By Saturday night, the hôtel de ville of Limoges had lost its roof, most of its façade and its belfry. The 19th-century civic palace was inaugurated in 1883 and modeled on the Hôtel de Ville of Paris. Maurice Barate, the prefect of Haute-Vienne, told Agence France-Presse that the roof had fallen onto the lower floors everywhere except the west wing and that two-thirds of the façade “had already disappeared.” He called it a *catastrophe patrimoniale*, a heritage catastrophe, and “a deliberate act by vandals, not protesters.”

People were inside when the fire was set: elected officials, municipal police officers and city staff. Barate said no one was hurt. The mayor, Guillaume Guérin of the center-right Les Républicains, said municipal officers got out as the attackers came in, and that the attackers had told them they were going to kill them. “This isn’t stupidity, it’s hatred,” Guérin said. He listed hatred of the flag, of institutions, of school principals, of police and of elected officials. According to AFP, four national police cars and two municipal police cars were burned or badly damaged in the city.

Limoges produced the worst single image of the day. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu blamed the violence on the “ultra-left” and on criminals. But the violence was not the whole day.

Two counts of the same street

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said 110 marches drew about 550,000 people nationwide. The CGT union and student organizations put the number at 800,000, the Associated Press reported. Most of those people marched without incident. In Paris, the AP said, the main march moved toward the northwest of the city, with people singing the national anthem and some playing trumpets and violins.

In other places, order broke down. Paris police fired tear gas and water cannon at hooded, masked groups throwing fireworks and paving stones in the Place de la République. Rioters tried to force their way into the Galeries Lafayette department store, smashed banks and ransacked shops, i24NEWS reported. In Marseille, protesters forced their way into the lobby of City Hall. In Lyon, where about 20,000 people marched, a fire broke out inside the tourist office. Nuñez also reported attacks on local government buildings in Bordeaux and attempted break-ins at the city halls of Lille and Calais and at a police station in Brest.

Early in the evening, Nuñez said about 400 people had been arrested. By late Saturday, Lecornu put the number at about 1,200. He said more than 150 police officers were injured but did not say how many protesters were hurt.

The hand in Saint-Étienne

In Saint-Étienne, a young protester was badly injured and lost a hand. Authorities have opened an investigation. Nuñez declined to confirm French media reports that a police grenade caused the injury, the AP reported. According to i24NEWS, France’s police watchdog is looking into at least two dozen allegations of police violence. Earlier in this wave of protest, after a 15-year-old lost a hand, Nuñez suspended the use of one type of stun grenade against high-school demonstrators. That suspension did not apply to Saturday’s marches.

The detail matters because of who started this movement. It began in September with blockades of high schools, first in the working-class northern suburbs of Paris according to i24NEWS. The students were protesting teacher shortages, run-down buildings and crowded classrooms. The movement then grew to take in anger at gasoline, energy and food prices, which have jumped in recent months. Some marchers wore the fluorescent vests of the 2018 *gilets jaunes*. The CGT called for “higher wages and pensions, lower prices and the protection of public services that meet people’s needs.” Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a far-left presidential candidate who supported the students, marched in Paris.

The election in the smoke

France elects a new president next year, and everyone read Saturday with that in mind. “To those who clearly want to use this violence as a ‘warm-up’ before the presidential election, I say clearly: We will not let ourselves be intimidated,” Lecornu wrote on X. President Emmanuel Macron said that “those who vandalized property, attacked government offices and businesses, and even looted our town halls will be prosecuted and punished.”

Neither statement mentioned the prices that brought 550,000 people into the street, by the government’s own count. Those prices are not only a French problem. CNN reported that Brent crude touched $110 a barrel on Friday for the first time since May. Analysts quoted by The Moscow Times say the higher fuel costs are largely the result of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Washington’s answer this week was to buy Russian diesel and waive its own sanctions law (see World). Paris has not yet given one.

What to watch: whether the government treats the 550,000 marchers and the arsonists as one problem or two; whether the Saint-Étienne investigation identifies what caused the injury; and what Limoges does with a town hall that its own prefect calls largely lost.

President Donald Trump has waived the main penalties of the Russia sanctions law he signed in mid-September. Most of its provisions were due to take effect on Sunday. In an executive order released on Friday, Trump certified to Congress that the waiver was “in the national interests of the United States.” The order says the waiver stays in place until he or White House officials decide that “further action is appropriate.”

