More than 800,000 people have marched in cities across France as railway workers, teachers and hospital staff held one of the biggest public sector strikes in decades against Emmanuel Macron’s plans to overhaul the pension system. A nationwide transport strike brought much of France to a standstill and was expected to continue for the next…

After a photo surfaced of West Virginia correction officer trainees giving what appears to be the Nazi salute, state officials quickly suspended some employees and the governor ordered the firing of those involved. The image, showing more than two dozen trainees with their arms raised and faces blurred, was released on Thursday by the West…

Her family called her Twinkle. In the dry desert brush of Rajasthan where her body was found, blood spattering her tiny legs and brown school uniform and a belt fastened around her neck, she lay among scattered toffee wrappers. Her family could barely utter the words to describe what happened to the six-year-old. “If you…

US prosecutors have charged two members of a Russia-based hacking group that calls itself Evil Corp with masterminding a global banking fraud scheme that netted the unsubtly named gang more than $100m. Two leading members of Evil Corp, Maksim Yakubets of Moscow and Igor Turashev from the Russian city Yoshkar-Ola, were charged with bank fraud…

R Kelly is facing new bribery charges apparently related to his 1994 marriage to the R&B singer Aaliyah, who was 15 at the time. A revised indictment in federal court in Brooklyn accuses Kelly of scheming with others to pay for a “fraudulent identification document” for someone identified only as “Jane Doe” on 30 August…

Two Muslim US congresswomen have been targeted by a vast international operation that exploits far-right pages on Facebook to inflame Islamophobia for profit, a Guardian investigation has found. A mysterious Israeli-based group uses 21 Facebook pages to churn out more than a thousand coordinated fake news posts per week to more than a million followers…

Elon Musk’s attorney pressured a British cave explorer to apologize for criticizing Musk’s miniature submarine, in the third day of Vernon Unsworth’s defamation trial. “Do you believe Mr Musk is so cold-hearted that he was sending over this sub with no regard for the children’s lives?” Bill Price asked Vernon Unsworth in a Los Angeles…

UN peacekeepers have been sent to South Sudan’s northern Lakes region after a series of clashes in which 79 people were killed and more than 100 injured. With roads impassable due to heavy rains and flooding, the Nepalese blue helmets travelled by helicopter on Tuesday from Rumbek, the state capital, to Maper, about 100km north,…

Parents at a public school district in Maryland have won a major victory for student privacy: tech companies that work with the school district now have to purge the data they have collected on students once a year. Experts say the district’s “Data Deletion Week” may be the first of its kind in the country….

More than 3,000 Uber passengers reported sexual assaults in 2018, the ride-sharing company revealed in its first-ever safety report on Friday. Nine passengers were murdered and 58 riders were killed in crashes last year, the report said. These incidents, which include 229 rapes, represent just a fraction of the more than 1.3bn rides Uber facilitated…