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INSERT INTO `nl_articles` VALUES (1,'France’s Total boosts Cypriot gas plan as it eyes Iran exit','The Washington Post','Economy',1,'https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/frances-total-boosts-cypriot-gas-plan-as-it-eyes-iran-exit/2018/05/21/e051d51a-5cf1-11e8-b656-236c6214ef01_story.html?utm_term=.32e6b9b90285','Menelaos Hadjicostis','\"NICOSIA, Cyprus — French energy company Total says it is looking to expand its search for natural gas off Cyprus’ south coast and seeks to secure another exploratory drilling license, days after warning it could exit Iran over renewed U.S. sanctions there.\r\nStephane Michel, Total’s Middle East exploration chief, said Monday that the company has applied for a license to search for hydrocarbons in Block 8, an area south of Cyprus where Italian company Eni is already licensed to carry out exploratory drilling.\r\nTotal is partners with Eni to search for oil and gas in two other areas off Cyprus. In one of the two, Eni said in February it has discovered a “promising” gas deposit with similar geological features as that of another discovery in Egyptian waters it described as the largest ever in the Mediterranean.\r\nCyprus Energy Minister Yiorgos Lakkotrypis called Total’s move an “important development” that expands the company’s exploration footprint off Cyprus.\r\nLakkotrypis said what gives the move added weight is the fact that Total’s interest comes three months after Turkish warships blocked a drillship from carrying out exploratory drilling by Eni in Block 3, an area southeast of Cyprus.\r\n“After all that happened in Block 3, we see one of the most important partners of the Cyprus Republic wanting to expand its presence inside the Exclusive Economic Zone, especially in an area like Block 8 which is still unexplored.”\r\nTurkey opposes what it calls a “unilateral” gas search by the ethnically divided island’s Greek Cypriot-run government, insisting that it flouts the rights of breakaway Turkish Cypriots to natural resources. Only Turkey recognizes a Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence and claims parts of exploration areas south of Cyprus which it says fall within its continental shelf.\r\nThe Cyprus government says any potential gas proceeds will be shared equitably with Turkish Cypriots after an accord reunifying the island is reached.\r\nA deposit discovered off Cyprus by Texas-based Noble Energy in 2011 is estimated to contain around 4.5 trillion cubic feet of gas.\r\nTotal’s move also comes just days after it said it would have to withdraw multi-billion-dollar project in Iran unless it is granted a waiver by U.S. authorities. The group said it cannot afford to be exposed to U.S. sanctions, including the loss of financing by American banks.\r\n\"','2018-05-21',''),(2,'Marquez wins French MotoGP to extend world championship lead','The Washington Post','Sport',1,'https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/marquez-wins-french-motogp-to-extend-world-championship-lead/2018/05/20/d9728216-5c2f-11e8-b656-236c6214ef01_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.aaf01261fcbd','Associated Press','\"LE MANS, France — Defending MotoGP champion Marc Marquez won a crash-marred French MotoGP on Sunday, extending his overall lead in the championship as he chases a fifth world title.\r\nThe dominant Spanish rider powered his Honda to victory for only the second time on the Le Mans circuit where he retired last year and finished a lowly 13th in 2016. He raised his front wheel in a “wheelie” celebration and banged his fist on his chest after crossing the line. The 25-year-old Marquez then jumped off his bike and ran over to celebrate with fans. His other win here was in 2014.\r\n“The grip of the track was a little bit less than yesterday,” Marquez said. “I’m happy, because this victory is important on this track.”\r\nDanilo Petrucci took second place on his Ducati ahead of Italian countryman Valentino Rossi, the seven-time world champion.\r\n“I knew the race would be very, very difficult. We struggled a lot with the front tire,” Petrucci said. “But I managed the rear very well. Then I just followed Marc.”\r\nThe 39-year-old Rossi profited from the spills to climb up from ninth on the starting grid.\r\n“I had a good rhythm all the race,” Rossi said after his second podium of the season.\r\nHome favorite Johann Zarco and Italian rider Andrea Dovizioso were among several riders to come off their bikes in the first four laps.\r\nZarco had taken the fourth pole position of his career on Saturday — the first Frenchman on pole at Le Mans since Christian Sarron in 1988.\r\nMarquez started from second, but both made poor starts and Jorge Lorenzo took the race lead as he chased a sixth career win at Le Mans. Dovizioso moved into second spot, while Zarco fought back to third with Marquez fourth.\r\nBut Dovizioso suddenly crashed on the fourth lap, taking his Ducati too wide on entry into turn 8 and sliding off the track. He was unharmed and wrung his hands in frustration.\r\nMinutes later, Zarco made a similar braking error and flew off his Yamaha.\r\nLorenzo almost crashed too, when Marquez made a stunning but borderline dangerous move on his inside to lead with 18 laps to go.\r\nThe 39-year-old Rossi profited from the spills to climb up from ninth on the starting grid.\r\n“I had a good rhythm all the race,” Rossi said after his second podium of the season.\r\nPetrucci overtook Lorenzo soon after to move up to third, while Rossi moved ahead of Lorenzo into third with 14 laps to go.\r\nThe Yamaha rider then set a lap record and had Marquez, his bitter rival, in his sights. Last month, Rossi called Marquez a “dirty” rider at the Argentina GP in their latest bust-up.\r\nBut with 10 laps left, the 25-yearold Marquez set a lap record of his own and was untroubled thereafter.\r\nHe is well clear in the standings, with 95 points. Spanish rider Maverick Vinales is next with 59, one ahead of Zarco and three clear of Rossi.\r\n\"','2018-05-20',''),(3,'Marseille: at least one injured after masked gang opens fire in French city','The Guardian','Society',2,'https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/21/marseille-france-masked-gunmen-la-busserine','Kim Willsher','\"Hooded gunmen armed with AK-47s have opened fire near a group of young people on a housing estate outside the French Mediterranean city of Marseille before reportedly taking a man hostage.\"\r\nAt least one person was injured when the gunmen, all dressed in black, drew up in three vehicles, and began shooting near a cultural centre in the Busserine district.\r\nThe local newspaper La Provence reported that the armed gang appeared to be looking for someone and threatened locals before firing several times into the air. They then grabbed a youth and drove off.\r\nPolice said the incident was not being investigated as terrorism.\r\nAmateur film footage posted on Twitter showed at least half a dozen black-clad gunmen firing, apparently at random, on the estate. Witnesses said the group brandished several semi-automatic rifles and at least one handgun.\r\nCorrupt, dangerous and brutal to its poor – but is Marseille the future of France?\r\nRead more\r\nThe local prosecutor Xavier Tarabeux said the gunmen were involved in an exchange of fire with police called to the scene who found their squad car blocked by a Renault Megane belonging to the gang. After a brief shootout the gunmen sped off.\r\n“According to a witness, one person was abducted in a car whose occupants shot in the air several times,” Tarabeux told local journalists.\r\nA Marseille police officer said “numerous bullet casings” had been found at the scene. He added that the incident was not being investigated as a terrorist attack.\r\nThe shooting happened shortly before 5pm local time. The injured man was taken to hospital with a minor head injury after one of the gunmen hit him with the rifle butt.\r\nBusserine, one of Marseille’s northern housing estates, in the city’s 14th arrondissement, is a district of high unemployment, poverty and drug gangs. In 2016 police smashed what was described as a “drug supermarket” with around 450 regular customers and takings of up to €15,000 ($18,000) a day.\r\nFrance television reported that six people have been killed in alleged gang-related shootings since the beginning of the year.\"','2018-05-21',''),(5,'Motor Racing-Prost Relives Past Glories With Ricard Return','The New York Times','Sport',3,'','Alan Baldwin / John O\'Brien','\"LE CASTELLET, France — Alain Prost has many great memories of racing at Le Castellet, the French Formula One track that returns to the calendar this weekend for the first time in 28 years, but the wins are only part of the story.\r\nThe retired four-times world champion, his country\'s most successful racer by far, triumphed at the track near Marseille four times in total, including three in a row and Ferrari\'s 100th grand prix victory in 1990.\r\n\'Le Professeur\' also gave Renault a commanding home victory from pole position in 1983.\r\nWith other wins at Dijon-Prenois in 1981 and Magny-Cours in 1993, no driver has won more home grands prix than Prost, although Britain\'s Lewis Hamilton could equal that at Silverstone this season.\r\nSome of Prost\'s fondest recollections, however, are not necessarily the ones you would expect; of winter testing and the fans who flocked to the circuit to watch and soak up the noise of the engines.\r\n\"\"We had contact with the people,\"\" the 63-year-old, now a Renault ambassador, told Reuters in a recent interview.\r\n\"\"Today, I very often meet people who say they became interested in Formula One because they were looking at the tests (at Le Castellet) in winter.\r\n\"\"We were going to the small restaurant to have a sandwich between the tests and you have the people there. It was really a sort of a community,\"\" he added.\r\n\"\"And all these memories come back to me when I am talking about Paul Ricard.\"\"\r\nCreated by the late pastis magnate Paul Ricard in 1970, the circuit will host the first French Grand Prix since Magny-Cours in 2008 -- a switch from the heart of rural France to the sunny Mediterranean south.\r\nThe track layout has changed, the famed Mistral straight now tamed by the addition of a chicane, but for Prost the main thing is that France is back.\r\nHe had lobbied for a circuit near Paris, arguing that it was logical to be as close as possible to the metropolis with its hotels and tourist attractions, but other arguments prevailed.\r\n\"\"France has always been part of Formula One history, in any kind of manner. With constructors, manufacturers and drivers. So that\'s the first good news,\"\" he said.\r\nOVERTAKING AYRTON\r\nLe Castellet, renovated by former F1 supremo Bernie Eclestone for private testing after the Briton bought it in 1999 and now run by a family trust, is a big part of Prost\'s personal history.\r\n\"\"I did the karting world championship in Le Castellet, then the school and then a lot of Formula Renault, Formula Renault Europe, Formula Three, Formula One. A lot of races,\"\" he said.