French interior minister Gérard Collomb has ignited a fierce row after accusing union organisers of recent nationwide street marches against government policy, during which there have been violent attacks by extremist anti-capitalist groups on shops, banks and vehicles, of being 'accomplices' to the events by not preventing them.
The French government has appointed a French art historian and a Senegalese scholar to lead a feasibility study into an initiative by President Emmanuel Macron to return African cultural artefacts currently held by museums in France, a move that one French historian said will 'make European curators quake in their boots'.
A so-called 'tidal wave' of nationwide street demonstrations called for by radical-left party 'France Unbowed' together with one of the country's biggest trade unions, the CGT, and dozens of left-leaning associations on Saturday in protest at French President Emmanuel Macron's public sector reforms and tax breaks for the wealthy drew fewer numbers than hoped for, with the largest march, in Paris, numbering an estimated 32,000 people according to independent estimates, 5,000 less than a similar demonstration on May 5th.
A bottle of Vin Jaune from the Arbois region of eastern France dating from the harvest of 1774, when the last French monarch King Louis XVI was still the country's ruler, has sold for a record 103,700 euros at an auction in the French Jura region, while two other bottles of the same vintage sold for 76,250 euros and 73,200 euros.
