The French president announced 'every effort will be made' to punish those who cut down an olive tree planted in a Paris suburb as a memorial to Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jewish man who was kidnapped and tortured by a gang in 2006 and who died from his horrific injuries.
A violent mob of youths prevented an open-air public screening of the film Barbie in a low-income Paris suburb, claiming it promoted homosexuality and demeaned women, igniting a political row over alleged attempts by hardline Muslims to influence social behaviour in districts with large immigrant populations.
Israel has claimed responsibility for the assassinations in Gaza on August 10th of a group of Gazan journalists working for the TV channel Al Jazeera, and alleged that one of them, reporter Anas al-Sharif, was "the head of a Hamas terrorist cell". The Israeli military have carried out an unprecedented number of executions of Palestinian journalists, writes Mediapart co-founder Edwy Plenel in this op-ed article. He argues that the slaughter of local reporters in Gaza, to where no international media can gain access, is in order to eliminate the evidence of the crimes being committed there.
France waged a 'war' with 'repressive violence' before and even after its former colony gained independence in 1960, declared French President Emmanuel Macron in a letter sent to his Cameroonian counterpart Paul Biya in July and made public on Tuesday.
Three reactors at the Gravelines nuclear plant near Calais in north-est France shut down automatically after their coolant water filters became jammed by what operator EDF said was a 'massive and unpredictable' swarm of jellyfish.
To the backdrop of a second major heatwave in France this summer, a political debate has opened over the use of air-conditioning, which the far-right has promised to encourage with a 'major' national plan, and which the Left, beginning with the Greens, counters is only treating the symptoms of climate warming while fuelling it, rather than removing its underlying causes.
The vast wildfire that last week swept through around 16,000 hectares of land in the Corbières region of southern France also destroyed the 100-year-old vines of winemaker Jean-Marie Dubois and the stock of 1,300 bottles of his prized white wine.
An exhibition now on until November at the Paris Institut du Monde Arab is showcasing the rich history of what is present-day Gaza, displaying objects that trace the artistic and commercial development of a place that has been a crossroads of cultures since Neolithic times.
Media revelations about the use of outlawed filtering of mineral water by French companies, chief among them Nestlé's subsidiary Perrier, and allegations of a cover-up of the practices by both the firms and conniving ministers, are now joined by concern about the over-pumping of water tables which are fast diminishing amid the effects of climate change.
The gigantic wildfire which, in barely more than 48 hours, burnt through about 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) of vegetation and forestland in southern France this week has finally been halted. For an explanation of the magnitude of this exceptional wildfire, the tactics employed to contain it, and the lessons to be learned from it, Mickaël Correia turned to Éric Brocardi, a senior firefighter and spokesman for France's National Federation of Firefighters, who described the events this week as a "turning point".
Local winemakers and mayors have blamed the state-subsidized uprooting of vineyards in the Corbières region of southern France, the scene of this weeks mega-wildfire, for the rapid spread of the flames which they claim would otherwise have been slowed by the moist plantations.
Amid increasing tensions between France and Algeria, notably over refusal by Algiers to accept its deported nationals and recognition by Paris of Morocco's sovereignty over the disputed territory of Western Sahara, president Emmanuel Macron has asked his government to adopt a tougher stance against the former French colony.
One person has died and at least nine others injured, one seriously, in what has become the largest wildfire in France since two decades, which by Wednesday afternoon had destroyed more than 16,000 hectares in the southern Corbières region, close to the Pyrenees, and which about 2,000 firefighters were still trying to contain 24 hours after it first erupted.
A 47-year-old Moroccan man is being held in police custody after he was filmed lighting a cigarette from the 'eternal flame' above the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, situated under the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs Elysées avenue in central Paris, in an act described by interior minister Bruno Retailleau as 'unworthy and deplorable'.
Beginning in May, Mediapart has been publishing a series of reports regularly sent to it from inside the Gaza Strip by two young Palestinians. Nour Elassy, a 22-year-old journalist, who is also a poet and writer, and Ibrahim Badra, a 23-year-old journalist and human rights activist, have been chronicling the grim reality of life and death in Gaza as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to wage a genocidal war against the population of about 2.1 million. Elassy last month arrived in France to study political sciences, while Badra remains in Gaza where “famine shows no mercy”, he writes in this latest despatch. “It steals our lives silently, weakens our bodies, and leaves us to face death alone.”