\r\n\"\"I have some unbelievable memories in Formula One. I think all the races I have done in Ricard, and in France in fact...\r\n\"\"If you remember 1990, for sure. But \'88, \'89 against Ayrton (Senna). And when I overtook Ayrton, things like this you always remember.\r\n\"\"And \'83 with Renault was really one of the very nice wins. We were dominating and there are some races where you feel that you were unbeatable and this was one of them.\"\"\r\nThe 1988 race saw the McLaren team mates together on the front row, with Prost denying Senna a record seventh pole in succession.\r\nThe Frenchman lost the lead in the pits but seized it back by overtaking down the straight as the Brazilian wrestled with a gearbox problem, and won by more than half a minute.\r\nProst won again in 1989, from pole and by 44 seconds from Britain\'s Nigel Mansell, after he had announced he was leaving McLaren. Senna retired at the re-start.\r\nOnly two French drivers have won races since Prost left Formula One in 1993 -- Jean Alesi in Canada in 1995 and Olivier Panis against all the odds in Monaco in 1996 -- but things are picking up.\r\nRenault, champions with Spaniard Fernando Alonso in 2005 and 2006, are currently fourth while France has three drivers in Romain Grosjean, Esteban Ocon and Pierre Gasly. Two domestic broadcasters will be covering the race.\r\n\"\"It looks like it\'s getting better,\"\" Prost, who saw his own eponymous team fail in 2002 after sponsorship dried up, said of France\'s on-off love affair with Formula One.\r\n\"\"But the biggest influence you have in Formula One is when you are winning.\"\"\r\n','2018-06-21',''),(7,'Rafael Nadal lifts record 11th French Open title','Aljazeera','Sport',3,'','N/A','\"World number one Spaniard beats Austria\'s Dominic Thiem in three straight sets for his 17th Grand Slam trophy.\r\nRafael Nadal, the tennis superstar leading men\'s rankings, has clinched a record-extending 11th French Open win after beating eighth-ranked Dominic Thiem in straight sets to defend his title.\r\nThe clay-court specialist from Spain raced to a 6-4, 6-3, 6-2 victory in two hours and 42 minutes over his younger Austrian rival and first-time major finalist on a warm, humid Sunday afternoon in France\'s capital, Paris.\r\nThis was Nadal\'s 11th win at the French Open, also known as Roland Garros. Overall, the 32-year-old has won 17 Grand Slam championships - the four most important tennis events held annually in France, United States, Britain and Australia.\r\nAustralia\'s Margaret Court is the only other player to have won the same major - the Australian Open - 11 times. \r\n\"\"It\'s amazing, I can\'t describe my feelings because it\'s not even a dream to win here 11 times,\"\" said an emotional Nadal after the final. \"\"It\'s impossible to think something like this.\"\"\r\nNadal broke serve early in all three sets against the only player who had beaten him on clay over the past two seasons.\r\nDespite the loss, the 24-year-old Austrian said it had been a \"\"great two weeks\"\" for him. \r\n\"\"Rafa, I just want to say \'well done\',\"\" he said at the post-match presentation. \"\"What you did and what you are doing is the most outstanding thing that any athlete can achieve in sport.\"\"\r\nNadal had come into the year\'s second Grand Slam high on confidence, after wins in Monte Carlo, Barcelona and Rome. His only loss on the surface this year had come to Thiem in Madrid. \r\nHowever, it was not all smooth sailing for Nadal on Sunday, as he started suffering cramps on his left hand in the third set.\r\n\"\"Tough moment in the third set when I got a little bit cramped on the hand,\"\" Nadal said. \"\"I was very scared.\"\"\r\nThe Spaniard now inches closer to Roger Federer\'s all-time record of 20 Grand Slam titles.\"','2018-06-10',''),(8,'France turn to Olivier Giroud in bid to up their game against Peru','The Guardian','Sport',3,'','Amy Lawrence','\"Considering how many of the World Cup aristocracy did not manage to win their opening games in Russia, the France camp have raised a collective eyebrow about the negativity that swirled around the three points they collected against Australia.\r\nQuestions came thick, fast and critical. Why couldn’t they create more chances? Are the tactics flawed? Should the front three be abandoned? What about Paul Pogba? (There is always something about Paul Pogba.) Raphaël Varane took a moment when he was up in front of the media at France’s base camp in Istra, near Moscow, to ask something of the inquisitors. “If you could be a bit more positive, that would be cool,” he said.  The thing is, being more positive is exactly what the public crave from France. For a country with ambitions to fare well in this World Cup, to try to go further than the quarter-final exit in Brazil four years ago, the pattern of the opening game was a worry. The team did not function smoothly. The thrill count was on the low side. A new three-pronged attack that was audacious in principle was subdued in practice.  Ever since, the pressure has been on Didier Deschamps to abandon it and all the signs suggest he is about to throw his exciting big idea out the window. The revolution appears to have lasted one game. With Peru on the agenda for match number two Deschamps has gone back to the drawing board. “The aim is to put everyone in their best position but you have to reach a balance,” the manager said.\r\nEnter Olivier Giroud. France’s next trick is to bring back an old-fashioned focal point. The shake-up is partly about themselves and partly about their wariness of Peru’s qualities. It is time to up their game. Deschamps admitted France did not have enough energy last time out. “N’Golo Kanté told me he was struggling to breathe in the first game, struggling to move, and I understood then what was going on with the other players. If it comes from him, this is a player who likes to run a lot. So we lacked dynamism in attack but we hope to address that this time.”  To Giroud or not to Giroud? That was the question that nagged and the Chelsea forward will be back leading the line, supported by the jewels Antoine Griezmann and Kylian Mbappé, with the more reliable Blaise Matuidi adding support. The aim is to bring a bit more attacking structure. Giroud is a handy metaphor for the more pragmatic style associated with Deschamps. But even if Giroud’s characteristics may not be quite as glamorous as some of the pacier options, the 31-year-old’s goalscoring record for France exceeds his reputation. He is fourth in the all-time list, behind Thierry Henry, Michel Platini and David Trezeguet. He has scored the same number of goals as Zinedine Zidane (in far fewer appearances). His goals-per-game ratio is the same as Henry’s. “When he is not there we realise just how useful he can he be,” said Deschamps pointedly. Having a natural focus for the attack is proving beneficial for some of the teams who have started this World Cup on the up. Russia’s Artem Dzyuba, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and England’s Harry Kane are in that bracket. If Giroud’s presence is designed to serve a purpose, even more expectation is heaped on the shoulders of Peru’s Paolo Guerrero. He is expected to come back into the starting lineup and his appearance at this World Cup owes something to the captains of the opposing teams in Group C, who signed a letter in support of him while he fought a ban after a positive drug test. “Being able to play in a World Cup is unique, it’s very special in a player’s career, and that is the case for Guerrero,” the France captain, Hugo Lloris, said. “It was only an act of solidarity with another player.”\r\nPeru’s record scorer is ready, despite joining the squad late because of his unusual situation. “Guerrero is fully fit; he is not constrained in any way,” Ricardo Gareca said.\r\nThe Peru manager is in bullish mood. His team thrilled but started off with a defeat by Denmark, which puts their status in the group on a knife edge.\r\n“We are going to go out to try to win the game,” Gareca said. “We are used to being the underdog, to living on the edge. And there is an element of luck to games. I think we can beat anyone, we have the tools to win and we know how to handle ourselves in this extreme situation.”\"','2018-06-20',''),(9,'France Captain Bastareaud Out of Third NZ Test','Reuteurs','Sport',3,'','Greg Stutchbury/John Stonestreet','\"WELLINGTON — France captain Mathieu Bastareaud has been left out of the side for the third test against the All Blacks in Dunedin by coach Jacques Brunel, with Wesley Fofana joining Clermont team mate Remi Lamerat in a new midfield combination.\r\nScrumhalf Morgan Parra will lead the side in Bastareaud\'s absence. He is the third captain in Brunel\'s tenure after Guilhem Guirado was left at home to rest.\r\nFrench media said on Tuesday that the 29-year-old Bastareaud would be missing from the side. The bullocking centre had played 30 games for his club Toulon and for France this season and Brunel had long planned to give him a rest, Midi Olympique reported.\r\nBrunel\'s desire to see Fofana, who has not played a test in 18 months, and Lamerat play together at international level was also a factor, the newspaper said.\r\nAdvertisement\r\nLamerat started at centre during the first games of this year\'s Six Nations tournament, but was one of several players reportedly sanctioned by France\'s rugby federation for a night out drinking following their 32-26 loss to Scotland.\r\nGeoffrey Doumayrou, who played both of the first two tests with Bastareaud, injured his ankle in the second, a 26-13 loss in Wellington. Montpellier fullback Benjamin Fall, sent off last week after a mid-air collision with Beauden Barrett, was selected after a disciplinary panel rescinded the red card.\r\nBrunel made just two other changes to the 23-man match day squad, who were impressive in the Wellington defeat and had the All Blacks stretched, despite playing almost 70 minutes with a man down.\r\nAdrien Pelisse comes onto the bench as reserve hooker for Pierre Bougarit, while Felix Lambey replaces Paul Gabrillagues as cover at lock. Team: 15-Benjamin Fall, 14-Teddy Thomas, 13-Remi Lamerat, 12-Wesley Fofana, 11-Gael Fickou, 10-Anthony Belleau, 9-Morgan Parra (captain), 8-Kevin Gourdon, 7-Kelian Galletier, 6-Mathieu Babillot, 5-Yoann Maestri, 4-Bernard Le Roux, 3-Uini Atonio, 2-Camille Chat, 1-Dany Priso\r\nReplacements: 16-Adrien Pelissie, 17-Cyril Baille, 18-Cedate Gomes Sa, 19-Felix Lambey, 20-Alexandre Lapandry, 21-Baptiste Serin, 22-Jules Plisson, 23-Maxime Medard\r\n(Reporting by Greg Stutchbury; Editing by John Stonestreet)\r\n','2018-07-20',''),(10,'Thousands of public workers protest against Macron\'s reforms','Al Jazeera News','Society',3,'','Natacha Butler','\"Emmanuel Macron, who plans to cut 120,000 public sector jobs, is on a collision course with France\'s trade unions.Paris, France - Under a stormy sky, more than 15,000 public sector workers have marched across the French capital to protest against President Emmanuel Macron\'s planned economic reforms.