Five Britons staying in a ski resort chalet in the French Alps, including a boy aged nine, have been found to be carrying the coronavirus, which has killed more than 700 people since an outbreak of the virus in December the Chinese city of Wuhan, while six other Britons who were staying in the chalet are being monitored under quarantine in French hospitals.
Four officers of France's Foreign Legion are on trial for alleged manslaughter over the deaths of six recruits in an avalanche in January 2016 while on a training exercise in the French Alps.
The Mer de Glace – the “sea of ice” – near the Alps’ highest summit, the Mont Blanc, has lost around 800 metres in length over the past 30 years in a stark example of the effects of global warming on the world's glaciers, the subject of a UN report due to be presented next week.
Once hunted to extinction and feared as predators of small children and sheep, bearded vultures have been successfully reintroduced to the French Alps in a multi-million-euro project that began 30 years ago and which has now established around 250 of the birds, including 50 breeding pairs with a record 35 chicks, in their mountain habitat.
Migrants from Africa and the Middle East, desperate to reach a better life, continue to attempt to cross to France from Italy, where they are increasingly evicted from refugee centres by the country's coalition government of populists and far-right, using the deadly route of Alpine passes for which they are ill-equipped to traverse.
Human remains, ski equipment and glasses found in 2005 at an altitude of 3,000 metres in Italy's Aosta region have been found through DNA tests to be that of a Frenchman who disappeared in a storm there in 1954, after his family answered an appeal for information launched on social media by Italian police.
