Police in the French port city of Marseille on Tuesday killed man suspected of stabbing five people in the city centre after he was evicted from an hotel for refusing to pay his bill.
French art world is fiercely opposed to the project to display artwork in London, with experts fearing the 230 foot-long masterpiece is in far too delicate a state to be transported across the Channel.
Prime minister François Bayrou has approved the renovation of his office in Pau, the small city in south-west France where he is also still the serving mayor. The aim of the work is to “restore the original splendour” of that office, and the bill - to be paid from public funds - comes in at 40,000 euros, according to Mediapart's information. Such a move is politically explosive in the middle of a national austerity plan being pushed by the prime minister himself and against the backdrop of a city council whose public debt has soared since it came under Bayrou's control. Fabrice Arfi and Antton Rouget report.
Earlier this month a screening of the hit film 'Barbie' in the Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Sec was cancelled after local protests. Yet the move to stop this film being shown was just the latest episode in a long list of cancel-culture attacks on the freedom to stage artistic performances across France. Many of these interventions have come from fundamentalist Catholic and nationalist groups, with some also emanating from the Left. Faced with such threats, some local elected representatives have felt obliged to yield to the pressure and cancel events. Laura Wojcik reports.
Following the surprise announcement by French Prime Minister François Bayrou on Monday (photo) that he will submit his government to a confidence vote in France’s hung parliament on September 8th, which several opposition parties have announced they will reject, his fate now appears sealed after less than nine months in office. As Pauline Graulle reports, the parties of the Left and Right are now preparing for the post-Bayrou period, with the looming possibility of new snap parliamentary elections amid the deepening political chaos.
French Prime Minister François Bayrou, whose minority government already faced almost certain defeat of its draft budget legislation in October, which includes vast public spending cuts, has called for a confidence vote in the country's hung parliament on September 8th which is mathematically impossible for him to win, and which would force his departure.
A state of famine in the Gaza Strip was officially declared on Friday by a UN-affiliated body of experts, the IPC, that evaluate food insecurity around the world. The famine is declared in the Gaza Governorate, which includes Gaza City with a population of one million and which now faces a large-scale Israeli military offensive. Mediapart’s Gwenaëlle Lenoir interviewed Jérôme Grimaud, the emergency aid coordinator in Gaza for the French NGO Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), who told her of the horrific consequences of the famine, notably on hospital patients.
The French foreign affairs ministry has summoned the US ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, the Jewish father-in-law of US President Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka, to complain about his open letter to French President Emmanuel Macron published in The Wall Street Journal alleging a 'lack of sufficient action by your government' to confront anti-Semitism.
The Italian ambassador to France was on Friday summoned to a meeting at the French foreign affairs ministry to be told that Paris considered a comment by Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, in which he mockingly dismissed Emmanuel Macron's suggestion that European troops cound be sent to Ukraine in the case of a peace agreement with Russia, to be 'unacceptable'.
There has been outcry in France after Raphaël Graven, aka “Jean Pormanove”, or simply “JP”, died on Monday in front of the cameras of an online streaming channel whose viewers paid to watch him being subjected for 12 days to cruel physical and psychological abuse. After an autopsy found no external or internal injury to explain his death, toxicological tests have been ordered. Questions remain over the precise circumstances of his death, and others over the antics of his fellow streamers, the failure of relevant authorities to intervene beforehand, the laisser-faire attitude of the Australian platform Kick which hosted the channel, and why viewers watch the disturbing content.
