French parliament on Thursday voted in favour of the introduction of a law prohibiting the use of mobile phones by children at state schools, extending and reinforcing a ban on mobile phones already applied by about half of France's almost 60,000 educational establishments.
Gilles Bertin, 57, once lead singer of punk band Camera Silens, and who with accomplices robbed the equivalent of 1.8 million euros from a banknote delivery depot in south-west France before living in secret exile abroad for 28 years, during which time the French authorities declared him dead, has been given a suspended jail term after turning himself in.
Police acting for France's financial crime prosecution services on Wednesday searched offices in the economy and finance ministry as part of an investigation into a complaint lodged against President Emmanuel Macron's chief of staff for suspected influence peddling and conflict of interest when he was one of the ministry's most senior civil servants.
French President Emmanuel Macron, asked during a press conference about a phone conversation with US President Donald Trump last week on the latter's decision to impose import tariffs, borrowed a saying by 19th-century Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck to the effect that it's best not to know what lies inside sausages.
A grain silo in the eastern French city of Strasbourg with a storage capacity of 400,000 tonnes was wrecked by an apparently accidental explosion early on Wednesday which left at least three people seriously injured.
Inspired by a similar experiment in the Netherlands, local authorities in the Landes region of south-east France are funding the construction of a village with shops, a restaurant and a farm to accomodate about 120 people suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a far less constrained environment than current nursing homes.
A man from the French Alps region last month won for the second time a 1 million-euro jackpot with numbers randomly assigned when playing the EuroMillions lottery, something estimated to have a 1 in 16 trillion chance of happening and far more unlikely than the odds of someone being struck by lightening twice.
Yassine Atar, brother of Osama Atar who is suspected of having planned the November 13th 2015 Islamic State group attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead, has been extradited to France from Belgium where he was arrested in March 2016 in connection with the terrorist bomb attacks in Brussels that month which claimed 32 lives.
Inhabitants of Provins, east of Paris, have voted in favour of introducing school uniforms in the town's primary schools, which France's education minister approved of saying it might be a way of lessening inequalities between pupils as perceived in clothing brands.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Tuesday, when the two swapped opposing views over the Iranian nuclear programme deal and the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem, but did agree on concerns over Iran's growing leverage in the Middle East.
