Jacques Chirac, who died Thursday at the age of 86, is considered by the French as the best president of the Fifth Republic, and tied only with Charles de Gaulle.

According to an Ifop poll published in the Journal du Dimanche, Sunday, he received a preferential vote of 30 percent of respondents, up 20 points compared to a similar Ifop survey in November 2013. François Mitterrand tumbled from 28 percent to 17 percent.

Surprisingly, supporters of the left wing party, France Unbowed, gave him the highest approval rating with 39 percent followed by the far right National Rally (32 percent) and well ahead of the conservative party, Les Republicans (25 percent), who prefer Charles de Gaulle (48 percent).

Alcohol consumption in Russia declined by 43 percent from 2003 to 2016, leading to a dramatic increase of life expectancy, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

In a study published on October 1, the UN health agency attributed the decline of consumption to a series of alcohol-control measures implemented by the state and a push toward healthy lifestyles.

As a result, Russian life expectancy reached a "historic peak" in 2018, standing at nearly 68 years for men and 78 years for women, the report said.

Although consumption remains one of the highest in the world, Russia can now serve as a role model for other states with its policy of combating high mortality from alcohol consumption, WHO expert Carina Ferreira-Borges said.

Former Dallas police Officer Amber Guyger was found guilty of murder Tuesday for fatally shooting her neighbor, Botham Jean, after thinking he was an intruder when she mistakenly entered his apartment.

Guyger, who has been out on a $300,000 bond, faces a maximum of life in prison. She was not immediately taken into custody and the sentencing phase in her trial began Tuesday afternoon with opening statements from Jean's mother.

A gasp could be heard in the packed courtroom when state District Judge Tammy Kemp read the jury's decision. Jean's family later walked out crying and embracing, many wearing red — the victim's favorite color.

Nicaraguan plantation workers told RT that they haven't lost hope of finally getting compensated by major chemical firms whose deadly pesticide, they say, severely damaged their health and had major impacts on their lives.

The pesticide makes men sterile and "also increases cancer rates among women and men," the victims' lawyer Stuart Smith told RT.

The people that were affected by the highly-toxic chemical were not compensated, despite being "significantly hurt," he said.

The US banned the use of the roundworm-killing DBCP, marketed as Nemagon, in 1977. But chemical giants Dow, Shell and Occidental (now OxyChem) continued to sell it overseas, including to Nicaragua, where the substance was sprayed over banana and sugarcane plantations. It was reported that up to 22,000 workers were affected as a result.

At least one person has been killed and ten others injured in an attack at a shopping mall hosting a college in Kuopio, Finland. One of those injured is the suspected perpetrator, who was arrested by responding officers.

According to the local police, violence happened at the premises of a vocational college located at the Herman mall.

Officers had to use firearms to apprehend the sole suspect.

A Russian court has reduced a jail term for young actor Pavel Ustinov to a one-year suspended sentence, after he was earlier convicted of violence against police during an unsanctioned rally in Moscow.

The case garnered a lot of media attention in Russia and abroad after many celebrities and activists came out to support Ustinov and vouch for his innocence. He was due to spend three years and six months in jail, but a Moscow court ruled otherwise on Monday. The actor had earlier been released on bail while waiting for his appeal hearing.

UFC boss Dana White has slammed the "ridiculous" calls from a politician to ban Octagon girls for UFC 243 in Melbourne on Sunday.

Similar to boxing, mixed martial arts deploys scantily-clad females to parade around the cage prior to each round at their events.

That has led to the likes of the beautiful Chrissy Blair, Brittney Palmer, Arianny Celeste and Jhenny Andrade all becoming huge favourites with fight fans across the globe.

But the much-loved girls could be banned from a UFC event in Australia next week after Melbourne's Lord Mayor Sally Capp claimed the "sexist and backward" tradition was "outdated".

"It's 2019, do we really still need scantily clad women to wander around the middle of a fighting ring between rounds?," she said. "Grid girls are no longer part of Formula One, walk-on girls are no longer part of professional darts — surely it's time to move on."

However, UFC president White has hit back at those comments and insists the girls are just as much of the show as the fighters.

"Our Octagon girls, they're as much a part of the UFC brand as anyone, they're ambassadors for our sport," the 50-year-old told The Daily Telegraph.

A review of How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century by Frank Dikötter, Bloomsbury Press (December 2019) 304 pages

One of the first things to emerge from Professor Frank Dikötter's eagerly awaited new book How to Be a Dictator is that it is a stressful vocation: there are rivals to assassinate, dissidents to silence, kickbacks to collect, and revolutions to suppress. Quite hard work. Even the most preeminent ones usually meet ignominious ends. Mussolini: summarily shot and strung upside down over a cheering crowd. Hitler: suicide and incineration. Ceausescu: executed outside a toilet block. Or consider the fate of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie: rumoured to have been murdered on orders of his successor Mengistu Haile Mariam, he was buried underneath the latter's office desk. Not the most alluring career trajectory, one might say.

Dikötter's monograph is a study of twentieth century personality cults. He examines eight such cults: those created by Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il-sung, Duvalier, Ceausescu, and Mengistu. For them, cultism was not mere narcissism, it was what sustained their regimes; foregoing cultism, Dikötter argues, caused swift collapse. Consider Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Cambodians were unsure of Pol Pot's exact identity for years, even after he had assumed leadership of the country. The Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, was in its initial stages merely called "Angkar" — "The Organisation." There was no inspiring iconography. There was no ritualised leader worship. There was only dark terror. Dikötter quotes historian Henri Locard: "Failing to induce adulation and submissiveness, the Angkar could only generate hatred." The Khmer Rouge soon lost its grip on the country. Dikötter makes an obligatory reference: "Even Big Brother, in George Orwell's 1984, had a face that stared out at people from every street corner."

San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities in the US, but its high housing prices and strict zoning have contributed to a homelessness crisis. The city has declared war on its rough sleepers - because housing them is too easy.​

The latest offensive in the city's "war on homelessness" is sidewalk boulders - giant rocks placed along the sidewalk to deter homeless encampments. San Franciscans in the Mission Dolores neighborhood raised $2,000 to line their sidewalk with 24 large boulders to stop the homeless from setting up camp, using and selling drugs, and otherwise lowering the quality of life.​

The plan, so far, has made matters worse - the homeless set up tents anyway, forcing those who actually want to use the sidewalk for its intended purpose to walk on the street, and some locals have taken it upon themselves to remove the rocks - either by pushing them onto the street or (in the case of one enterprising woman) by listing them on Craigslist.​

A documentary tracking the rise of conservative figure Jordan Peterson has faced hurdles getting to the big screen in his home country of Canada, with the creators telling RT the difficulties signal deeper problems in the West.

A psychology professor and author, Peterson first rose to international prominence for his vocal and unapologetic opposition to extreme political correctness and identity politics. The firm stance won him quite a few supporters worldwide - and at least as many critics, who see him as a transgender-hating custodian of the patriarchy, whose 'archaic' views don't deserve any platform in the woke modern world.

Filmmaker Patricia Marcoccia knew Peterson before he became an international phenomenon and she witnessed his meteoric burst into the public consciousness and watched as his profile grew exponentially in recent years. Her observations form the basis of the documentary 'The Rise of Jordan Peterson' which expands on an earlier film aired by Canadian public broadcaster CBC last year.