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French police on Thursday raided the residence near Paris of former Renault and Nissan boss Carlos Ghosn, who is currently detained in Japan on alllegations of financial irregularity, as part of their investigation into a party he threw at the Palace of Versailles in October 2016 to celebrate his marriage, a benefit estimated as being worth 50,000 euros and which was in exchange for a philanthropy deal between the state-owned property and Renault.

A march by around 1,000 people was held on Thursday in the port of Lorient, north-west France, in homage to a nine-year-old boy who was killed when a car fleeing a gendarmerie checkpoint in the town mounted a pavement and hit the child and his seven-year-old cousin, who remains critically ill, while a major search continues to find the fugitive driver whose passenger has now handed herself in to police.

Presenting the second stage of legislative reform of his goverment after two years in power, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe has told parliament that environmental issues and 'social justice' will be at the forefront of future policy-making over the remaining three years of its mandate, and also announced that it will end a ban on IVF for lesbian couples and single women.

Five alleged members of a neo-Nazi cell in France, two of them minors, have been arrested on suspicion of planning to attack a place of worship, a source close to the investigation told French media.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Rassemblement national party (formerly the Front national), has been sent for trial for posting images of atrocities carried out by the so-called Islamic State group, under the charge of spreading “violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity”, which carries a maximum three-year jail sentence.

British cycling champion Chris Froome, 34, who was due to attempt a record-breaking fifth win in the Tour de France to be held in July, has been ruled out of the race after crashing into a wall at around 60 kph during a practice run in the Critérium du Dauphiné road race in central France, fracturing sevreal bones.

In what might be perceived by some as a reflection of increasing tensions between US President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron, a young oak tree presented as a gift by the French president during an official visit to the US last year, and which was symbolically planted in the White House gardens by the two leaders before being placed in obligatory quarantine, has died.

A 98-year-old US WW2 veteran, who returned to France for this month's commemorations of the D-Day landings, was reunited, thanks to the diligent research of two French journalists, with the French woman he had fallen in love with in 1944, now aged 92, but had never again seen after he was sent on to continue combat further east, a long-lost encounter that visibly proved of mutual joy.

French carmaker Renault, partly state-owned, could reduce its stake in its Japanese counterpart Nissan in an effort to save the strained commercial alliance between the two marques, said France's economy and finance minister Bruno Le Maire, adding that French plans for a merger between the two, resisted by Nissan, could be abandoned.