According to eyewitnesses, quoted by the Daily Express, the car was in the middle of the rally when a passenger opened the door to shout at the protesters, which was then followed by the driver accelerating.

Several people were overthrown and at least three were injured as a result of a car that drove into yellow vests protesters in the French city of Rouen, BFM TV reported, citing a police source. As the broadcaster specified, first aid to those injured was provided immediately.

Large-scale protests erupted in France on 17 November 2018 in the wake of the government's decision to raise fuel prices and increase fuel taxes. Even though the French authorities later scrapped their plans, the yellow vest protesters, dissatisfied with the government's social policies, have continued to rally across the country.

The yellow vests are rallying for the fourteenth straight weekend in Paris and other major French cities on 16 February.

According to French TV channel LCI, about 1,300 police officers, gendarmes, and firefighters have been injured since the movement launched.

French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe has revealed that there have been nearly 1,800 court convictions of activists who have taken part in the weekly Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protests.

The French prime minister revealed the extent of the convictions during a speech in front of the National Assembly, updating a previous figure released last month that confirmed just under 1,000 convictions of members of the movement, Le Figaro reports.

“Since the beginning of these events, 1,796 sentences have been pronounced by the court and 1,422 people are still awaiting trial,” Philippe said and went on to add, “more than 1,300 immediate appearances were held and 316 people were placed under an arrest warrant.”

The so-called “yellow vests” protests have been raging across France since mid-November, with the movement calling for the resignation of French President Emmanuel Macron over his government’s policies.

The official Twitter account of an Italian political show, “Piazzapulita", released a video of an interview with a man they claim is Christophe Chalençon, one of the leaders of the yellow vests movement.

READ MORE: Yellow Vests Protester Gets Hand Blown off by Grenade in Paris (GRAPHIC VIDEO)

While the footage, apparently filmed on a hidden camera, shows only the legs of a man, he can be heard speaking about the ongoing unrest in France.

The man, who is alleged to be Chalençon, is heard saying that if anything happens to him, French President Emmanuel Macron would end up on the guillotine.

The wave of demonstrations against Haiti's President Jovenel Moïse and his government’s mishandling of development funds has left a seventh protestor dead after a week of violent clashes in the Caribbean nation.

Haitians took to the streets of the capital Port-au-Prince’s once again on Wednesday to demand the resignation of the country’s President Jovenel Moïse as tensions continue to mount after a week of demonstrations marked by violent clashes with the police.

According to AFP, a young man died at a crossroads near the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince and a Haitian journalist was wounded by gunshots during crossfire between police and protestors.

The former French colony has been mired in a political crisis since February 7 that has left at least seven people dead and everyday life in the largest towns paralyzed by protests and barricades.

Two executives at the company that chartered the U.S. plane that was caught smuggling weapons into Venezuela last week have been tied to an air cargo company that aided the CIA in the rendition of alleged terrorists to “black site” centers for interrogation. The troubling revelation comes as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has rejected a U.S. “humanitarian aid” convoy over concerns that it could contain weapons meant to arm the country’s U.S.-backed opposition.

Last Tuesday, Venezuelan authorities announced that 19 rifles, 118 ammo magazines, 90 radios and six iPhones had been smuggled into the country via a U.S. plane that had originated in Miami. The authorities blamed the United States government for the illicit cargo, accusing it of seeking to arm U.S.-funded opposition groups in the country in order to topple the current Maduro-led government.

Life in America has become a gut-wrenching, soul-sucking, misery-drenched, demoralizing existence.

We have managed to survive crackdowns, clampdowns, shutdowns, showdowns, shootdowns, standdowns, knockdowns, putdowns, breakdowns, lockdowns, takedowns, slowdowns, meltdowns, and never-ending letdowns.

