Seven Lights Daily Brief - October 25, 2026
· Episode runtime 11 min 17 s
About this episode
Serbia votes as Vucic's party faces a student movement in its most contested election in fourteen years. More than 1,300 are arrested as cost of living protests across France turn to clashes. Israel closes all West Bank crossings on its own election day as the Hebron operation displaces about 2,000 residents. The Justice Department orders California counties to identify noncitizen voters within 48 hours, and twelve people, six of them minors, are injured in a shooting near Florida A&M University.
Today's stories
An eleven-minute briefing on the day’s five biggest stories: a watershed election in Serbia, a fourth weekend of unrest in France, the West Bank shutdown ahead of Israel’s vote, the federal-state legal fight over California’s ballots, and a homecoming weekend shooting in Tallahassee.
Stories in this episode
- Serbia Votes as Vucic’s Party Faces Challenge From Student Movement
- More Than 1,300 Arrested as Protests Across France Turn to Clashes
- Israel to Close All West Bank Land Crossings on Election Day
- Justice Department Orders California Counties to Identify Noncitizen Voters
- Twelve Injured in Shooting Near Florida A&M University on Homecoming Weekend
Transcript
From Seven Lights, this is your Daily Brief for Sunday, October twenty-fifth, two thousand and twenty-six.
Today: Serbia votes in the most contested election of a decade, with a student movement challenging the ruling populists. Across France, more than thirteen hundred people are arrested as cost of living protests turn to clashes. Israel shuts all West Bank crossings on its own election day, as a military operation in Hebron displaces thousands. In the United States, the Justice Department presses California counties over noncitizen voting claims, and a shooting near Florida A and M University leaves twelve people injured, six of them children. Five stories to carry you through the weekend, from Belgrade to Tallahassee.
Our first story takes us to Serbia, where voters went to the polls on Sunday in what has become the most uncertain parliamentary election in the fourteen years that President Aleksandar Vucic and his Serbian Progressive Party have dominated the country’s politics. Long queues formed outside polling stations as six point four million voters were eligible to choose among eighteen parties competing for two hundred and fifty seats in the National Assembly. And going into the vote, the polls placed the governing party and the main opposition force, the so called Students’ List, neck and neck.
The Students’ List grew directly out of nearly two years of student led protests. Those protests began after the collapse of a renovated canopy at the Novi Sad railway station on November first, two thousand and twenty four, in which sixteen people died. Demonstrators alleged corruption at the construction site, a flagship public project carried out with Chinese contractors. The government denied the charges, and the protests were repeatedly met with police violence and arrests. Radio Free Europe’s Balkan Service reported that authorities were accused of deploying an unlawful sonic weapon against demonstrators on March fifteenth, last year.
Mr. Vucic announced in June that he would step down and back early elections. He resigned the presidency in late September and, barred by term limits from seeking it again, is now seeking the office of prime minister, which he held from twenty fourteen until twenty seventeen. The youth movement, by contrast, has no formal leader. It has put forward candidates drawn from the professions rather than from politics. Ilija Srdanovic, a cardiologist, stands as the list’s top candidate. Students who selected the candidates said their absence of political backgrounds was a strength rather than a weakness.
Concern for the fairness of the vote shadowed the campaign. An investigation by Radio Free Europe found roughly five hundred thousand people registered to vote without a full address, raising fears of fraud. International and local monitors cited detentions, near total government control over the media, and reports of surveillance and cyberattacks against activists. The observation mission for the two thousand and twenty three parliamentary election noted an overwhelming ruling party advantage from media bias and the misuse of public office. Serbia is a candidate for European Union membership, and the bloc is watching the conduct of the vote closely. Turnout was expected to be high, which could push smaller parties below the three percent threshold required to win seats, and narrow the contest to the two leading camps. A victory for the Students’ List would resonate well beyond Serbia’s borders, coming as youth led protest movements have pressed incumbent governments elsewhere in Europe. Results were expected late Sunday.
From Serbia we turn to France, where the interior ministry says more than thirteen hundred people were arrested after hundreds of thousands marched on Saturday in protests over the rising cost of living, school funding and policing. Officials counted four hundred and ten thousand protesters nationwide, including one hundred and ten thousand in Paris. Unions put the national figure at roughly eight hundred thousand.
The fourth weekend of demonstrations was largely peaceful by day, but clashes followed into the night. Police fired tear gas and water cannon to disperse crowds in several cities, including Paris, Lyon and Toulouse. Barricades were set alight in Marseille, where authorities in the Bouches-du-Rhone region said seven businesses were looted or damaged, and demonstrators tore boards from a shopfront in Bordeaux. In Lyon, police used tear gas grenades on a crowd that had gathered in an area declared off limits by the local prefecture.
Two people were seriously injured, the interior minister, Laurent Nunez, said. A twenty year old protester in Toulouse lost fingers on one hand when an explosive went off nearby, according to the medic who treated him. A second serious injury was recorded in Clermont-Ferrand. Mr. Nunez said high risk groups had broken away from the main marches to commit acts of violence, and warned that the arrest total would likely rise.
Some seventy thousand police were deployed for a second consecutive weekend, with shops boarded up, museums closed and access to city centres restricted in Montpellier, Nantes and Toulouse. Students, workers and retirees marched side by side, expressing anger at President Emmanuel Macron over purchasing power and what demonstrators described as inadequate resources for essential services. There was also widespread discontent with the government’s ban on non union demonstrations it deemed illegitimate. Protesters in Paris said frustration over taxes and stagnant living standards had persisted since Mr. Macron took office in twenty seventeen.
The authorities had feared a repeat of the previous Saturday, when public buildings were burned, hundreds of shops were destroyed and looted, and at least twenty seven hundred people were arrested, in some of the worst disorder in France’s modern history. Officials judged that scale to have been avoided this time. The government gave no immediate sign of concessions. Unions have called for further action, and forces remained on high alert as the unrest carried into the early hours of Sunday.
