By JOHN LEICESTER, JEFFREY SCHAEFFER and SAMUEL PETREQUIN

PARIS (AP) — Protesters blocked roads, lit blazes and were met with volleys of tear gas on Wednesday in Paris and elsewhere in France, heaping pressure on President Emmanuel Macron and making new Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu ‘s first day in office a baptism of fire.

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The government announced hundreds of arrests, as demonstrations against Macron, budget cuts and other complaints spread to big cities and small towns.

Although falling short of its self-declared intention to “Block Everything,” the protest movement that started online over the summer caused widespread hot spots of disruption, defying an exceptional deployment of 80,000 police who broke up barricades and swiftly took people into custody.

Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said that a bus was set on fire in the western city of Rennes. In the southwest, fire damage to electrical cables stopped train services on one line and disrupted traffic on another, government transport authorities said.

Spreading protests

The “Bloquons Tout,” or “Block Everything,” protests, while mobilizing tens of thousands of people, nevertheless appeared less intense than previous bouts of unrest that have sporadically rocked Macron in both his first and ongoing second term as president. They included months of nationwide so-called yellow vest demonstrations against economic injustice in 2018-2019.

After his reelection in 2022, Macron also faced firestorms of anger over unpopular pension reforms and nationwide unrest and rioting in 2023 after the deadly police shooting of a teenager on Paris’ outskirts.

Still, demonstrations and sporadic clashes with riot police in Paris and elsewhere Wednesday added to a sense of crisis that has again gripped France following its latest government collapse on Monday, when Prime Minister François Bayrou lost a parliamentary confidence vote.

The protests immediately presented a challenge to Bayrou’s replacement, Lecornu, installed Wednesday.

‘Another from the right’

Groups of protesters who repeatedly tried to block Paris’ beltway during the morning rush hour were dispersed by police using tear gas. Elsewhere in the capital, protesters piled up trash cans and hurled objects at police officers. Firefighters were called out to a fire in a restaurant in the downtown Châtelet neighborhood, where thousands of protesters gathered peacefully.

In Paris, the number of arrests topped 200, police said. The Interior Ministry reported nearly 300 people taken into custody nationwide, Paris included.

Road blockades, traffic slowdowns and other protests were widely spread — from the southern port city of Marseille to Lille and Caen in the north, and Nantes and Rennes in the west to Grenoble and Lyon in the southeast. Authorities reported demonstrations in small towns, too.

Afternoon gatherings of thousands of people in central Paris were peaceful and good humored, with placards taking aim at Macron and his new prime minister.

“Lecornu, you’re not welcome,” read a placard brandished by a group of graphic design students. Another read: “Macron explosion.”

“One prime minister has just been ousted and straight away we get another from the right,” said student Baptiste Sagot, 21. “They’re trying to make working people, young students, retirees — all people in difficulty — bear all the effort instead of taxing wealth.”

A weary nation

France’s prolonged cycle of political instability, with Macron’s minority governments lurching from crisis to crisis, has fueled widespread discontent.

Paris protester Aglawen Vega, a nurse and public hospital union delegate, said anger that fueled the yellow-vest protests never went away and that she wanted to defend France’s public services from privatization.

“We’re governed by robbers,” she said. “People are suffering, are finding it harder and harder to last out the month, to feed themselves. We’re becoming an impoverished nation.”

Some criticized the disruptions.

“It’s a bit excessive,” said Bertrand Rivard, an accounting worker on his way to a meeting in Paris. “We live in a democracy and the people should not block the country because the government doesn’t take the right decisions.”

“Block Everything” gathered momentum over the summer on social media and encrypted chats, including on Telegram. Pavel Durov, its Russian-born founder now under investigation in France for alleged criminal activity on the messaging app., said he is “proud” the platform was used to organise anti-Macron rallies.

The movement’s call for a day of blockades, strikes, boycotts, demonstrations and other acts of protest came as Bayrou was preparing plans to massively slash public spending — by 44 billion euros ($51 billion) — to rein in France’s growing deficit and trillions in debts. He also proposed the elimination of two public holidays from the country’s annual calendar — which proved wildly unpopular.

Lecornu, who previously served as defense minister, now inherits the task of addressing France’s budget difficulties, facing the same political instability and widespread hostility to Macron that contributed to Bayrou’s undoing.

