Announcing a 15 billion-euro bailout package for aircraft manufacturer Airbus and aerospace industry companies, as well as for national carrier Air France, economy minister Bruno Le Maire said, 'We will not let the global aeronautical market be divided between China and the United States. France and Europe will be there too".
The official toll announced on Tuesday of deaths from the Covid-19 virus over 24 hours since Monday rose to 87, taking into account fatalities in both hospitals and care homes, reaching a total of 29,296 since the officially declared beginning of the epidemic in March, representing the seventh succesive day that daily recorded deaths numbered less than 100, while ICU patients treated for the disease fell by 69 to 955.
French interior minister Christophe Castaner said the case of Gabriel Djordjevic, 14, who sustained a fracture to his eye socket and four broken teeth after he claimed he was kicked by a police officer, was 'troubling'.
The repairs to Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris entered a critical stage on Monday when work began to remove the tubular metal scaffolding that melted together in the fire that almost destroyed the landmark in April 2019, an operation that runs the danger of damaging the limestone walls supporting the gothic vault.
France's police force is to end using chokeholds as a technique to immobilise people, interior minister Christophe Castaner on Monday, although the controversail practice of officers pressing down on the chest of a person on the ground, and which is alleged to have caused deaths during arrests, remains legal.
Official French figures released Sunday evening said 13 people had died in hospitals from the Covid-19 virus over the previous 24 hours, down from 232 on Saturday, while recorded new cases of infections by the virus, and hospitalisations and intensive care unit patients treated for the disease all continued to fall, although the numbers of fatalities are expected to rise when the toll in care homes are due to be announced on Tuesday.
As protest demonstrations were again held around the world on Saturday in a gathering momentum following the death in the US of George Floyd, a black man suffoctaed by a Minneapolis police officer, thousands of people joined marches across French cities to highlight cases of police violence, including in Paris where two banned rallies blocked the centre of the capital.
The traditionally large ceremonies on the Normandy coast to mark the anniversary of the June 6th 1944 D-Day landings, which normally draw vast crowds and the presence of the remaining veterans of the largest seaborne invasion in history, were on Saturday reduced to several small gatherings due to safety restrictions imposed over the Covid-19 pandemic.
French defence minister Florence Parly has announced an operation led by French forces this week killed Abdelmalek Droukdel, leader of al-Qaeda in North Africa, and that last month a senior Islamic State group commander in Mali had also been captured.
Immunologist Jean-François Delfraissy, head of the French government's scientific advisory council, on Friday pronounced that 'we can reasonably say' the Covid-19 virus epidemic was now 'under control' in the country.
