In the 'banlieues', the urban rings of high-rise, run-down housing estates where about seven percent of the French population lives, many are disillusioned with five years of Socialist Party rule, an electorate which radical-left presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, gaining ground in opinion polls just days before the first-round vote, is tapping in to.
Front National party leader Marine Le Pen, who opinion polls place second in voting intentions for the first-round this Sunday, has said that if elected she would introduce 'a moratorium on all legal immigration to stop this frenzy, this uncontrolled situation that is dragging us down'.
Sophia Chikirou, the French presidential election campaign communications director for radical-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, spent three months last year as a volunteer with the campaign team of Democrat presidential nominee contender Bernie Sanders, when she learnt how to offset a low budget with use of social media, the internet and hi-tech.
Two men of French nationality aged 23 and 29 were arrested Tuesday morning in the southern city of Marseille when, according to the French interior minister, bomb-making chemicals and weapons were found in what the authorities suspect was a plan to launch a terrorist attack during this weeks French presidential election campaigning.
With just days to go before voting begins in the first round of the French presidential elections, latest opinion polls gave a narrowing lead for the frontrunners, centrist Emmanuel Macron and the far-right's Marine le Pen, with scandal-hit conservative François Fillon and radical-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon chasing close behind.
Fans from Corsican side Bastia twice invaded the pitch during the League 1 match against Lyon, when a steward was suspected of joining a group who attacked the visiting players, forcing the match to be delayed and finally abandoned.
Paris City Hall has positioned a 'Timescope' stand equipped with a virtual reality telescope on the banks of the river Seine which allows pedestrians to view, free of charge, a reproduction of the same panaroma around them but as it was in the 17th-century.
The veterans, aged between 78 and 90, were among about 200,000 soldiers from France's former colonies in West Africa, notably Senegal, who fought to free France of German occupation and who lost their right to French nationality after their homelands gained independence.
An unnamed 51-year-old British national has been detained by French gendarmes after admitting to carrying out 38 robberies at houses of fellow Britons in and around the village of Civray, in west-central France.
French foreign minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s claim that reports of a chemical weapons attack on rebels in the town of Idlib last week were false was '100 percent lies'.
