French President Emmanuel Macron has arrived in Canada from New York, where he had addressed the United Nations, for a set of meetings with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau on subjects as diverse as strengthening the influence of French culture and language and issues surrounding artificial intelligence.
Frenchs rail operator SNCF and Germany's Deutsche Bahn are to begin a daily, daytime high-speed rail service linking the Gare de l'Est in Paris with the Berlin Hauptbahnhof in around eight hours, with stops along the route both ways at Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, and Frankfurt Süd.
One of the 49 men accused of raping Gisèle Pelicot, who was unkowingly sedated by her husband who offered her to other men for sex, said that when he first began touching her, the absence of reaction led him to believe she might be dead.
A study by an environmental group has shown that the bed of the Gerardmer lake in the Vosges mountains of eastern France, a popular site for bathers, contains unexploded munitions from the first and second world wars, and even the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, causing high levels of TNT explosive in the waters, as well as metals like iron, titanium and lead.
The revelation that a 22-year-old Moroccan man suspected of murdering a 19-year-old woman student in Paris, before burying her body in a shallow grave in nearby woods, had failed to leave France as ordered after serving a prison sentence for rape has sparked calls for a toughening of deportation measures.
The composition of the new French government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier was decided during all-male meetings between political representatives of the conservative and centre-right parties. And it shows, write Mediapart’s co-editor Lénaïg Bredoux and political correspondent Ellen Salvi in this op-ed article. There are no women in charge of the most powerful ministries, namely those of the interior, defence, justice, economy and foreign affairs, while some members of Barnier’s government have opposed the inclusion of women’s right to abortion into the French Constitution, and are hostile towards LGBTQI+ rights. Meanwhile, the cause of promoting equality between men and women has been demoted from full-time ministerial status to that of a government department.
Tensions were running high on Tuesday in the France's Pacific Ocean territory of New Caledonia, where the pro-independence, indigenous Kanak people lament every September 24th which marks French annexation of the territory in 1853, and where unrest this year has claimed the lives of 13 people.
The new French government is the most rightwing in France for more than a decade despite the fact that the leftwing alliance, the Nouveau Front Populaire, won more seats in July's parliamentary elections than any other political group. Mediapart's Fabien Escalona argues in this op-ed article that the creation of prime minister Michel Barnier's government is not in keeping either with the principles of France's Fifth Republic or those of a more traditional parliamentary system. The president and his new prime minister are heading dangerously towards a no man's land of legitimacy, he writes.
On Saturday President Emmanuel Macron appointed France's most rightwing government in twelve years. All factions on the Right are represented in prime minister Michel Barnier's team, even if this has meant disregarding the results of the parliamentary elections held back on July 7th. The appointment of Didier Migaud, a former leftwing MP, to the justice ministry serves as a token gesture to the Left. Otherwise, the sharp shift to the Right is clear, as is the rickety appearance of the whole edifice. Mediapart's political correspondent Ilyes Ramdani gives his analysis of the new government team.
New PM has ended up with a government that includes a mix of holdovers from the last government and several conservative newcomers including Bruno Retailleau - a staunch conservative known for his hardline stance on immigration - as interior minister.
Demonstrations against the high cost of living that began at the start of September have been causing tensions in the French Caribbean département of Martinique. However, the issue of food prices and the cost of other consumer goods is not new, and nor is it confined just to this island. As Amandine Ascensio reports, it is a persistent reality as a result of the obsolete way the economy is organised, something which has its roots in colonial times.
Authorities are banning demonstrations in four municipalities after violent protests over rising living costs led to the imposition of a curfew earlier this week.
