French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said half of the Afghan population was now at risk, including more than four million women and around 10 million children.
France's aid fund for agricultural catastrophes is to be increased, Prime Minister Jean Casteix has announced, after continuing severe nationwide frosts that followed exceptionally mild weather have wiped out many crops in the bud, especially fruit and including vast amounts of grapes in winegrowing regions.
French finance minister Bruno Le Maire on Monday said emergency government aid for the country's carmakers, an industry severely hit by the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic, is conditional to them bringing certain manufacturing activity home to France from abroad.
A number of volunteers from Britain who were heading to the migrant camp in Calais to distribute aid packages of food, clothes and tents were turned back by French customs officers ahead of the imminent demolition of the so-called 'Jungle'.
In a desperate protest to save the public finances of his local administration, the mayor of Sevran, a town of 51,000 inhabitants situated just north-east of Paris, began a hunger strike this weekend outside the French parliament which he has vowed will only end when concrete reforms are made to ease the economic plight of France’s worst-off towns. In this interview with Renaud Ceccotti, he details his demands and explains how, after 11 years of battling with what he calls a "structural" financial shortfall, “we’ve reached the end.”
