In a new book, French academic Édouard Morena traces the emergence of climate class consciousnesses among the world's economic elites. According to the senior lecturer, the ultra-rich have become key players in the debate on climate change so they can promote green capitalism and guarantee their own financial interests. He spoke to Mickaël Correia.
As part of Mediapart's ongoing series about everyday hate in France, Céline, aged 24, who is now a musician in Paris, and who was born in France to a French father and a Mongolian mother, describes how she suffered from racism during her childhood in the west of the country. The harm was caused, she says, by racism in general and prejudices about women of Asian origin in particular, prejudices linked to the hyper-sexualisation and fetishization of the body. Léa Dang reports.
The judicial authorities are investigating what could turn out to be one of the biggest cases yet seen in France involving the hiding of artworks from a deceased person's estate to reduce inheritance tax. The case, which follows the death more than a decade ago of the great French film-maker Claude Berri, shows glaring weaknesses in the French system when it comes to scrutinising this area of taxation. Now a Member of Parliament is calling for a national register to be set up to record who owns works of art in the country – a system similar to what currently exists with car ownership. Fabrice Arfi reports.
Earlier this month a nurse was stabbed to death at a hospital in the northern French city of Reims; the person arrested over the killing is a psychiatric patient. This follows two other cases in recent decades in which staff have been killed by patients suffering from serious mental health issues. Politicians have now promised greater security in hospital settings. But as Mediapart's health correspondent Caroline Coq-Chodorge writes, it is government policies themselves that are behind the growing number of violent cases, with an undermined psychiatric service losing its relationship of trust with the mentally ill.
French historians Malika Rahal and Fabrice Riceputi are specialised in researching the events of the 1954-1962 Algerian war of independence, and notably the kidnaps, detention, torture and disappearances of pro-independence militants at the hands of the French army. They lead a project to trace the fate of thousands of people who disappeared during the 1957 Battle of Algiers, when France’s military led a bloody, months-long campaign to dislodge independence fighters and sympathisers in the French colony’s capital. When in Algiers late last year to continue their research, the historians made the chance and revealing discovery of the site of a former colonial farm used by the military to torture and kill detainees. This is their story.
Mediapart can reveal the latest developments that allowed judges to wrap up the Sarkozy-Libyan funding affair probe after nine long years of investigation. Those who are under investigation in the case, including former president Nicolas Sarkozy, now face the possibility of being sent to trial at a criminal court in Paris. Fabrice Arfi and Karl Laske report.
The pension changes proposed by President Emmanuel Macron – the fourth reform in twenty years and which in this case will push the retirement age back from 62 to 64 - will leave no one better off. The demonstrators who have taken to the streets on January 19th and January 31st have fully grasped that point, say Mediapart's Stéphane Alliès, Carine Fouteau and Dan Israel in this op-ed article. They argue that the stubbornness shown by the government, which looks set to force the reforms through the French Parliament, represents a danger to democracy.
The revelation that dozens of schools in southern France were asked to provide data on the number of pupils who had been absent during the festival of Eid has sparked controversy. Some of the schools involved refused, fearing that the demand was a form of discrimination. Senior education officials who had appeared to support the requests later backtracked, telling schools they did not have to comply with them. Meanwhile the Ministry of the Interior has got itself in a tangle trying to explain the reasons for requesting this data. Mathilde Goanec reports.
French agriculture minister Marc Fesneau has announced the end of a controversial exemption granted to sugar beet producers to use a family of insecticides dubbed “bee killers” and which were banned by the European Union in 2018. The move follows a ruling last week by the European Court of Justice, the EU’s supreme court, which outlaws member states from any further use of a legal loophole which allowed for "emergency" dispensation from the ban on neonicotinoids, which scientific studies have linked to a collapse of colonies of honey bees and other pollinators, and also bird populations. Amélie Poinssot reports.
Belgian judge Michel Claise is leading the investigation into the snowballing corruption scandal rocking the European Parliament in Brussels, and which has already led to the downfall and imprisonment of a now former vice president of the chamber. In this interview with Mediapart, the veteran investigating magistrate, specialised in financial crime, details the extent to which corruption and organised crime are out of control in Europe, and slams the lack of resources to fight it. “When you touch on dirty money, and when that involves the political world, people become transformed into wild animals,” he says.
