French President Emmanuel Macron said blasphemy was a right protected by law in France in an interview about the case of a 16-year-old girl who received death threats and was forced into hiding after filming an anti-Islam diatribe on her Instagram account prompted by insults she received when she announced her homosexuality.
In an interview with The New York Times while in temporary exile in Italy, author Gabriel Matzneff, once celebrated by Parisian literary circles for his accounts of sex with underage girls and boys in France and abroad, and who is now under investigation in France for the sexual abuse and grooming of a minor, said he felt 'like the living dead, a dead man walking', turning on his former admirers for 'showing their cowardice', and accusing those who now denounce him of hypocracy.
The chief Paris prosecutor on Tuesday appealed for past victims of sexual abuse by author Gabriel Matzneff, 83, once revered by French lierati for his books about his sexual adventures with young minors, to come forward in the framework of an investigation into accustaions of sexual abuse and grooming of a minor made against him in a book published in January.
Around 200 French cinema professionals have signed an open letter calling for the overhaul and democratisation of the organisation behind France's César awards, the country's equivalent to the Oscars, which they complain is an 'elitist and closed system'.
French wine producers are demanding their government and aircraft manufacturer Airbus set up a 300 million-euro fund to compensate them over their losses from the imposition by the US of tariffs of 25 percent on a range of European exports, including wine, in retaliation for EU subsidies of Airbus, arch-rival of Boeing.
The sister of a mother of two children who was shot dead with her parents by a partner previously reported to the authorities for domestic violence has brought a court case against the French state for failing to prevent the killings in what her lawyer said was a 'textbook case' of 'neglect at every level'.
A support group calling for the release of two French academic researchers, Fariba Adelkhah and Roland Marchal, held since last June in a Tehran prison on allegations of threatening Iranian national security, has said that Adelkhah, who began a hunger strike in December, is now 'very weakened' and that Marchal is suffering worsened ill health due to his captivity.
A statement issued on the website of China's embassy in France warns that excluding Chinese tech giant Huawei from future French 5G telecoms contracts would be regarded as 'blatant discrimination' and 'disguised protectionism', in a riposte to US pressure to bar Huawei's involvement in the new fifth-generation wireless networks over fears of Chinese spying.
A Briton who is believed to have spread the deadly coronavirus to five others staying at a French Alps chalet which he visited on his way home from Singapore may also have also infected two other people who have been separately diagnosed as carrying the virus in Spain and the UK.
Five Britons staying in a ski resort chalet in the French Alps, including a boy aged nine, have been found to be carrying the coronavirus, which has killed more than 700 people since an outbreak of the virus in December the Chinese city of Wuhan, while six other Britons who were staying in the chalet are being monitored under quarantine in French hospitals.
