France deploys 70,000 officers for Saturday protests
Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said 70,000 police and gendarmes will be on duty nationwide, after last weekend’s violence (ZDF). The deployment shifts policing costs onto a national budget already under pressure.
French lawmakers reject the Social Security revenue bill
Deputies in the National Assembly voted down the revenue section of the Social Security financing bill, in a chamber largely empty of government supporters (Le Monde). The text is not dead. The government hopes to attach it to the state budget. That would force the health and pension funding and the state budget into one negotiation. Opposition parties would then hold more leverage over both.
Eni caps pump prices through year-end as energy costs spread
Eni will keep a ceiling on retail fuel prices until the end of the year, according to Il Sole 24 Ore. The cap started in late September. It holds petrol at €1.99 per litre and diesel at €2.25 per litre. Drivers are the immediate beneficiaries. Eni takes on the gap between the cap and market prices on its retail margins. The cap also blunts the fuel-price anger that has fed truck blockades in southern Italy.
The ifo institute (Germany’s main business-survey body) shows why costs keep passing down. Its price-expectations index rose to 22.7 points in September from 21.4 in August, meaning more firms plan to raise prices (ifo). It expects inflation to climb above 3%. It also says power and gas suppliers are likely to raise tariffs this winter.
Greece bans social media for under-15s from 1 January 2027
Parliament passed the ban on Thursday, with only the governing New Democracy party voting in favour (DW). Platforms will have to build age checks for a further EU market. That raises their compliance costs, and the pressure to adopt common EU rules grows.
Non-obvious angle: Ebola tracing runs through a European-linked airport record
Health officials are checking whether the first Ebola patients in Kenya and Nigeria both passed through Uganda’s Entebbe airport on 3 October (DW). New information from Switzerland contradicts Uganda’s account of the Nigerian patient’s travel. Uganda reports no active cases. The gap between those accounts shows how little shared travel data supports early detection.
Catch the next Gist for the continent’s moving pieces.
