On Saturday, roughly 550,000 people marched through French cities to protest a government budget proposal that would cut school support staff and index social benefits below the current inflation rate of 3.1 percent. The Interior Ministry counted nearly 1,800 arrests. More than 500 police officers, gendarmes, and firefighters were injured. A protester in Saint-Etienne lost a hand. One person died of a heart attack in Paris; the circumstances are under investigation. In Limoges, a 140-year-old town hall was set on fire Saturday night and burned until early Sunday morning. (Al Jazeera reported Saturday on the full scale of the protests, including the Limoges fire and the government’s arrest figures.)

The demonstrations began with student groups and broadened through the day to include unions, pension advocates, and workers whose argument is that inflation is eroding household income faster than any official benefit adjustment recognizes. Organizers said turnout reached 800,000 nationally; the government’s count was 550,000. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said Sunday that he would meet with union representatives this week. He didn’t announce any changes to the budget proposal.

In the spring of 2023, President Emmanuel Macron raised the French retirement age from 62 to 64 using a constitutional provision, Article 49.3, that allowed the government to pass the bill without a parliamentary vote. Protests spread across France for months. Sanitation, transit, and refinery workers went on strike. The Constitutional Council upheld the reform, but its age-increase provision was suspended in late 2025 until after the 2027 presidential election. The 2023 protests didn’t stop the legislation. What they did establish was that French workers will take to the streets in very large numbers when they believe the government is making budget decisions over their objections. Whether Lecornu’s promised meetings this week produce any concrete change to the budget will determine whether Saturday was an endpoint or the first day of something longer.

This is day 234 of the war with Iran. On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi repeated the ceasefire offer his government first made in September, telling reporters the Strait of Hormuz could reopen within days. “If they comply with our conditions,” Araghchi said, “the Strait of Hormuz will reopen on the sixth day, and negotiations will begin on the seventh day.” The conditions include lifting the United States naval blockade on Iranian ports, removing oil sanctions, and releasing approximately twelve billion dollars in frozen Iranian assets. The Trump administration hasn’t accepted the offer. (NewsNation reported Sunday on Araghchi’s statement and the terms of the offer.)

The supertanker this column reported Saturday, carrying roughly two million barrels of crude, continues to burn after striking naval mines in the southern strait. A container ship hit by an Iranian projectile sank while under tow. The United States Central Command says commercial transit through the waterway continues; the volume data suggests something more complicated. Transits through the strait, which on a normal day carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, are running far below pre-conflict levels. Oil closed Friday at around $110 a barrel.

In 1987, the Reagan administration launched Operation Earnest Will, under which the United States reflagged eleven Kuwaiti oil tankers and escorted them through the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran-Iraq War. The operation lasted fourteen months and involved direct military engagements between American and Iranian forces. The strait stayed open because the commitment was sustained and the objective was narrow: protect the ships while they moved. The current conflict is broader, the objectives on all sides harder to define, and a seven-day ceasefire is a different arrangement than an ongoing escort mission. What happens on day eight of any ceasefire is the question neither side has answered publicly.

Fifteen days before the November 3 midterm elections, three separate polling organizations released presidential approval figures Sunday that converged within three points of each other. NBC News found 34 percent. The Washington Post and ABC News found 33 percent. Fox News found 36 percent. The NBC survey showed 71 percent of American adults saying the country is on the wrong track, and Democrats leading Republicans 55 to 45 on congressional preference among registered voters. Twenty-seven percent of respondents said they approved of the president’s handling of the cost of living. (NBC News published the full polling results Sunday.)

Axios reported Sunday that more than a dozen Republican candidates have removed the president’s name, image, or formal endorsement from their campaign websites in the past two weeks. The president begins a campaign swing today with a rally in Kansas.

In November 2010, the Democratic Party lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives. President Obama’s approval rating was in the low forties at the time. The party in the White House loses seats in midterms in almost every modern election; the magnitude of those losses has historically tracked with how the sitting president is polling. What 2026 produces will depend on turnout, district maps, candidate quality, and whatever the next two weeks put on the front pages. The polls are where they are. They’re consistent across three methodologies. That’s as much as polling can tell you.

Early voting opened in Texas today and runs through October 30, with Election Day on November 3. The United States Senate race between Democratic state Representative James Talarico of Round Rock and Attorney General Ken Paxton is competitive by recent polling. A UT Texas Politics Project survey of 861 likely voters conducted September 25 to October 5 found Talarico at 50 percent and Paxton at 47 percent, within the poll’s 3.34-point margin. A Marist survey of registered voters in September showed 50 to 44. (CBS Austin reported Sunday on the significance of early voting in both the Senate and governor’s races and what the polling shows.)

Texas last sent a Democrat to the United States Senate in 1988. That Democrat was Lloyd Bentsen, who was simultaneously the Democratic vice presidential nominee on the Dukakis ticket. Texas law allowed him to appear on both ballots. He won his Senate seat and lost the national ticket in the same election. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke came within 2.6 percentage points of Ted Cruz, the closest a Democrat had come in three decades. The current polls put Talarico ahead by margins ranging from three to six points, though likely voter models and actual turnout have a way of diverging. What the early vote patterns show over the next eleven days will be the first real signal.

Noah Adams, who co-hosted All Things Considered on NPR from 1982 to 1987 and again from 1989 to 2002, died Friday at his home in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He was 84. His wife, Neenah Ellis, confirmed his death. He came to NPR in the mid-1970s after working construction and selling cars in Kentucky, where he grew up. He spent eighteen years in one of the more demanding chairs in American broadcasting: a live nightly news program, heard coast to coast, for a public radio network that was still working out what it was going to be. He covered Cold War negotiations, two Gulf Wars, the AIDS epidemic, and September 11, and he did all of it in a voice that was unhurried. (NPR published an obituary Sunday, with tributes from colleagues and a full account of his career.)

NPR broadcast its first program on May 3, 1971. The founding documents described the network’s goal in plain terms: to treat listeners as complete human beings. Adams spent nearly two decades trying to do exactly that. He died at home, at 84, in a town he’d chosen, beside his wife. He did the work for a long time. Then he went home.

Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.