French Prime Minister Michel Barnier has been ousted in a no-confidence vote just three months into his term, after lawmakers on the left and the right united to plunge the country into deeper political instability.

A total of 331 out of 577 lawmakers voted against Barnier’s fragile government, seizing their opportunity to topple the veteran centrist after his attempt to ram through part of his government’s annual budget on Monday.

His is the first French government to be defeated in a no-confidence motion since 1962, and Barnier is now set to become France’s shortest-serving prime minister in history.

Barnier’s cabinet is now expected to serve in a caretaker capacity until French President Emmanuel Macron names new leadership.

But that will prove a delicate task, with the increasingly vulnerable president forced to appease lawmakers on both extremes of French politics.

Macron had appointed Barnier to lead a minority government after a snap election, called by the president in the summer, split France’s parliament into three factions, each well short of a majority.

The situation had immediately appeared untenable, and it collapsed at the first major hurdle on Monday, when Barnier was forced to use a risky constitutional mechanism that bypassed a vote in the legislature on his 2025 budget.

That allowed rival lawmakers on the left, who had long vowed to bring him down, to call a confidence motion in response, and the far-right National Rally supported the motion to see it through on Wednesday.

Pleading his case during Wednesday’s debate in the National Assembly, Barnier told lawmakers he was “not afraid,” but warned that removing him would make “everything more difficult.”

But he was forced to watch as lawmaker after lawmaker called for his ouster.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Rally, said during the debate that Barnier’s “stubborn adherence to dogma and doctrine prevented him from making the slightest concession, which would have avoided this outcome.”

The far-right leader has been the chief antagonist throughout the Macron era, challenging him in two presidential elections and now dispatching the prime minister he handpicked to settle a simmering crisis.

“It’s for his conscience to tell him if he can sacrifice public welfare and France’s future to his ego,” Le Pen said of Macron during the debate, as she sought to quickly turn scrutiny toward the president.

A leader of one of Georgia’s opposition parties has been detained by police after he was beaten unconscious by officers in the capital Tbilisi, his party said Wednesday, in the wake of fierce protests in the former Soviet republic.

The Coalition for Change party – which comprises four opposition groups – published video on social media showing Nika Gvamaria being carried limp by several men down a street in broad daylight.

“They were quite aggressive. They took away everything,” she said. Shortly after Gvamaria arrived, police turned on him. “He was severely beaten by the police,” Khoshtaria said.

The group said Gvamaria was then “dragged by the police and thrown into a detention car” outside the Droa party’s office.

The unrest in the country was sparked by the ruling Georgian Dream party’s decision last week to suspend talks to join the European Union. Tensions had been simmering since a disputed election in October. Georgian Dream – already 12 years in office – claimed victory, but observers say the vote was neither free nor fair. The European Parliament has called for a re-run.

Following the vote, Georgia’s opposition parties said they would boycott parliament. Several opposition politicians have taken part in six nights of protests since Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said he was halting talks with Brussels.

The protests have been met with a brutal police response. Georgia’s human rights ombudsman on Tuesday accused police of inflicting torture on people arrested during the protests. Georgian Young Lawyers Association, a watchdog, said most individuals detained on Monday night had been subject to violence “both during and after their arrest.”

Thirteen women from the Philippines have been convicted on human trafficking-related charges for acting as surrogates in Cambodia for a ring selling babies to foreigners for cash.

The women were each sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty of selling, buying or exchanging a person for cross-border transfer, the Kandal Provincial Court said late Monday.

According to the verdict, two of the four years in prison were suspended, meaning they won’t have to be served unless they’re found guilty of another crime.

The women are held at a police hospital outside Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, and authorities have previously said they would not have to serve prison time until after giving birth.

The women can appeal the verdict, said court spokesperson So Sarin. He refused to comment on how many were still pregnant, or what would happen to the babies after they have given birth.

Developing countries have been popular for surrogacy because costs are much lower compared to the United States and Australia, where surrogate services could cost around $150,000.

The Cambodia case was unusual because surrogates normally are employed in their own countries, not transported elsewhere.

Authorities have said the business that recruited the women was based in Thailand, and that their food and accommodation in Cambodia was organized there.

The women were arrested in late September in a raid on a villa in Kandal province, where authorities found 20 Filipinos and four Vietnamese.

At the time the women were charged in October, Cambodia’s Interior Ministry said the ringleaders had not been identified. It said, however, that it considered the women offenders who conspired with the organizers to act as surrogates and then sell the babies for money, rather than victims.

Eleven of the women who were not pregnant were deported, and the 13 Filipinos were charged under a provision on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation. The law was updated in 2016 to ban commercial surrogacy after Cambodia became a popular destination for foreigners seeking women to give birth to their children.

