France's European affairs minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said the country was being 'pounded by the propaganda of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its communication corridors' which he said was also interfering with campaigning for European elections due in June.
Earlier this week, commemorations were held to mark the mass killings in July 1944 by German troops of French Resistance fighters and civilians in the village of Vassieux-en-Vercors in south-east France, including Senegalese and North Africans whose role in the maquis has been largely overlooked.
The 34-year-old experienced paraglider was attacked and wounded by a golden eagle as he cruised at a height of 1,900 metres above the French Alps, before the bird, which typically has a wingspan of around two metres, finally flew off as its victim came down to land.
A man of Iranian origin was arrested by police on Friday after he entered the Iranian consulate in central Paris threatening violence and wearing a fake explosives vest, and who last September set fire to the gates of the Iranian embassy in the French capital, prosecutors said.
Several hundreds of people, many of them immigrants in legal employment, were on Wednesday evicted by police from a disused bus company building in the south-east Paris suburb of Vitry-sur-Seine, which an official from NGO Médecins du Monde said was part of ongoing operations to move the homeless out of the French capital before it stages this summer's Olympic Games.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has thanked Damien Guerot, a French carpenter who, with fellow countryman Silas Despreaux, confronted Joel Cauchi during his deadly knife rampage at a Sydney shopping centre, for his 'extraordinary bravery' and pledged that Guerot, whose visa expires next month, has no difficulty in staying in Australia for 'as long as you like'.
France claims a UK ban on trawling the seabed with heavy nets in 13 marine protected areas in British waters breaches the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, but environmentalists on both sides of the Channel say the protests by Paris is motivated by hypocritical electioneering.
French President Emmanuel Macron has confirmed that, amid what are perceived to be growing terroris threats, 'there are plan Bs and plan Cs' for changing the site of the opening ceremony of this summer's Olympic Games in Paris, currently intended to be along a six-kilometre stretch of the River Seine involving a flotilla of 160 barges.
Paloma Picasso, 74, the daughter of Pablo Picasso and the French artist Françoise Gilot, who the Spaniard led a vindictive campaign against after she left their ten-year relationship, said claims her father was abusive and cruel to women are modern-day judgments of a different era.