We’ve been held up, stripped down, faked out, photographed, frisked, fracked, hacked, tracked, cracked, intercepted, accessed, spied on, zapped, mapped, searched, shot at, tasered, tortured, tackled, trussed up, tricked, lied to, labeled, libeled, leered at, shoved aside, saddled with debt not of our own making, sold a bill of goods about national security, tuned out by those representing us, tossed aside, and taken to the cleaners.

We’ve had our freedoms turned inside out, our democratic structure flipped upside down, and our house of cards left in a shambles.

As Haitians throughout the country seethe with rage over Jovenel Moise’s blatant corruption, gross mismanagement and numerous scandals, the neo-Duvalier era in Haiti that has largely been orchestrated by the U.S. is now in danger of finally falling apart.

46% of the Gilets Jaunes agree with the proposition that:

“immigration is organised deliberately by our political, intellectual and media elites to bring about the replacement of the European population with an immigrant population”

This is 21% more than the population at large.

The more hardcore the Gilets Jaunes are, the more likely they are to believe this.

The first weeks of 2019 have been marked by a dramatic upsurge in the international class struggle. Workers’ strikes and protests have broken out in virtually every region of the world. After decades in which the class struggle has been suppressed by the trade unions, the working class, the stirring giant of world politics, is beginning to find its feet.

In France, the main complaint that the Yellow Vests movement has now taken into its 13th consecutive weekend is crystal clear: people can’t pay their bills anymore. In the UK, austerity has demolished wages, social care, the NHS and much else. In the US, many millions of Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency payment, have ever scarcer access to healthcare and live from paycheck to paycheck.

Rinse and repeat for every western nation. The storylines vary somewhat, but they all tell the same tale, they could be, they are, chapters in the same book. And it makes one think if people are not connecting them.

Renowned French philosopher Michel Onfray summarizes Emmanuel Macron’s ongoing Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) problem in these words:

“Macron is trying to explain that there is not enough liberalist Europe in our lives, while the Gilets Jaunes are saying back to him that there is too much – not too much Europe, but too much liberalism.”

- Ongoing protests in all cities in France
- Mainstream media: 'a few protesters'
- Protests against Macron govt, high taxes, labor laws
- More than 1000 arrested, hundreds of wounded, multiple dead

There were more violent clashes in France on Saturday as the Yellow Vest protest movement entered its thirteenth week.

The numbers were down again this weekend estimations of the participation vary from 50 to more than 100 thousand but the confrontations were intense. One protestor lost four fingers witnesses said he’d tried to handle a sting-ball grenade thrown by police.

In the south of France police blocked yellow vest leader Maxime Nicolle from crossing into Italy to join forces with Italian demonstrators.

The war of words between globalist France and populist Italy has intensified after the Macron government referred to “nationalist leprosy” and criticised Italy’s Luigi Di Maio’s meeting with Yellow Vests.

France recalled its ambassador to Italy for the first time since the Second World War after Italy’s anti-establishment deputy prime minister Luigi Di Maio, of the Five Star Movement (M5S), made an impromptu visit to meet with the anti-Macron government protesters, in what the French government referred to as an “unacceptable provocation.”

In an interview with Europe 1 on Friday, France’s Benjamin Griveaux said: “It’s not a permanent recall, but it was important to make a statement because Italy is a historic ally and is also a founding member of the European Union.”

Emmanuel Macron's National Debate has turned into a boring monologue in favour of his re-election instead of solving the people's problems, Karel Vereycken, vice-president of the Solidarity and Progress Party, told Sputnik, sharing his views on the possibility of the nation-wide referendum and prospects of the yellow vests movement.

On 2 February, French weekly Journal du Dimanche (JDD) reported that Macron is allegedly considering calling a referendum on 26 May — the same date that the European parliamentary elections are due to take place.

"The idea of holding a nationwide referendum on the same day as the European elections is considered as the latest desperate attempt to 'take steam' out of the yellow vest protest movement by giving in to the least embarrassing and least expensive of their demands", says Karel Vereycken, a French journalist and vice-president of the Solidarity and Progress Party, headed by Jacques Cheminade.

