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French President Emmanuel Macron has said he wants to see the future building of express commuter rail networks in towns and cities across France, calling it 'a super idea, for the environment, for the economy and for the quality of life'.

While there are hundreds of thousands of water reservoirs used by farmers across France, what has prompted angry protests by environmentalist activists, dismised as 'eco-terrorists' by France's interior minister, is the size of the latest ones and the source of the water they collect.

Three people were wounded in separate shooting incidents involving French hunters at the weekend, amid growing controversy over the widespread and traditional practice of hunting in rural areas.    

A government decree making a village location in central France a national heritage site on archeologists' advice that it was where the 25BC Battle of Gergovia was played out, when an army of Gauls defeated that of Roman emperor Julius Caesar, is being legally challenged by the Patrimoine-Environnement association which insists that the real battlefield was four kilometres away, at a spot soon to be covered in solar panels.

France's prosecution services specialised in financial crimes have confirmed that a current investigation into potential tax fraud by the US-based consultancy giant McKinsey has been widened to include involvement by consultancy companies in Emmanuel Macron's two successful presidential election campaigns in 2017 and 2022.

The National Assembly, the French parliament's lower house, has voted in favour of making the right to abortion a clause of the country's constitution, a move prompted by the US Supreme Court's ruling earlier this year to overturn nationwide abortion rights, and which will now be submitted for approval by France's rightwing-controlled upper house, the Senate.

France's parliament will on Thursday debate a proposal by a leftwing member to introduce a ban on bullfighting, which is still practiced in southern French towns, prompting street protests by corrida supporters and counter-demonstrations by those supporting the bill.

A gendarmerie report into the deaths of 27 migrants whose boat sank in the Channel en route to England from France last November has found that the Calais coastguard failed to respond to several earlier distress calls, opening the possibility of prosecution proceedings, according to French press reports.

Jean-Marie Straub, who formed a film-making tandem with his wife Danièle Huillet, challenging traditional narrative and aesthetic patterns in their work which included The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968), From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979) and Sicilia! (1999), has died at his home in Switzerland at the age of 89.