Two French tourists kidnapped while on a safari trip in Benin and who were rescued last week along with two other hostages after their captors transferred them to the Sahel region of Burkina Faso, arrived at a military airfield close to Paris on Saturday where they and a South Korean woman freed with them were greeted by President Emmanuel Macron.
Jean-Jacques Savi, who turned 72 during his single-handed crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in a 3-metre-long specially built barrel, has arrived in the French Carribean Island of Martinique, after drifting on currents for 135 days at sea and across more than 4,500 kilometres from his departure point in the Canary Islands off the coast of West Africa.
Two marines and four suspected kidnappers died in an exchange of fire when a French special forces unit overnight rescued two French nationals, an American and a South Korean being held hostage in northern Burkina Faso.
A man has died after his leg was severed by a shark while he surfed off the coast of France's Indian Ocean island of La Réunion on Thursday, the second person to die from a shark attack close to the island's shores this year, and the 24th fatality since a markedly high number of attacks began there in 2011.
Nationwide street protests called by public sector workers' unions against government plans to reduce 120,000 jobs by 2022 drew between around 110,000-250,000 demonstrators according to, respectively, interior ministry estimates and those of unions, ahead of draft legislation due to be debated before parliament next week.
A class at a primary school of a small village in the French Alps was due to close on an administrative order because it had lost five of its previous numbers of 266 pupils, placing it just under the reglementary threshold, but in an operation organised by the local mayor, parents and a local farmer, it appears to have been saved after the latter enrolled 15 of his ewes, birth certificates in hand, for the start of the next academic year.
A teenager armed with a gun who took several women hostage in a tobaconnist's store in his home town of Blagnac, near Toulouse in south-west France on Tuesday, in an attack for which the motive remains unclear, gave himself up to police close to midnight after earlier releasing his captives.
Six hostages are being held by a gunman in a tobacconist's store in Blagnac, close to Toulouse in south-west France, local media report, and has threatened to kill one of his captives while demanding to negotiate unknown terms with police.
Opinion polls are giving France's far-right Rassemblement National party (the former Front National) a short lead over President Emmanuel Macron's LREM party in the run-up to European Parliament (EP) elections on May 26th, while both are way ahead of the 31 other party lists, which are the most ever seen in EP elections in France.
French President Emmanuel Macron has announced a series of environmental measures measures, including increasing the size of protected natural areas on land and at sea, limiting sales of arable land for construction projects and reaffirming France's goal of reducing the use of chemical pesticedes by 50% between now and 2025, after a meeting in Paris with experts who produced a UN report warning one million species in the world are on the brink of extinction.
The grandparents of a three-year-old boy and his sister aged four, who were wounded and captured with their French mother after the fall of the Islamic State stronghold of Baghouz and who are currently stranded in a detention camp in north-east Syria, have begun legal action against the French state before the European Court of Human Rights for refusing to repatriate the three.
A police commissariat in north-east Paris has been forced to close public access to its building because of an invasion over recent weeks of fleas which police staff unions say have bitten a number of officers.
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Le journaliste Raphaël Boukandoura a été arrêté par la police turque lundi alors qu’il couvrait une manifestation à Istanbul. Mediapart, comme l’ensemble des médias pour lesquels il travaille, demande sa libération immédiate.
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Le journaliste français est mort vendredi 3 octobre en Ukraine, victime d’un tir de drone. Il couvrait cette guerre depuis le début de l’invasion russe et avait collaboré avec Mediapart à de nombreuses reprises.