The right hand of one of the Yellow Vest protesters has been blown off by a police grenade, according to an eyewitness, during Saturday's demonstrations in Paris.

RT video agency Ruptly's footage from the scene shows clouds of smoke billowing around the street as protesters and police clash outside the grounds of the National Assembly.

Video captured in the moments surrounding the horrific hand injury show a marked escalation between police and protesters. One police grenade was filmed exploding as protesters approached the device.

A criminal enquiry has been launched after an arson attack on the home of the President of France's National Assembly.

Richard Ferrand, who is the equivalent of the Speaker in Britain's House of Commons and a close personal friend of President Emmanuel Macron, described the attack on the property in his Brittany constituency as 'violence and intimidation'.

The National Gendarmerie discovered a blanket, tire residue and a homemade torch soaked in fuel on the site, leaving 'the criminal origin in no doubt,' according to a statement from Mr Ferrand's office.

The attack follows months of regular disturbances by the Yellow Vest anti-government movement, who have been behind similar blazes.

“For more than two months the people who come out into the streets are met with governmental repression. Since the 17th November 2018 we have been on the streets but we have not been listened to.” The statement from the Yellow Vests — or Gilets Jaunes (GJs) as they are better known in France — was published just before Saturday February 2, 2019, when tens of thousands of GJs took to the streets of cities nationwide for Acte XII (Week 12) of the protests that have been a weekly event since they first began on November 17, 2018.

The GJ movement has taken France by storm since its sudden appearance after the increasingly unpopular President Emmanuel Macron introduced a number of measures that appeared to protect the French wealthy elite while penalising those already on the brink of poverty. The increase in the fuel tax was the final straw that broke the back of the already pressurized population struggling to make ends meet every month.

A lawmaker has told his colleagues he will leave French President Emmanuel Macron’s governing party, a day after an unprecedented number of lawmakers refused to approve a bill aimed at curbing violent protests.

Fifty lawmakers from Macron’s Republic On The Move (LREM) abstained in the vote at the lower house National Assembly on Tuesday, the highest number of abstentions since Macron’s election in 2017.

Although the bill passed thanks to Macron’s comfortable majority, the abstentions were a sign of growing unease over the government’s lurch to the right in response to three months of protests by the grassroots “yellow vest” movement.

Large street protests in both France and Venezuela. Two Presidents with low approval ratings. But only one whose legitimacy has been denied by Western 'democracies' and by the French president himself.
Just when you thought globalist hypocrisy couldn't get any worse, it just did.

France and Venezuela have both experienced widespread anti-government protests in recent weeks. These have been fuelled by economic factors and increased financial hardship of the majority.

But it's only in Venezuela where the democratically-elected leader, Nicolas Maduro, has been ordered to step down and his opponent, Juan Guaido, has been anointed president. The 'good old democracies' of the US and the EU have been falling over themselves to 'recognise' Guaido. They're simply Mad About the Boy, and mad at Maduro.

Addressing the protests in France earlier in January, leader of the anti-establishment party Five Star Movement (M5S) and Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio supported the "yellow vests" movement, harshly criticising French President Emmanuel Macron.

The French Foreign Ministry slammed Di Maio on Wednesday for his meeting with Christophe Chalençon, one of the "yellow vests" leaders.

"This new provocation is not acceptable between neighbouring countries and partners in the European Union", a Foreign Ministry spokesman said at a daily online briefing. "Mr Di Maio, who holds government responsibilities, must take care not to undermine, through his repeated interferences, our bilateral relations, in the interest of both France and Italy".

The first referendum in 14 years could take place in France in May as part of President Emmanuel Macron’s response to the ongoing series of weekend ‘yellow vests’ protests. The newspaper Journal du Dimanche reported that Macron was planning to organise the vote on the same day as European parliament elections: on May 26th.

