The charges date back to when Rachida Dati was a European MP and allege she accepted lawyer’s fees and lobbied for French carmaker Renault-Nissan while sitting in the European parliament.
With the Louvre museum in Paris cracking at the seams under the pressure of welcoming around nine million visitors per year, among a vast and costly restructuring plan is the idea of placing the main attraction by far, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, into a gallery of its own, with a separate, paying entrance.
Police reported that between 100 and 150 masked individuals, described by local mayor Émile Roger Lombertie as an 'urban guerrilla group', tried to block a B-road close to the town of Limoges, central France, attacking vehicles with iron bars before clashing with police in what authorities said were gang turf wars.
The success of a petition opposing a law allowing the use of a banned pesticide, which was passed in parliament this month without proper discussion, means that the subject must be debated in full in the National Assembly after the summer recess, although the law itself cannot be overturned.
Ali Akbar, 72, originally from Rawalpindi in Pakistan, is believed to be the last mobile newspaper seller in Paris, where since 40 years he has been walking the capital's streets carrying bundles of the latest editions of newspapers, and who has become so well known that President Emmanuel Macron is to award him the Legion of Honour later this year.
Lebanese national Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, 74, a founder of the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Factions who was given a life sentence for complicity in the 1982 killings in the French capital of a US military attaché and an Israeli diplomat, was ordered by a Paris appeals court to be freed next week after spending 41 years in jail.
There has been outraged reaction to the proposition by French Prime Minister François Bayrou, revealing his plans for the 2026 budget this week, to scrap two national holidays, which he argues would bring in an annual 4.2 billion euros for the state purse and an obvious gain in productivity, while in fact France has less national holidays than the European average and productivity per worker is almost a fifth higher than in the UK.
In a much-awaited speech on Tuesday, France's prime minister, François Bayrou, presented his government's plan for reducing the indebted state's spending by 44 billion euros, including cutting back the numbers of public service employees, the introduction of a 'white year' in 2026 when welfare benefits and pensions are frozen, and the scrapping of two public holidays.
