Following a ten-year judicial investigation, prompted by Mediapart's revelations of how Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated illegal funding for his 2007 presidential election campaign from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, French prosecutors have called for the former French head of state to stand trial for the alleged scam along with 12 others, including three of his former ministers.
The French government has announced an 'unprecedented' crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion with a blaze of publicity as part of President Emmanuel Macron’s promised '100-day' drive to reconnect with the public and respond to deep discontent about perceived injustice following his unpopular reform of the pensions system.
France’s parliament has unanimously passed a non-binding resolution aimed at encouraging members of the EU to put Russian paramilitary group Wagner on its official list of terrorist organisations, opening up the possibilty of freezing the assets of it and its members, while media reports said a similar blacklisting was “imminent” by the UK and likely to be enacted within weeks.
The first high-profile French actress to speak out over sexual abuse in the country’s movie business, whose watershed interview with Mediapart shook France's cinema establishment, has said she is now retiring from film acting because of 'the general complacency in our industry towards sexual abusers' and 'how this business collaborates with the global, deadly, ecocidal and racist world order'.
Arman Soldin, a 32-year-old video reporter for French news agency Agence France-Presse, was killed in a Russian missile attack on Ukrainian army positions in the town of Chasiv Yar, close to the town of Bakhmut where intense fighting has raged for months.
France's interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has instructed all prefects - the regional chief administrative officers for central government - to issue bans on demonstrations organised by 'ultra-right' groups, following an outcry over the allowing of a neo-Nazi march in Paris at the weekend.
Pyrénées-Orientales, which borders Spanish Catalonia, will be officially declared at drought "crisis" level from 10 May; bans on car-washing, garden-watering and pool-filling will also start then.
Opposition politicians have accused Fonds Marianne, a government fund set up to combat what the French government calls Islamic "separatism", of creating videos slandering politicians.
The spat developed after French interior minister Gérald Darmanin said Italian PM Georgia Meloni was "unable to solve the migration problems on which she was elected".
