French President Emmanuel Macron went on television Sunday to call for "calm and order,” a day after nationwide protests over fuel prices, the cost of living and crumbling school conditions curdled into rioting and looting. He vowed to hold accountable those who, in his words, sought to bring down the republic.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard how massive this has become. Authorities put Saturday’s turnout at roughly 550,000; organizers claimed 800,000. About 2,400 people were arrested nationally, 855 of them in the Paris region, and the interior ministry said some 1,000 police officers were injured, seven of them seriously. BBC News described the weekend as one of the worst bouts of disorder in modern French history.

Rioters set fires and went after city halls. In Limoges, the 19th-century hôtel de ville was gutted and its roof collapsed. Paris police said one person died of a heart attack, and the Paris prosecutor's office is investigating. No official damage estimate has been released, and there's no full civilian injury count yet.

Macron and Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez pinned the violence on far-left activists joined by opportunistic looters. That assignment of blame is already campaign material with a presidential election next spring: Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon spent Sunday pointing at each other. President Donald Trump posted “France is burning!” and tied the unrest to immigration. French authorities have not.

What’s still unresolved is whether the disorder carried into the workweek, what the cleanup costs and whether the grievances that filled the streets—fuel, groceries, schools—get anything more than a speech. Macron has roughly six months to find out.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order late Friday waiving a fresh round of sanctions on Russia that were due to kick in two days later. On Sunday he explained himself on Truth Social: the pause, he said, is meant to keep Moscow at the negotiating table. It’s a sharp reversal, considering he signed the legislation mandating those sanctions a month earlier.

The bill is named for Sen. Lindsey Graham and targets Russian officials, banks and the so-called shadow tanker fleet moving sanctioned crude. Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed the waiver as a 60-day pause for economic analysis. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered a narrower read, saying only the diesel embargo has been lifted. Trump, meanwhile, aimed his frustration at Kyiv, saying Volodymyr Zelenskyy “doesn’t want to end this war” and blaming Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries for high fuel prices at home.

Of course, nobody’s acting like a deal is close. Ukraine launched more than 1,000 drones at Russia, hitting an oil terminal near St. Petersburg, while Russia hammered Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Zelenskyy has urged support for the sanctions Trump just shelved. So, will this last? No one knows it seems.

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China's economy grew 4.5% in the third quarter from a year earlier, beating the 4.4% expected in a Reuters poll and reversing a three-year low of 4.3% in the second quarter. The engine: exports of technological goods, which papered over a property slump that keeps getting deeper.

But if you look past the headline number, the domestic picture is more grim. September retail sales rose just 1.1%, per CNBC. Industrial output climbed 5.5%. Urban fixed asset investment fell 7.2% over nine months. Urban unemployment sat at 5.2%. Beijing has answered with targeted rate cuts, mortgage subsidies and 550 billion yuan in added local government debt quota.

Economists expect the People’s Bank of China to hold lending rates through year-end, which means the stimulus already on the table is the stimulus you get. For American businesses, they see it more as Chinese factories are still shipping, but Chinese consumers still aren’t spending. How long an export-led quarter can outrun a housing bust is the question nobody really has an answering for.