Macron’s governments have been on particularly shaky ground since he dissolved the National Assembly last year, triggering an unscheduled legislative election that stacked the lower house of parliament with opponents of the French president.

Spontaneous movement

“Block Everything” grew virally online with no clear identified leadership and a broad array of complaints — many targeting budget cuts, broader inequality and Macron himself.

Retailleau, a conservative who allied with Macron’s centrist camp to serve as interior minister in Bayrou’s government and is now in a caretaker role until Lecornu puts his Cabinet together, alleged Wednesday that left-wing radicals hijacked the protest movement, even though it has an apparent broad range of supporters. Appeals for non-violence accompanied its online protest calls.

Retailleau alleged that elected politicians who have backed the movement are attempting “to create a climate of insurrection in France” and he said some protesters appeared hell-bent on fighting with police.

“We have, in fact, small groups that are seasoned, mobile, often wearing masks and hoods, dressed in black, which in reality are the recognized signs, the DNA, of … extreme-left and ultra-left movements,” Retailleau said.

The spontaneity of “Block Everything” is reminiscent of the yellow vests. That movement started with workers camping out at traffic circles to protest a hike in fuel taxes, sporting high-visibility vests. It quickly spread to people across political, regional, social and generational divides angry at economic injustice and Macron’s leadership.

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, maker of weight-loss drug Wegovy, said Wednesday it would cut 9,000 jobs, 5,000 of them in Denmark, in order to strengthen the company’s focus on growth opportunities in obesity and diabetes medications.

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The restructuring, which would eliminate 11% of the company’s workforce, aimed to reduce organizational complexity and speed up decision-making as the company faces a more competitive market for obesity drugs.

The streamlining would save 8 billion Danish krone ($1.25 billion) by the end of 2026, savings that are to be redirected to diabetes and obesity, including research and development, the company said. Novo Nordisk also makes Ozempic, a diabetes drug that also can result in weight loss.

The company said implementation of the job cuts would begin immediately and that it would let the affected employees know over the next few months depending on local labor rules. The company, which is based in Bagsvaerd just outside Copenhagen, has 78,400 workers.

“Our markets are evolving, particularly in obesity, as it has become more competitive and consumer-driven,” said President and CEO Mike Doustdar. “Our company must evolve as well. This means instilling an increased performance-based culture, deploying our resources ever more effectively, and prioritizing investment where it will have the most impact — behind our leading therapy areas.”

Doustdar became CEO in May after his predecessor, Lars Fruergaard Jorgensen, left the company after the share price fell and as the company faced competition from weight-loss drugs from competitor Eli Lilly. Shares had skyrocketed after the introduction of Wegovy and Ozempic, which are both based on the same basic ingredient, semaglutide.

At the peak, the company’s market capitalization — or the combined price of all its shares — exceeded Denmark’s annual gross domestic product and made it Europe’s most valuable company.

By Nazmul Ahasan, Bloomberg News

Hiring in the U.S. health care sector is looking increasingly shaky, raising a warning flag for the economy given its importance as a key driver of job growth over the last three years.

Health care and social assistance companies added about 47,000 employees to payrolls in August, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report published Friday. While it remained the largest contributor to job growth in the month, it also marked the sector’s marking the smallest increase since January 2022.

The report also showed excluding health care, the U.S. economy has shed more than 140,000 jobs over the last four months, a rare development which underscores the critical role health care employers are playing in supporting the broader labor market.

“Health care has been recovering from a slowdown during the pandemic and was growing faster than its pre-pandemic trend, so the catch-up has been an important part of that story,” said Neale Mahoney, a Stanford University economics professor who studies health care. “It’s still propping up the economy, but it won’t go on forever.”

Friday’s numbers were the latest in a string of data in recent days showing a chilling in the labor market for health care workers. A BLS report on job openings published Wednesday showed listings for open positions fell in July to the lowest level in more than four years.

Another report, published Thursday by the private-sector payroll processing firm ADP, showed headcount in the education and health services sector contracted in August for a fifth straight month.

The discrepancy between the ADP data showing a run of declining employment and the BLS data showing ongoing hiring, even if at a slowing pace, has raised questions among analysts about which one is likely closer to reality.

