All of all of the Cannes Film Festival's female jury members, including its leader Cate Blanchett, along with many women actors, directors and producers held a protest on the red-carpeted entrance to the festival's Palis des festivals on Saturday to call for gender parity in the cinema industry, underling that Cannes had since its beginnings awarded 71 male directors with the coveted Golden Palm prize, but has given the honour to just two female directors.
The Islamic State group (IS) has claimed responsibility for the attack by a knife-wielding man who stabbed passers-by in the Paris central Opera district at around 9pm local time on Saturday, when he killed one person and wounding at least four others, two seriously, before police shot the him dead.
A government financial watchdog has announced the top six banks in France must from July limit their exposure to indebted companies at five percent of their capital, in a move aimed at slowing what has become record-level borrowing by French businesses
The French government has reacted angrily to US President Donald Trump's decision, after withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, to re-impose sanctions on companies that do business with Tehran and which include Airbus, French carmakers Renault and PSA, and oil giant Total.
French President Emmanuel Macron has been awarded the Charlemagne Prize, an honour given each year by the German city of Aachen to those it considers make a significant contribution to European unity and development, when he told assembled guests at the ceremony, who included German Chancellor Angela Merkel, that Berlin must do away with a ‘fetish’ for tight budgetary discipline among EU member states.
Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo has demanded that President Emmanuel Macron take action to provide alternative shelter for thousands of migrants who are sleeping rough in squalid conditions in the north of the capital, a situation which France's citizens’ rights ombudsman, Jacques Toubon, has denounced as a denial of fundamental human rights.
French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said that despite US President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the 2015 agreement with Iran limiting its nuclear development programme in exchange for a lifting of economic sanctions France would stick to the deal, while economy minister Bruno Le Maire said the US must not consider itself as the world’s 'economic policeman'.
An investigation has been opened in France into how a 22-year-old woman from the eastern city of Strasbourg died of multiple organ failure hours after phoning emergency services for help but was mocked by a female call operator.
Air France staff held a 14th day of strike action over pay on Monday, three days after the national carrier's CEO Jean-Marc Janaillac resigned amid the dispute, estimated to have caused losses of around 300 million francs, and after warnings from France's economy minister Bruno Le Maire that the government will not step in to save the struggling airline from collapse.
A confidential French justice ministry report, revealed by daily Le Monde, based on a study of court cases involving women returning to France from Syria where they had joined the ranks of the Islamic State group, has found that a majority held active roles within the organisation, and that only one third of those who joined the jihadists did so accompanying their families.
