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Rival French rap stars Booba and Kaaris, who were placed in preventive detention after they and their entourage engaged in a fist fight inside an Orly airport terminal earlier this month, causing tens of thousands of euros of damage and delays to flights, have been released on bail ahead of their trial in September.

A knife-wielding 36-year-old man described by France's interior minister as suffering from 'serious psychiatric problems' was shot dead by police on Thursday after murdering his mother and sister and severely wounding another woman in the town of Trappes, south-west of Paris, in an attack which the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for.

French President Emmanuel Macron held a post-holiday cabinet meeting of ministers ahead of challenging months ahead when he faces stern opposition to his planned reforms of the pensions system, an overhaul of the public healthcare system and a shake-up the highly unionized public sector, amid forecasts that economic growth is slower than expected.

An anti-discrimination association is preparing legal action against property owners advertising holiday homes online who a French radio investigation has found turned away potential renters with North African names for no reason other than their Arabic names, a practice described by one journalist as affecting 'tonnes of people each day'. 

Under threat of US sanctions Total has officially halted its multi-billion-dollar investments into a gas production project in Iran, while carmakers PSA, Renault and Daimler are also among those to suspend or drop plans to invest in the country, along with Deutsche Bahn and Deutsche Telekom.

Authorities in France's south-east Hautes-Alpes region said more than 50 cows, sheep and horses have died from an outbreak of anthrax, which can spread to humans and is deadly in its rarest forms, after it spread spread to 28 farms in the area since June.

Recent data shows the UK’s manufacturing sector being starved of investment funds and losing momentum as uncertainty persists surrounding the the UK’s relationship with the EU from next year.

Seven people, including five children, were reported to have suffered life-threatening injuries, and 15 others, including ten police officers, also received medical attention after a fire broke out in a three-storey building in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, just one month after a mother and her three children died in a blaze in another residential building in the same district.

A report commissioned by the French transport ministry in July, before this month's collapse of a motorway bridge above the Italian port of Genoa which left at least 43 people dead, found that around 840 bridges in France were at risk of collapse unless repair work was soon carried out, French media have revealed. 

The months following September’s rentrée, when millions return from holidays, will test the resolve of French President Emmanuel Macron, who came to power last year on a pledge to uproot his country’s traditions of work and exclusion and now faces his first major confrontations with public anger and perceptions of entrenched privilege.