The law is the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, named for the South Carolina senator who pushed it until his death this summer. It would have imposed tariffs of up to 100% on the biggest importers of Russian oil or gas, a group that includes China and India. It would also have sanctioned Russia’s energy sector, its banks and the “shadow fleet” of tankers that moves its oil around existing restrictions. The Senate passed it 86–11.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio described the move differently on Saturday. He called it a 60-day pause to “analyse what imposing both sanctions and tariffs will mean to the global economy and even to the US economy.” The signed order gives no end date. Readers should keep both in mind: one is how the administration describes the waiver, the other is what the document says.

In Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the waiver a “reward” for Vladimir Putin. “Unfortunately, the lifting of sanctions will continue, and I believe that the ‘diesel deal’ is the first step,” he said. The diesel deal is Trump’s announcement last week that the United States would buy Russian diesel to bring down fuel prices. Zelenskyy said Russia had just hit more than 15 critical power-generation and transmission sites, one of its worst attacks yet on Ukraine’s grid.

In Moscow, Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s envoy for investment, called the suspension “an important and truly historic moment.”

In Washington, some of the sharpest objections came from Trump’s own party. “What part of enforcing a law passed 86-11 by the Senate does the President and his advisors not understand?” asked Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said: “Lindsey would be appalled.” Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, said that “by giving the Russian economy life support, Trump’s deal with the devil keeps getting dirtier.”

Outrage is not a vote, though. The Associated Press reported that the House and Senate are on recess until after the Nov. 3 election. The law also lets the president waive its penalties simply by telling Congress they are not in the national interest. Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., introduced a bill on Friday to block the diesel deal. It cannot move until lawmakers come back.

Analysts quoted by The Moscow Times pointed to the politics: with the midterms weeks away, new penalties could have pushed oil prices higher. On Friday, Brent crude touched $110 a barrel.

According to The Washington Post, Heidi Levine was wearing markings that clearly identified her as a journalist when masked Israeli settlers caught her on Friday. She was retreating from an olive grove near the West Bank village of Abu Falah.

Levine is a veteran photojournalist and was on assignment for the Post. She said the Palestinian harvesters she was with started to pull back when they saw dozens of settlers running toward them. In a video statement, she said the attackers tore off her cameras, her bag and the cord holding her phone, and kept kicking her for what she estimated was 10 minutes. “I didn’t see anybody trying to stop it,” she said.

Jasper Nathaniel, a journalist who saw the attack, told CNN that he and Levine had watched settlers on a hilltop put on masks and pick up clubs before charging down at the harvesters. He said Israeli soldiers then arrived and fired tear gas at the Palestinians, and that settlers fired guns from the back of a pickup truck. He said five or six settlers surrounded Levine and beat her with clubs, and that young Palestinian men threw rocks to give him cover so he could reach her. Nathaniel said she had a broken rib, a broken vertebra and a severe finger injury that needs surgery. The Foreign Press Association said she was in stable condition at Ramallah Government Hospital.

CNN described video of the attack. It shows masked settlers, some carrying clubs, throwing stones at Palestinians, some of whom threw stones back. In the background, at least five settlers surround Levine and throw her to the ground.

The official responses followed one after another. Israel Police opened an investigation. The military said it would examine “all circumstances.” President Isaac Herzog called Levine after the Sabbath ended and apologized to her. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “unequivocally condemns violence against anyone” but also said “serious questions remain.” CNN noted that he did not criticize the attackers. Gadi Eisenkot, his main rival in the coming election, said acts like this “stain an entire nation.”

In Washington, Ambassador Mike Huckabee called the attack “a despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards” and called for arrests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the administration was “very disturbed by those images” and had asked Israel “to crack down on that stuff.” He was asked how that fits with Trump’s decision early in his current term to lift sanctions on Israeli settlers. Rubio said lifting the sanctions “does not mean he’s a supporter of what he’s seeing now.” Kuwait’s state news agency reported that Rubio expects an update from the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem by Sunday.

The Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that masked settlers attacked vehicles belonging to European diplomatic missions in Taybeh, east of Ramallah, on the same day. The Palestine Red Crescent said it was treating two people beaten by settlers in the area: a 63-year-old woman and a 40-year-old man.

Levine made her own prediction: “Sadly, none of them will be prosecuted. I am sure of it.” Every official quoted above has now said, in one way or another, that her attackers should face justice. This paper will report whether anyone is charged.

