Ex-French president vows to take case to European court of human rights if appeal does not succeed
Days after his conviction for corruption and influence peddling, Nicolas Sarkozy has said he will take the battle to clear his name to the European court of human rights if he does not win on appeal.
The former French president described a Paris court’s verdict on Monday and the three-year prison sentence he was given (two years suspended) as “profoundly and shockingly unjust”.
Continue reading...Both countries urged to take action to avoid pile-up of unused AstraZeneca vaccine doses
Authorities in Germany and France are under pressure to come up with creative solutions to shift the AstraZeneca vaccine at higher speed in order to avoid a pile-up of unused doses over the coming weeks.
On Monday, France’s medical regulator reversed its advice not to use the AstraZeneca jab on over-65s, and Germany’s vaccination committee is coming under increasing pressure to follow suit or even scrap prioritisation altogether.
Continue reading...Anne Hidalgo condemns plans to shut city and suburbs to stem spread of coronavirus
The mayor of Paris has described as “inhumane” plans to force the city into weekend lockdowns to combat the continuing spread of Covid-19.
Anne Hidalgo has vehemently opposed government plans to shut down the city and its suburbs at the end of the week, saying its residents, most of whom live in apartments with no outside space, “need a horizon” and have to be able to escape to outside spaces such as parks, gardens and riverside areas.
Continue reading...Sarkozy found guilty of corruption and influence peddling but is unlikely to spend time in prison
When the verdict came, it reduced the Paris court to a stunned silence: Nicolas Sarkozy was guilty of corruption and influence peddling, and sentenced to three years in prison, two of them suspended.
France’s president from 2007 to 2012 had played an “active role” in forging a “corruption pact” with his lawyer and a senior magistrate to obtain information on a separate investigation into political donations, the leading judge declared, and there was “serious and concurring evidence” of collaboration between the three men to break the law.
Continue reading...A new police science unit in France is deploying groundbreaking forensics and believes DNA will soon allow it to put faces on suspects
Imagine a crime scene. The body of a man in a red sweatshirt and jeans lies dead on the living room floor of an apartment, a revolver near his right hand. There is a blood stain on the blue patterned rug and a bullet hole in the ceiling. On a low table sit an almost empty bottle of whisky and two glasses. The television is off.
If this were an episode of the French TV crime drama Engrenages (Spiral) which ran for eight seasons, or the more recent Netflix hit Lupin, the mystery would have been solved and the killer caught before the screen credits rolled.
Continue reading...As illegal, and often violent, pushbacks of asylum seekers continue – human rights groups also report growing hostility
At the offices of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights group in Budapest, András Léderer and his colleagues have a map on which they track every asylum seeker – man, woman or child – who has been physically pushed back by police from the Hungarian border and into the forests of Serbia.
The pushbacks are illegal under international law. Yet it is Léderer and his fellow human rights activists who could face arrest and a jail sentence if they went to the border to witness what is happening there.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Sylvie Bermann, who has written book in attempt to understand Brexit, says question of Britain’s identity was key
When Sylvie Bermann arrived in August 2014 as France’s new ambassador, London was, she says, a city of “extraordinary dynamism and optimism”.
French cabinet ministers were queuing up to visit, she said, one after the other, all searching for “Britain’s recipe for success. It was an an astonishing place.”
Continue reading...Sylvie Bermann, former French ambassador, puts PM’s handling of pandemic alongside Donald Trump’s
Boris Johnson is “an unrepentant and inveterate liar” who feels he is not subject to the same rules as others, Sylvie Bermann, the former French ambassador to the UK during the Brexit vote, says in a new book.
She also claims some Brexiters are consumed with hatred for Germany and gripped by a myth that they liberated Europe on their own, describing Brexit as a triumph of emotion over reason, won by a campaign full of lies in which negative attitudes to migration were exploited by figures such as Johnson and Michael Gove.
Continue reading...Scène de rue à Montmartre has been part of same French family’s private collection for more than a century
A major Paris work by Vincent van Gogh that has been part of the same French family’s private collection for more than a century is to go on public display for the first time since it was painted in the spring of 1887.
Scène de rue à Montmartre is part of a very rare series depicting the celebrated Moulin de la Galette, on the hilltop overlooking the capital, painted during the two years the Dutch artist spent sharing an apartment with his brother Theo on rue Lepic.
Continue reading...Temporary decision by Green mayor of Lyon to take meat off menu met by protests
A decision by the Green mayor of Lyon, seen by many as the country’s culinary capital, to temporarily take meat off the menu in school canteens during the coronavirus pandemic has sparked a major political row in France.
Government ministers have accused the mayor, Grégory Doucet, of “ideological” and “elitist” behaviour after the measure, which is also being studied by several other cities including Paris, came into force in Lyon’s schools on Monday.
Continue reading...French star is being investigated over an incident with a female actor at his Paris home in 2018
The French actor Gérard Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault, allegedly committed in 2018 against an actor in her 20s, a judicial source told AFP on Tuesday.
An initial investigation into the rape accusations against Depardieu, 72, was dropped in 2019 for lack of evidence but reopened last summer, leading to criminal charges filed in December, the source said.
