A police investigation has been opened into the attack on the two brothers, aged 29 and 17, who said they were assaulted as they drove through Bondy, east of Paris, by two men in a van who were soon joined by others, one wielding a metal saw, and which left them both hospitalised.
A students' rally in Paris on Thursday to protest the recent alleged rape of a young black man by a police officer wielding a telescopic truncheon ended in violent clashes with anti-riot police, while pupils used rubbish bins to blockade about a dozen secondary schools in the capital.
A programme aimed at de-radicalising Islamist extremists in France, launched by President François Hollande after the country was hit by a series of terrorist attacks, has been an 'amateurish' flop driven by a government that 'panicked', a cross-party parliamentary commission of enquiry has reported.
The spot market appears to be bracing itself for the possibility that a higher than estimated score for French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen in the first round vote may drive the euro lower despite the low odds of her winning the final round.
If France left the European Union and eurozone, as championed by far-right presidential election frontrunner Marine Le Pen, the ensuing breakup of Europe's economic and monetary union 'has the potential to go beyond a Lehman's moment' and would be a 'nightmare', according to analysts at Deutsche Bank.
Amnesty International Secretary-General Salil Shetty, presenting the NGO's yearly report, has called on France to resist 'all that hateful rhetoric against Muslims and migrants' in the current presidential election campaign, urging that citizens 'stay true' to the 'values of human rights' on which he said the country's republic was founded.
Veteran French centre-right politician François Bayrou, who has stood in three previous presidential elections, announced on Wednesday he was backing the candidacy of maverick centrist Emmanuel Macron, one of the frontrunners in the elections this spring, a move which the latter described as 'a turning point in the campaign'.
President François Hollande, speaking at a UNICEF conference in Paris on children caught in conflict, slammed the British government's refusal to take in more migrant minors with family already settled in Britain and who are now stranded in France.
Irish director Niall McCann's documentary Lost in France takes members of Scottish bands The Delgados, Mogwai, Arab Strap, Bis and a pre-Franz Ferdinand Alex Kapranos back to their collective beginnings at a music festival in a small town in Brittany in 1997.
French business activity has grown since January faster than that in Germany for the first time since 2012, according to IHS Markit's latest Purchasing Managers’ Index, which showed an overall rise in economic activity in the 19-nation eurozone to be on track for a quarterly growth of 0.6 percent.
