France's Ministry of Higher Education has commissioned a survey to assess the attitude of university staff to anti-Semitism. Some trade unionists have attacked the move as a political “census”. According to Mediapart's information, university presidents have now told the ministry that they will not pass on the questionnaire to employees.
On November 26th France's top appeal court, the Cour de Cassation, rejected the former president's appeal against his conviction over the illegal financing of his unsuccessful 2012 re-election campaign. This follows an earlier conviction for corruption and influence peddling in the case known as the 'Bismuth' phonetap affair. Nicolas Sarkozy has therefore been definitively convicted in two separate cases. Earlier this year he was also convicted at first instance in the Libyan election funding scandal but has appealed against that verdict.
The Mediterranean port city of Marseille faces a serious housing crisis, with demand for rented accommodation largely outstripping supply, and unmaintained buildings falling into dilapidation. Heightening the problem is a boom over recent years in short-term tourism rentals via Airbnb and other platforms, a lucrative business which has attracted unscrupulous landlords who buy up buildings of family apartments and chop them up into studios, bypassing basic health and safety regulations. The scourge prompted the city authorities to take legal action over the trend for the first time, and four landlords were tried earlier this week, when Lucie Delaporte was in court to follow the proceedings.
Mediapart in May began publishing a series of reports sent to it from inside the Gaza Strip by two young Palestinians, Nour Elassy and Ibrahim Badra, who chronicled the everyday events of life and death, displacement and hunger in the Strip. Both found refuge in France in July, from where they continue their chronicles for Mediapart. In this latest contribution, Ibrahim Badra denounces the absurdity of what is called a ceasefire, officially in place since October 10th, under which Palestinian civilians continue to be killed by Israeli forces. “Warplanes fly overhead and shells continue to rain down, leaving Gazans trapped between death and despair,” he writes.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that his country faced "one of the most difficult moments in our history" after US President Donald Trump announced that Kyiv has until next Thursday to accept or reject a peace plan mapped out in secret between US and Russian officials. Leaks of the 28-point draft plan reveal it includes handing over to Russia areas of the Donbass region still under Ukrainian control, and a reduction of Ukraine’s armed forces. There has been broad angry reaction in Ukraine to the US ultimatum, piling more pressure on Zelensky, as detailed in this report from Mediapart’s Ukrainian media partner, The Kyiv Independent.
In Brazil, the Movement for Popular Sovereignty in Mining (MAM) is active in opposing what it regards as the unbridled exploitation of indigenous populations and their land by private mining companies, whose polluting activities are further fuelled by the market demands of energy transition. At the UN COP30 climate talks in the Brazilian city of Belém, centred on the issue of energy transition, Mediapart met with MAM activist Jeremias Santos, who in this interview denounces the harm extractivism is causing to human health and the environment in his country, in a process which is "driving new forms of colonialism".
A shipment of reprocessed uranium from French nuclear power plants has left the Channel port of Dunkirk to be enriched at a specialised Russian industrial plant run by the country’s nuclear energy group Rosatom, before being in part returned to France for further use in civil reactors. The shipment, loaded at the weekend on a Russian-operated, Panama-registered cargo vessel, was described by Greenpeace as a "cargo of shame", and “immoral”, while both French utility giant EDF, which operates the country’s nuclear power plants, and the French economy ministry, declined to comment.
Mediapart in May began publishing a series of reports regularly sent to it from inside the Gaza Strip by two young Palestinians who chronicled the everyday events of life and death, displacement and hunger, in the Strip. One of them, Nour Elassy, a 22-year-old journalist, poet and writer left Gaza and her family for France this summer, after she was offered a place at the country's prestigious social sciences school, the EHESS. In this latest contribution to Mediapart, written in France, she denounces the grim reality of conditions in Gaza after last month's tenuous ceasefire was introduced, and how the twisted use of language has become a weapon of the conflict.
Emmanuel Domenach, 38, survived the shooting massacre at the Bataclan music hall in Paris on November 13th 2015, when terrorists belonging to the so-called Islamic State group led a series of attacks across the French capital which claimed the lives of 131 people, including 92 inside the Bataclan. On the tenth anniversary of that horrific night, marked by numerous ceremonies throughout the day, he reflects on how the process of a collective remembrance of the events, and the questions it raises, can help avoid history repeating itself.
A French minister recently suggested that people on welfare benefits who do not have children should no longer get the traditional Christmas bonus payment provided by the state. In doing so, report Marie Turcan and Faïza Zerouala, the government is discreetly reviving the notion that there is a social pecking order concerning those who have children and those who do not. As a result, it is spreading ideas that are popular with the far-right.