Continue reading...Test developed in France is as accurate as PCR test and does not require lab processing
French researchers have developed a coronavirus test that they say delivers results three times faster than rapid lateral flow antigen tests with – according to initial trial data – almost the same accuracy as more reliable, but slower, PCR tests.
The electrochemical test, which uses nanobodies taken from the camelid group of animals, returns a result within 10 minutes and, in an early test of 300 samples, proved 90% as accurate as a PCR test for both positive and negative results. It is being developed by scientists at Lille and Marseille universities and from the French national scientific research centre CNRS.
Continue reading...French proposal comes after accusations wealthier nations have ordered more than they need
As Britain prepares to host the G7 club of wealthy nations on Friday under the chairmanship of Boris Johnson, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has proposed that 5% of its vaccines are sent to poorer countries, especially in Africa.
Johnson is expected to advance a parallel plan to cut the amount of time it takes to create vaccines, and may be unimpressed it has been upstaged by Macron.
Continue reading...Western foreign ministers to discuss response to Iranian plan to ban snap intrusive inspections
The future of the Iran nuclear deal is hanging in the balance as the west prepares its response to Iranian plans to increase pressure on Washington by banning snap intrusive inspections of its nuclear sites.
The German, French and British foreign ministers are to confer urgently with the US secretary of state, Tony Blinken, on how to respond to Iran’s plans, which it is expected to implement on Tuesday.
Continue reading...The Seventy-Five Pages, out next month, contains germinal versions of episodes developed in In Search of Lost Time and opens ‘the primitive Proustian crypt’
For everyone who decided to bite the madeleine and read all 3,000-odd pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time during lockdown, what’s one more book? French publisher Gallimard has announced that it will be releasing a never-before-published work by the great French writer: Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, or The Seventy-Five Pages, on 18 March.
The texts in The Seventy-Five Pages were written in 1908, around the time Proust began working on In Search of Lost Time, which was published between 1913 and 1927. The papers were part of a collection of documents held by the late publisher Bernard de Fallois, who died in 2018. During his lifetime, De Fallois oversaw the posthumous publication of several Proust works including Jean Santeuil, Proust’s abandoned first novel from the 1890s.
Continue reading...The unit, which supplies the Herta brand, had been cleared by French state vets and claimed to be addressing concerns
French veterinary officials have been accused of publishing “falsely reassuring” inspection findings after undercover footage at a farm appeared to show pigs in conditions that continued to breach regulations following allegations of abuse in December.
The farm is a supplier for the Herta brand of frankfurter, part-owned by Nestlé, which is sold by most major UK supermarkets.
Continue reading...After laying silent for more than 17,000 years, an ancient instrument Is heard again – a deep, plaintive bleat, like a foghorn from the distant past. When archaeologists realised that a large conch shell discovered in the Marsoulas cave in the Pyrenees had been modified thousands of years ago to serve as a wind instrument, they invited a French horn player to play the conch in a sound studio. The horn produced clear C, C-sharp, and D notes.
Continue reading...Book alleging political scientist Olivier Duhamel sexually abused stepson has led to resignations and calls for changes to age of consent
When Camille Kouchner – daughter of a former government minister and stepdaughter to a renowned constitutional expert – published a book about alleged child sexual abuse in her family it sparked another of France’s periodic moral, social and political crises.
Once again, the country turned itself out to explain why another of its great and good might have abused a child, and how his equally great and good friends might have turned a blind eye – but this time the impact went much further.
Continue reading...French nun Sister Andrée tested positive in her retirement home in Toulon but had no symptoms
A French nun who is Europe’s oldest person has recovered from Covid-19 after it swept through a nursing home in the south of France, and will celebrate her 117th birthday this week.
Sister Andrée, born Lucile Randon in 1904, tested positive for the coronavirus last month at the Sainte-Catherine Labouré home near Toulon where 81 of the 88 residents contracted the virus – 10 of whom died.
Continue reading...A French teen ski champion navigates sexual exploitation by her male coach in Charlène Favier’s difficult but impressive debut
Is this a tale of abuse, or forbidden love? Or is there something insidious in asking that question, suggesting an ambiguity that will err leniently on the side of love? Slalom is the debut feature by director and co-writer Charlène Favier, who has indicated that it is drawn from personal experience and her own teen years growing up in the ski resort of Val-d’Isère in south-eastern France. It is impeccably acted and beautifully shot, although I wondered if it is burdened by a softcore-tasteful aesthetic and a tactful reluctance to take its own narrative implications very far. The movie finishes on an unresolved chord, as if we have left the story months or years before the actual scandalous denouement. But it is arguably faithful to the mood of messy bewilderment and frustration that governs the ongoing situation.
A retired slalom ski champion – whose retirement might have been due to injury – is now pouring all his passion and frustration into coaching in a facility leased from a school. This is Fred, played by Jérémie Renier, who is a fierce and exacting teacher of teenage skiers, turning them into possible national champions and even future contestants at the Olympic Games. Almost from the very first, it is clear that his star pupil is 16-year-old Lyz, played by Noée Abita, who has got what it takes both in terms of skill and energy but also those dark, fissile ingredients of submission and self-abasement. Her divorced mum Catherine (Muriel Combeau) is away working in Marseille, and has a new boyfriend there, leaving Lyz alone in the apartment.