The French government declared overnight curfews in Paris, Bordeaux, and Nice on Monday after Interior Minister Laurent Nunez told reporters that police had “lost control” of protests in several cities over the weekend. In Paris, the curfew covers Place de la République and the blocks around Les Halles, running from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Demonstrations in several Paris neighborhoods were banned from 8 p.m. Monday through 6 a.m. Tuesday. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who announced Sunday that he would meet with union representatives this week, hasn’t announced any changes to the budget proposal that put hundreds of thousands of people in the streets last Saturday. (France 24 reported Monday on the curfew orders, Nunez’s statement, and the nationwide scope of the government’s response.)
The protests have crossed into Italy. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni convened an emergency security meeting Monday to address cost-of-living demonstrations that turned violent in Milan and surrounding cities. Italy told its citizens in France to register their location on a government platform and avoid large crowds. The United Kingdom issued a separate travel advisory for France. (Foreign Policy reported Monday on the spread to Italy, Meloni’s emergency meeting, and the broader European response.)
Lecornu’s union meetings, if they happen this week, will be the first real test of whether the government intends to adjust the proposal or simply outlast the protests. In the spring of 2023, France went through months of demonstrations over pension reform. The protests were large, sustained, and widely covered. The government held the legislation. The pattern isn’t a guarantee of anything. It’s a precedent. What distinguishes this one from that one is how many countries are watching it happen inside their own borders at the same time.
Three ballistic missiles struck the al-Alam military training camp near Ataq in Yemen’s Shabwa province on Monday, killing at least 53 soldiers and injuring 200 others. Recruits were in the middle of a training exercise when the missiles hit. Yemen’s Houthi movement acknowledged the attack. The local authority in Shabwa said the toll was the largest single-day casualty figure for government forces since the Houthis resumed major military operations in July, when the conflict’s 2022 ceasefire broke down as part of the broader Iran war. (Al Jazeera reported Monday on the attack, the Houthi claim of responsibility, and the Shabwa casualty figures.)
The Yemen civil war began in 2014 and escalated sharply in 2015 when Saudi Arabia led a regional coalition against the Houthi movement. Before the 2022 ceasefire largely halted major combat, a United Nations estimate put the war’s total death toll at more than 377,000 people, most of them from indirect causes: disease, hunger, and a collapsed health system. The fighting that resumed this summer runs on a different engine. It’s connected to the Iran war rather than to Yemen’s domestic politics alone, and the outside parties are different ones. The number from Monday is 53. The history of wars like this one says it won’t be the last number.
Separately, drones struck the Amiet Common Market, about ten kilometers from Abyei town in the disputed border region between Sudan and South Sudan, on Monday, killing at least 73 people and injuring 19 others. The market was open when the attack hit. Abyei’s caretaker information minister, Yohana Akol Ngor, accused Sudan’s army of responsibility. Sudan’s government hasn’t commented. South Sudan’s foreign ministry summoned Sudan’s ambassador to Juba. (Radio Tamazuj reported Monday on the death toll, the minister’s accusation, and South Sudan’s diplomatic response.)
The Abyei region has been caught in legal and administrative limbo since South Sudan’s independence in 2011. Neither country holds formal sovereignty. A United Nations peacekeeping force, UNISFA, has operated there since 2011. A UN report from earlier this year documented 58 people killed and more than 20,000 civilians displaced in the area in the six months ending March 2026. An attack on a civilian market is a different category than the numbers in that report. Attribution, which hasn’t been officially settled, will determine what happens at the Security Council and whether this becomes a line in another six-month summary or something that gets a hearing before then.
