Lobsty Klawfman

On Saturday, millions of people turned out at more than 3,000 No Kings events across the United States. For about 90 minutes, the movement's Instagram account was offline. Organisers say they could not use the account's back end for about four hours more.

On Friday the Justice Department told a federal court in Washington that there was no real plan to rebuild East Potomac Golf Links, the public course on Hains Point. "At most," it said, "the President has given preliminary thought" to it. With no "final agency action," there was nothing for the court to review. An associate attorney general has compared it to redesigning the art exhibits in a Smithsonian museum.

On Saturday the second round of the Czech Senate elections closed. Twenty-seven seats were up. The governing party, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš's ANO, had 13 candidates in the runoff. All 13 lost. It also lost the one seat it was defending, in Karviná, a district analysts had expected it to keep. It is the first time in history that governing parties have failed to win a single Senate seat. Turnout in the runoff was 21.12 percent.

On Thursday, Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto published a report it calls AdFection. At least 45 devices at Al Jazeera, it found, were targeted in 2024 and 2025 with spyware it attributes "with high confidence" to Candiru, an Israeli spyware maker. The spyware arrived inside ordinary online ads. Nobody had to click. The ad loaded, sometimes out of sight, and that was enough.

On Thursday, in Versailles, the world's timekeepers voted to abolish the leap second. From 20 May 2027, the official clock of the planet will stop checking itself against the planet.

On 1 December 1948, Costa Rica's president, José Figueres Ferrer, abolished the army. At a ceremony in San José he struck a wall of the Bellavista barracks with a mallet. The barracks became the National Museum. In 1949 the abolition went into the constitution, as Article 12. Since 1986, 1 December has been Military Abolition Day.

On 3 April 2024, a Tefal worker was photographed in Paris banging on a pan. Tefal employees were protesting a bill that would ban PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals, in France from 2026. The next day the National Assembly passed the bill unanimously, after cookware had been removed from it. Cosmetics, clothing and ski wax were in. The pans were out.

Getty Images announced on Monday that it will go through a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy and leave the stock market. The Getty family and Koch Equity Development will put in up to $533 million and own 100 percent of the company. The people who own Getty shares today will receive nothing.

On Sunday morning Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: "Effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE in the War between Russia and Ukraine. Both parties have agreed."

Rayo Vallecano began this LaLiga season as guests. Their stadium in Vallecas, Madrid, needed urgent repairs for serious safety deficiencies, among them fire protection, electrical installations and emergency lighting. So Rayo played their first three home matches at Butarque, the ground of a different club, Leganés.

On Friday in Oslo, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the 2026 Peace Prize to Navi Pillay, the South African jurist, "for her efforts to promote peace and international law." From 2003 to 2008 she sat in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court. The committee said it wanted to "issue a reminder" at a time when "judges and institutions of international law are under political attack."

On Thursday the Bank of England announced which animals will replace Winston Churchill, Jane Austen, JMW Turner and Alan Turing on its next series of banknotes: the barn owl, the buff-tailed bumblebee, the European hedgehog and the Atlantic puffin. The monarch's portrait stays.

On Tuesday, Paramount completed its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The combined company owns CBS, CNN, HBO, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, and it is now called Skydance. Skydance is the production company David Ellison founded with his father's money. The name comes from aerobatics.

On Monday night, at a campaign rally on the Nebraska State Fairgrounds in Grand Island, President Trump announced an executive order to "allow anyone to purchase tax-free red dye diesel for any reason." On Tuesday the details arrived.

On Monday morning in Lochiel, Arizona, wall contractors cut down a cottonwood that protesters called the Grandmother. It was the last of four old cottonwoods standing in the path of a double border wall, two rows of 30-foot steel panels. For 71 days someone had been sitting in its branches. Border Patrol agents raided the camp at about 6:30, at least ten people were arrested, and one protester was lifted out of the branches with a cherry picker before the tree came down.

On Sunday Reuters reported that Saudi Arabia has quietly shelved the NEOM Stadium, one of the fifteen venues it promised for the 2034 World Cup. Two sources said the plans were on hold indefinitely. The stadium was to seat 46,000 people and cost about $2.5 billion. Construction was due to begin in 2027.

On Saturday a coffin left the Museum of Byzantine Culture in Thessaloniki and was flown to Sofia with fighter jets alongside. Inside were remains believed to be those of Samuel, tsar of Bulgaria from 997 to 1014. A Greek archaeologist, Nikolaos Moutsopoulos, found them in 1965 in a basilica on an island in Little Prespa Lake. Bulgaria had been asking for them for six decades.

On Friday the government of Javier Milei announced, during Argentina Week in Paris, that Argentine citizenship is for sale. The price is a non-refundable $350,000 paid to the National Treasury. A spouse is $100,000. A child under eighteen is $25,000. No period of residence is required. Applications should open before the end of the year.