Cambodia has a bad reputation for human trafficking, especially in connection with online scams in which foreigners recruited for work under false pretenses are kept in conditions of virtual slavery and help perpetrate criminal fraud online against targets in many countries.

The surrogacy business boomed in Cambodia after it was put under tight restrictions in neighboring Thailand, as well as in India and Nepal.

In July 2017, a Cambodian court sentenced an Australian woman and two Cambodian associates to 1 1/2 years in prison for providing commercial surrogacy services.

Amnesty International on Wednesday said that it had gathered “sufficient evidence to believe” that Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people – a charge the Israeli government has vehemently denied.

The 296-page report details evidence gathered over nine months, outlining numerous instances in which Amnesty says Israeli forces and government authorities have committed three of five acts prohibited under the United Nations’ Genocide Convention – including the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life “calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.”

“Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard said in a statement.

Amnesty said that Israel is responsible for extensive and often indiscriminate aerial and ground attacks, widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, the forced mass displacement of Palestinians across the besieged enclave, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid.

“There is only one reasonable inference that can be drawn from the evidence presented: genocidal intent has been part and parcel of Israel’s conduct in Gaza since 7 October 2023, including its military campaign,” Amnesty’s report states.

Israel launched the war in Gaza after Hamas-led militants carried out an attack on southern Israel on October 7 last year, killing 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage. In a little over a year, more than 44,000 people in Gaza have been killed and 104,000 injured as a result of Israel’s ongoing military onslaught, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Israeli government lawyers, speaking earlier this year at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, rejected what they called “grossly distorted” accusations of genocide leveled against it by South Africa. The lawyers argued that the convention was adopted only to “address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional circumstances,” and was “not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities” on civilians during warfare. It called South Africa’s accusation “a concerted and cynical effort to pervert the meaning of the term ‘genocide’ itself.”

The report is the latest in a string of accusations over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Over the weekend, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’lon – who served for three decades with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) – described the Israeli military’s actions in northern Gaza as “ethnic cleansing.” A United Nations Special Committee warned in November that Israel’s conduct in Gaza was “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” And Human Rights Watch said last month that the forced mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza amounted to a war crime and a crime against humanity. The military rejected those accusations and said its forces act within international law.

What constitutes a violation of the UN Genocide Convention?

The 1948 UN Genocide Convention, which Israel ratified in 1950, says that genocide has occurred when any of five prohibited acts are are carried out with the intent “to destroy in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

The organization said it believes Israel’s acts were committed with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. As evidence for that, it cited calls by Israeli military and government officials for the targeting of Palestinians in Gaza using language that “equated Palestinian civilians with the enemy to be destroyed.” It also noted the use of indiscriminate weapons within densely populated areas, and actions taken by Israeli authorities to obstruct or prevent humanitarian aid from reaching the besieged enclave.

The investigation – which focuses on Israel’s actions between October 7, 2023, and July 2024 – examines the repeated and consistent targeting of residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in densely populated areas, including apartment buildings, religious sites, schools and markets.

The Israeli military has said that it makes “significant efforts to mitigate harm to civilians,” and that “throughout the conflict, Hamas cynically exploits the civilian environment.”

While Amnesty says that it recognizes that Hamas has put Palestinian civilians in danger by operating from, or in the vicinity of, densely populated residential areas, the organization asserts that this does did not relieve Israel from its own obligations under international humanitarian law to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.

The human rights organization also noted the use of explosive weapons with wide area effects, such as US-manufactured Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), in some cases without warning or between the hours of 11pm and 4am, when residents would likely be sleeping.

“Even where Israeli forces targeted what could be considered military objectives, Israel’s use of explosive weapons with wide area effects, especially aerial bombs of 250 pounds to 2,000 pounds, on residential buildings and in the proximity of hospitals in one of the world’s most densely populated areas likely constitute indiscriminate and/or disproportionate attacks,” Amnesty said.

In a detailed report verifying fatalities in Gaza in the first six months of the conflict, the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) said it “found close to 70 per cent to be children and women, indicating a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law” on the part of the Israeli military.

It added that of the confirmed deaths, 80% were killed in residential buildings or similar housing, of which 44% were children and 26% were women.

In a series of case studies examined by Amnesty, the human rights organization highlighted a deadly Israeli strike on a residential building in Rafah in December 2023, which killed at least 30 civilians, including 11 children. Among the fatalities was three-month-old Ayla Nasman, who was killed alongside her mother, grandparents, and two siblings – aged just five and four. Ayla’s father, Ahmad, survived the attack. He said it took him four days to retrieve Ayla’s body from the rubble, and that he found his five-year-old daughter, Arwa, had been decapitated by the blast.

