A major French teachers' union organised strikes at almost 500 secondary schools around the world run by the France's education system in protest at new spending cuts it estimates will amount to 33 million euros and threaten 500 teaching jobs.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Monday announced a raft of measures aimed at ending "bureaucratic inflation", including the 'right of error' on tax returns and similar charges by businesses and individuals and a reduction in administrative paperwork.
A breakaway group of MPs from the French conservative party Les Républicains have announced they are launching a new party, positioning themselves as centre-right, pro-European and humanist, in opposition to the forecasted iminent election of hard-right Laurent Wauquiez as the new Républicains leader.
French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday proposed a series of measures intended to curb violence and sexual harassment against women, including extending the statute of limitations for sex crimes to 30 years, facilitating the reporting of rape, setting a minimum age below which sexual activity with a minor cannot be considered consenting and a plan that women may hail a bus anywhere at night in cities.
France's Socialist Party has moved to expel Olivier Dussopt, a 39-year-old specialist in regional affairs, after he was made junior minister in the public accounts ministry led by former conservative Les Républicains party member Gérard Darmanin, who Dussopt had recently had fierce exchanges with in parliament, in a minor reshuffle of centrist President Emmanuel Macron's government.
Gilbert Chikli, 51, sentenced in France in 2015 in absentia to seven years in jail for swindling companies and banks to the tune of millions of euros, and whose life story was turned into a cinema film, was jailed immediately after his extradition to Paris from Ukraine.
The 200-kilogramme animal had escaped from a travelling circus that had just arrived in the south-west of the French capital and was sighted prowling streets near a television centre and hospital before it was shot dead by the circus owner.
French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has ruled that official government texts will not use proposed inclusive masculine and feminine forms of nouns and their until-now gramatically subservient adjectives, following in the steps of the nearly all-male (but feminine in title) Académie Française which described calls for gender-neutral written French as a "mortal danger" for the language.
A survey of the confidence of businesses in France across the industrial, services, construction, retail and wholesale sectors reached its highest level since 2008 according to figures released Thursday by the country's national staistics office INSEE, which also predicted Gross Domestic Product would grow by 1.8% this year after recording expansion of around 1% over the previous three years.
For the first time since 2013, the French economy has moved to fifth place, above that in Britain, in world economy rankings by Gross Domestic Product published by the International Monetary Fund.
