’s backwards thinking came last week in a Hamburg courtroom, where a Ukrainian accused of blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipeline connecting Russia and Germany (which “should never have been built”) was informed that he faced a charge of “war crimes”, as though his audacious patriotism was akin to the mass rape of women, the kidnapping of children and the mutilation of prisoners practised by Russia’s monstrous soldiers. It’s grotesque. Europe has used Ukrainians as human shields while expanding its welfare states. Which is why, as Trump sells Ukraine down the river, and Europe talks of “betrayal”, only one word is appropriate. “Hypocrisy.”

Something fishy is happening on Britain’s electricity grid, says Juliet Samuel in The Times. In the past fortnight there have been a number of “highly unusual” events in the National Energy System Operator (NESO) control room. Twice their forecasts wrongly showed that we were going to run out of power, so they put out a call for additional same-day generation. On two other occasions, “for no obvious reason”, the grid suddenly ran so low on power that we had to request emergency assistance from France. NESO insists these incidents are “routine”, but insiders are worried. We need to find out “what the hell is going on”.

Ruly is a daily logic puzzle where “you set the rules”. Players are presented with a grid of numbers and must assign a very specific rule to each square. Starts reasonably easy, becomes pleasingly complicated. Try for yourself here.

Even for a country “hardened by street insurrection”, says The Economist, the riots that rocked France over the weekend were shocking. The 19th-century town hall in Limoges was set alight. Masked casseurs, or hooligans, broke into Marseille town hall and toppled a bust of Marianne, the country’s official symbol. In Bordeaux hooded teens smashed the glass windows at Louis Vuitton and other upmarket shops, grabbing handbags and other loot. “One youngster swung his stolen merchandise inside a plastic shopping basket as if strolling back from the supermarket.”

While some of this was opportunistic, the perpetrators who turned up “fully hooded, wearing ski goggles and face masks”, were clearly out to cause as much chaos as possible. The government blames the populist-left party La France Insoumise, whose leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, joined a non-violent demo in Paris on Saturday. Whoever’s responsible, it’ll be the centrists who’ll suffer in next year’s all-important presidential election. Mélenchon’s supporters will look at the more peaceful protests – against everything from overcrowded classrooms in schools to high petrol prices – and see a “muscular show of strength” for their man. Backers of the populist-right’s Marine Le Pen will see the unrest as evidence that Mélenchon is unfit for office. With the centre struggling to find a compelling candidate to replace Emmanuel Macron, polls suggest we’re heading for a run-off between Mélenchon and Le Pen – which Le Pen would be “almost certain to win”. That would probably prompt another round of protests on the left. And whereas Macron calmed down the gilets jaunes protests by writing checks, France’s increasingly dire public finances mean that won’t be an option this time. The “apocalyptic scenes” we saw across the country on Saturday may just be the start.

🇬🇧🇫🇷 We Brits have always prided ourselves on our “calm objectivity” in contrast to our hot-headed Gallic neighbours, says Andrew Roberts in The Telegraph. There was hardly any rioting on British streets between Millwall fans fighting in 2002 and the anti-G20 demonstrations in 2009, for example. Yet in the past six years we’ve seen violent disorder at the 2020 Black Lives Matter protest in Whitehall, anti-Israel marches every Saturday since 2023, the Southport riots of 2024, and Palestine Action sympathisers attacking military sites, banks and think tanks. Today we see masked and hooded men marching through Southampton and Dover. Whisper it, but we’re becoming “revoltingly French”.

Katie Zacharia’s hapless five-day tenure as White House press secretary could mark a “troubling turning point” for Donald Trump, says Andrew Feinberg in The Independent. The US president gave her the job without consulting his chief of staff, Susie Wiles – Zacharia reportedly caught his eye by working out when he would be watching TV and then timing her appearances on Fox News accordingly. Now there are rumours Trump will get rid of Wiles, despite her success in keeping the White House free of the leaks and internal feuds that characterised his first term. If she goes, or Trump makes a habit of going over her head, prepare for more dysfunction.

Here’s an odd thought, says Matthew Green in Cryptography Engineering: AI might make the world’s software “too secure”. The current hodgepodge of cybersecurity is riddled with bugs and vulnerabilities that humans don’t have the capacity to fix, which is one of the main ways the world’s law enforcement agencies figure out what the bad guys are up to. If tireless AI finds all those bugs and fixes them, a huge portion of police capability will simply “go dark”.

It’s a black lab from the Scottish Highlands who has just been named “animal of the year” by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, says Maddy Ando in Country Living. Six-year-old Sgiath, who works for her owner, marine ecologist Texa Sim, has been trained to sniff out an invasive species known as the carpet sea squirt – or, less delicately, “sea vomit” – which can smother and kill native marine life, but is tricky to spot among the normal seaweed. Working at low tide, Sgiath – thought to be “the UK’s first sea squirt-detection dog” – has already located hundreds of colonies.