“While Amnesty International’s investigation has focused only on a small fraction of Israel’s aerial attacks, they are indicative of a pattern of repeated direct or indiscriminate attacks by the Israeli military in Gaza over the nine-month period under review,” the organization said.

The report also refers to the staggering number of injuries recorded over the course of the war, which Amnesty said meets the UN convention’s criteria of causing serious bodily or mental harm. According to the UN’s World Health Organization, approximately 22,500 people were estimated to have suffered life-changing injuries requiring long-term rehabilitation by late July, with more than 3,000 limb amputations reported. Recent data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health places the total number of injuries recorded at over 100,000.

As the humanitarian situation in Gaza grows more desperate, Amnesty International says Israel has brought the Palestinian population within the enclave “to the brink of collapse,” noting the “disastrous conditions” within the strip, caused by Israel’s destruction of critical infrastructure.

Evidence featured in the report explores the deepening hunger crisis civilians in Gaza are facing, with obstructions to vital humanitarian aid reaching the strip. According to the UN, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza was critically low in November, with the number of food trucks received last month equating to just 36% of the monthly average since 2023.

Amnesty’s report also examines the forced mass displacement of Palestinians in “unsafe and inhumane conditions,” with civilians repeatedly ordered by the Israeli military to evacuate to so-called “humanitarian zones,” which offer little in the way of shelter and have repeatedly been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

“Israel has forcibly displaced 90% of Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants, many of them multiple times, into ever-shrinking, ever-changing pockets of land that lacked basic infrastructure, forcing people to live in conditions that exposed them to a slow and calculated death.”

In a statement on Wednesday, Callamard said the organization’s damning findings “must serve as a wake-up call” to the international community, warning that states who continue to transfer arms to Israel could be at risk of becoming complicit in genocide.

“All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end,” Callamard said. “This is genocide. It must stop now.”

The Israeli military on Wednesday said that a February strike on Khan Younis in southern Gaza may have led Hamas militants to execute six hostages.

The bodies of those six male hostages were recovered in late August. Two days later, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that all of them had been shot, but it could not definitively say whether it was the cause of death. The slain hostages were Yoram Metzger,  Alexander Dancyg,  Avraham Munder, Chaim Peri, Nadav Popplewell, and Yagev Buchshtab.

“It is highly probable that their deaths were related to the strike near the location where they were held,” the military said in a Wednesday statement on the investigation.

Speaking at a press briefing about an investigation into the hostages’ deaths, an IDF official said the Israeli military struck “a terror target” on February 14 in Khan Younis, but did not know that hostages were being held nearby. “The investigation did not find anything wrong with this attack, in the planning process or the execution,” the official said.

After a forensic examination and other investigations, the military now believes that “the most plausible scenario” is that the hostages and their guards survived the initial effects of that strike but that the strike may have led militants to shoot the six hostages. The guards themselves subsequently died, the military official said, from “a secondary effect” of the strike, such a lack of oxygen in the tunnel where they were living.

IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari later raised the possibility of the aftermath of the strike killing the hostages. He said that while the most likely way the hostages died was at the hands of militants following the February attack, with the militants then dying from “secondary effects of the strike,” there were also other possible explanations.

“Another possibility is that the hostages were killed by secondary effects along with the terrorists and subsequently shot by other terrorists who arrived later,” he said, adding, “a less probable possibility is that the hostages were killed before the strike.”

Hagari said that due to the amount of time that passed from when the hostages were killed to when the forensic exams took place, “it is not possible to definitively determine whether the hostages were killed by gunfire or as a result of exposure to the aftermath of the strike.”

“Operational lessons from this incident have been incorporated to minimize risks to hostages in the future,” he said.

Munder, 79, Metzger, 80, and Peri, 80, were all residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz, near the Gaza border, where they were captured during Hamas’ October 7 attacks, according to statements from the kibbutz.

Popplewell, who was 51 when abducted, and Buchshtab, 35, were taken from Kibbutz Nirim, the kibbutz said in a statement.

Israeli soldiers on August 31 found the bodies of another six hostages, this time in Rafah. Hamas said that it had executed them because it believed Israeli soldiers may have been closing in.

Another hostage recovered

As the six hostages’ families were presented with the findings of the investigation surrounding their deaths, the military announced on Wednesday that it recovered the body of yet another hostage.

Israel recovered 38-year-old dual German-Israeli citizen Itay Svirsky’s body from Gaza, after he was killed by his captors, the Israeli military and security agency Shin Bet announced.

“In a special operation, the body of the abductee Itay Svirsky was recovered, who was kidnapped on October 7, 2023, from Kibbutz Be’eri and murdered in captivity by Hamas terrorists in January 2024,” the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said, adding that the operation was carried out by Israel’s military and security agency.

