France has threatened to block UK fishing boats disembarking catches in French ports and to also impose systematic sanitary checks on British exports to the continent via French ports unless London relents on the limited number of post-Brexit licences accorded to French fishing vessels operating in UK waters.
The trial has opened in Paris of two men accused of the 2018 stabbing murder in Paris motivated by anti-Semitism of 85-year-old Mireille Knoll, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National party, has met with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest, when she promised that if she is elected president next year, France will back a "reorientating" of the European Union "whose ideological brutality threatens the very idea of sovereignty".
Zoe Alexander, sister of Nick Alexander, a 35-year-old British merchandise manager for US group Eagles of Death Metal and who died at the Bataclan Paris concert hall when members of the so-called Islamic State group attacked the venue on November 13th 2015 in a shooting massacre that left 90 dead, told the defendants at their ongoing trial in the French capital that while she and her family “deplore what you did, we don’t hate you”.
Éric Zemmour, a far-right French polemicist and media commentator, who is widely tipped to announce his candidature for next year's presidential elections in which opinion polls suggest he would rival the traditional far-right candidate, on Friday held what had all the appearance of a campaign rally but which was officially to present his recent book.
The French goverrnment is to make a 100-euro payment to all those in earning a net monthly income of no more than 2,000 euros, representing around 38 million people, in a move prompted by soaring energy costs and, argue some observers, the threat of mass discontent six months before presidential and legislative elections.
At a court in Versailles, French prosecutors on Thursday called for a suspended prison sentence to be handed to footballer Karim Benzema, the star striker of Real Madrid and the France national team, for his alleged part in an attempt to blackmail team-mate Mathieu Valbuena over a sexually explicit video recording, for which four others are also standing trial.
Hervé Gattegno, editor of Paris Match magazine and weekly newspaper Le JDD, has been sacked by Vincent Bolloré, the media tycoon who owns the publications, in a move precipitated by photos that embarassed far-right essayist Éric Zemmour, another Bolloré employee, who is expected to run for the French presidency in elections next year.
Sergey Savelyev, a 31-year-old Belarusian who worked in a prison office while serving a jail term in Russia, when he accessed and copied more than 1,000 videos of physical abuses of prisoners which he gave to Russian human rights group Gulagu.net, has escaped to France where he is seeking asylum.
Social media giant Facebook has agreed a deal with an alliance of French national and regional press groups by which it will pay for their content uploaded and shared by its users.
