MOSCOW — Russian police cracked down fiercely Saturday on demonstrators in central Moscow, beating some people and arresting more than 1,000 who were protesting the exclusion of opposition candidates from the ballot for Moscow city council. Police also stormed into a TV station broadcasting the protest.

Police wrestled with protesters around the mayor’s office, sometimes charging into the crowd with their batons raised. State news agencies Tass and RIA-Novosti cited police as saying 1,074 were arrested over the course of the protests, which lasted more than seven hours.

Along with the arrests of the mostly young demonstrators, several opposition activists who wanted to run for the council were arrested throughout the city before the protest. Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, was sentenced Wednesday to 30 days in jail for calling an unauthorized protest.

The protesters, who police said numbered about 3,500, shouted slogans including “Russia will be free!” and..

PARIS — France is pushing ahead with a landmark tax on tech giants like Google and Facebook — despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats of retaliatory tariffs on French wine.

After Trump slammed the “foolishness” of the tax in a tweet Friday and promised reciprocal action, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said “France will implement” it anyway.

According to Le Maire’s office, he added, “the universal taxation of digital activity is a challenge that concerns us all.” He said the tax is meant as a temporary measure pending negotiations on an international tax deal.

The 3% tax, which went into force this week, mainly concerns companies that use consumer data to sell online advertising.

It’s designed to stop multinationals from avoiding taxes by setting up European headquarters in low-tax EU countries. Currently, companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Airbnb and Uber pay very little tax on their significant business in countries like France.

The Trump administrat..

ROME — Two American teenagers were jailed in Rome on Saturday as authorities carry out a murder investigation in the killing of an Italian police officer.

A detention order issued by prosecutors was shown on Italian state broadcaster RAI, naming the suspects as Gabriel Christian Natale Hjorth and Finnegan Lee Elder. The detention order didn’t give their ages, but says they were both born in San Francisco in 2000. Police earlier said they were 19.

Prosecutors said in the order that Elder is the main suspect, accusing him of repeatedly stabbing Carabinieri paramilitary policeman Mario Cerciello Rega, 35, who was investigating the theft of a bag after a drug deal gone wrong in Rome. Natale Hjorth is accused of using his bare hands to strike the officer’s partner, who wasn’t seriously injured in the attack.

Both suspects were also being investigated for attempted extortion. Elder’s lawyer, Francesco Codini, said his client exercised his right not to respond to questions during a detenti..

Police fired round after round of tear gas to disperse tens of thousands of demonstrators who defied an official ban and flooded Hong Kong’s residential town of Yuen Long Saturday, bringing their months-long pro-democracy protests to the doorstep of a divided suburb that was the site of bloody mob violence against activists early this week.

The ordinarily quiet cluster of villages near the China border became a flashpoint in the city’s spiraling crisis last Sunday after a mob of suspected gangsters attacked demonstrators, journalists and passersby at a mass transit station in the most barbaric episode of protest-related violence since the unrest began in early June. Police were accused of turning a blind eye as they ran amok, a charge officials denied.

Dressed mainly in black shirts, yellow hard hats and face masks, the de facto uniform of the city’s protest movement, a massive crowd turned out to vent their anger over perceived police inaction during the assault, carried out in two..

Boris Johnson became the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister this week. The former London mayor and foreign secretary assumed the U.K.’s premiership with a mandate to lead the U.K. out of the E.U. He has promised to secure a better Brexit deal with Brussels than his predecessor, Theresa May. He has also promised to pull the U.K. out of the E.U. by the October 31 deadline, deal or no.

Why It Matters:

Because the UK is heading into the biggest peacetime political crisis in generations, and the person leading his country into the great unknown must corral a British public and political class that has never fundamentally agreed on what form Brexit should take—Hard Brexit, Soft Brexit, No-Deal Brexit or anything in between.

In Boris Johnson, that task has now fallen to someone who can charitably be described as Britain’s most divisive politician. Johnson himself has taken a hardline stance on Brexit, which he needed to do in order to win over the Conservative party membership and become Pri..

Airstrikes in Syria over the last 10 days have killed more than 100 civilians, according to the U.N., which has criticized the “apparent international indifference” in response to the escalating violence. The death toll includes at least 26 children.

The Syrian government, backed by the Russian air force, said the increases in attacks on Idlib and areas in northwest Syria, the last remaining major anti-government stronghold, was due to violations of a truce by jihadists with links to al-Qaeda, the BBC reports.

The latest offensive against the rebel enclave began at the end of April, since then the U.N. has documented the deaths of at least 450 civilians, including those recently killed.

The U.N High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet condemned the Syrian government, under President Bashar al-Assad, and its allies for the “latest relentless campaign of airstrikes” in a forceful statement, saying they have “continued to hit medical facilities, schools and other civilian i..