Wildfires that reached the edges of the port city of Marseille were still active on Wednesday but no longer advancing, according to the local prefecture which confirmed firefighters and police officers were among 97 people injured, 24 of whom were admitted to hospital, while 750 hectares of land was burnt by the wind-fuelled flames.
On the second of a three-day state visit to the UK, French President Emmanuel Macron met for talks on Wednesday with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer whose office announced the pair had agreed to 'make progress on new and innovative solutions' to stem the number of England-bound migrant crossings of the Channel from France.
A fast-spreading wildfire has reached the periphery of Marseille, where around 1,000 firefighters are engaged in preventing it entering the Mediterranean port city where they are 'waging guerrilla warfare, hoses in hand' according to the local mayor.
The French president on Tuesday addressed several hundred MPs and guests at the start of a three-day state visit to Britain, the first of a European leader since Brexit, when he spoke of a new Europe beyond the boundaries of the 27-member EU bloc, one in which France and Britain were at its core, and argued that the two countries must end 'excessive dependencies on both the US and China'.
French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Britain on Tuesday at the start of a state visit accompanied by his wife Brigitte, when the couple were hosted by King Charles at Windsor Castle before beginning wide-ranging talks with Prime Minister Keir Stamer, with the issue of clandestine crossings of the Channel from France high on the agenda.
A criminal investigation was launched in France in 2021 over the sale of 36 Dassault Aviation Rafale fighter aircraft to India in a deal concluded in 2016 and worth 7.8 billion euros. The judge-led probe is examining the involvement of India's Reliance Group, owned and run by businessman Anil Ambani, who became Dassault's industrial partner in the massive contract signed by the French and Indian governments. Detectives are also looking into the funding by Anil Ambani's company at the same time of a film produced by actor and producer Julie Gayet, the partner of the then French president François Hollande. She has been questioned by detectives as part of the investigation. Will the former president himself now be interviewed? Karl Laske reports.
By the time of his death in January 2025 the founder of the far-right Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been out of front-line politics for a few years. But right until the end this deeply divisive figure still had the ability to make waves. According to a new will drawn up in August 2023 and whose existence Mediapart can reveal, Jean-Marie Le Pen bequeathed to his wife Jany the right to continue to live at the family's manor in a wealthy suburb of Paris. This has hampered his daughter Marine Le Pen, who only found out about this will after her father’s death, in her efforts to sell the property. As Karl Laske and Marine Turchi report, the veteran far-right figure's final wishes are now the subject of intense family negotiations.
On Wednesday a parliamentary inquiry led by MPs published its reported on the scandal at the prestigious Notre-Dame-de-Bétharram private Catholic school in south-west France and the wider issue of the abuse of pupils in French schools. Prime minister François Bayrou, a former education minister and local politician whose own children attended that school, was criticised by the inquiry for “failing to act” in relation to the scandal. However, in their report, the MPs also refer to the “Pélussin affair”, which broke in 1995 at a Catholic boarding school in the south-east of France. According to documents uncovered by Mediapart, in that case, too, François Bayrou ignored whistleblowers, who have now attacked his “inaction”. Mathilde Mathieu and David Perrotin report.