“Our heart is torn by the heavy loss of the Svirsky family, who also lost Itay’s parents, Orit and the late Rafi, who were murdered in the murderous attack by Hamas,” it added.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum said Svirsky was laid to rest in Israel, and on behalf of his family, requested the public not to share images of him from the Hamas video that was distributed in January.

In January, Hamas released a video showing clips of three hostages – Noa Argamani, Svirsky and Yossi Sharabi – speaking to the camera, ending with a caption saying, “Tomorrow, we will inform you of their fate.” The next day, another video appeared to show the dead bodies of Svirsky and Sharabi. In the video, Argamani said both men had been killed by Israeli bombing.

This brings the number of hostages currently held – dead and alive – to 100, of which 96 were taken on October 7.

President Yoon Suk Yeol announced the decree – which only lasted a few hours before being struck down by lawmakers who forced their way past soldiers into parliament – in an extraordinary late-night television address late Tuesday night

“I replied, ‘That’s a deepfake. It has to be a deepfake. There’s no way that’s real,’” he said, referring to the term for fake audio and video created with artificial intelligence.

“But when I watched the video, the president was indeed declaring martial law – yet I thought to myself, ‘This is fabricated, it’s fake.’”

The news was especially stunning given South Korea has spent the last four decades shaping itself into a vibrant democracy with frequent protests and protected freedoms – a hard-won victory after a long history of bloody authoritarian rule.

In the last few days, after Yoon backed down and lifted the decree early Wednesday, protesters have demanded the president’s removal while opposition parties including the DP begin impeachment proceedings.

Lee, who was Yoon’s main rival in the 2022 presidential election and is himself embroiled in multiple legal difficulties after being indicted on criminal charges, has led the impeachment efforts.

On Tuesday night, within an hour of Yoon announcing martial law, Lee rushed to the parliament in Seoul – live-streaming as he climbed over a fence to enter the building as lawmakers scrambled to vote against the decree. The video has since gone viral, viewed tens of millions of times on the social platform X.

Parliament could vote on impeachment as soon as Saturday. If it reaches the two-thirds majority to pass, it will then go to one of the country’s highest courts for further approval.

However, Yoon’s ruling People Power Party is working to block the move.

Multiple members of Yoon’s party joined their political opponents in blocking the martial law decree during the remarkable late-night scenes inside parliament.

But party leader Han Dong-hoon said in a briefing Thursday he would oppose the impeachment because it could cause “unprepared chaos,” though he emphasized he was “not defending President Yoon’s unconstitutional martial law,”

Meanwhile, many lawmakers haven’t dared leave the parliament building – including opposition member Kang Sun-woo, who has been there since Tuesday night.

Questions now swirl around the future of Yoon’s presidency, his party’s position in government, and how this could reshape the country’s political landscape of a major Asian economy and key US regional ally.

Lee, a human rights lawyer turned former provincial governor, only lost the 2022 election by a razor-thin margin – but neither candidate was particularly popular. Both men were mired in scandal, and have been dogged by legal cases and allegations in the years since.

Lee now faces several trials including for bribery and charges related to a $1 billion property development scandal, Reuters reported. In November, he was indicted for personal misuse of public funds, and separately convicted and sentenced for violating election law.

Lee has denied the charges and said he would appeal.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol has accepted the resignation of his Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun amid growing criticism over the leader’s short-lived declaration of martial law.

The defense ministry said South Korea’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia Choi Byung-hyuk has been nominated as the new minister.

Kim had submitted his resignation on Wednesday, just moments after South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party said it had filed a motion to impeach him.

The chief of the president’s own People Power Party had also called for the removal of the defense minister for recommending martial law.

Earlier, Kim accepted responsibility for ordering troops to enact martial law, saying in a text message sent to reporters: “All soldiers who performed their duties in relation to the emergency martial law (were acting on) the order of the minister, and all responsibilities lie within myself.”

In the same text, Kim said he felt sorry for “causing concerns and confusion to the people.”

President Yoon is also facing growing calls to step down after he declared – then retracted – the martial law decree.

Six opposition parties on Wednesday submitted a bill calling for Yoon’s impeachment. The motion is expected to be voted on by lawmakers on either Friday at midnight or Saturday at midnight.

The main opposition Democratic Party said it has begun formalizing plans for a treason charge against the president.

When Yoon declared martial law in a surprise late-night address on Tuesday, he accused the main opposition party of sympathizing with North Korea and of anti-state activities, citing a motion by the opposition to impeach top prosecutors and reject a government budget proposal.

Lawmakers rejected Yoon’s decree just hours after he announced it, with 190 of the 300 members of parliament voting to overturn the measure.

Yoon then backtracked on his short-lived decree in the early hours of Wednesday local time and withdrew the troops deployed to carry out the order.

This is a breaking news story. More to come.