\r\nA united front of teachers, police officers, transport staff and air traffic controllers rallied on Tuesday, carrying banners and placards condemning a government they say is bent on destroying workers\' rights while targeting people who are already underpaid and overworked.\r\n\"\"We have to fight not just for ourselves but for everyone because the government is hurting the public sector,\"\" a protester said.\r\n\"\"So we\'re fighting for France\'s vital public services.\"\"\r\nMacron wants to cut 120,000 public sector jobs to help streamline public services, reduce debt and create new opportunities.\r\nElected last year as a reformer, he is forging ahead with his ambition to transform and modernise France.\r\nThe protests, he says, will not make him change his plans. It\'s a position that has put him on a collision course with France\'s trade union leaders.Since March, several unions have led the almost weekly strikes that have seen public sector workers walk out and transport disrupted.\r\nThe unions\' anger was triggered by Macron\'s decision earlier this year to reform the debt-ridden national railway, or SNCF - long a bastion of French trade unionism. The president\'s push to overhaul public services has only added fuel to their fire.\r\n\"\"The unions are supporting all public sector workers,\"\" Pascal Pavageau, head of the Force Ouvriere labour union, said at the Paris demonstration.\r\n\"\"We\'re also here to send the message that the sort of politics that favours only 10 percent of the population, those who already have everything, to the detriment of the other 90 percent has to stop - the inequalities must end,\"\" he said.\r\nMacron\'s face-off with the unions has prompted many analysts in France to call it the president\'s biggest test yet.\r\nIf he fails, he will not be able to press ahead with the remainder of his sweeping reform agenda. But to win, he needs to beat the unions - and in France that is no easy task.For decades, French unions have been a mighty force. In 2006, they forced then-President Jacques Chirac to abandon new job contracts for young people.\r\nIn 1995, nationwide strikes forced the conservative leadership to scrap a raft of reforms.\r\nIt was the biggest social movement since May 1968 when workers and students nearly brought down the government of President Charles de Gaulle.\r\nSeveral of Macron\'s predecessors have attempted to overhaul the SNCF, only to crumble in the face of stiff union opposition.\r\nBut it seems that history is not about to repeat itself.\r\nMacron looks on track to win his battle, with momentum being on his side. The protests have been frequent but the number of participants is low. Tens of thousands of people is a far cry from the millions that hit the streets in 2009 to protest against then-President Nicolas Sarkozy\'s economic policies.\r\nAlso, opinion polls suggest that there\'s little public support for the strikers. But most critically for Macron, the unions are much weaker than in the past. Sixty years ago a third of the workforce was unionised, but today it\'s only one-tenth.\r\nATCH: Macron\'s first year - French divided over \'president of the rich\' (2:38)\r\n\"\"It\'s a very French thing,\"\" said Remi Bourguignon, a professor at Sorbonne University.\r\n\"\"Traditionally the unions are very visible so you think that they are very powerful but actually they are small, so it\'s difficult for them to try and mobilise lots of people with such small numbers,\"\" added Bourguignon.\r\n\"\"There\'s not been a really big mobilisation since 1995. The appetite for strikes is weaker as striking staff lose wages and it\'s not the most efficient way to influence politics. Increasingly, there\'s a sense that there are other union methods such as negotiation or dialogue that should be used rather than getting into a power struggle.\"\"\r\nBourguignon says that if Macron makes a gesture to the unions and grants them a small concession then some of the more moderate unions like the CFDT will take it and withdraw their support for the strikes. That would probably see the movement collapse.\r\nIt is unclear if that\'s part of Macron\'s plan.\r\nSince becoming France\'s youngest president in May 2017, he has passed key reforms including a new work law. The contested reform of the national railway is being discussed in the Senate this week having already cleared the National Assembly.\r\nMacron seems to be on track to get his way and if he does, some say, the glory days of France\'s trade unions could be over.\"','2018-05-22',''),(11,'Spain \'accepts French offer\' to receive migrants aboard Aquarius','BBC','Politics',3,'','N/A','\"Spain says it has accepted an offer from France to take in some of the 630 migrants rescued by the Aquarius ship off Libya and turned away by Italy.\r\nThe Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Carmen Calvo said the French government would work together with Spain to handle the arrival of the migrants.\r\nThey are scheduled to dock in Valencia on Sunday.\r\nMadrid said that those migrants who expressed a wish to go to France would be allowed to do so.\r\nThe fate of the ship caused a diplomatic row between Italy and France, with French President Emmanuel Macron accusing Italy of \"\"irresponsibility\"\" for turning it away.\r\nItaly, meanwhile, under its tough-talking new Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, says it is unfair that countries on the frontline of the EU have had to carry most of the burden of handling the migrant influx.\r\nOn Friday, Mr Conte and Mr Macron agreed the current system must be reformed.Separately, the Spanish coast guard said it had rescued 933 migrants and found four bodies in the Mediterranean on Friday and Saturday, reported Reuters news agency.\r\nSpain\'s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has adopted a migrant-friendly stance since taking up his post two weeks ago.\r\nThe migrants aboard the Aquarius spent 20 hours in overcrowded rubber dinghies before being rescued by the Aquarius off the Libyan coast. They have since spent a week aboard the rescue ship in rough seas - with many aboard suffering seasickness.\r\nThe migrants will be met by a team of 2,300 people, primarily health workers, when the Aquarius docks on Sunday, Efe news agency reports.\r\nThey will then be given a choice as to whether to go on to France if it is established that they have a claim to asylum, Efe quoted the French foreign minister as saying.Migration reform is likely to be a key topic at a meeting of EU leaders later this month, as many countries continue to grapple with the political fallout caused by an influx of migrants in recent years.\r\nItaly\'s populist coalition - and in particular its interior minister, the right-wing League party leader Matteo Salvini - has taken a hard-line approach to immigration, resulting in the diplomatic row over the fate of the Aquarius.\"','2018-06-16',''),(13,'France celebrates World Cup success: The good, the bad and the ugly','CNN','Society',4,'','Henry Young / Judith Vonberg','\"As the heavens opened in Russia and torrential rain lashed down upon the triumphant French team, millions took to the streets of Paris in celebration.\r\nTwenty years on from exploits of the \"\"Rainbow team,\"\" whose victory on home soil united a nation, Les Bleus had once again won the World Cup.\r\nFifteen members of France\'s 23-man squad are of African descent, prompting goalscorer Antoine Griezmann to say: \"\"That\'s the France we love. Different origins but we are all united.\"\"\r\nSome 100,000 gathered at the foot of the Eiffel Tower to take in the action on big screens on Sunday. Once victory had been confirmed — courtesy of a 4-2 win against Croatia — a party atmosphere took hold and went on long into the night.\r\n\"\"MERCI,\"\" tweeted French President Emmanuel Macron, having leapt to his feet in the Luzhniki Stadium executive box to punch the air with delight.\r\nMacron subsequently \"\"dabbed\"\" with French full-back Benjamin Mendy in the changing room.\r\nA new generation of heroes had been born and, as if to prove it, their images were beamed 50 meters high on the Arc De Triomphe.\r\nParis metro operator RATP has temporarily renamed six stations in recognition of the team\'s achievements.\r\n\"\"Champs-Elysées - Clémenceau\"\" is now the \"\"Deschamps - Elysées Clemenceau,\"\" honoring the team\'s manager Didier Deschamps, who captained the side to glory back in 1998, while \"\"Victor Hugo\"\" is now the \"\"Victory Hugo Lloris\"\" in a nod to the team\'s goalkeeper.\r\n\"\"The day of glory has come,\"\" splashed the oldest national daily newspaper in France, Le Figaro.\r\nFrench daily sport newspaper L\'Equipe branded it \"\"An Eternal Happiness.\"\" \"\"Encore!\"\" said Liberation, alongside a picture of the team holding the trophy.\r\nSuch moments captivate those not normally swayed by the power of sport. Even Beyonce and Jay-Z got in on the act, performing at the Stade de France wearing French shirts complete with two stars above the crest.\r\nCelebrations turn violent\r\nBut as the night wore on, the scenes of revelry were marred by two confirmed fatalities and the behavior of a small minority.\r\nIn the south eastern town of Annecy, a man in his fifties killed himself diving into a shallow canal following the win, local police confirmed, while a 30-year-old motorist died having crashed into a tree in the western village of Saint-Félix.\r\n\"\"Despite numerous efforts, the victim died,\"\" posted the Oise Fire Department. \"\"Today, we call on pedestrians, motorists and cyclists to be very careful. The party must not end in tears.\"\"\r\nIn the capital, fireworks, flares and smoke bombs were thrown indiscriminately along the Champs Elysees, as fans refused to disperse and clashed with the advancing police.\r\nWindows were smashed and shops were looted, with similar scenes of unrest occurring in the cities of Lyon and Marseille.\r\nSome 30 individuals broke into the luxury store Drugstore Publicis on Champs Elysees in scenes reminiscent of the 2006 World Cup final, when the shop was also damaged.\r\nThe Drugstore Publicis, a luxury store on the Champ Elysees, was ransacked by a small minority.\r\n\"\"Lots of merchandise was stolen and damaged,\"\" Drugstore Publicis deputy CEO Virginie Levy told CNN. \"\"They stole alcohol, including champagne, but also lots of jewelery.\r\n\"\"No one was injured, that is the important thing, but we are shocked. This is obviously not in the spirit of the world cup. Last night, tens of people ruined the party for everyone. It is not patriotic.\"\"\r\nIn response riot police first fired tear gas to disperse the crowds, and later used water cannons in a bid to evacuate the streets.\r\nAll in all, 292 people were placed into custody in France last night, including 90 people in Paris, the Interior Ministry told CNN.\r\n\"\"There were no major incidents,\"\" a spokesperson said. \"\"There were however some upsets in big cities, with shops and terraces damaged.