According to the publication, one of the questions the French would be asked is whether they want to reduce the number of national lawmakers — a campaign pledge by Macron, as well as whether they favour imposing term-limits on legislators.

French unions are holding a rally over a minimum wage in the city of Paris, which has also seen 12 weeks of violent "Yellow Vests" protests.

According to a Sputnik correspondent, protesters clashed with police after they reached Place de la Concorde square, close to the Louvre Museum. A group of protesters provoked police by throwing various objects at them and forcing the law enforcement officers to respond with tear gas.

Police in the city of Toulouse came under fire after several officers were caught on tape discussing plans to “shoot” the protesters involved in clashes.
The comments were made in the police command room, as broadcaster France 3 reported, where the officers were watching an intense standoff between police and the demonstrators unfolding on the streets of Toulouse.

While the officers aren’t seen in the video, the voices are heard saying “What a bunch of bastards!” and “The f***ers!”, when the clashes turned violent.

Then a female officer is heard saying, “But you have to shoot!” and the other male officer replying, “When I tell you to, line up two or three rounds.”

Hundreds of Germans have donned yellow vests to match protesters in France, demonstrating in the bastion of Germany's car industry in Stuttgart against a recent driving ban on older diesels.

The protest came after organizers asked people to hit the streets clad in the yellow high-visibility vests that have defined months of protests in France -- themselves triggered by an increase in tax on diesel.

"The French are an example to us, because they dared take to the streets to protect their rights," organizer Vasilos Topalis told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Stuttgart is home of Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler, Volkswagen subsidiary Porsche and the world's biggest car parts supplier Bosch.

Since January 1, only diesel vehicles meeting the Euro 5 emissions standard are allowed into Stuttgart, with efforts underway to implement similar driving bans in many German cities.

One week after a Yellow Vest organizer was "handicapped for life" by French police, protesters dedicated Saturday's demonstrations to denouncing police violence - only to be beaten and gassed by said police.

There have been 1,900 protesters and around 1,000 police injured since the movement began in November, and 10 fatalities, including an 80-year-old Marseille woman who was killed when a police tear-gas canister was launched into her apartment window while she was trying to close the shutters. She was taken to a nearby hospital but died during an operation after suffering shock, according to a local media report.

Emmanuel Macron is mulling over the possibility of holding a referendum in France in an attempt to resolve the socioeconomic crisis that triggered the wave of yellow vests rallies, while officials have already launched preparations for the vote in the event that Macron gives the signal, the Journal du Dimanche reported.

According to the sources, Macron is thinking about organizing the referendum on May 26, the day of the elections to the European Parliament, and the chances that the vote will be held on this very day are "very high," the outlet reported.

Yellow Vests protesters have turned into a "new political factor" in French domestic affairs, Karel Vereycken, vice-president of the Solidarity and Progrès Party, told Sputnik, commenting on the movement's bid to take part in the upcoming EU parliamentary elections.

"What the Yellow Vests have gained after 12 weeks of protest is less tangible but much 'bigger' than the scrapping the planned increase of taxes on fuel and some pocket money," Karel Vereycken, a French journalist and vice-president of Solidarity and Progrès Party, headed by Jacques Cheminade, said.

Yellow Vest protesters have returned to the streets of Paris to honor those injured in months of demonstrations and to condemn the police for using rubber-ball projectiles.

An estimated 13,800 people gathered between Daumesnil and Republic avenues, according to a count by Occurrence cited by Liberation.The police, however, provided lower estimates, stating that some 10,500 people turned out for the rally in Paris. All across France, around 58,600 people participated in the protests.

Coverage of the protests show clashes, with police firing tear gas into the crowds of demonstrators on the smoke-choked streets in Paris.

Lines of riot police are facing off against protesters.

Some of those marching through the French capital bear the scars of their injuries, with prominent protester Jerome Rodrigues covering his wounded eye with a patch.

