What happened
Hundreds of thousands of people joined strikes and marches across France yesterday to protest looming government budget cuts. Teachers, rail workers, pharmacists and hospital staff walked off the job, while students blocked schools and highways. Unions demanded more funding for public services, higher taxes on the wealthy and the reversal of pension reforms that extended working years. The CGT union claimed that one million demonstrators took part, although government authorities put the figure at half that number.

Who said what
“The anger is immense, and so is the determination,” declared CGT leader Sophie Binet, insisting that “it’s the streets that must decide the budget.”

France’s deficit last year was nearly twice the EU’s 3% limit, but “as much as he wants to reduce that”, new French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu, who is reliant on other parties to push through legislation, “will face a battle to gather parliamentary support”, said France 24. His predecessor François Bayrou was toppled in parliament just last week after putting forward a €44 billion (£38 billion) austerity plan.

What next?
Lecornu has pledged to consult with unions “in the coming days”. Politicians on the left have called for tax rises rather than austerity.

What happened
The UK’s top broadcasters are urging the government to protect them from global streamers. Bosses of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 argue that their duty to “serve the British people” sets them apart from platforms such as Amazon, Disney and YouTube, and warn that their channels face extinction without “bold intervention”. They have called for further tax credits, sustainable funding for the BBC and regulation of commercial peers.

Who said what
We are “engines of economic growth”, the group said in a statement, claiming that public service broadcasters could “add a further £10 billion to the UK economy by 2035”. The broadcasters point to the risk that “global online platforms, “driven by profit, not purpose”, will come to “dominate our cultural landscape”, and assert that the need for action is “urgent”.

Last year YouTube overtook ITV to become the UK’s second-most-watched service, according to broadcasting regulator Ofcom.

What next?
The government will publish initial proposals next month regarding the BBC’s 2028 charter renewal. The suggestion is that “there will be implications for all the public service broadcasters”, said The Times, and “some speculation” that mergers may be considered.

We often wonder whether there are aliens on other planets, but what if we ourselves are aliens on the planet that we call home?

Panspermia, the “controversial” theory that life “began elsewhere in space” and was “delivered to the Earth on comets and asteroids”, is gaining new traction, according to BBC Science Focus.

New analysis of asteroid rocks brought back to the Earth by Japanese and Nasa-led space missions suggests the presence of some of the building blocks of life – which could mean that those “same building blocks”, and “perhaps even primitive microbial life”, could have been delivered to the Earth on other asteroids or comets billions of years ago, said BBC Science Focus.

Scientists examining the rock samples have found carbon, ammonia, salts, 14 of the 20 amino acids needed to make proteins and the “basic constituents of DNA and RNA”.

Of course “just having the right conditions and ingredients” for life “doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily create life”, but the findings will still gladden the hearts of believers in panspermia.

The origin of those first life-delivering rocks could have been a nearby planet like Mars, or somewhere light years away. And, if that was the case, the potential consequences are huge – because if it happened here, it has probably happened on other planets, too.

But even if the panspermia theory turns out to be true, it doesn’t answer the big question, said New Scientist, because it “simply relocates the problem of how life got going”.