The No Kings network has spent nearly two years organizing demonstrations against President Donald Trump. On Saturday it asked for something different. The Associated Press reported that the hundreds of events held under the banner “No Kings: Vote Early” were billed as nonpartisan, with the goal of getting people to cast ballots before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

Where reporters counted, crowds were smaller and older than at the movement’s biggest marches. A few hundred people in caps and coats gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where a band played and signs read “VOTE EARLY” and “HANDS OFF MY VOTE!” In New Haven, Conn., organizers estimated that about 200 people came, out of 275 who had registered, CT Mirror reported. Maggie Marcarelli, one of the organizers, said many people treated it as a protest anyway: “Almost everyone here thinks it’s a rally and a march.” Volunteers at a voting table said attendees filled out about 40 postcards to people who rarely vote and took another 250 home. Several attendees noticed how few young people were there. “There’s not even anybody freaking my age or younger than me,” said a 41-year-old father from Hamden.

In Atlanta, City Councilman Michael Julian Bond told the crowd: “The Constitution gives you one power, right? That is the power to vote.”

The bigger election news of the week came from the government. On Thursday, the Trump administration sued California election officials. It asked a judge to stop the state from counting mail ballots from people the federal government has identified as “likely” noncitizens until their immigration status is confirmed. On Friday, according to the AP, the Justice Department warned that local officials who process and count ballots from suspected noncitizen voters put themselves at risk of criminal investigation and possible prosecution.

It is worth being clear about what the warning shows and what it doesn’t. It does not show that any meaningful number of noncitizens has voted. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that fraud cost him the 2020 election. What the warning does is put legal risk on the clerks and county workers whose job is to count the ballots that arrive.

On Friday, three Democratic senators, Alex Padilla of California, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Dick Durbin of Illinois, wrote to Attorney General Todd Blanche. They asked the department to commit to not seizing ballots or other election materials before the midterm results are certified.

The movement is betting on early voting. Over the next 16 days, the question is whether a warning aimed at ballot counters affects how fast, or how completely, those ballots get counted.

Jabil is a contract manufacturer based in St. Petersburg, Fla. It builds equipment that other companies sell under their own brands. Its fiscal year ended on Aug. 31, and its chief executive called the results exceptional. Some of them are. According to the company’s preliminary, unaudited release, revenue rose 21% to $36.0 billion. Net income attributable to Jabil shareholders rose to $1.042 billion from $657 million.

Then there is the other figure. Jabil reports “core” earnings, the measure it uses for its guidance, of $1.399 billion, or $13.09 per diluted share. Under U.S. accounting rules (GAAP), diluted earnings per share were $9.75. That leaves a gap of $357 million, and Jabil’s own reconciliation shows where it comes from. The main item is $365 million of adjustments to operating income. These cover stock-based compensation, amortization of acquired intangible assets, restructuring and severance, acquisition-related charges and other items. Small adjustments for benefit costs and taxes offset part of that.

Some of those items make sense to strip out when comparing one quarter with another. For an owner, stock-based compensation is not one of them. It is a real cost paid in shares. Restructuring charges show up often enough at big manufacturers that calling them non-core is a judgment, not a fact.

To be fair to the company, the adjustments got smaller this year: $365 million, down from $438 million in fiscal 2025. Fiscal 2025 also included a $97 million loss on selling the company’s operations in Italy. As a result, GAAP earnings per share grew faster than core earnings per share: up 65% from $5.92, compared with 34% for the core measure. That direction is healthy. The level still matters, though. Anyone valuing Jabil on $13.09 a share is paying for earnings about 34% larger than what the accounts record.

Two more things to note. First, diluted weighted-average shares fell to 106.9 million from 110.9 million, a drop of about 3.6%. Buying back shares raises per-share figures without the business itself doing any better. Second, the chief executive cited “more than $1.5 billion in adjusted free cash flow.” That is a non-GAAP measure the company defines itself, not a figure taken straight from the cash-flow statement.

The guidance for fiscal 2027 is $44.5 billion in revenue, up 24%; core earnings of $17.55 a share; and about $1.6 billion in adjusted free cash flow. These are forecasts.

Then there is India. Jabil and Adani Enterprises have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding for a proposed 50:50 joint venture. It would make AI racks, servers, storage and networking equipment in India, along with power distribution units, liquid-cooling systems and transformers. The release says the venture still depends on definitive agreements and on approvals. It says the venture is expected to have “multi-gigawatt” capacity, but that capacity has not been built. It cites a projection that India’s data-center capacity will reach 5 to 8 gigawatts by 2030, which is a forecast. Today the venture has no revenue, and the investment it will need has not been disclosed.