Other than voicing their usual demands, protesters will also raise the issue of police violence following protest leader Jérôme Rodrigues sustaining an eye injury in an earlier rally.

Yellow Vests demonstrations are underway on Saturday, with the anti-establishment movement reaching its twelfth week of nationwide protests. Rallies are expected to take place not only in Paris, but in Bordeaux, Marseille, Toulouse, Lyon, Lille and numerous small French towns.

Yellow Vest protesters have returned to the streets of Paris to honor those injured in months of demonstrations and to condemn the police for using rubber-ball projectiles.

An estimated 13,800 people gathered between Daumesnil and Republic avenues, according to a count by Occurrence cited by Liberation. Live coverage of the protests show clashes, with police firing tear gas into the crowds of demonstrators on the smoke-choked streets in Paris.

Lines of riot police are facing off against protesters.

French politicians have approved controversial measures to ban what the government calls “brute” troublemakers from street demonstrations as gilets jaunes (yellow vests) anti-government protests enter their 12th week.

There were tense and heated exchanges in parliament late on Wednesday night, including from rebels within Emmanuel Macron’s own centrist party, as deputies backed giving regional prefects – local state security officials – the power to ban people presumed to be violent from taking part in demonstrations.

Deputies on the left and some on the centre said the measures posed an “authoritarian” threat to civil liberties.

The French government is under growing pressure to review police use of explosive weapons against civilians after serious injuries were reported during gilets jaunes street demonstrations, including people alleged to have lost eyes and to have had their hands and feet mutilated.

France’s legal advisory body, the council of state, will on Wednesday examine an urgent request by the French Human Rights League and the CGT trade union to ban police from using a form of rubber-bullet launcher in which ball-shaped projectiles are shot out of specialised handheld launchers. France’s rights ombudsman has long warned they are dangerous and carry “disproportionate risk”.

The Senate is once again debating boycott against Israel today, in a sign that Middle East policy is politicized as never before.

The Senate voted overwhelmingly yesterday, 76 to 22, to proceed forward on S.1, a bill sponsored by Marco Rubio– and AIPAC, the leading Israel lobby group– that encourages states to adopt measures to financially punish “entities using boycotts, divestments, or sanctions to influence Israel’s policies.”

The anti-BDS language is an unconstitutional limitation of free speech, the ACLU has said; state laws aimed at crushing BDS have already cost employment to a number of people of good faith who are opposed to Israeli policies.

The French government won’t stop the Yellow Vests by force, but only by doing what the people demand, according to prominent protester Jerome Rodrigues, who may remain blind in one eye after being injured by the police.

“The president [Emmanuel Macron] declared war on us and our injuries are battle wounds. The traumatic weapons are equipped with collimators [optical sights] – such equipment is used on the battlefield, at war,” Rodrigues told RT.

“I never thought that such a thing could happen in France,” he added, describing what the country has been going through in recent months as “dark times.”

The activist, who calls himself “a hyper pacifist,” was broadcasting live on Facebook from a rally in Paris last weekend when a police officer fired at him from an LBD 40 non-lethal gun. A projectile hit him in the eye, leading to hospitalization and a medically induced coma. The man said “there are no guarantees that the injured eye will be able to see again.”

François Boulo is the a 32-year-old lawyer and spokesman for the Gilets Jaunes Yellow Vests movement in the northern city of Rouen, who is now calling on the French people to form a general strike on February 5th, as “The only way to force a deaf president to call us to the polls.”

As a lawyer, Boulo says, “I defend people threatened with the seizure of their homes by the banks,” and he complains that the “tax devices” of the Macron government work “for the benefit of the richest 1%,” at the expense of public services.

Boulo says he doesn’t seek to become the national spokesperson of the Gilets Jaunes, saying “One spokesperson is not desirable,” in this decentralized movement. Nor does he seek the support of a political party, as being unaffiliated is more powerful. He emphasizes that he “is absolutely neither Left nor Right,” and that the political “quarrels of people are sick.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren fights for middle- and working-class Americans. But she's part of the Top 1%.

