French President Emmanuel Macron has warned that if France 'proven evidence that chemical weapons proscribed in treaties are used, we will strike the place where they are made' following reports that signs that chlorine bombs had been used against civilians by the Damascus regime.
Magistrates presiding the trial of a 29-year-old man on charges of 'sexual abuse' for having sex with an 11-year-old girl he said consented to their relationship have halted the hearings and advised that the case should be reconsidered as rape becauss of the girl's age and the circumstances of the events.
A vast cellar belonging to Champagne house Pol Roger collapsed in 1900 and buried more than a million bottles of its produce, but recent building work has unearthed 20 of them, which date back to the harvest in 1887, in what appears to be good condition.
British home improvement and DIY retail company Kingfisher has announced it is to cut more than 400 jobs at its French subsidiaries Castorama and Brico Depot.
A fourth book in French philosopher Michel Foucault's series of works The History of Sexuality has been released in France despite his instruction that the text, which was incomplete when he died in 1984 of an Aids-related illness, should not be published posthumously.
The French education ministry has released a report prepared by leading French mathematician and MP Cédric Villani, who was awarded the coveted Fields Medal, detailing measures to improve teaching of mathematics which it says has produced 'catastrophic' levels of competence in the subject, recommending better maths training for largely arts-orientated primary school teachers and less reliance by pupils on calculating machines.
Three 16th-century paintings by Flemish master Joachim Patinir were on Monday returned by the French government to the heirs of a Jewish couple who were despoiled of them while fleeing to the US from their native Germany at the outbreak of World War II.
Jacques Cassandri, 74, used a pseudonym in a book published in 2010 in which he declared himself to be the organiser of an elaborate robbery in the Rivierra city 42 years ago when a gang tunnelled their way into a bank's vault of safeboxes and escaped by boats through sewers to the open sea with loot worth almost 30 million euros.
Laura Smet and David Hallyday, the adult children of French rock star Johnny Hallyday, who died in December from cancer at the age of 74, have launched a legal challenge to his will drafted in the US that leaves all of his wealth and posessions, and also future royalties, to his fourth wife, Laeticia Boudou.
