Paris-Beauvais airport caters essentially for low-cost airlines, chief among them Ryanair, and is a major, popular hub for budget flights to and from the Paris region. In 2024, a total of more than 6.5 million passengers passed through the airport, and its new operators, awarded a 30-year concession estimated to be worth around 4 billion euros, now plan to increase passenger numbers to an annual turnover of 9.4 million. But in a David-and-Goliath-like combat, local resident and environmentalist associations are mounting a legal challenge to halt the expansion, citing the threat to public health and the acceleration of climate change. Mickaël Correia reports.
Canada's new prime minister, Mark Carney, held talks with Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Monday, when the French president, addressing the media, criticised US President Donald Trump's threats to raise tariffs on imported goods, saying 'fair trade which respects international rules' was 'certainly more effective than tariffs'.
Prolific, France-based Belgian actress Émilie Dequenne, whose debut role in the film Rosetta earned her a best actress award at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival, who in 2023 revealed she was suffering from adrenocortical carcinoma (ACC), a cancer of the adrenal gland, died on Sunday at the Gustave-Roussy hospital in Villejuif, close to Paris.
French Prime Minister François Bayrou, interviewed on Sunday by radio station France Inter, has ruled out a return to the previous minimum retirement age of 62, raised in 2023 to 64, despite his previous declarations suggesting a reset was a possibility.
The US president's threat to impose a 200% tariff on European wines and spirits has shaken France's producers of Champagne who fear their biggest international market, worth more than 800 million euros annually, could almost disappear.
While mention of the word torture was banned from official language at the time, the French military in Algeria encouraged the use of torture during the 1954-1962 war of independence, and with the consent of the government in Paris. Historian Fabrice Riceputi, an associate researcher with the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHTP), specialised in the events of the independence war, details here how, after the military experimented with torture and forced disappearances during the 1957 Battle of Algiers, French generals recommended a generalisation of the practice.
French tycoon Vincent Bolloré's media empire, which includes TV and radio stations, newspapers and publishing houses, has adopted an agressive pro-Kremlin stance, attacking President Emmanuel Macron's position on the war in Ukraine.
Several 17th-century works by Rococo-period French artist Antoine Watteau have joined an exhibition of his works in the Chateau of Chantilly, north of Paris, after their Franco-American owner saved them from a wildfire licking his home in Los Angeles in January.
In a landmark ruling, the Paris administrative court of appeal this week found that the French state must pay damages to victims of the carcinogenic insecticide chlordecone, which it allowed to be used on banana plantations on France’s Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe for three years after it was banned on the mainland. The court has also widened the criteria of eligibility for the compensation. Amélie Poinssot reports.
Four years after submitting a major report for the French government on colonialism and the Algerian War, the leading French historian Benjamin Stora reflects on the unprecedented deterioration in relations that currently exists between Paris and Algiers. It is the “most serious crisis since independence” he tells Mediapart, and regrets the fact that French politicians have failed to embrace the gains of anti-colonialism. The academic also says that France is undergoing a realignment of the Right towards the stance of the far-right. Interview by Ellen Salvi.
Defence minister says France will use the money to provide the Ukrainian army with older equipment from the French army, in particular AMX-10RC tanks and armored front-end vehicles.
The collective organising the rallies said 250,000 people had taken to the streets across France at some 150 demonstrations, with 120,000 people in Paris alone.
The inhabitants of Syrian Kurdistan are surrounded by urgent threats and challenges: attacks from Turkish troops, the enduring threat from jihadists, the refusal by the new regime in Damascus to consider any form of confederate status for their region and now the historic pronouncement by Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has called on his militant group PKK to lay down its weapons after a long armed struggle. Yet the Kurds in Rojava, as this area of north and east Syria is also known, are determined to defend the de facto autonomy they have secured since 2013 – along with the extraordinary women’s revolution that this independence has made possible. Mediapart's Rachida El Azzouzi reports from the region.
Bernard Squarcini, who led the equivalent of MI5, has been jailed for two years for sending a ‘mole’ after a left-wing filmmaker on behalf of the luxury group