On the 12th December, The Guardian published an article entitled ‘If you want to understand the Gilets Jaunes you have to leave Paris’. The article had little by way of analysis, devoting itself to a standard ‘look at me I live in France’ one up man-ship. The ostensible topic, the Gilets Jaunes and questions concerning why now, who and where – surely the key questions – were largely ignored or under-developed.

I too live in France, about 800 kilometres from Paris: in South West France. My department is one of the poorest in the country. Moreover, even within this department, the area where I reside is backward in a developmental and progressivist sense: there are no motorways, the towns are little more than villages, there is little by the way of hospitals, work or facilities and, despite its fantastic natural beauty in the shade of the Pyrenees, the towns display an obvious air of poverty, unemployment and civic decay.

Over 50 people were detained on Saturday during the Yellow Vest rally in Paris, media reported citing the police.

According to BFM TV, as of 06:00 p.m. local time (17:00 GMT) the police detained 52 protesters.

The protesters gathered at the Place de la Republique, where the Yellow Night action will take place. The police had to use tear gas as a result of clashes with activists.

France Info broadcaster reported that about 69,000 people took part in Yellow Vest rallies across France on Saturday, including 4,000 protesters in Paris alone. Last week, 84,000 protesters participated in the rallies in the country with 7,000 in the capital.

French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner condemned the violence in Paris.

"I resolutely condemn the violence and destruction conducted on Saturday both in Paris and in the province by hooligans in yellow vests," Castaner said on Twitter.

France’s yellow vest movement kept up pressure on President Emmanuel Macron with mainly peaceful marches and scattered skirmishes Saturday, its 11th straight weekend action despite internal divisions and growing worries about protest violence.

Multiple anti-government protests took place in Paris and other cities, centered on Macron policies seen as favoring the rich. France deployed about 80,000 police officers to patrol the events and to disperse trouble.

A few cars were set ablaze in the Normandy town of Evreux. In Paris, crowds gathered at the columned headquarters of France’s lower house of parliament. Police used tear gas on demonstrators at the iconic Bastille Plaza who hurled items within reach.

Protests have hit the streets of French cities for the 11th weekend in a row. In Paris, the rallies were yet again marred with violence and clashes ahead of the very first nocturnal Yellow Vest demonstration in the city.

Saturday’s protest in Paris began uneventful, giving hope of a non-violent demonstration for a change. However, tensions later escalated in the center of the French capital at Bastille Square, with protesters and police engaging in a tense standoff that continued after the sunset.

Venezuela's foreign minister has blasted a European ultimatum to hold elections within eight days as 'childlike'.

Jorge Arreaza insisted that Nicolas Maduro remained the legitimate president despite pressure from Britain, France, Spain, Germany and the US.

'Europe is giving us eight days? Where do you get that you have the power to establish a deadline or an ultimatum to a sovereign people,' Arreaza told the Security Council. 'It's almost childlike.'

"Yellow Jacket" protesters have actually commenced a BANK RUN against banks in France today.

Hundreds are lined up outside bank branches and Automated Teller Machines pulling out their money.

This effort was first put forth as an idea about two weeks ago, but nothing much seemed to come of it. Today, that changed.

Videos are now surfacing on Social Media showing people lined up outside banks, and taking money out. The "run" has commenced.

Former U.S. diplomat Elliott Abrams will lead U.S. efforts on Venezuela, where Washington has recognized an opposition leader as the legitimate president, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday.

“Elliott will be a true asset to our mission to help the Venezuelan people fully restore democracy and prosperity to their country,” Pompeo said in announcing Abrams’ appointment.

He said Abrams would accompany him to the United Nations on Saturday for a Security Council meeting on Venezuela where the U.S. will press other countries to support opposition leader Juan Guaido as the country’s interim head of state.

