A 29-year-old Algerian man was shot dead by police early on Friday morning in the town of Rouen, northern France, after he threatened officers with a knife as they attempted to arrest him on suspicion of setting fire to a synagogue.
Guards held public protests at jails across France on Wednesday following the shooting dead of two of their colleagues, and the wounding of three others, during an attack on their van on Tuesday which freed prisoner Mohamed Amra.
Violent protests on France's Pacific Ocean territory of New Caledonia broke out over draft legislation, currently debated in the French parliament, that would allow people who have settled in the archipelago since ten years or more to be included on the voting register, and which the pro-independence movement says will weaken the political strength of the indigenous Kanak people.
A Paris court has rejected a defamation case brought by actress Charlotte Lewis against film director Roman Polanski over an interview he gave to weekly magazine Paris Match in which he said she was a liar for accusing him of raping her when she was 16.
Two guards were shot dead and another three wounded in an attack on a prison vehicle on a Normandy motorway which was carrying 30-year-old Mohamed Amra, who was serving a sentence for robbery and suspected of involvement in a fatal kidnapping, and who escaped along with the gunmen.
The French father of retired 78-year-old university professor François Grosjean was a double-agent at the service of the British during WWII, and Grosjean suspects his English mother, who deserted him and his sister in 1946, had in fact been an agent used by MI5 as a honeytrap, but the secret service agency refuses to release its files.
Amazon is to invest 1.2 billion euros in its activities in France, while Pfizer and AstroZeneca are to separately pledge multi-million-euro expansions of their businesses in the country, Emmanuel Macron's office announced on Sunday, ahead of a 'Choose France' conference next week when almost 200 foreign firms will be hosted at Versailles Palace.
A collective group representing freelance workers in the arts sector, who include projectionists, programmers, box office staff, logistics and floor managers, has called a strike at next week's Cannes film festival, in protest over their exclusion from a scheme that tops up salaries of other seasonal arts workers to reach a year-round minimum wage.
Bernard Pivot, whose 15-year weekly evening TV show Apostrophes could make or break a newly published book, and whose guests ranged from the literary world's greats and scandalous to presidents, died ealier this week from cancer at the age of 89.
A three-year-old girl has died from cholera and another 57 people have been identified as infected by the disease on the French Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, where reinforcements of medical staff have been sent and a vaccination campaign launched.