Our next story comes from the Middle East, where Israel says it will close all land crossings with the West Bank on Tuesday’s parliamentary election, and bar Palestinian workers from entering Israeli communities and settlements. The military announced Sunday that the full closure would apply throughout Tuesday’s voting, and that it would enforce a ban on the entry and exit of Palestinian workers throughout the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, including industrial zones. Before the Hamas led attack of October seventh, two thousand and twenty three, more than one hundred thousand Palestinian workers held permits to enter Israel. Only a small fraction have had them restored since.
The announcement followed a Friday attack on a checkpoint near Hebron, in which two gunmen shot dead two Israeli soldiers and wounded three more before being killed. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed a heavy price, and said a military operation was under way on a scale not seen since Israel occupied the West Bank in nineteen sixty seven. Most workers will also be barred from settlements from Sunday, with exceptions for industrial zones and a limited number of other areas.
And in Hebron itself, that operation is intensifying. Israeli forces pushed into the city, demolished homes and businesses and displaced around two thousand residents, Defence Minister Israel Katz said. Mr. Katz said the displaced would not be allowed to return until the military had finished dealing with all the Hamas issues in Hebron. Footage shared online showed at least one whole street flattened. The military has cordoned off Hebron, home to some two hundred thousand Palestinians, heavily restricting movement. Israeli rights groups have criticised the demolition of the homes of suspected attackers as collective punishment.
The Palestinian Authority called for international pressure on Israel. Hebron’s mayor, Youssef al-Jaabari, said the operation was being driven by the elections, with Mr. Netanyahu and his ministers seeking the votes of the far right and the settlers. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who oversees civilian affairs in the West Bank, said he personally ordered the immediate demolition of a row of illegal structures after the shooting.
The crackdown comes as Mr. Netanyahu faces a tight re-election race against Gadi Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff, with the two polling neck and neck. On Saturday, thousands gathered in Tel Aviv at a rally organised by the October Council, a group of families of attack victims and hostages, demanding a state commission of inquiry into the failures of October seventh, two thousand and twenty three. The military said the Hebron operation would last several days, and Mr. Netanyahu suggested further action was coming.
Back in the United States, the Justice Department is escalating its campaign against alleged noncitizen voting ahead of the November midterms. Federal prosecutors sent letters to county registrars across California on Friday, demanding that local officials identify registered voters the department believes are noncitizens, and set aside and verify any corresponding ballots within forty eight hours, according to the Los Angeles County registrar and a letter obtained by The Associated Press. At least eighteen counties received the notices.
The letters warned that election officials who fail to comply risk significant federal scrutiny. The correspondence asks county officials to provide identifying information tied to ballots the federal government believes were sent to people illegally registered to vote despite being noncitizens, and to sequester any ballots whose citizenship cannot be verified. Bill Essayli, the first assistant United States attorney, said any election official who knowingly processes the ballot of a noncitizen is opening themselves to legal jeopardy.
This is the latest step in a legal fight between the state and the federal government, which has concentrated on California in its efforts to root out noncitizen voting ahead of the midterm elections. Earlier this month, the government sued Los Angeles County and the California secretary of state’s office, seeking to block the counting of votes of more than twenty thousand people it alleges are likely noncitizen voters. A hearing in that case is scheduled for Tuesday. And on Friday, the Trump administration asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule before the district judge assigned to the case decides, setting a deadline of Saturday for the lower court to act.
It is worth noting what the data shows. Cases of noncitizen voting are rare, difficult to prove, and have not been shown to change the outcome of races. California officials have disputed the federal government’s voter match methodology, arguing it sweeps in eligible citizens, including naturalised Americans, through flawed comparisons of driver licence and voter registration records. The forty eight hour deadline places county election offices, already counting mail ballots before the midterms, under direct federal pressure. The registrar in Los Angeles County, the state’s largest, said the office was reviewing the letter and its legal obligations. A ruling in the pending lawsuit could determine whether the sequestered ballots are counted at all.
And finally, a story out of Tallahassee, Florida. Twelve people, six of them under eighteen, were injured in a shooting Saturday night near Florida A and M University’s Bragg Memorial Stadium. Eleven of the twelve were struck by gunfire. Three victims sustained serious injuries, including one minor. The others were reported in stable condition. The youngest of the injured was eleven years old.
The violence unfolded at about eight o’clock in the evening at an intersection adjacent to the stadium on Perry Street, as the historically Black university marked its annual homecoming. Earlier in the evening, Florida A and M’s Rattlers had hosted the University of Arkansas dash Pine Bluff Golden Lions for the homecoming football game. Police Chief Lawrence Revell told a news conference early Sunday that preliminary information pointed to a physical altercation between two or three individuals that escalated into gunfire. He said police believed one shooter was involved, that no arrests had been made, and that no one was in custody. At least three of the shooting victims have sustained serious injuries, while nine others are in stable condition, the Tallahassee Police Department said in a statement. It is especially heartbreaking to know that children are among those injured, Chief Revell said.
NBC News reported that eleven of the twelve injured were shot. CBS News, citing police, said a fight broke out in a crowded area after the game before the shooting began. The university said on social media that the shooting took place near campus, that the campus itself remained safe, and urged members of the community to stay away from the area. The safety and security of students, faculty and staff remain the highest priority, the university said. The police violent crimes unit is investigating, and the chief asked witnesses to come forward, saying the priority is to determine what happened and why, and to bring those responsible to justice. No motive had been announced as of Sunday morning, and the investigation continued.
Those are today’s top stories from Seven Lights. Visit sevenlights.org for full coverage and additional analysis.