Sunday's final round voting to decide the makeup of the new French parliament saw early turnout figures down even further on the historic low seen in the first round, as Emmanuel Macron's party is tipped to win up to 450 seats out od a total 577.
Spanish bullfighter Ivan Fandino, 36, caught his feet in his cloak and fell to the floor, where he was gored by the bull during the Aire-sur-l'Adour bullfighting festival near Pau.
The French government has announced it will give a priority research programme into climate change 30 million euros in public funding, to match what it hopes will be another 30 million from universities and other organisations, making the total funding worth up to 60 million euros.
More than 120 journalists and technicians at the French state-run international channel, which broadcasts 24-hour live news in in French, English and Arabic worldwide, staged a walkout over what they said was the management's failure to implement a 2015 agreement to ease “unsociable and unhealthy” working hours.
Far-right Front National party leader Marine Le Pen once dreamed of leading the principal opposition party to Emmanuel Macron and of marshaling a hundred or more members of parliament to push her party's hard nationalist agenda, but now she could well end up as its only member in the National Assembly.
The great aunt and uncle of Grégory Villemin, a four-year-old who was found dead in a river in eastern France in 1984, have been placed under investigation investigation for "kidnapping leading to death" as a gendarmerie cold-case review attempts to pierce one of the most high-profile French murder mysteries in the last 50 years.
Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, 44, was left unconscious after she fell over when a man violently confronted her while the conservative former minister was campaigning for next Sunday's legislative elections at a street market in the Latin Quarter of Paris on Thursday morning.
The elderly relatives of Grégory Villemin, a four-year-old boy whose body was found in a river in eastern France after he disppeared from his family home, have been placed in custody for questioning, suspected of being the authors of poison-pen letters sent at the time of the murder, following an investigation by a specialist cold-case review unit of gendarmerie detectives.
A spokesman for the Paris fire service said tracker dogs had helped them find the boys, aged 16 and 17, in a network of ancient burial chambers that stretch some 250km beneath the French capital.