Kim Yo-jong, a senior official of North Korea’s ruling party and the sister of leader Kim Jong-un, threatened Monday to resume loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts against South Korea and to deploy more tactical weapons near the Military Demarcation Line. “Our military leadership is considering increasing the deployment of tactical strike means near the entire southern border and resuming loudspeaker broadcasts against South Korea as preemptive and suppressive measures in preparation for any contingency,” Kim’s statement said, as carried by North Korean state media. She said South Korea had issued warning broadcasts 2,870 times and warning shots 201 times along the border between August 1 and October 17. (The Korea Times reported Tuesday on Kim’s statement, South Korea’s defense ministry response, and the context behind the border tensions.)
South Korea’s defense ministry called the threats a matter of “grave concern” and said its border actions were legitimate under the 1953 Korean Armistice Agreement. Seoul clarified that the warnings Kim cited weren’t the large-scale propaganda loudspeaker systems that face north, whose operation was suspended in June 2025. Those are different from the smaller speakers at guard posts. South Korea’s unification ministry on Tuesday urged the North to halt armistice violations and engage in dialogue. The loudspeaker systems on both sides of the Korean border have been used, suspended, and reactivated many times since the armistice. The current escalation traces to a landmine explosion in the demilitarized zone in September that injured three South Korean soldiers. That incident produced this threat. The threat will produce a response. The response will produce something else.
The Supreme Court declined Monday, without comment, to hear a challenge to the Trump administration’s January 2025 firing of Gwynne Wilcox, a Democratic-appointed member of the National Labor Relations Board. The Court’s action leaves in place a December 2025 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which found that Congress had violated the Constitution by limiting the president’s power to remove NLRB members without cause. (CNBC reported Monday on the Court’s decision, the legal background, and the board’s current status.)
Wilcox’s firing had eliminated the board’s quorum and halted processing of hundreds of labor cases for most of 2025. The board recovered a working majority in December when the Senate confirmed two Trump nominees. The Court’s action Monday applies the precedent it established in June, when it overruled Humphrey’s Executor v. United States outright in Trump v. Slaughter. Humphrey’s Executor was the 1935 case in which the Court held that Congress could protect independent agency heads from presidential removal without cause, preserving their independence from political pressure. The current Court ended that protection in June. Monday’s non-decision applies it further.
Fourteen days before the November 3 midterm elections, President Trump holds a campaign rally this afternoon in Greenville, North Carolina. Yesterday he held a rally in Wichita, Kansas, for Republican Senator Roger Marshall, who faces Democrat Adam Hamilton in a race Cook Political Report reclassified earlier this month as a toss-up. Multiple surveys show Marshall leading by margins inside or near the margin of error. Kansas hasn’t sent a Democrat to the United States Senate since the 1930s. The Republican National Committee is now spending significantly to protect the seat.
The Kansas race is one of several where the Senate majority is in play. Republicans hold 53 seats to Democrats’ 47. Democrats would need to flip four seats to take control, a difficult arithmetic in a map that favors incumbents. What happens over the next fourteen days, including what happens in states like Kansas where the map has shifted, will determine whether November 3 looks like a typical midterm or something else.
In Colorado, a study released by the state’s Department of Transportation last month found that a network of wildlife crossings built along Interstate 25 south of Denver has reduced wildlife-vehicle collisions on that stretch of highway by 91 percent. The system includes an overpass, five underpasses, and 14 miles of fencing along both sides of the road. The overpass came in at approximately $15 million, roughly half its original $30 million estimate. Cameras installed at the structures have recorded bears, elk, and pronghorn using them. Pronghorn, which migrate seasonally and won’t cross barriers they can’t see through, have been filmed crossing to the west side of the highway for the first time in decades. (Colorado Politics reported September 28 on the CDOT findings, the construction costs, and the camera footage of pronghorn making the crossing.)
The fencing ends somewhere. CDOT says most of the collisions that still happen occur at those endpoints. That part isn’t solved yet. What is solved is the gap in the middle: a gap in the highway, the animals on their seasonal routes, and 91 percent fewer of them dead on the road. The pronghorn don’t know what a budget overrun is. They just know the way is open.
Howard Fenn writes The Day, Monday through Saturday.
