France’s political turmoil, election deniers and Japan’s bears
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Today, France's government is on the verge of collapse. The 2020 election deniers who aren't going anywhere and tackling the rise of bear attacks in Japan. It's Tuesday, December 3rd. This is Reuters World News, bringing you everything you need to know from the frontlines in 10 minutes every weekday. I'm Tara Oakes in Liverpool. When you hear LSEC data and analytics, what do you think of?

The White House has defended President Joe Biden's decision to pardon his son Hunter.

The surprise move was panned by Republicans, but also by some Democrats who say it threatens to undermine public trust in the rule of law — a concept Biden and his party had used to criticize President-elect Donald Trump. Tesla says it's going to appeal the latest decision by a Delaware judge to reject Elon Musk's $56 billion compensation package.

The decision comes after months of legal wrangling and January's decision by Judge Kathleen McCormick that called the pay package excessive. Donald Trump says there will be hell to pay in the Middle East if Hamas fails to release all the Israeli hostages held in the Gaza Strip before his inauguration. Writing on social media, Trump says those responsible will be hit harder than anyone has been hit in the long and storied history of the United States of America.

In the Middle East itself, in Syria, hundreds of Iran-backed Iraqi fighters have crossed into the country to help the government fight rebels who seized Aleppo last week. But sources tell us that Lebanon's Hezbollah has no plans to join them for now. The French government, led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, is all but certain to collapse later this week.

with far-right national rally leader Marine Le Pen confirming that her party would vote for the left-wing coalition's no-confidence bill as well as her own. Michel Rose is in Paris. Michel, the government were relying on Le Pen's support to pass their budget. How did it come to this?

Ever since the early elections of this summer, it was clear that Le Pen could pull the trigger at any time. But people thought that she would help him pass the budget because her strategy has long been to look respectable, to look like a reasonable government in waiting.

What's changed for her in terms of supporting the current government? Well, in November, Marine Le Pen had to go through a court case about the use of

assistance for European lawmakers in her party. They went into this trial thinking it would go smoothly. And there was a big surprise with the prosecutor saying they would request judges to ban her from public office with immediate effect.

And a lot of people think that's something that changed her plans because in March, if judges decide to follow what prosecutors requested, she could be banned from public office and in effect miss the next presidential election. Ever since, her attitude and political posturing really hardened.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has been forced out less than four years after taking the helm. The company's board having lost confidence in his turnaround plan.

Intel's last two quarters of results have been weak at best and disastrous at worst. For the June quarter, Intel reported financial results that surprised Wall Street in a negative way. The stock dropped roughly 25% in the trading session that followed the recession.

report. On top of weak financial performance, Intel announced that it was going to lay off 15% of its staff, which is over 15,000 people. Intel has thus far failed to produce an AI chip that has made meaningful inroads into this now critical segment in the chip industry. And

As a result, it has been unable to capture the enormous amount of revenue that has gone mostly to Nvidia. It doesn't have a new chip design for AI coming until late 2025, according to the company. And on the last earnings call, Pat Gelsinger got asked directly,

what the plans are, because it's not apparent what the company is going to do to participate in this massive growing market. Since winning the 2024 election, Donald Trump has gone quiet on his false claims of voter fraud. But the election denial movement he spawned isn't going away. In fact, in some parts of the country, it appears to be growing stronger.

Reporter Peter Eisler has been covering the movement for months. So Peter, the preferred candidate of the election deniers won. What are they up to now?

Well, the one thing that the movement is not up to is suggesting that the 2024 election was rigged in any way, shape, or form. Those complaints have sort of gone away. They are still looking to push some pretty stark changes in the way that Americans vote, and they're looking to do it ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, the 2026 congressional elections.

and they insist that they're responding to legitimate concerns about election integrity and suggesting appropriate reforms. But a lot of the reforms that they're pushing are

are aimed at dealing with problems that really don't exist or certainly have never been documented to exist. And there's speculation from election officials and sort of good government groups that the real goal of these changes, at least some of these changes that they're pushing, is to sort of cement electoral advantages for the Republican Party. A spokesperson for Trump and the Republican National Committee say common sense election reforms are needed.

So Peter, what are some of the reforms that the election deniers are trying to implement? It ranges from pretty modest reforms that folks on sort of all sides agree are necessary and helpful to some more dramatic things like restricting early voting and restricting mail-in voting and restricting the use of drop boxes, which are all things that many, many Americans have

come to rely on as a way to cast their vote more conveniently, more easily, or even at all in cases of people who, you know, might not be able to get to the polls physically on election day. This is northern Japan, and a massive brown bear is being captured.

It had been roaming near a house and eating its way through cornfields. To keep people safe, officials turned to hunters, who lured the bear into a cage using a deer carcass as bait. The threat of bear attacks in Japan is rising, and Sakura Murakami has been looking at how officials are responding.

Estimates show that there's been a gradual but steady increase in the bear population. And what complicates that problem is that the areas the bears are active are expanding and the bears are moving closer to human inhabited areas. At the forefront of the issue is a dwindling and aging group of recreational hunters. And they have the license to shoot and are often called on to cull bears when they're captured. But they're not

But there isn't really a nationwide approach to the problem. So experts, local residents and hunters themselves are concerned about whether the system is really sustainable and how they can continue to tackle the bear problem as Japan's population declines. Why do officials think bears are moving into those areas now? Those areas have sort of depopulated and there's less of a natural buffer zone and there's

the cycle of the ripening and flowering of fruits and nuts, the main diet for bears, that's been changing. So that may be driving bears to raid crops when their usual food sources are low.

And Sakura, there's also been calls to deal with this human-bear conflict in a way that ensures a future for the bears, right? What other solutions have officials been looking at? So the government, local governments as well, have a variety of programs and projects and subsidies to try and help recruit younger hunters and to kind of involve technology into research.

warding away bears and wildlife. One of the companies that I talked to developed this robot, I guess, called the Monster Wolf. It has an infrared sensor that reacts and when a bear or any kind of wildlife passes, emit these very loud sounds to ward the bear away.

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Time now for our recommended read, all about how a fuel oil smuggling network is raking in a billion dollars a year for Iran and its proxies. The operation exploits a government policy under which Iraq allocates fuel oil to asphalt plants at heavily subsidized prices and involves a network of companies, groups and individuals in Iraq, Iran and the Gulf states. You can read more about it in the link in the pod description.

And for more on any of the stories today, check out Reuters.com or the Reuters app. Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast player. And we'll be back tomorrow with our daily headline show.