A passenger train collided with a coach carrying schoolchildren at a level crossing in countryside near Perpignan, southern France, on Monday afternoon, killing at least four teenagers and leaving at least 24 other people injured, 11 of them in a serious condition.
An admirer of the works of late French writer Claude Simon, who received the Nobel Prize for literature for his collected works in 1985, sent an extract from one of his books, disguised as a new submission, to 19 publishers in France who all rejected it, one of them dismissing it for its lack of 'a real plot with well-drawn characters'.
Paris city council has voted in favour of an end to the use of performing animals in circuses and other shows in a symbolic move which now requires government-led legislation to enforce a legal ban.
The Paris City Hall is this week staging an event highlighting discrimination forms including a catwalk show of rounded models who will parade to raise awareness that overweight people are subject to prejudice that results in intolerable social 'rejection, disdain' and 'hostility'.
French police say they are hunting a man identified on CCTV footage as previously sleeping rough at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport walking into an unlocked room used by a company that supplies cash to ATM machines in the terminals and who left with two bags containing 300,000 euros.
France's far-right Front National party has been placed under investigation by Paris magistrates over suspicion it fraudulently placed France-based staff on the European Parliament payroll as assistants to its sitting MEPs.
French President Emmanuel Macron, adopting a role to relaunch the December 2015 Paris climate accords damaged by the withdrawal of the US from the charter, hosted a 'One Planet' summit of world leaders in Paris on Monday when he warned that the international community was 'nowhere near' meeting the pledges made for measures to reduce mounting global temperatures.
French education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer has announced that school pupils aged between 6- and 15-years-old will be banned from using their mobile phones at school from the start of the next education year, beginning in September 2018.
French President Emmanuel Macron is to announce on Monday evening the names of winners of so-called 'Make Our Planet Great Again' grants offered to US-based climate scientists to relocate to France to work on projects of three to five years, and which were created to counter US President Donald Trump's pullout from the 2015 UN-led global accord in Paris on measures to reduce climate change.
Elections to decide the makeup of a new regional assembly on the French Mediterranean island of Corsica have resulted in a resounding win for an alliance of nationalists who want greater powers of autonomy and the introduction of preferential treatment for locals, such as in access to housing.