Jabil is a real business benefiting from real AI demand. For owners, the question is not whether that demand exists. It is how much of the $13.09 is left as cash after stock compensation, capital spending and the next downturn.

On Oct. 10, at a chip conference in Shanghai, ChangXin Memory Technologies president Cao Kanyu made an announcement. China’s largest DRAM maker, he said, would introduce a DDR5 server memory module built on a “4F²” memory cell before the end of 2026. On the following Tuesday, Samsung Electronics shares fell 7.39% and SK hynix shares fell 10.09%, The Korea Herald reported. A wider selloff over AI spending also pushed them down.

What was announced: a new cell layout. On paper, it takes up about two-thirds of the area of today’s standard 6F² design at the same feature size. The saving comes from a transistor that stands upright with its gate wrapped around it, which CXMT calls a vertical surrounded gate. Tom’s Hardware reported that the company says it holds more than 300 patent families on the approach.

What was not announced: speed, capacity, die density, process node, named customers or planned volume. When Tom’s Hardware published its report, CXMT had not put out a release in its own newsrooms. Samsung showed a working 16-gigabit 4F² prototype at the ISSCC chip conference in February, and its own production timeline has since become less clear. “Developing a technology and mass-producing it are two entirely different things,” Park Jae-geun of Hanyang University told the Herald. He said mass production this year would be “practically impossible.”

An industry source quoted by the Herald made a sharper point. A smaller cell only means cheaper memory if extra processing steps and low yields don’t eat up the savings. What counts is the cost of each usable bit, not the area of each cell.

The Herald’s reporting suggests the real threat to the Korean makers is CXMT’s money and factories more than its new cell design. CXMT raised 57.92 billion yuan ($8.66 billion) when it listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market in July. TrendForce estimates its share of global DRAM revenue at 9.5% in the second quarter, up from 7.6%. That puts it fourth, behind Samsung, SK hynix and Micron. Reuters has reported supply deals worth more than $3 billion with Tencent and more than $7 billion with ByteDance. Korean makers are focusing on high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for AI chips. Meanwhile, TrendForce found that in the first quarter, revenue per wafer from 64GB DDR5 server modules overtook HBM. That is exactly the market CXMT is going after.

The same week offered a contrast. At the OCP Global Summit in San Jose, held Oct. 12–15, SK hynix ran working system demonstrations of pooled memory over CXL, a standard for linking memory across servers, with partners including AMD and Marvell. It also showed a second-generation 256GB CXL memory module that it says more than doubles bandwidth, to 80GB/s. These are demonstrations and company claims, not shipment or pricing data. But a customer could watch them run.

The market sold first. A closely watched index of chip stocks fell 11.4% for the week, CNN reported, its worst week since April 2025. What to watch for evidence: whether outside testers get a CXMT 4F² module by December, and at what yield.

Jeffrey Ingold bought tickets for a 7:15 p.m. showing of *The Odyssey* at the Vue in North Finchley, London. In The Guardian this weekend he describes what he saw: a car ad at 7:15, a horror trailer at 7:25, an ad for the cinema he was already sitting in, and finally the film at 7:45. He concludes that cinemas are lying and that films should start on time. Then comes his provocative idea: get rid of assigned seating, so that people who arrive early and sit through the ads earn the best seats.

He’s right about the lie. A showtime is a promise about what happens at that time. If a cinema says 7:15 and means “the commercials begin,” it has sold you something other than what the ticket says. Ingold points out that a Connecticut senator introduced a bill in 2025 to require accurate start times in listings. After cinema operators warned they would lose advertising money, it was watered down to a “working group.” That tells you everything. The ads are worth money exactly because you can’t tell when they end.

He’s wrong about the seats. First-come seating turns a night out into a race. It penalizes parents getting a babysitter settled, anyone who uses a wheelchair, and anyone whose train runs late. It brings back the coat thrown across six seats “for my friends.” Reserved recliners spread because people were willing to pay for them. Cinemas don’t need to remove the one improvement of the last decade that customers actually chose.

The fix is boring, which is why it would work. Print two times: “Program 7:15. Feature 7:42.” Airlines do it with boarding and departure. Theaters do it with house open and curtain up. Then let people decide whether they want the trailers. For some moviegoers, including me, the trailers are the best part. They are one of the last places where a whole room laughs at the same bad marketing at the same moment. I can do without the ads. The trailers are the overture.