The United Nations Human Rights Office announced yesterday it is beginning an investigation into the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

In a statement, the UN said that an independent panel would seek to establish “the nature and extent of states’ and individuals’ responsibilities for the killing”.

The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnes Callamard, said she would travel to Turkey next week to head an “independent international inquiry” into Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October.

British barrister Helena Kennedy and Duarte Nuno Vieira, a pathology expert and professor at the department of legal and forensic medicine at Coimbra University, Portugal, are among the team. Along with Callamard, they are to visit Turkey between 28 January and 3 February and plan to report to the UN Human Rights Council in June.

Callamard said that the findings will be raised at the UN rights office on 19 June.

Putting a new face to the Venezuelan opposition then immediately allowed for all sorts of anti-Maduro actors use Guaidó as their man to rally around.

So now that there is a new imperial point-man inside Venezuela the real question is, what happens next?

There are two likely outcomes to the rise of Guaidó, one of which is contingent on him succeeding and the other which would be another complete failure for the imperialists.

Guaidó launches his campaign today following several days or organizing protesters at rallies in Caracas. The protests have already started to turn violent as of this writing with at least four dead and the opposition calling for the military to “rise up” against the Bolivarian government.

From 2017, the Trump Administration has been angling for regime change in Venezuela. Back during his tenure as CIA Director, Mike Pompeo was talking about trying to orchestrate such a “transition” of power.

This week, President Maduro’s power began to face a serious challenge. Following calls from Pompeo’s State Department, opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself interim president. The hawkish parts of the Trump Administration are only too eager to embrace this, and are looking to aggressively back the change.

Backing Guaido means open efforts to undermine Maduro, and that seems to be the near-term direction for the administration. John Bolton says that the main focus right now is on figuring out a way to ensure that all money from Venezuelan oil exports goes directly to Guaido. Bolton said this was only consistent with US recognition of him as the legitimate government of Venezuela.

Russia warned that the attempted US coup attempt, which was later backed by the right-wing governments of Brazil, Colombia, and Canada, would result in bloodshed if further actions were taken. Kremlin spokesmen Dmitry Peskov stated said outside interference in the country were “unacceptable” and that talk of US military actions was “dangerous”.

Educated at the CIA-infested George Washington University, Guaido only became president of the National Assembly of Venezuela on January 5th. He immediately claimed that Maduro was not Venezuela’s President and worked to incite rebellion within the military.

Maria Iris Varela Rangel, a leader in Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela, Tweeted of the sedition, “Guaido: I have already gotten your jail cell ready with the right uniform, and I hope you name your cabinet quickly to know who will keep you company, you stupid kid”.

At least 25,000 people demonstrated throughout France demanding fiscal justice and President Emmanuel Macron to step down. Clashes broke out in Paris as yellow vest protesters approached the National Assembly. According to police reports, 103 people were arrested in the capital city.

A group of French Yellow Vests has announced it would put forth a list of candidates for the upcoming European Parliament elections. Yet the move has attracted a wave of criticism from their fellow protesters.

The Citizens’ Initiative Rally (RIC) announced its decision to field a group of candidates for the upcoming May elections on Wednesday, unveiling first 10 names. The list is to be expanded, as the group plans to get 69 more candidates on it.

“The citizen movement… has shown the need to transform the anger into a political project capable of giving answers to the French people who have supported it,” the group said in a statement.

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe announced in late November that France would raise university fees for students coming from outside the European Union.

Teachers and students take to the streets of the French capital again marching against planned educational reforms by the government of French President Emmanuel Macron.

In December, French students have already gathered in Paris to rally against higher university fees for non-EU citizens coming to study in France.

Oklahoma lawmakers have filed a host of bills that seek to crack down on the methods educators employed to stage a statewide walkout and Capitol protest last spring.

