Brahim Aouissaoui, a 21-year-old Tunisian migrant has been identified by France's prosecution services as the assailant who killed two women and a man in a knife attack in a church in the south-east city of Nice on Thursday, and who had reportedly arrived in France in early October with identity papers issued by the Red Cross after disembarking on the Italian island of Lampedusa in September.
Traffic jams in and around the French capital on Sunday were estimated to stretch to a cumulative total of at least 700 kilometres as residents who could fled the city for a rural environment before new national lockdown measures came into force as of midnight on Thursday.
Two women and a man have died in an apparent terrorist attack at a church in the French Riviera city of Nice by a knife-wielding man who was shot by police and taken to hospital.
President Emmanuel Macron has announced a national lockdown on public movement in France beginning on Friday and which will last at least until December 1st, as the country witnesses a sharp rise in Covid-19 infections and deaths.
Turkish state media have announced that the country's prosecution services have opened an investigation after the publication of a cartoon in this week's edition of satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo magazine depicting Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan holding a beer can and lifting a veiled woman's dress with the caption, 'In private he's very funny'.
At least four people, believed to be Iranian nationals and including two children aged 5 and 8, were drowned after their boat bound for Britain and carrying at least 19 people capsized in difficult weather conditions in the Channel after they embarked in a clandestine crossing from France.
There were growing calls from French medical professionals and politicians on Monday for the re-introduction of a general lockdown of public movement to combat the soaring numbers of Covid-19 infections across the country, now at more than one million, and which has seen a significant rise in people hospitalised with the disease.
There were more fierce protests and calls for a boycott of French goods in Muslim countries on Monday following President Emmanuel Macron's defence of the right to publish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad during a homage to teacher Samuel Paty who was beheaded by a fundamentalist for showing the cartoons to his pupils in a lesson on civic rights and free speech.
France announced on Saturday that it was recalling its ambassador from Ankara after Turkish President Recep Erdogan said in a televised address to his compatriots that French President Emmanuel Macron had a 'problem' with Muslims and 'needs mental treatment'.
French President Emmanuel Macron, visiting a hospital near Paris, said scientists have advised him they believed the novel coronavirus would be present 'at best until next summer", addinbg it was still too early, despite a surge in infections, to say whether France would go into a new full or partial lockdown.