If the ads pay the rent, cinemas should say that too. Sell a ticket that includes the ads at one price and a ticket for the feature time at a higher one, and see what people choose. My guess is that more people would pay to skip the car ad than the industry fears. I also suspect they would still turn up for the trailers.

Disagree? Send us your worst pre-show: the longest wait, the strangest ad, the cinema that got it right. We’re keeping a list, and we’ll print it.

Two scenes from Saturday, Oct. 17.

In Limoges, a crowd broke the windows of a town hall that had stood since 1883 and set it on fire with people still inside. The belfry fell that evening. The movement whose march the attack followed started in September in French high schools, where teenagers blockaded the gates over missing teachers and crumbling classrooms.

On the New Haven Green, about 200 people gathered for an event its organizers insisted was not a rally. At a folding table, volunteers estimated that people filled out 40 postcards urging infrequent voters to go to the polls. A 24-year-old art teacher said she was “shocked to see a lot of it being older people.”

It is tempting to read these scenes as a contrast in courage: in France the young take the street, in America the old pick up a pen. That reading is wrong in both directions.

Start with the fire. The prefect calls whoever burned the Limoges town hall *casseurs*, vandals, not protesters, and the 550,000 who marched peacefully deserve that distinction. The arsonists did not strike a symbol of power. They struck the most everyday part of the French state: the building where you register a birth, pick up a document and, in France, get legally married. A ministry is the state looking down at you. A *mairie* is the state at eye level. Burning it is not a revolt against whoever sets fuel prices. It is vandalism against the neighbor who needs a birth certificate on Monday.

The French government should not take comfort in that, though. The prime minister blamed the “ultra-left.” Maybe so. But the teenagers who started this were not ultra anything. They were students in classrooms without enough teachers. And the government’s crowd-control weapons are under scrutiny after a young protester lost a hand in Saint-Étienne. A state in that position should not assume that its policing problem is its only problem.

Now the postcard. The American scene looks quaint until you notice what it is defending. That same week, the Justice Department warned that local officials who count ballots from suspected noncitizens risk criminal investigation. That is a quieter way of going after the town hall. It uses doubt aimed at the clerk instead of fire. The right answer to it is not a riot. It is a turnout so large and so early that no one can credibly dispute the count. That is exactly what the postcard is for.

America’s problem is not its method. It is the missing generation. “There’s not even anybody freaking my age or younger,” said a 41-year-old in New Haven. A democracy of procedure that only retirees keep running is a democracy on a timer.

So France has the young and the anger, but too many of them no longer believe the town hall belongs to them. America has people who still believe in the clerk’s table, but they are getting old. Whichever country solves the other’s problem first will win the decade. Against the fashion, my bet is on the postcard, provided someone under 30 picks one up.

Sen. Thom Tillis asked a fair question on Saturday: “What part of enforcing a law passed 86-11 by the Senate does the President and his advisors not understand?”

Here is an answer he won’t like: the president understood the law perfectly. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act lets the president waive its penalties by telling Congress they are not in the national interest. Trump did exactly that, days before the provisions took effect, with a certification and an executive order. Friday’s move did not require breaking the law. It only required reading it.

That is the uncomfortable part for the senators now issuing statements. They wrote a sanctions law with a built-in exit. They sent it to a president who had spent months warming to Moscow. Then they left town, and that is the part that should embarrass everyone. The House and Senate are on recess until after Nov. 3. The objections are loud partly because, for now, they cost nothing.

None of this excuses the waiver. Kirill Dmitriev, the Kremlin’s envoy for investment, called it “historic,” and on that point he is right. A law meant to punish the buyers of Russian oil was suspended in a week when Russia hit more than 15 Ukrainian power sites, and when Washington agreed to buy Russian diesel to bring down its own fuel prices before an election. The secretary of state calls it a 60-day pause to “analyse.” The order gives no end date. When the administration’s description and the signed text disagree, go by the text.

The lesson for Congress, though, is practical, not moral. In 2017 Congress made a president submit any easing of certain Russia sanctions for congressional review. If 86 senators mean a sanction, they can do that again and require a vote before it is lifted. Anything less is not really a law. It is a suggestion with a seal on it.

Some readers think the waiver is the smarter energy policy, given fuel prices. If that’s you, make the case and we will print the best one.