Working conditions have become ‘intolerable, says police union, calling for the station to be completely fumigated
A police station in north-eastern Paris had to be evacuated on Sunday after it was invaded by fleas, a police union said.
“Police station closed until further notice!” read an notice stuck to the front door of the station, which is located in the 19th arrondissement of the French capital.
Continue reading...Three firefighters in custody after a woman made a complaint to police
Police are questioning three Paris firefighters in connection with the alleged rape of a woman at their station.
The firefighters, who were not on duty at the time, allegedly brought “at least” three women back to their Plaisance fire station in the city’s 14th arrondissement at 4am on Saturday after an evening of drinking, according to reports.
Continue reading...After 30 years at the highest level of fashion, Virginie Viard makes debut as solo designer
“Complacency,” designer Karl Lagerfeld once said, “is the beginning of the end.”
Three months after his death, this spirit lives on at Chanel. The house has sprung out of mourning and back into action, transforming the Grand Palais in Paris into a Belle Époque railway station for the first collection by Lagerfeld’s successor, Virginie Viard.
Continue reading...Staff say they stopped attempt to enter intensive care, but intruders smashed computers
French officials say medical staff narrowly averted “a catastrophe” after May Day demonstrators reportedly stormed a Paris hospital and attempted to force their way into an intensive care unit.
About 50 protesters – some wearing gilets jaunes (yellow vests) and others with masks – entered the hospital after the admission of a riot police officer who was hit in the face by a paving stone towards the end of a traditional union-led 1 May march.
Continue reading...Worst violence occurs in Paris but trouble also flares in Berlin, Gothenburg and St Petersburg
Police and protesters have clashed, sometimes violently, in cities across Europe as tens of thousands of trade unionists, anti-capitalists and other demonstrators marched in traditional May Day rallies.
The worst confrontations were in Paris, where riot police fired teargas and stingball grenades as a 40,000-strong crowd, included gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters and an estimated 2,000 masked and hooded “black bloc” activists, marched from Montparnasse station to Place d’Italie.
Continue reading...Police and protesters have clashed in cities across Europe as tens of thousands of trade unionists, anti-capitalists and other demonstrators march in traditional May Day rallies. The worst confrontations were in Paris, where riot police fired teargas and stingball grenades as a 40,000-strong crowd marched from Montparnasse station to Place d'Italie
Continue reading...Eurozone economy grew by 0.4% in the last quarter, faster than expected, as Italy escaped its third recession in a decade
Earlier:
Italy’s farms, factories and service sector companies all made a positive contribution to growth in the last quarter, Istat says.
Net exports also boosted growth, which is an encouraging signal.
In another boost to the eurozone, Italy has returned to growth after its third recession in a decades.
Italy Q1 preliminary GDP +0.2% vs +0.1% q/q expected https://t.co/bZacGKzKXT pic.twitter.com/6Nl0Eqd7KZ
Continue reading...Police advise cleaning dust with wet wipes after tests find particles of toxic metal released by cathedral fire
Neighbours of the fire-stricken Notre Dame cathedral have been advised to use wet wipes to clean surfaces where lead-laden dust from the blaze may have settled.
Tests have shown that the devastating 15 April fire released particles of the toxic metal that had been present in the frame of the church and its now-levelled spire, Paris police have said.
Continue reading...Sibeth Ndiaye is the plain-speaking communications guru who has been by the French president’s side since he was an ambitious minister. As she joins his cabinet, she talks about their political differences, les gilets jaunes, Brexit and racist attacks
During his rise to power, Emmanuel Macron, France’s youngest modern leader, was often seen surrounded by a close-knit group of identikit white male advisers in suits, fellow graduates of elite political schools, soon nicknamed “the Mormons” for their uniformity. But one woman stood out: Senegalese-born Sibeth Ndiaye, his media communications supremo. The straight-talking 39-year-old in a biker jacket played a key role in crafting Macron’s image as the change-making outsider; the man who built a new centrist party in order to fight the far-right Marine Le Pen, with his intriguing personal story as a gifted school pupil who married his drama teacher, Brigitte.
Often, when Ndiaye briefed the Paris media establishment on Macron’s policy ideas, she was the only minority ethnic person in the room. She remembers the exact moment Macron really understood how this felt. It was 2015, he was an ambitious economy minister in government under the Socialist president François Hollande, and she was organising the media scrum following him at an aviation show in a hangar north of Paris. But the police kept blocking her way. “Every time we got to a stand, the security cordon would stop me going through,” she says when we meet in her office. “Usually I’m incredibly strong in those situations. But this time – I don’t know why, maybe I was tired – I just cracked and I sat down and cried.” The local police chief stepped in and personally escorted her through the event.
Continue reading...President recognises protesters’ demands but vowed to still liberalise the economy
Emmanuel Macron has vowed to make his style of politics more “humane”, but insisted he would press on with his project to liberalise the French economy and overhaul its welfare state despite five months of demonstrations by gilet jaunes (yellow vest) anti-government protestors.
In his first press conference in two years as president, Macron promised €5bn (£4.3bn) worth of cuts to income tax for lower and average earners as well as pension rises for the poorest and vowed no more schools or hospitals would be closed during his presidency, as he responded to protests.