\"\"\r\nVisit CNN.com/sport for more news and features\r\nThere had been 10,000 police officers and gendarmes mobilized in the capital for the match — 45 were injured but none were \"\"seriously\"\" hurt.\r\nOn Monday, Macron welcomed the team back to Paris and the players made a bus parade up the Champs-Elysees avenue, where they were honored by hundreds of thousands of people.\r\nThe players and coach will receive their country\'s highest accolade, the Légion d\'Honneur.\r\nOver in Croatia, the reception was no less rapturous for the beaten finalists.\r\nThe trophy had eluded them, but there will still plenty to celebrate — not least being the smallest nation to reach the final since Uruguay in 1930.\r\n\"\"Not a lot of people had high expectations for this World Cup, some weren\'t even sure we\'d get through the group stages because the group was not easy,\"\" Croatian fan Anita Sambol told CNN Sport. \"\"It\'s been really crazy, crazy, crazy here during the World Cup!\"\"\r\n\"\"Congratulations to the France team for this great victory! We are also very proud of our heroes who made us dream,\"\" tweeted Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic.\"','2018-07-17',''),(15,'Tour de France: Greg Van Avermaet extends lead but Team Sky remain in contention','Express','Sport',4,'','Brendan Gallagher','\"The Tour de France took an an unexpected turn yesterday when Greg Van Avermaet took advantage of a largely becalmed peloton to extend his overall lead in a stage won in spectacular fashion by France’s Julian Alaphillipe.\r\nll of which suited Team Sky perfectly. Bradley Wiggins suggested earlier in the week that it might cause problem if second placed Thomas went into yellow too early and although it ruffled a few feathers, tactically the former Tour de France winner was right.\r\nSky want to quietly shake off a few more contenders before making their bid for yellow and finalising their marching orders and yesterday, operating under the radar, they did that very efficiently\r\nAfter letting the break go they then rode very hard over the last 30km to put GC contenders Bob Jungels and Robert Uran into trouble and lose more time on Thomas and Chris Froome.\r\nThat late effort saw Froome move up to sixth overall despite a mechanical - he has been plagued by them on this Tour - on the gravel section of plateau des Gileres.\r\n“There as a little bit of wacky races going on when I had a puncture on the dirt section and had to swap wheels, “ said a relaxed Froome afterwards.\r\n“Then when I got the spare wheel from my teammate I realised that the wheel was also flat so there was a little bit of a comedy of errors going on there. Thankfully it was quite far from the finish so I was able to get back in.\r\n“I think everyone played it a bit conservatively with the upcoming two stages, but from our point of view I was really happy with how we rode and we had numbers upfront today which was the main thing.”\r\nWith the main GC contenders riding tactically and saving themselves for today’s mountain top finish today (wednesday) and another on Thursday at Alpe D’Huez, Van Avermaet decided to take full advantage.\r\nThe tough Belgian, the reigning champion and a one day specialist, joined in the early break and although he couldn’t stay with Alaphilippe he did more than enough to maintain his grip on the yellow jersey. In fact he increased his lead over Thomas to two minutes 22 seconds\r\nVan Avermaet knows the jersey is only on loan - his lead will disappear the moment the GC riders decide to really duke it out in the mountains - but with his team leader Richie Porte out of the tour van Avermaet had nothing to lose.\r\nToday’s stage is a short (108.5km) but brutal affair from Albertville to La Rosiere San Bernardo with over 48km of climbing including the Hors Categorie Monte de Bisanne and the Col du Pre before a mountain top finish in La Rosiere where the GC fight is finally expected to kick off in earnest.\r\nIt is essentially the same route as stage six of the Criterium du Dauphine last month when Thomas finished second, so the Welshman will be hoping for and expecting another strong showing.\r\nAnnemiek van Vleuten followed up on her superb recent victory at the Giro Rosa victory when she chased down Anna van der Breggen on the col de la Colombiere yesterday to win La Course, the one day women\'s race, run in conjunction with the Tour de France.\r\nVan Vleuten of the Mitchelton Scott team wrapped up the ten-day Tour of Italy on Sunday but showed no sign of fatigue as she fought back right at the death for a stunning win\r\n“It was unbelievable. With 300 meters to go I still thought I would get second and then I saw her dying, “ said Van Vleuten. “I always keep believing and keep on thinking that anything is possible and never give up.\"\"\"','2018-07-18',''),(16,'Why Europe’s leaders are staying SILENT on May’s Brexit plans - and what they REALLY think','Express','Economy',4,'','Simon Osborne','\"EUROPE’S leaders are being unusually tightlipped about Theresa May’s Brexit White Paper amid growing fears that failure to accept the Prime Minister’s plans will lead to a chaotic \"\"no-deal\"\" departure next March.\r\nEuropean Union sources claim member states have decided not to heap criticism on Mrs May’s proposals because they do not want to add to the pressure she is already under from warring factions in her Conservative Party.\r\nOne insider said there was still a lot of goodwill towards Mrs May in Brussels and while there were many serious doubts about the viability of her White Paper, it was being welcomed as a starting point for fresh talks.\r\nBrussels bosses are also aware that the likelihood of a hard Brexit would be higher if Britain underwent a change of leadership so are keen to be as supportive as possible of Mrs May’s Chequers Compromise.\r\nA German source said: \"\"It doesn\'t make any sense, but make positive noises about it.”\r\nVeteran German Europhile Elmar Brok, a prominent member of the European Parliament’s Brexit Committee, appeared to follow that line when he acknowledged the White Paper “could be he basis for future relationships”.\r\nBut he broke ranks to single out Downing Street’s proposals on a customs arrangement, questioning whether Mrs May’s plan to avoid controls at the Irish border would work, and calling for a full customs union agreement like Britain currently has.\r\nMr Brok, a key ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel, said: \"\"The proposal will be difficult where they talk about a type of customs agreement. This means that they will soon collect and pass on our customs duties at their external borders.\r\n\"\"By doing so they want to avoid having controls between Northern Ireland and Ireland.\r\n\"\"We do not know yet if that will work. There are considerable doubts as to whether this is sufficient and whether it is practicable at all, and that has to be discussed in detail.\r\n\"\"A real customs union would certainly be helpful.\"\"\r\nGerman Foreign Office Minister Michael Roth said the EU had many questions about the British proposals but believed Mrs May wanted to compromise.\r\nMr Roth said it was still unclear if a no-deal Brexit could be avoided but added: \"\"Everyone has to be aware that the EU is in a worse position after the UK leaves and that also applies to the UK itself.\r\n“Now it must be a matter of keeping the disadvantages as low as possible.\r\n“For us, the cohesion of the EU27 is crucial. For us the integrity of the single market is crucial and for us it is crucial that we want to work as closely as possible with the United Kingdom.\"\"\r\nAnd Mrs Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert summed up the government’s line after a crunch cabinet meeting on Brexit last week when he said: “It’s clear that very intensive work lies ahead of us until October. This is an ambitious timeframe.”\r\nRegarding France, meanwhile, President Emmanuel Macron will be targeted by Britain as a key way to get an EU deal with Chancellor Philip Hammond travelling to Paris to meet his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire next week.\r\n\r\nBut Mr Macron and his team have also remained tight-lipped on Mrs May’s White Paper for fear of also putting Mrs May ’s leadership in danger.\"','2018-07-20',''),(17,'Petty Italy LASH OUT at French World Cup champions - ‘Our wine is better than yours!’','Express','Sport',4,'','Romina McGuinness','\"ITALY’S interior minister has launched a bizarre attack on France’s World Cup champions, boasting “our wine is better” and declaring Sardinia is “a lot prettier” than Corsica.\r\nMatteo Salvini, one of French President Emmanuel Macron’s most vocal critics, also slammed the French team, brushing off their World Cup victory by saying that the Italian winners of a relay race were more deserving than the young footballers.\r\nHours after the final whistle, Mr Salvini posted a picture on his Twitter account of the four runners with the caption: “The real champions of the day!”.\r\n“And Italian wine is better than French wine, as is Italian cinema and music. And Sardinia is a lot prettier than Corsica,” he said in reference to the two Mediterranean islands.\r\nTwo days before the World Cup final, Mr Salvini said he would “jinx” France and hoped it would lose against Croatia, because he didn’t want to see Mr Macron “jump up and down with joy,” according to the Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano.\r\nItalian football fans have also tried to cast a shadow over France’s victory, its second in 20 years.\r\nA picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa clad in the French football shirt posted on the Louvre’s official Twitter account triggered a social media storm on Sunday, after Italian supporters accused the world-famous Paris museum of cultural appropriation.\r\n“Mona Lisa is the work of Leonardo da Vinci. She was born in Italy, and was created by an Italian. This has always been the case and will always be the case,” one Twitter user said.\r\n“To celebrate you use an Italian painting. You should hide in shame,” another Italy fan tweeted.\r\nThe Louvre responded to the backlash with humour – and in Italian –, saying that the famous artist had sold the work of art to France’s King Francis I.\r\nRecent disagreements over the fate of migrants rescued at sea have soured relations between France and Italy.\r\nLast month, Mr Macron accused Italy’s new populist government of “cynicism and irresponsibility” for refusing to take in a ship carrying more than 600 migrants, exposing deep divisions between the two neighbours on migration and deeply angering Mr Salvini, who has repeatedly asked France to take in more refugees.\r\nA popular French daily has accused an Italian newspaper of trying to take credit for France’s World Cup victory after it implied that the team’s head coach Didier Deschamps had honed his football skills in Italy, and not in France.\r\nItaly’s far-right leader openly derided the French, saying that Italy’s wines were superior to France’s.