Two years ago the French-owned Pâtisserie des Rêves opened two patisseries in London to considerable acclaim. “A cake shop like none other,” was how The Telegraph newspaper described one of the shops launched with the involvement of top French pastry chef Philippe Conticini. But just before Easter this year both stores closed abruptly and staff were not paid their final month's wages. Mathilde Goanec reports on the battle by the 22 former employees to get their money.
In an open letter to the French president on Friday the founder of WikiLeaks, Julain Assange, made an apparent appeal for political asylum in France. Assange, whose whistleblowing organisation was behind the recent revelations published by Mediapart and Libération about US spying on French heads of state, said that he faced “political persecution” and that his life was “in danger”. However, within an hour of the publication of the open letter President Hollande's office issued a brusque statement rejecting asylum for Assange, who has spent three years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to escape extradition to Sweden. As Lénaïg Bredoux, Jérôme Hourdeaux and Mathieu Magnaudeix report, the episode quickly stirred up a row and will inevitably reignite the debate about how far France should be prepared to go in welcoming whistleblowers such as Assange and the former National Security Agency (NSA) employee Edward Snowden.
Novelist Taiye Selasi comes from a diverse background. Born in London to a Nigerian mother and Ghanaian father and brought up in the United States, she writes in English but now lives in Italy. Her first novel, Ghana Must Go, which has recently been translated into French, is every bit as hard to classify as its author – other than the certainty that it is evidence of a new and distinctive voice on the literary landscape. Mediapart has conducted a lengthy and fascinating interview in English with Taiye Selasi, a video of which can be seen below. But first Christine Marcandier explains some of the main themes of this remarkable début novel.
