Exactly 1,000 years ago this month, construction started on a magnificent island building off the coast of France that, as it rose improbably from the choppy waters of the Atlantic Ocean, would become a lasting symbol of national fortitude.

The medieval abbey atop Mont Saint-Michel, a cascade of walls and buttresses descending from a lofty central spire, was a spectacular creation which has played crucial roles in French history over the centuries.

Today, as it marks a millennium since work began, it’s one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions outside of Paris – at times overwhelmed by its own popularity to such a degree that its custodians have urged people to stay away.

The abbey, which lies off the coast of France’s Normandy region, west of Paris, has pulled in legions of pilgrims over the centuries. Today, it attracts 1.3 million tourists each year.

In a speech on Saturday at a Republic Party convention in Georgia, Mr Trump said: "They're cheating, they're crooked, they're corrupt - these criminals cannot be rewarded, they must be defeated."

New York
CNN
—
YouTube on Friday said it will no longer remove content featuring false claims that the 2020 US presidential election was stolen, reversing a policy instituted more than two years ago amid a wave of misinformation about the election.

The platform said in a blog post that it will stop removing “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past US Presidential elections.”

“In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” YouTube said in the post, which was first reported by Axios. The Google-owned platform said that it had removed “tens of thousands” of videos under the old policy.

The announcement comes in the run-up to the 2024 US presidential election and at a time when former President Donald Trump, the current frontrunner in the Republican primary, continues to make baseless claims about the previous election.