\r\nFrance’s Le Monde called out Rome’s Corriere dello Sport after it claimed in an article published after France’s stunning 4-2 win against Croatia on Sunday that Mr Deschamps – himself a world champion – had perfected “the Italian art of defence and tactics” during his five-season spell with the Turin-based Juventus football club.\r\nFour-time world champions Italy failed to qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1958 after a play-off defeat against Sweden in November 2017, a defeat widely seen as one of the biggest embarrassments in the country’s history. \"','2018-07-18',''),(18,'Butchers in France Seek Protection, Citing Vegans and Violence','New York Times','Economy',4,'','Alissa J. Rubin','\"PARIS — French butchers say they’ve had enough. Not only must they confront media coverage of the “vegan way of life,” now they say they are under assault.\r\nAfter a series of small but unprecedented incidents, the butchers federation says its members need protection from militants who have broken windows, thrown fake blood and sprayed graffiti on their shops. In a letter to the French Interior Ministry, the butchers wrote that “physical, verbal, and moral violence” against them was “neither more nor less than a form of terrorism.”\r\nThe letter may be a touch hyperbolic — French vegan organizations are quick to defend their movement as nonviolent — but it has struck a chord with many French who dislike being told what they should eat.\r\nFood is sacred in France, a country proud of its more than 300 cheeses and its cuts of beef so refined that it is impossible to order a steak at the butcher’s counter without being offered a choice of at least 10 cuts.\r\n“The enemies of a meat-based diet want to consign humanity to grains,” a columnist wrote Tuesday in the newsmagazine Le Point. “Down with totalitarianism. Long live blanquette.”\r\nButchers in different parts of the country have been targeted recently with fake blood by anti-meat or animal-rights groups. In the northeastern city of Lille and the surrounding region, vandals shattered windows and left graffiti saying “Stop Speciesism” on a butcher’s shop, a fishmonger, a restaurant and a rotisserie.\r\n“Attacks like this, acts of violence against businesses are new in France,” said Pierre Sans, a veterinary professor at the University of Toulouse who also studies food consumption. “We have seen it against slaughterhouses and laboratories, but towards a business that is selling legal foodstuffs, it’s rather shocking.”\r\nThe attacks not only have taken the butchers by surprise, but also have offended them, perhaps in part because the village butcher, like the baker and the cheese proprietor, tend to be respected community members.\r\nThe Vegan Federation also condemned the attacks.\r\n“We have a very clear position: We are completely against ugly language and violent expressions of opinion,” said Constantin Imbs, leader of the federation. Some social media exchanges among new converts to the vegan and animal rights movements can become particularly virulent, he said, and those people may be motivated to extremism by graphic slaughterhouse videos posted by activists.\r\n“It’s very counterproductive,” Mr. Imbs said. “Veganism is about reducing violence.”\r\nThe butchers’ letter comes against a backdrop of a gradual fall in meat consumption in France that has been driven by many factors: health concerns, higher prices and a general sense of the cost of meat to the environment.\r\nFrench per-capita consumption of meat dropped by more than 10 percent from 2000 to 2012, according to the Agriculture Ministry, and has continued to decrease.\r\n“The 18,000 artisans, butchers and sausage makers of our country are worried about the excessive media exposure about the vegan way of life,” Jean-François Guihard, the president of the Federation of Butchers, Charcuteries and Traiteurs, said in his letter to Interior Minister Gérard Collomb.\r\nStill, it hardly seems likely that vegans are about to carry the day. France remains the highest per-capita consumer of red meat in Europe, and it leads the world in the manufacture of foie gras, a favorite Christmas delicacy made from the liver of a force-fed goose or duck.\r\nIn an interview on France Inter radio, Sébastien Arsac of the animal rights group L214, which is known for secretly recording videos of slaughterhouse conditions and putting them online, did not explicitly condemn the militant activists, but made clear it was not the purpose of his movement.\r\n“In general the animal-rights militants are nonviolent,” he said. “The most important part of their work is to make posters, to hand out fliers and to make videos.”','2018-06-26',''),(21,'France audit warns 840 bridges may face risk of collapse','New York Post','Society',9,'https://nypost.com/2018/08/19/french-audit-warns-840-bridges-may-face-risk-of-collapse/','Associated Press','\"PARIS — An audit commissioned by the French government says about 840 French bridges are suffering from serious damage and at risk of collapse in the coming several years.\r\nPresident Emmanuel Macron’s government had already promised new infrastructure spending, but is coming under new pressure after Tuesday’s bridge collapse in neighboring Italy that killed 43 people.\r\nThe audit, published Sunday by the Journal du Dimanche newspaper, says a third of the 12,000 government-maintained bridges in France need repairs. About 7 percent, or about 840 bridges, present a “risk of collapse” in the coming years if spending is kept at current levels, the audit says.\r\nThe audit doesn’t address thousands of other French bridges maintained by private companies or local authorities, which have seen budget cuts in recent years.\r\nThe government released a summary of the audit last month, blaming previous administrations for inconsistent and inadequate road funding, and saying the growth of traffic and increasing episodes of extreme weather have worsened the problem.\r\nThe Transport Ministry didn’t respond to requests for comment Sunday. Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne told broadcaster Franceinfo last week that bridge “maintenance is our priority” and announced plans for a 1 billion-euro (($1.14 billion) plan to “save the nation’s roads,” including bridges and tunnels. She reiterated plans for a new infrastructure law after the summer holidays.\r\nThe Genoa bridge collapse has shined a spotlight on road maintenance in Italy. Italian investments in roads sank most dramatically among the top five European economies after the 2008 economic crisis, never fully recovering, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development\"','2018-08-19',''),(22,'Local fishers in France struggle along with Mediterranean ecology','Aljazeera','Economy',9,'https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/08/local-fishers-france-struggle-mediterranean-ecology-180810161143970.html','David Chater','\"Climate change and pollution have taken their toll on the fish population in the Mediterranean and the effect of tourist fishing is not even being calculated.\r\nAccording to the UN, the Mediterranean now the most over-fished sea in the world and pollution and climate change are doing their own damage to fish populations.\r\nAs the state of the marine environment worsens, local fishers have begun looking for alternatives to make ends meet and preserve the dwindling fish populations.\r\nAl Jazeera\'s David Chater met fishermen in the city of La Ciotat, on the French Riviera - who are trying to make a difference.\"','2018-08-10',''),(23,'Monaco noble claims millions from France over royal \'trick\'','BBC','Politics',9,'https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-45173493','N/A','A French-born aristocrat has asked the French state to pay him €351m (£314m; $401m) in damages, alleging that it tricked his relatives out of succeeding to the throne of Monaco.\r\nCount Louis de Causans, 44, says that early in the 20th Century France changed the succession rules to thwart a German claim to the throne.\r\nMr de Causans told the French daily Le Parisien that it was a matter of family honour to rectify the \"trickery\".\r\nPrince Albert II rules Monaco today.\r\nIn a video broadcast by Le Parisien (in French), Mr de Causans said \"I want the truth to come out - I want reparation for the injustice done to my family by France\".\r\nHe stressed that his dispute was with France, not with Prince Albert.\r\nHis lawyer, Jean-Marc Descoubès, told the BBC that \"on 2 July this year we asked the foreign ministry to pay compensation to my client\". The ministry has two months to accept or reject the request, so the deadline is 2 September.\r\nThe claim centres around Prince Louis II, who reigned in 1922-1949. He was a bachelor, without any legitimate royal heir, and therefore under the original inheritance rules he was ineligible to reign.\r\nMr de Causans maintains that under these rules his own branch of the Grimaldi family should have succeeded to the throne instead.\r\nBut in 1911 a law was passed, under French pressure, changing the rules so that Louis could reign. He had an illegitimate daughter, Charlotte, and the new law enabled her to be adopted by Louis, thus getting round the succession problem. Charlotte was born of a passionate liaison between Louis and a cabaret singer, Marie-Juliette Louvet.\r\nAt the time the great European powers were in an arms race that turned into the carnage of World War I in 1914.\r\nMr de Causans says the succession should have gone to a German nobleman from his own branch of the family - Wilhelm, the Second Duke of Urach, who was Louis\' cousin.\r\nThe lawyer, Jean-Marc Descoubès, said that \"it was quite simply unacceptable for a German to reign over Monaco then, on the eve of the First World War\".\r\n\"We identified the responsibility of the French government,\" he told the BBC.\r\n\"There were secret meetings in Paris and Monaco between the French ambassador and Monaco authorities, they signed a secret pact. I have some evidence, and will give it to the court if the French government doesn\'t want to pay.\"\r\nWhen asked why Mr de Causans had only decided to make his claim now, he said the late Prince Rainier III - Albert\'s predecessor - had \"blocked everything\" during his reign. He died in 2005.\r\nRainier had barred Mr de Causans and his side of the Grimaldi family from entering Monaco, the lawyer said.\r\nThe €351m figure for the claim resulted from the calculations of lawyers and accountants, based on the Grimaldi fortune and Mr de Causans\'s age, he said.\r\n\"If the government refuses we will sue it in court,\" he explained.\r\nMr de Causans, who lives in Paris, says he is a direct descendant of Honoré III, who ruled the tiny Mediterranean principality in 1733-1793. The royal family are known as the House of Grimaldi.','2018-07-18',''),(24,'BA and Air France to stop flights to Iran next month','BBC','Politics',9,'https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45288659','N/A','\"British Airways and Air France have announced that they will stop flying to Iran next month.