Continue reading...The warlord Khalifa Haftar, who controls eastern Libya, has never disguised his ambitions. Once one of Muammar Gaddafi’s generals, he returned from exile in the US when the dictator fell in 2011, attempted to launch a coup three years later, repeatedly declared his intention to take Tripoli and has said that his country may not be ready for democracy.
So the professions of shock from his backers when he mounted his assault on the western capital, held by the internationally recognised Government of National Accord, cannot be treated with great seriousness. The only real surprise about his advance was its timing. By moving while the UN secretary-general was in the country, to discuss arrangements for a UN-organised conference intended to lead to elections, he destroyed muted hopes of a political solution and underscored his already evident contempt for the process. As the prime minister, Fayez al-Sarraj, complained, the response of many supposed allies was silence.
Continue reading...Protective tarpaulins unfurled over fire-ravaged cathedral to prevent rain damage
Climbers have been brought in to unfurl protective tarpaulins over Notre Dame to protect it from the rain after the Parisian cathedral was left badly damaged and open to the elements by a fire last week.
The blaze on 15 April felled the 850-year-old Gothic cathedral’s spire and destroyed two-thirds of its vaulted roof, leaving the building in a fragile condition.
Continue reading...Yellow vest protesters angry over high taxes and inequality march in Paris days after blaze
Riot police and protesters have fought running battles in the centre of Paris as gilets jaunes anti-government demonstrators in fluorescent yellow vests led street marches over what they called “a crisis” of high taxes and economic inequality.
Less than a week after the fire that destroyed the roof and spire of Notre Dame Cathedral, firefighters rushed to put out multiple small fires around the Place de la République, as motorbikes, bins, bicycles and cars were set alight on roads and pavements. Groups of masked men threw projectiles and police fired teargas. Some rioters in masks smashed the window of a sports shop and ran in to loot it, emerging with bags full of goods.
Continue reading...The competition to repair the Paris cathedral will attract global interest. Architects give their views
It is less than a week since the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral and the response has swung from global grief at an architectural tragedy, to relief that the damage was not as extensive as it could have been, and on to matters of reconstruction. President Emmanuel Macron has announced that the 13th-century landmark will be rebuilt within five years, “even more beautifully”.
Macron’s words accompanied the announcement of an international competition to design a new spire and roof structure – boosted by €1bn of private donations pledged so far. The prime minister, Édouard Philippe, said they hoped for “a new spire adapted to the techniques and the challenges of our era”.
Continue reading...Neus Català, who has died aged 103, was a lifelong fighter against fascism. A communist who had escaped over the Pyrenees at the end of the Spanish civil war, then joined the French resistance, she was eventually captured and sent to Ravensbrück, the Nazi death camp for women in northern Germany. She was then moved to the Flossenbürg camp, where she was set to work in the Holleschein munitions factory. Català was one of a group of women who sabotaged the bombs and shells being manufactured, by spitting in gunpowder or spilling oil in the machinery.
Her memories of the extermination camp, she said, were always in black and white, never in colour. She survived because of her determination and because “there was great solidarity among the women”. Català was critically ill when the camp was liberated in April 1945 (“We were just skulls with eyes”), but she recovered to continue her fight against fascism.
Continue reading...France’s interior minister says demonstrators are planning action on Saturday
Anti-government gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protesters will be banned from demonstrating near Paris’s fire-ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral on Saturday, as the police chief warned that any plans to march on the banks of the river Seine near the site were “pure provocation”.
The French interior minister, Christophe Castaner, warned that rioters would be on the streets in several major cities in France on Saturday but “particularly Paris”. He suggested that extremist groups and troublemakers were planning to repeat the scenes of arson, looting and vandalism by masked men that took place on Paris’s Champs-Elysées last month on the edge of anti-government marches by demonstrators. He urged against Paris becoming “the capital of rioters” for the day.
Continue reading...Blaze at Paris cathedral being treated as accidental but search of interior yet to take place due to safety risk
Investigators think an electrical short circuit may have caused the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral, according to a judicial police official.
An initial assessment of the cathedral was made on Wednesday but safety hazards have prevented a search of its charred interior, the official told Associated Press.
Continue reading...18 April 1934: “Trotsky had not kept his promise to remain neutral when he was granted the hospitality of France,” said the French minister of the Interior
Paris, April, 17.
The French Government, at its meeting to-day, decided to expel Trotsky from France. Commenting on this decision, M. Sarraut, the Minister of the Interior, said that “Trotsky had not kept his promise to remain neutral when he was granted the hospitality of France.” Trotsky, M. Sarraut said, would be asked to leave France (and, in the first place, the Paris district) within the shortest possible time.
Related: From the archive: The expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet party
Continue reading...French president postponed his address to the nation but the stakes have been raised
The broadcast was ready to go. Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation in response to months of protest and violence from the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement and the “great national debate” they sparked had been recorded that afternoon and was due to go live at 8pm.
Running to 26 minutes, it was, said Le Monde, “a make-or-break moment for the presidency and for this president, confronted […] with one of the most serious social crises the country has known for 30 years”.
Continue reading...Notre Dame Cathedral was '15 to 30 minutes' away from complete destruction as firefighters battled to stop flames reaching its Gothic bell towers, French authorities have said. The blaze destroyed the roof and spire of the Parisian landmark. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said he wants to see the cathedral rebuilt 'more beautiful than before' within five years, but there are warnings that the repairs could take decades