The French president has announced that Paris will formally recognise the state of Palestine during the United Nations General Assembly in September. After long waiting for backing from both Western and Arab allies, the French head of state has now decided to go it alone. As Mediapart's political correspondent Ilyes Ramdani reports, the impact of this decision - which has already been angrily condemned in Tel Aviv and criticised in the United States - will largely depend on Paris’s ability to stand firm against Israeli pressure.
Mediapart has since May 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, chronicle 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. In this episode, Elassy recounts the pain and sorrow of her evacuation from Gaza earlier this month, after being offered a place at France’s prestigious social sciences school, the EHESS, while Badra, who remains in Gaza, recounts more of the dire plight of the population facing starvation.
The charges date back to when Rachida Dati was a European MP and allege she accepted lawyer’s fees and lobbied for French carmaker Renault-Nissan while sitting in the European parliament.
As one of a series of reports looking into the rise of support for the far-right in France, Mediapart chose to visit the small town of Gaillon, in southern Normandy, about 100 kilometres north of Paris, with a population of around 6,500. Nejma Brahim travelled to Gaillon to interview inhabitants of an apartment building in the centre of the town, after they agreed to talk about their hopes and fears and political choices, shedding light on the tensions and dissatisfaction that may well drive a far-right victory in nationwide municipal elections next year, and presidential and parliamentary elections due in 2027.
With the Louvre museum in Paris cracking at the seams under the pressure of welcoming around nine million visitors per year, among a vast and costly restructuring plan is the idea of placing the main attraction by far, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, into a gallery of its own, with a separate, paying entrance.
Police reported that between 100 and 150 masked individuals, described by local mayor Émile Roger Lombertie as an 'urban guerrilla group', tried to block a B-road close to the town of Limoges, central France, attacking vehicles with iron bars before clashing with police in what authorities said were gang turf wars.
The success of a petition opposing a law allowing the use of a banned pesticide, which was passed in parliament this month without proper discussion, means that the subject must be debated in full in the National Assembly after the summer recess, although the law itself cannot be overturned.
Félix Kir was a priest, an honorary canon, briefly a journalist, a one-time supporter of the wartime collaborationist leader Marshal Philippe Pétain before joining with the Resistance, a cassock-wearing Member of Parliament and mayor of the town of Dijon, a conservative anti-Gaullist who was admired by USSR leader Nikita Khrushchev. Ordinary he was not. In this, one of a series of articles about some of the most unusual, stand-out characters in the history of France’s parliament, Pierre Januel traces Kir’s extraordinary life and career (and whose legacy includes the eponymous apéritif).
Ali Akbar, 72, originally from Rawalpindi in Pakistan, is believed to be the last mobile newspaper seller in Paris, where since 40 years he has been walking the capital's streets carrying bundles of the latest editions of newspapers, and who has become so well known that President Emmanuel Macron is to award him the Legion of Honour later this year.
Lebanese national Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, 74, a founder of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions who was given a life sentence for complicity in the 1982 killings in the French capital of a US military attaché and an Israeli diplomat, was ordered by a Paris appeals court to be freed next week after spending 41 years in jail.
There has been outraged reaction to the proposition by French Prime Minister François Bayrou, revealing his plans for the 2026 budget this week, to scrap two national holidays, which he argues would bring in an annual 4.2 billion euros for the state purse and an obvious gain in productivity, while in fact France has less national holidays than the European average and productivity per worker is almost a fifth higher than in the UK.
Mediapart is 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, chronicle the grim reality of life and death in Gaza. “The word 'massacre' passes through the ears of Gazans like a morning greeting with a dark tone,” writes Ibrahim Badra in this, his third contribution. “We ask 'where is so-and-so?' knowing already the answer. The word no longer arouses astonishment or shock. It has become part of our daily lexicon.”
