Will Wagner outlive its founder? Russian authorities have confirmed the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin and his number two in the downing of their private jet on a flight to his native St Petersburg. We ask about the downing of the plane on the two-month anniversary of his aborted march on Moscow and the thousands of irregulars on three continents who still answer to the private military company.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Paris this Thursday for a special visit. Modi is the guest of honour at the July 14 military parade on the Champs-Élysées, but his visit is also expected to deepen ties with New Delhi's oldest strategic partner in the West, with a deal worth over €5 billion for India to take delivery of 26 French Rafale fighter jets.

US President Joe Biden laid out his vision in Vilnius and threw down the gauntlet to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, who is now further isolated by a NATO summit that strengthens the Alliance at Russia's border. That summit came in the wake of wavering Russian support for Putin's Ukraine campaign.

NATO is no longer brain dead. Emmanuel Macron, who authored that quip back in 2019, can thank Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine for that. But now that it's back to its original mission of containing Russia, can the Alliance keep up?

Too old, too out of touch, gaffe-prone – the president of the United States has his critics. But has Russia's invasion of Ukraine put 80-year-old Joe Biden back in the saddle? The veteran Cold warrior sat down with the new British king on Monday, before flying to the NATO summit, where Washington's all-in attitude has been crucial for Kyiv and has put US might back at the heart of Europe's defence strategy.

FRANCE 24 brings you a special debate about the battle for cobalt, a strategic mineral essential to making electric car batteries. Electric vehicles will help reduce the pollution caused by the internal combustion engine, the current standard for most motorised transport. But as our special full-length Reporters programme shows, the mining of the cobalt necessary for the batteries is already a source of human misery and damage to the environment, particularly in DR Congo. We delve into the issue with our guests, including the co-director of "The Battle for Cobalt", our documentary about the dark side of the cobalt rush.

News junkies can be forgiven for not having heard of gallium and germanium until now. That's all about to change. If our growing general knowledge of the periodic table seemed timed with the visit to Beijing of the US Treasury Secretary, that's because China is announcing controls on exports of key rare minerals that only it produces; minerals essential for microchips as well as electric vehicles and fibre-optic cables.

It's an easy way to get clicks when the world's richest man challenges the ninth richest to a cage fight. But it's actually win-win for them if the owner of Twitter and the founder of Facebook have us debating whether we are Team Musk or Team Zuckerberg, instead of the outsized power the pair enjoy thanks to the concentration of popular, mostly unregulated social media platforms in the hands of a few.

It's almost as if it never happened. The unrivalled master of the Kremlin for 23 years has emerged from a moment of wavering with the leader of an aborted march on Moscow now sidelined and forced abroad, Russian troops on the frontlines in Ukraine who continue to hold their own and a public opinion that's either staying out of it or still squarely behind Vladimir Putin.

How can France pick up the pieces? From the anger over a police shooting and its attempted cover-up, to the riots and destruction that have left a local mayor's wife in hospital, has the violence now drowned out the legitimate outrage over what sparked it? There is no justification for looting and destruction, nor for the targeting of law enforcement with firecrackers. Why are so many of those in the street so young? Was the escalation avoidable? We ask about the state's response.