An off-duty police officer shot dead his wife and two of his children, aged three and five, before turning the gun on himself on the platform of a train station in Noyon, about 100 kilometres north of Paris, local public prosecutor Virginie Girard told reporters.
Category four hurricane Jose has passed more than 100 kilometres away from the Caribbean islands of Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy, where Hurricane Irma last week wreaked devastation and left tens of thousands homeless before moving on towards the American continent.
French daily Le Monde, citing a report by France's competition and consumer affairs anti-fraud agency DGCCRF, said carmaker PSA, owner of Peugeot and Citroën, has been found to have equipped its diesel engines on up to 1.9 million vehicles with so-called defeat devices that would reduce the level of nitrogen oxide emissions during testing.
As hurricane Irma moves north-west towards Cuba and the Bahamas, the French authorities said the death toll had risen to at least nine people with another seven missing on the devastated islands of Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin, with an estimated 80,000 left homeless on Saint Martin, where the French overseas territories minister Annick Girardin said she had witnessed looting.
Pierre Bergé, the personal and business partner of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who was an outspoken campaigner for gay rights and Aids research, active in the world of the arts and the media, and who was latterly suffering from myoptahy, died in Provence early on Friday.
French companies LVMH and Kering, which own dozens of haute couture brands including Saint Laurent, Dior and Gucci, have signed a charter to ban overly thin models, both female and male, and those aged under-16, from their catwalks and advertising.
French ecology minister Nicolas Hulot has presented a draft bill of law to end France's relatively small fossil fuel production by 2040, as part of President Emmanuel Macron’s broader plan to take the lead against climate change, after US counterpart Donald Trump ditched the landmark Paris COP 21 agreement to fight global warming.
The Finnish telecoms firm has announced that it is to shed 597 jobs in France, representing more than 10 percent of its workforce in the country, as part of a plan to stem financial losses.
French judicial sources have confirmed that police have arrested two people on Wednesday in the Paris suburb of Villejuif where gas bottles and other components that can be used to make TATP explosives of the type used in recent terrorist attacks in France, Britain and Belgium were found in their flat.
The eye of the category five hurricane struck Saint Martin and Saint Barthélemy overnight, with recorded gusts of more than 360 kilometres per hour, flattening buildings and trees and causing severe flooding from raised sealevels and giant waves.