\r\nBoth airlines said that the route was \"\"not commercially viable.\"\"\r\nThe reintroduction of US sanctions has caused a slump in the value of the Iranian currency, the rial, making it harder for Iranians to travel overseas.\r\nBA restarted the service to Tehran two years ago after a four-year gap. The last flight will be on 22 September, returning the next day.\r\nThe airline apologised to travellers planning to travel to Iran and said it was offering refunds for affected customers or a possible rerouting through other airlines.\r\nAir France, which had transferred its connections with Tehran to its low-cost airline Joon, had reduced the frequency of the flights from three to one a week since the beginning of this month. It will stop all flights on 18 September.\r\nKLM said last month that it would also suspend flights from Amsterdam to Iran from September.\r\nThe sanctions, prompted partly by Washington\'s decision in May to abandon the Iran nuclear deal, have prompted many western firms to step back from business in Iran.\r\nCompanies such as the French energy giant Total, German insurer Allianz and Danish tanker operator Maersk have said they are preparing to wind down their operations in Iran.\"','2018-08-23',''),(25,'100 years later: Returning to World War I\'s Western Front in France','Stuff','Politics',9,'https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/destinations/europe/france/106584311/100-years-later-returning-to-world-war-is-western-front-in-france','Mary Winston Nicklin','\"A century has passed since the battles that baptised the US military into the horrors of modern industrialised warfare.\r\nNearly three years after the guns of August opened the First World War, the first doughboys in General John J. Pershing\'s American Expeditionary Forces - young, enthusiastic and prone to breaking into song - arrived on French shores to join the weary Allied Forces.\r\nThe United States\' entry into the war would turn the tide.\r\nNumbering just 200,000 - including the National Guard - at the beginning, the soldiers in the US Armed Forces in France would total 1,894,000 by the time the armistice was signed.\r\n* New Zealand memorial museum to open in Le Quesnoy, France\r\n* Napier\'s \'unsung\' WWI war hero will be remembered in proposed museum\r\n* Kiwi war memorial museum on the Western Front in France comes closer to reality\r\nNot only did the Great War create the modern American military, but it was also a catalyst for the civil and women\'s rights movements, and it carved up empires on the modern world map.\r\nThe \"\"War to End All Wars\"\" claimed an estimated 40 million military and civilian lives - of which nearly 117,000 were American - and left behind apocalyptic devastation.\r\nOver There - in the parlance of the famous George M. Cohan song - France was an unimaginable hellscape: trees like charred matchsticks jutting from bombed-out craters, miles of trenches, body parts blown into trees or lost in the mud. In this ghoulish wasteland, the scale of physical and psychological suffering was unprecedented. Fifty per cent of the dead have no known graves.\r\n\"\"I have a rendezvous with death,\"\" begins the famous poem by Alan Seeger, who died at the Battle of the Somme while volunteering in the French Foreign Legion.\r\nEntire villages were wiped off the map and never rebuilt. Names like the Somme and Verdun - site of the war\'s longest battle and one of the costliest battles in human history - are eternal symbols of the sacrifice.\r\nFollowing the war, what was called the Red Zone, a swath of 460 acres across the Western Front, was declared off-limits for habitation. The annual \"\"iron harvest\"\" unearths tons of shrapnel, guns and grenades. Unexploded ordnance is still a danger to farmers plowing their fields. Reminders are everywhere in France; the tiniest rural villages have monuments to the war dead. Although famous Americans fought in the conflict - including a son of President Theodore Roosevelt (Quentin Roosevelt), an author (John Dos Passos) and a future president (Harry S. Truman) - the First World War was largely forgotten in Americans\' national memory.\r\n\"\"The US got away with a bloody nose; France suffered an evisceration,\"\" explained historian Jay Winter at a spring lecture at the Hotel de Talleyrand in Paris. \"\"Since the 1980s, there\'s been a memory boom. The First World War has taken its place as the foundational moment of the 20th century.\"\"\r\nAnd at last, Washington, DC, is expected to get a First World War Memorial, in Pershing Park on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. For now, the Great War is the only 20th-century conflict not commemorated in the nation\'s capital.\r\nTo mark this centennial year and the battles that marked the dawn of the American century, we have assembled a selection of historic battlefields, important sites and commemorative events. We have focused on the main offensives on the Western Front in France, during which US soldiers helped bring to an end this war of attrition. Many of these sites are managed by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), which was created in 1923 to oversee memorial monuments and maintain permanent overseas cemeteries.\r\nChateau-Thierry Monument Visitor Centre\r\nIn summer 1918, the German army was dangerously close to reaching Paris. German technological advances - shells were being blasted through the stratosphere from up to 75 miles away by what was known as a Paris Gun - already meant an artillery assault on the French capital.\r\nAt Chateau-Thierry, in the Aisne department, just 50 miles (80km) from Paris, green US forces fought alongside the French to stop the German advance in the decisive Second Battle of the Marne. For their dogged defense, the 3rd Infantry Division earned the nickname \"\"Rock of the Marne\"\". According to reports at the time, the Germans were stunned by the courage of the Marines in three weeks of fighting at Belleau Wood, calling them \"\"Teufelhunden\"\" - \"\"Devil dogs.\"\"\r\nAfter the war, a colossal classical memorial was placed on Hill 204. Designed by architect Paul Philippe Cret with allegorical statues and an ornamental battle map, the portico is visible for miles around.\r\nAn on-site visitors\' centre opened on Memorial Day 2018. Explaining American involvement in the war, the exhibit also sheds light on stories such as those of the Gold Star Mothers, an association of women who had lost sons in battle.\r\nStill active today, it derived its name from the custom of hanging a service flag, marked with stars depicting family members in the military, outside the home. (The gold colour depicted the fallen.) These mothers lobbied for federally sponsored pilgrimages to ABMC cemeteries and memorial sites. Nearly 7000 women had made the transatlantic trip by 1933.\r\nBelleau Wood American Monument\r\nA pilgrimage site for Marines, Belleau Wood was the scene of an emblematic battle, a turning point in the war and a defining event in US military history. It was here in June 1918 that the 4th Marine Brigade captured the hilltop wood, which the Germans had fortified with machine gun nests in the trees.\r\nAdvancing across a wheat field without any artillery support, the Marines fought bravely with guns, bayonets, knives and fists in hand-to-hand combat. At the edge of the wood, there\'s a bronze Marine monument by Felix de Weldon, the sculptor who also created the Marine Corps War Memorial (or Iwo Jima Memorial).\r\nPassionate guides such as Jean-Bernard Capar lead visitors through the sun-dappled wood, pointing out the foxholes dug by Marines as they advanced up the hill.\r\n\"\"It\'s always been moving for me,\"\" Capar said. \"\"They came from so far away, gave their lives for us.\"\" At the small remembrance museum in Belleau, ask for the key for the gate across the street. In the garden of an old chateau that predates the war, there\'s a bulldog fountain originally purchased in Heidelberg, Germany - and to this day, visiting Marines will stop to take a drink.\r\nAisne-Marne American Cemetery and Memorial\r\nSitting at the foot of Belleau Wood, this cemetery contains the graves of 2289 soldiers who fought in the vicinity in summer 1918.\r\nThe chapel\'s Wall of the Missing commemorates an additional 1060. It\'s a startlingly beautiful place of neatly manicured grounds and flowering gardens; a 15-person team tends to the landscaping. The gravestones - a sea of crosses and stars of David - are polished to a dazzling white.\r\nOise-Aisne American Cemetery and Croix-Rouge Farm Memorial\r\nFourteen miles (22.5km) northeast of Chateau-Thierry, this cemetery holds the graves of 6012 US soldiers, including poet Joyce Kilmer and Foster Decorah, a Native American from Wisconsin\'s Winnebago tribe.\r\nNearby, in Fere-en-Tardenois, stands a bronze statue depicting an American soldier carrying his dead comrade, honouring the service of the 167th (Alabama) Infantry Regiment, part of the National Guard\'s 42nd Infantry Division.\r\nTo quickly build up an army after the United States\' declaration of war in 1917, National Guard divisions were federalised, drawing units from 26 states and the District. The 42nd became known as the \"\"Rainbow Division\"\" because its members spanned the country.\r\nFranco-American Museum at Chateau de Blerancourt\r\nImagine this: Anne Morgan, daughter of financier J.P. Morgan, driving her Ford Model T all over the devastated Aisne countryside, coordinating aid for the stricken region.\r\nOne of the richest women in the world set up a relief effort at Chateau de Blerancourt in 1917, working from the war zone with 350 American volunteers. Nearby, the Armistice was signed in a railway car in the Compiegne Forest on November 11, 1918.\r\nToday, this 17th century chateau is a splendid museum dedicated to French-American friendship. It reopened last year after a 10-year closure for renovation and expansion.\r\n\"\"Like in any family, they don\'t always agree,\"\" explained curator Carole Gragez. \"\"What we seek to do is explore this relationship.\"\"\r\nStarting with the ideological origins of the United States and the important French role in the American Revolution, the collection also provides insights into the First World War. Particularly prized is an original ambulance, which the volunteer American Field Service used to transport wounded French soldiers.\r\nIt\'s interesting to ponder propaganda\'s role in the war - both in France and the United States. When Pershing\'s troops symbolically paraded through Paris streets on July 4, 1917, to Lafayette\'s tomb in the Picpus Cemetery, newspapers at the time reported Lt. Col. Charles E. Stanton\'s legendary utterance: \"\"Lafayette, we are here!\"\" This choice quote boosted the morale of both Americans and the war-weary French.\r\nRunning through August 27, the \"\"Winds and Words of War\"\" exhibition, in partnership with the San Antonio Public Library, showcases the American propaganda posters - including works by Norman Rockwell - used to sway public opinion in favour of officially entering the war.