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The two tracked each other relatively closely in 2022 and 2023, but a gap between them began to open up last year and has widened more in 2025.

“Data from ADP raise doubts about the official BLS data on payroll growth in the health care industry,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists David Mericle and Jessica Rindels said in an Aug. 17 report, before last week’s releases.

“While the BLS numbers are more consistent with trends in health care spending, employment counts from large health care companies and views from our health care sector analysts suggest that the truth might be somewhere in the middle,” they said.

Friday’s report showed outright declines in headcount in August in industries including offices of dentists, vocational rehabilitation services and outpatient care services. Offices of physicians, nursing and residential care facilities and hospitals all registered ongoing expansion.

Jon Guidi, founder of the staffing firm HealthCare Recruiters International, said some key roles appear to be increasingly suffering from a lack of qualified labor supply.

“We’re observing a noticeable slowdown in job growth for positions that require professional licensure, such as nurses, physical therapists, and mental health therapists,” Guidi said.

“This trend appears to be driven by near-full employment in these fields, coupled with a limited pipeline of newly licensed professionals entering the workforce to meet ongoing demand.”

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By ISABELLA O’MALLEY, Associated Press

Fifty-five heat waves over the past quarter-century would not have happened without human-caused climate change, according to a study published Wednesday.

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Planet-warming emissions from 180 major cement, oil and gas producers contributed significantly to all of the heat events considered in the study, which was published in the journal Nature and examined a set of 213 heat waves from 2000 to 2023. The polluters examined in the study include publicly traded and state-owned companies, as well several countries where fossil fuel production data was available at the national level.

Collectively, these producers are responsible for 57% of all the carbon dioxide that was emitted from 1850 to 2023, the study found.

“It just shows that it’s not that many actors … who are responsible for a very strong fraction of all emissions,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate professor at the Swiss university ETH Zurich who was one of the study’s contributors.

The set of heat waves in the study came from the EM-DAT International Disaster Database, which the researchers described as the most widely used global disaster repository. The Nature study examined all of the heat waves in the database from 2000 to 2023 except for a few that weren’t suitable for their analysis.

Global warming made all 213 of the heat waves examined more likely, the study found. Out of those, 55 were 10,000 times more likely to have happened than they would have been before industrialization began accelerating in the 1800s. The calculation is equivalent to saying those 55 heat waves “would have been virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, the authors wrote.

“Many of these heat waves had very strong consequences,” said Seneviratne. She said the series of heat waves that struck Europe in 2022 that was linked to tens of thousands of deaths sticks out in her mind as one of the events with particularly grave consequences.

FILE – Nicole Brown wipes sweat from her face while setting up her beverage stand near the National Mall on July 22, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Nathan Howard, File)

Scientists calculate how carbon emitters influence heat waves

Climate scientists can use complex computer programs and historic weather data to calculate the connection between extreme weather events and the planet-warming pollutants humans emit. Climate change attribution studies often focus on how climate change influenced a specific weather event, but the scientists say this new Nature study is unique because it focused on the extent to which cement and fossil fuel producers have contributed to heat waves.

“They are drawing on a pretty well-established field of attribution science now, which has existed for about 20 years,” said Chris Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. Callahan has used similar attribution methodologies in his research and said the new study is appropriate and high-quality.

Scientists say the new study could be taken into consideration in legal cases. Globally, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against fossil fuel companies by climate activists, American state governments and others seeking to hold the companies accountable for their role in climate change.

For example, Vermont and New York have passed laws that aim to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for their emissions and the damage caused.

“For a while, it was argued that any individual contributor to climate change was making too small or too diffuse a contribution to ever be linked to any particular impact. And this emerging science, both this paper and others, is showing that that’s not true,” said Callahan.

FILE – A tourist uses a fan to shade her face from the sun while waiting to watch the Changing of the Guard ceremony outside Buckingham Palace, during hot weather in London, July 18, 2022. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth College climate scientist who wasn’t involved in the study, said the findings provide insight into the origins of the heat waves and how potential hazards from them could be minimized in the future.

“As we contend with these losses, the assessment of who or what’s responsible is going to become really important,” Mankin said. “I think there are some really appropriate questions, like who pays to recoup our losses, given that we’re all being damaged by it.”

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.