Proposed measures range from criminal penalties for disrupting the Legislature to the mandatory loss of pay and teacher certification for those who strike or shut down schools to resolve differences with state leaders.

At its peak, the two-week teacher walkout in April had more than 500,000 students out of school — about two-thirds of the state’s student population.

The Oklahoma Legislature had just scrambled to pass teacher raises, but teachers walked off the job anyway in protest of the effects on students of Oklahoma’s nation-leading state funding cuts over the last decade.

German Yellow Vest activists protested Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel signing a treaty which aims to bring together the economic and defence policies of France and Germany in a prototype “Sovereign Europe”.
Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron signed the expansion of the 1963 French-German reconciliation Élysée treaty in Aachen, Germany, on Tuesday.

The treaty proposes to integrate aspects of France and Germany, including merging public transport networks and utilities in border regions, creating a common economic area, and developing shared social and political fields, according to Euractiv.

Doctors, activists and others are sounding the alarm over the number of serious injuries suffered by Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement activists at the hands of police during the past several weeks.

The French Interior Ministry has claimed that in the first nine weeks of the Yellow Vest protests around 1,800 protesters and 1,000 police officers have been injured but have not separated out those with serious injuries, L’Express reports.

Doctors in France’s emergency rooms say that some of the injuries have been extremely serious, blaming the police use of “flash-ball” shots which have led to some of the most serious injuries, including at least four protestors, two of them women, who have lost an eye and suffered some form of disfigurement.

Populist firebrand and niece of Rassemblement National (National Rally) leader Marine Le Pen, Marion Maréchal, compared the French Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) protestors to supporters of Britain leaving the European Union.

The former French MP spoke to a packed crowd of 500 people at the prestigious Oxford Union earlier this week and made a 20-minute speech calling for the formation of a new “elite” who understand the needs of regular people, saying politicians need to “reconnect with the people,” La Libre reports.

“Yellow jackets are very similar to your Brexiteers,” the 29-year-old said, adding: “We are in the midst of a populist movement. Behind the word populist, there is the word people, people who have been abandoned, people who are not represented.”

Two days ago, we could not confirm a widely shared claim the British press had gotten a D-Notice ordering a clamp on any coverage of the Yellow Vest movement in France. But what there is no doubt of, is the prevalence of such D-Notice orders – media gag orders which prohibit or greatly direct the coverage of certain matters of public interest, normally covered by ‘free’ media, but in fact we find something rather ominous and indeed subversive to the work of independent media.

A new fuel tax last November sent the French into the streets wearing yellow vests, but so far, Germany doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. Berlin has published proposals for meeting EU climate change reduction goals, and among them are a fuel tax starting in 2023, a speed limit on the Autobahn, lifting Germany’s exemption on taxes for diesel fuel cars, and quotas for electric and hybrid vehicles.

Potential flash points abound. The Autobahn is about the only place that the normally reserved Germans can let loose, not to mention that studies on how much carbon emissions will be cut by enforcing a speed limit are fairly unimpressive and inconclusive. As for electric vehicle quotas, one can only imagine a car shopper pointing at the shiny new BMW: “wunderbar!” only to be met with a resigned sigh from the salesperson: “Actually sir, may I…strongly…‘suggest’ you buy that shoddy, overpriced hybrid over there?”

Venezuela’s government said on Monday it had suppressed a military revolt after a group of officers stole weapons and kidnapped several officials, as a video posted online showed a sergeant demanding the removal of President Nicolas Maduro.

Some two dozen officers attacked a National Guard outpost in the Caracas neighborhood of Cotiza, a kilometer (0.6 mile) from the presidential Miraflores palace, where they met “firm resistance,” the government said. Witnesses reported hearing gunshots at about 3 a.m. (0700 GMT).

Protesters later burned trash and a car outside the outpost, where the 25 officers were arrested, in a sign of growing tensions following Maduro’s inauguration to a second term that governments around the world have called illegitimate.