\r\nQuentin Roosevelt centennial in Coulonges-Cohan\r\nUS President Theodore Roosevelt\'s youngest son, a pilot, was killed during a dogfight on Bastille Day 1918.\r\nAfter the war, his mother, Edith, placed a commemorative fountain in the village of Chamery, which provided drinking water to the villagers who had carefully tended his grave. (At the time of the 20-year-old\'s death, the Germans - immediately recognizing him - buried Quentin Roosevelt with full battlefield honours. His remains were later exhumed and moved to be with his oldest brother, Ted, who died of a heart attack in 1944 and is buried in the World War II Normandy American Cemetery.)\r\nToday, there\'s a shrine in the place where he fell. To honour him and the other \"\"knights of the sky\"\", the weekend of August 25 and 26 will see a centennial commemoration with pilots from the \"\"Quentin Roosevelt squadron\"\" reenacting the 1918 air battles with more than 90 model aircraft.\r\n\"\"Soldiers of All Colours: Walking on the Path to Peace\"\"\r\nThe Aisne department will host a three-day programme of centennial events September 14-16.\r\nHighlights include concerts by Chicago\'s King College Prep high school jazz band and the unveiling in Blerancourt of a memorial to the 370th Infantry Regiment, the heroic African-American soldiers who, like the Harlem Hellfighters, fought under French command because of segregation in the US military. These soldiers are also credited with bringing jazz to Paris.\r\nMusee de la Grande Guerre\r\nJust 30 minutes outside Paris in Meaux, Europe\'s largest First World War museum offers an excellent immersion into the Great War with reconstructed trenches, hanging fighter planes and interactive displays.\r\nBut it\'s not just about war history; the museum portrays the war\'s profound impact on society. The modernist building occupies the site of the first Battle of the Marne - constructed beneath the towering \"\"American Monument\"\", a 23-metre-high sculpture called \"\"Tearful Liberty\"\", given to France in 1932.\r\n\"\"We felt like voyeurs reading these intimate letters,\"\" explained curator Jean-Yves Le Naour at the media opening of the fantastic temporary exhibition \"\"Families Tested by the War.\"\"\r\nIndeed, letter-writing was incredibly important during the war - the French postal service allowed 600,000 letters and 40,000 parcels to be delivered every day. And Pershing also understood the power of letters, encouraging the doughboys to write home. Running through December 2, the exhibit is a comprehensive look at the war\'s social legacy, including gender roles in society.\r\nMeuse-Argonne American Cemetery\r\nLaunched in September 1918, the Meuse-Argonne offensive was part of a larger Allied campaign to drive the German army from France and end the war.\r\nIn the largest battle in American history at the time, 1.2 million US troops fought over a period of 47 days. On 130 acres of ground that was liberated, the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery is Europe\'s largest such cemetery, memorialising 15,200 US soldiers.\r\nRemains from 150 temporary burial sites were reburied here between 1918 and 1934. Near the chapel, you\'ll find the grave of South Carolinian Cpl. Freddie Stowers, who received the Medal of Honnor for his heroic actions in battle 73 years after his death - the only African-American soldier honoured with this award.\r\nA new visitors centre, complete with interactive screens and a film, was opened on Memorial Day 2017.\r\nOn September 23, candles will be lit at the headstones in a Centennial Luminary remembrance of fallen soldiers.\r\n\"\"It\'s going to be an awesome event. This will be the biggest ceremony at the biggest cemetery to mark the biggest American World War I offensive,\"\" superintendent Bruce Malone said. \"\"The hillside will be aglow. There will be videos depicting soldiers\' stories, and volunteers will read aloud the names of the fallen. It will take 13 hours.\"\"\r\nSuresnes American Cemetery and Lafayette Escadrille Memorial Cemetery\r\nThe first American overseas cemetery is on a hill just outside Paris with sweeping views of the French capital. In 1917, the terrain served as a temporary field hospital before being converted after the war.\r\nUS President Woodrow Wilson conducted the Memorial Day ceremony in 1919. \"\"Here we have the broad story of American society at war - soldiers, women volunteers, third nation volunteers with civic organisations like the YMCA,\"\" superintendent Matthew Brown said.\r\nAlong with the other ABMC cemeteries, Suresnes will host a large commemorative event on Armistice Day (November 11).\r\nNearby, in the parkland of the Domaine National de Saint-Cloud, the Lafayette Escadrille Memorial honours the United States\' first combat aviators, 49 of whom are entombed in the memorial crypt, their sarcophagi arranged beneath stained glass windows depicting their famous air battles.\r\nFirst created in 1916, the Lafayette Escadrille was composed of volunteer American pilots who fought under French Captain Georges Thenault before the United States\' official declaration of war.\r\nThe squadron first fought above the skies of Verdun; their emblem was the visage of a Sioux Indian. It was disbanded in 1918, but the name lives on as a unit in the French air force.\r\nBellicourt American Monument and Somme American Cemetery\r\nA little less than 100 miles (161km) northeast of Paris, the Bellicourt American Monument was built above a canal tunnel built by Napoleon - a main defence of the Hindenburg Line which was broken by an American offensive in September 1918.\r\nButte de Vauquois\r\nLocated 13 miles (21km) south of the Meuse-Argonne cemetery, this hill is symbolic of the war\'s fierce fighting. A village was annihilated.\r\nPocked with craters and carved with trenches, the butte was transformed by the Germans into a veritable fortress, with its underground galleries reinforced with concrete (an innovation at the time). Finally liberated by American forces in September 1918, the butte today is threaded with walking trails through an otherworldly landscape. Artifacts are displayed in a small visitors centre.\r\nRomagne \'14-\'18 museum\r\nIn the village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, next to the American cemetery, Dutchman Jean-Paul de Vries has spent 30 years collecting objects in the surrounding battlefields - including helmets, love letters and the elaborate \"\"trench art\"\" carved by soldiers out of artillery shells.\r\n\"\"I want to tell the story of the soldiers\' everyday lives,\"\" he said. De Vries also leads walks through local battlefields. Take time to stop for lunch at his adjacent cafe.\r\nMontfaucon American Monument\r\nDedicated by Pershing in 1937, this soaring monument commands a perch that had been an observation point for Germans watching enemy lines around Verdun.\r\nDuring the Meuse-Argonne offensive, it was a key US objective to capture this peak. Climb the tower\'s 234 steps to reach the observation platform. Directly below, spy the stone ruins of Montfaucon-d\'Argonne village.\r\nVerdun Memorial\r\nRevamped and expanded in 2016, this excellent museum brings visitors to the heart of the Battle of Verdun. Nearby, the Douaumont Ossuary is filled with the bones of 130,000 unidentified soldiers recovered from the battlefield.\r\nThe setting, next to the ruins of the destroyed village of Fleury, creates a haunting ambience. Green with life, the landscape seems mystical, thanks to the work of the French National Forests Office, which has replanted the area devastated by the war.\r\nThe Verdun area is now more akin to a nature park, a former lunar landscape now dotted with wild orchids. Another notable initiative by the forestry commission is a battlefield circuit to honour the Americans who fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.\r\nNear the American cemetery, a forest trail was planted with 1700 trees to memorialise the 1700 soldiers of the 1st Division who died in October 1918.\r\nMontsec American Monument\r\nCommanding a hilltop spot in Thiaucourt, this circular colonnade was built to commemorate the capture of the St.-Mihiel salient, or bulge, by the American Expeditionary Forces and to symbolise the enduring friendship and cooperation between the US and French armies.\r\nNearby, it\'s possible to walk in authentic era trenches at Apremont-la-Foret.\r\nMusee de l\'Armee at Les Invalides, Paris\r\nDistinguished by its radiant gold dome, the former veterans hospital of Les Invalides is home to Paris\'s sprawling army museum and Napoleon\'s tomb.\r\nThe permanent collection has a section exploring the causes and consequences of the Great War, while temporary exhibits, such as \"\"1918, Armistice\"\" (July 24-September 30) and \"\"In the East, an Endless War 1918-1923\"\" (October 5-January 20, 2019) will be staged during this centennial year.\r\nA spectacular multimedia sound and light show, \"\"Night at Invalides\"\", is back this summer with a new theme: \"\"1918, Birth of a New World\"\". Running through September 1, the high-tech images are projected on a newly restored courtyard wall.\r\nFlanders Field American Cemetery and Memorial\r\nThe area around Ypres in Belgium saw fierce fighting throughout the four-year war. The famous poem In Flanders Fields by Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae, who served as a medic during the Second Battle of Ypres (1915), eternised poppies as a symbol of remembrance. (\"\"In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row.\"\")\r\nThe red flowers were the first things to grow on the war-ravaged landscape. In the American Cemetery lie the remains of 368 American soldiers who fought with the Allies to liberate Belgium during the Ypres-Lys offensive.\r\nSt. Mihiel American Cemetery\r\nSprawling over more than 40 acres, this cemetery contains the graves of 4153 US soldiers, most of whom died during the St. Mihiel offensive. A ceremony will take place on at 12.45 pm September 22 to mark the 100th anniversary of the offensive, including a free concert at 5pm by the US Naval Forces Europe Band.\"','2018-08-27',''),(26,'French Business Morale Drops as \'Macron Effect\' Eases','The New York Times','Economy',9,'https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/08/23/business/23reuters-france-economy-morale.html','Michel Rose','\"French business morale fell to its lowest since Emmanuel Macron became president in May 2017, suggesting an uncertain global trade outlook and higher oil prices may be offsetting the feelgood bounce generated by his election.\r\nSentiment soared after Macron arrived in the Elysee Palace promising investor-friendly reforms and a return to fiscal discipline, hitting a multi-year high of 111.5 in December.\r\nThe composite business morale index dropped to 106 by July and slipped further to 105 in August, statistics institute INSEE said on Thursday.