News in brief

By The Associated Press

France’s unions call for protests to pressure Macron

PARIS | With just 15 days before the start of the Olympic Games in Paris, a major French union on Thursday called for mass demonstrations and possible strikes to pressure President Emmanuel Macron into “respecting the results” of recent legislative elections and allow a left-wing coalition to form a new government.

France has been at the brink of a governing paralysis since Sunday’s vote for the National Assembly resulted in a legislature split among three political groupings: the New Popular Front leftist coalition, Macron’s centrist allies and the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen.

The New Popular Front won the most seats but fell short of an outright majority to govern on its own. The alliance’s three main parties, the hard-left France Unbowed, the Socialists and the Greens, have urged the president to turn to them to form the new government.

World population projected to peak of 10.3 billion

in 2080s

UNITED NATIONS | The world’s population is expected to grow by more than 2 billion people in the next decades and peak in the 2080s at around 10.3 billion, a new report by the United Nations said Thursday.

The report — released on World Population Day — says the global population is then expected to decline to around 10.2 billion by the end of the century.

According to the World Population Prospects 2024 report, the earlier-than-anticipated population peak is due to several factors, including lower fertility levels in some of the world’s largest countries, especially China, whose population is projected to drop dramatically from 1.4 billion in 2024 to 633 million in 2100.

Globally, women are having an average of one fewer child than they did in 1990, the report said, and in more than half of all countries and territories, the average number of live births per woman is below 2.1. That’s the level needed for a country’s population to maintain its size without migration.

—From AP reports