In recent weeks, Benoît Hamon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon have been ploughing their political furrows, criss-crossing France, addressing meetings and outlining their programmes for the presidency. But for the candidates of the Socialist party (PS) and hard-left movement La France insoumise (Unsubmissive France), the results have been distinctly underwhelming.Amid the travails of France’s mainstream right, whose candidate’s ever-deepening woes have been dominating media coverage, there has been little space left for the left. Both Mélenchon, a hard-left firebrand, and Hamon, a staunchly leftwing rebel outsider, are struggling to make their voices heard. (the guardian)…[+]

Some of Egypt’s major cities have been paralysed by rare protests in response to a cut in bread subsidies. The country’s ministry of supply reduced the state-sponsored provision of bread of up to 4,000 to 500 loaves per bakery, according to local news reports.

The move is designed to replace an earlier and more controversial proposal to cut the supply from five loaves per person per day to three. But while the cuts are unlikely to have a dramatic affect on the bread rations of the average citizen, the suggestion struck a nerve among the Egyptian public. In response to the decision, hundreds of Egypt’s poorest citizens filled the streets in the cities of Alexandria and Giza, and the towns of Kafr el-Sheikh and Minya. Roads were blocked and residents surrounded government buildings.(The guardian)…[+]

Apple has promised to “rapidly address” any security holes used by the CIA to hack iPhones, following the release of a huge tranche of documents covering the intelligence agency’s stockpile of software vulnerabilities.

The leak, dubbed “Vault 7” by its publisher WikiLeaks, is made up of a collection of around 10,000 individual documents created between 2014 and 2016. A spokesman for the CIA said it would not comment “on the authenticity or content of purported intelligence documents” and the Trump administration spokesman Sean Spicer also declined comment.Apple, one of numerous tech companies whose devices appear to have been targeted, released a statement late on Tuesday saying many of the vulnerabilities described by the documents were already fixed as of the latest version of its iOS mobile operating system, and aimed to reassure customers that it was working on patching the rest of the holes.(Telegraaf)…[+]