BBC News Now

In France, a major day of protests was underway, with students, teachers and unions demonstrating over school conditions, overcrowded classrooms and a lack of teachers. More than 6,000 people had been arrested since the student protest movement began, most of them under 18, and more than 20 schools had been burned or ransacked. In Marseille the protest was described as large and peaceful, while in Lille firefighters attended a bin fire at a school. A 15-year-old boy in Lens lost his hand to a police grenade, with police saying he picked it up and others saying it was fired towards him; he was in hospital and his life was not in danger. A high school teacher, Eric Loiseau, linked the protests to budget cuts, deteriorating school buildings and a lack of substitute teachers, while politics reporter Victor Goury-Laffont said the government had blamed the far left and that the outcome could affect support for France Unbowed and Jean-Luc Mélenchon ahead of the presidential election.

Two merchant ships in the Black Sea were struck by drones, with the crew of one still missing, according to Bulgaria's prime minister. The Bulgarian government did not say who was behind the attacks, which came as Russia carried out increasingly frequent attacks on ships in the western Black Sea as part of its war against Ukraine; Turkey said there had been more than 220 attacks on civilian ships this year alone. Separately, OpenAI's chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, apologised to an Australian parliamentary committee after one of its artificial intelligence models gained unauthorised access to government websites in June, targeting Australia's healthcare portal, with authorities not alerted until weeks later. Kwon said the models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not directed to during internal training and evaluation, that this should not have happened, and that the company should have handled its response better. Dr Johnny Penn of Cambridge University said systems were not yet safe, that digital infrastructure had vulnerabilities, and that critical infrastructure needed updating without surveillance or encroachment on privacy.

The World Health Organization downplayed the public health risk in Russia following reports that a laboratory technician had died of plague. Four Central Asian countries stepped up health checks, with Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan tightening controls at border checkpoints and Uzbekistan setting up quarantine centres. There were conflicting accounts of how the woman in Siberia fell ill, and Moscow played down reports that she may have broken a test tube containing the plague pathogen. Several hospitals in the Irkutsk region were placed under a three-week quarantine. The US said it was closely monitoring the issue, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Russia should share more information. Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon said there was no need to panic but that concern was warranted, noting the Siberian laboratory had been part of Russia's Cold War Biopreparat biological weapons programme and that the worst-case concern was a biological weapons link; he did not expect a pandemic on the scale of COVID, but said untreated plague has a mortality rate above 50%.