France protests, Texas Senate race and West Bank olives

Hi, I'm Tara Oaks in Liverpool. It's Sunday, October 25th. Today, largely peaceful demonstrations in France give way to an evening of violence. Brazilians vote in a tight presidential runoff. And early voting ramps up in what's set to be the most expensive U.S. Senate race in history. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the front lines in 10 minutes, 7 days a week. Violence flaring in Paris as night fell, after largely peaceful protests across France earlier on Saturday. Much of central Paris looked like a city under lockdown. With museums closing their doors and metro stations shut, before hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched across the country, denouncing rising living costs and growing inequality. The atmosphere deteriorated sharply in the capital after the main rally ended, as riot police fired tear gas and water cannon at a group of around 500 huddled youths, before they eventually dispersed on a cold, rainy evening. Now the past couple of weeks, we've seen so much dramatic footage from the protests. Including that of a couple enjoying a drink and a cigarette at a Paris café while fires burn behind them. That video is real, but some of what's shared online isn't. Nick Vant is on our fact-checking team. We do see older or unrelated images being given a new explanation or a new meaning across different languages. So, for example, we saw footage of protesters entering the offices of the Paris Stock Exchange. This was shared as breaking news and being about the protest, but this actually showed a pension reform protest in 2023. We've also seen another video of police and protesters clashing with smoke and burning debris in the street. This was described as Paris looking like a war zone during the protest, but it was Angers, another French city back in 2023. Nick says some of the footage he's looked at, Nick says some of the footage he's looked at, Nick says some of the footage he's looked at, tries to link the unrest to migrants. So one example we did see of this was a woman outside a supermarket. So there's genuine footage of her trying to stop people from looting a store, but Posts built essentially an entire story around her. They described her, quote-unquote, as a famous activist, as a supporter of immigration, and the owner of a small, chic boutique. The message was that the people that she had supported were now destroying her own business. Now we traced the picture to essentially a screenshot of a Paris-based photojournalist's video, and established that the shop was a Franprix supermarket in Paris. And the company told us that it owned and operated that specific branch, and that she, the woman in the video, was not an employee. So the ownership claim in this case was false. And that matters essentially because she was supposedly being framed as losing her own business, and that was central to the story. And then we also examined, um, other posts that paired her picture with another image apparently showing her holding an English-language sign, um, that said, "Refugees welcome here." So that appeared to provide supporting evidence for the story about her activism or pro-immigration views, but we essentially found that the original photograph, um, was, uh, taken, uh, at a London demonstration in 2016 and showed an entirely different woman. And we also, we also identified watermarks that indicated that AI tools had been used to alter that image. Voters in Brazil are heading to the polls today, and the match-up is a familiar one. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is seeking a fourth term in office, though not consecutively. His opponent? Senator Flavio Bolsonaro. He's the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who narrowly lost to Lula in 2022, and was later convicted of plotting a coup to overturn that election result. Now the race is remarkably close, with polls showing the candidates nearly even. Reporter Gabriel Stargardter has more from Sao Paulo. If, if Lula gets elected, I would not expect a huge amount of change. Uh, I think he's going to continue to try and chart this path between China and the United States. Um, he will remain a vocal member of the Global South, um, advocating for this group, uh, of nations which view themselves as, uh, caught between these, this geopolitical tussle between China and the United States, and wanting to act independently of them and chart their own path. Um, I think he is going to be 81 next week, and I think the, the legislative reality that he now faces is quite a complex one. Bolsonaro's allies have done very well in the elections, and they could make it very hard for him to govern. As for Bolsonaro, uh, I think it's safe to assume that the Trump administration, uh, will want to pull Brazil closer into its orbit. I mean, the main interest on a geopolitical level for the, for the Trump administration is Brazil's rare earths. Uh, China obviously controls the largest, world's largest stockpile of rare earths. Brazil controls the second largest. So, I would expect, you know, quite a lot of, uh, access for U.S. firms or, or interest on the rare earths issue. But Flavio Bolsonaro is not going to be able to turn his back on China, uh, at all. And that will be just a sort of gravitational force on his presidency that neither he nor the Americans will be able to do a great deal about. You can follow the results of the vote on Reuters.com and the Reuters app. And we'll give you the latest in the pod tomorrow morning. And I believe on November 3rd, we are going to do something extraordinary. U.S. Senate candidate James Tallarico, after casting his early vote in Texas midterms on Friday. Early voting is ramping up in a Senate race where Democrats have not won statewide in more than three decades. Whoever prevails here in November could determine control of the Senate. Our national affairs reporter, Brad Brooks, has been speaking to voters in Temple, Central Texas. What I'm hearing from several really important groups is encouraging for Tallarico, to be honest. Um, uh, Latino voters, who in 2024 swung for President Trump here in Texas and elsewhere, now appear to be swinging back to Democrats. I spoke with people who, uh, had said they'd never voted before, but were rolling up to, to polling places in Fort Worth, cast their first ballot, uh, the first, the first ballots they've ever cast in their lives. Really, really because, uh, they're tired of seeing ice in their streets, they told me. What's at stake in this election? What's at stake in this election is whether or not Democrats can break the, the absolute dominance that the Republicans have had in Texas for the last three decades. Uh, Democrats have not won a statewide office in Texas, uh, since 1994. And Tallarico is hoping to do that this year. Tallarico is facing a wall of Republican money in a late effort to rescue candidate Ken Paxton. Elon Musk alone has contributed more than $150 million. $150 million into a Republican super PAC backing Paxton. It is on track to become the most expensive US Senate race in the history of the country. And Tallarico at his rally here in Temple, Texas, just really hammered home the point that he has had over 1 million donors, whereas Paxton has had basically one. To the occupied West Bank now, where it's harvest season for Palestinian families to gather, he's been on the run for more than a year. And this year, many are coming back empty-handed. Hundreds of incidents of violence or crop theft have been reported in under a month. In some cases, Israeli forces firing tear gas and stun grenades at Palestinians as they pick their olives. Ahmed Salem is the mayor of Alaban al-Ghari, a village where hundreds of acres of olive groves have been seized by a nearby Israeli cellar. And he's been on the run for over a year to get the olives back to the settler outpost. He's watched settlers strip his own trees and load the olives into sacks to be pressed into oil at their outpost. Salem told Reuters he felt completely powerless to stop them. The attacks are escalating ahead of Israel's election on Tuesday, where opinion polls show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his pro-settler coalition could lose to opponents who have taken a harder line on settlement. Ziv Stahl is the director of Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din. She says in some cases, the military forces were actually with them. ZIV STAHL: They come in 25% of the cases with soldiers who come to protect them and to allow them and assist them to actually commit a crime to violate the rights of the Palestinians. Within Israel, the response among rabbis has been divided, with some calling it theft and others encouraging violence. ZIV STAHL: The Israeli military says it takes violence and crime seriously, but made no mention of of settlers and did not address reports of theft carried out in front of its own soldiers. For more on any of the stories from today, as well as more analysis and news shaping our world, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. There's a link in the description to download it and start getting pure news straight from the source. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. If you're listening on a smart speaker, just ask for the latest news from Reuters seven days a week. We'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.