\r\nThe latest reading remains above the long-term average of 100 however and, unlike a drop in French consumer confidence that can be attributed to discontent about higher taxes, all signs point to business morale being weighed down by factors mostly outside Macron\'s control.\r\nINSEE gave no reason for August\'s decline, though respondents in recent business surveys have cited uncertain trade prospects and rising energy prices as negatives.\r\nMorale in the industrial sector, which is more closely followed by economists, edged up to 110 points this month, down from an 18-year high of 113.3 hit in January but beating a Reuters poll of economists that forecast 108.\r\nGDP data for the euro zone\'s second biggest economy disappointed in the first half of the year. For the April-June period, France reported growth of 0.2 percent for the second quarter in a row, below predictions.\r\nSome of that slowdown was due to industrial action against Macron\'s reform drive, with railworkers staging three months of strikes against his plans to modernise the state-run SNCF, weighing on tourism.\r\nSuggesting the low point may have been reached, business surveys by private data compiler IHS Markit, also out on Thursday, showed French business activity bounced back more strongly than expected in August.\r\nU.S. President Donald Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker reached a truce on trade over the summer.\r\nHowever, economists will need more evidence before they can conclude that France\'s economic weakness in the first half was just a soft patch.\r\n\"\"Expecting a strong pick-up in GDP growth in the third quarter is an act of faith,\"\" economist Philippe Waechter of Ostrum asset management said.\"','2018-08-23',''),(28,'France may stop trains and planes from UK under no-deal Brexit','The Guardian','Politics',11,'https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/sep/13/france-may-stop-trains-and-planes-from-uk-under-no-deal-brexit','Patrick Wintour and Dan Sabbagh','Senior politician says France is prepared to pass emergency laws to protect citizens.\r\nEurostar trains may stop running in the event of a chaotic no-deal Brexit, the French minister for European affairs has warned.\r\nNathalie Loiseau sounded the warning as she made clear France was against a “blindfold Brexit”, in which key negotiating issues were deferred until the UK had left the EU.\r\nSpeaking in London, Loiseau coupled a firm commitment to protecting the single market with a frank warning that France would pass emergency legislation within weeks to protect its citizens from the impact of Britain leaving the EU without a deal at the end of March.\r\nShe said there was a real possibility that, in the absence of any contingency plans, Eurostar trains could be stopped on reaching French territory, and planes from Britain could be prevented from entering French airspace.\r\n“This is the reason we must prepare for a no deal because we cannot wake up on 30 March and tell our businesses and citizens: ‘Well, we thought it would never happen, so we are not ready.’”\r\nLoiseau also set out France’s resistance to a blindfold Brexit in which the EU and UK would fudge a deal on “future relations”, deferring difficult issues until after UK had left and the 21-month transition had begun.\r\nShe told the Chatham House thinktank: “We have to have a clear sense of the balance of rights and obligations on the future relations between the UK and the EU27. Details will be worked out afterwards, but it would be to the benefit of neither the UK or the EU27 to remain vague on what is going to be our future relations at the moment of leaving.\r\n“There is a need for clarity and perspective for our fellow citizens, for our businesses,” she said, adding it would be irresponsible to do otherwise.\r\nThere have been reports that Germany favours a fudged political declaration on future relations, partly due to the lack of time and a fear that Theresa May will be toppled by Conservative sceptics bent on rejecting any deal.\r\nThe final deal will include a legally binding withdrawal agreement covering the Irish border and a declaration on future relations.\r\nLoiseau said those who had suggested the significance of the Irish border was being exaggerated were being irresponsible. Defending the need for a legal backstop aimed at avoiding a hard border, she said “we cannot wake up on 30 March to tell our Irish colleagues we don’t have a solution and we must go back to a hard border”.\r\nShe said the UK and the EU had been trying to divorce without hurting the kids, but “there is no way that this can be a win-win situation for both parties”.\r\nShe rejected requests to speculate on a possible extension of the talks beyond March, saying no such request had come from the British government or parliament. “Should there be a new position we would study it,” she said.\r\nLoiseau said the goal remained an ambitious, unprecedented agreement, but this could not involve the EU changing the principles that govern the single market.\r\nMinisters in the UK have been particularly concerned to ensure that planes will be able to fly to EU countries in the event of no deal being reached. The Department for Transport incurred the wrath of the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, this week after writing to individual member states to try to strike a side deal on the issue.\r\nWhile the UK has been keen to outline the risks of no deal for areas ranging from driving licences to passports, Downing Street downplayed the warnings from the French minister.\r\nWhen asked to respond to her comments about planes and the Eurostar, the prime minister’s spokesman said: “It’s not in anybody’s interest for that to happen.”\r\nThe UK believes that countries such as Spain will not want to jeopardise revenues from British tourism, and that they would, if necessary, be prepared to strike bilateral deals to maintain transport services if there was no prospect of a deal.\r\nA Department for Transport spokesperson said: “Our ambition in the upcoming negotiations with the EU is to maintain the existing liberal level of transport access.\r\n“Both the UK and the EU reap significant benefits from the arrangements currently in place and it is in no one’s interests for planes and trains to be ‘turned away’.\r\n“We are confident of reaching an agreement with the EU on transport access but we continue to make sensible contingency plans, including exploring bilateral arrangements with member states.”','2018-09-13',''),(29,'French Turn on Macron, as They Grow Impatient for Results','The New York Times','Politics',11,'https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/23/world/europe/france-emmanuel-macron.html','Adam Nossiter','CIVRAY, France — The cheese lady, the melon man, the retiree downing his morning glass, the olive seller, the housewife sipping coffee and the village mayor submerged by constituents’ unpaid bills — all agreed that their country’s president, Emmanuel Macron, was letting them down.\r\n“Oh, it’s a very good government! A very good government for the rich, who are kicking the poor out into the street! It’s not a good government for people who are actually working,” said Fernand Aso, 60, who sells olives and relishes at the outdoor market squeezed into the little main square of Civray, a town of just a few thousand in central France.\r\nThis area, which had voted Socialist before, was among the many that took a chance on the wunderkind former investment banker. Operating outside the established political parties, Mr. Macron swept to power 17 months ago at age 39, imploding France’s ossified politics amid a yearning to move the country out of years of economic stagnation.\r\nBut if the French were willing to give the youthful, little-known Mr. Macron a chance for a time, that time appears to be running out. The bloom is off, and not just in this largely rural area of farms, light industry and suburbs surrounding Poitiers, home to a big regional university.\r\nFrom villages to the district’s ancient white limestone towns, across the rolling fields of sunflowers and corn burned brown by a torrid summer, through the French heartland, and even into the cities, the judgment is largely the same: negative.\r\nIn a spate of recent polls, Mr. Macron has dropped so sharply in popularity that he dipped even below his much-derided predecessor, the hapless Socialist François Hollande. A poll released last Monday showed Mr. Macron’s approval rating at only 19 percent, while 60 percent found his achievements “negative,” nearly double the figure six months ago.\r\nToday Civray and its environs demonstrate the souring of opinion on Mr. Macron as well as anywhere. Its representative in Parliament was one of the first to break openly with Mr. Macron’s political movement. Conversations across this emblematic region amount to a buffet of disillusionment.\r\n“In the beginning I thought, ‘Yes, he’s young, he’s dynamic,’” said Anaïs Bonetat, 22, a waitress in an empty cafe in nearby Montmorillon. “But really, now, I see he’s just doing it his way, without even asking us.”\r\nMr. Macron, a product of France’s top schools, may still command respect on the world stage, where he has positioned himself as the West’s indispensable alternative to know-nothing populism. But at home the young man christened “Jupiter,” king of the gods, by the news media and aides, half in awe at his total self-confidence and lightning ascent, has fallen very far, very fast.\r\nHis sputtering descent may hold broader dangers for liberal democracy in Europe at a time when the French president — with his pro-free trade, pro-Europe policies — has set himself up as the opposing pole to the forces of nativism tearing at the European Union.\r\nThe far-right Rassemblement National, formerly the National Front, waits in the wings, polling a close second to Mr. Macron’s movement before elections for the European Parliament next year.\r\n“I’m fearful that the extremes will have the wind in their sails,” said Michel Pain, mayor of the tiny nearby town of Saint-Maurice-la-Clouère.\r\nA series of mini-scandals this summer — an aide was caught on video hitting a protester, while other video found Mr. Macron admonishing ordinary citizens who accost him — has not helped the president.\r\nBut the problems are about more than just image; they are substantive.\r\nThe overwhelming feeling is that Mr. Macron’s express train of pro-market reforms — lightening a protective labor code, largely doing away with a wealth tax, ending favored status for the country’s railway workers— has so far not improved the lives of ordinary French people.\r\nInstead, those in the broad economic and social tiers below the elite complain that they are paying the price as Mr. Macron makes France more capitalist, forsaking traditions of equality and fraternity in favor of the rich.\r\nHis unforgiving countrymen, suspicious of change under the best of circumstances and rattled by globalization, migration and encroaching populism, have grown impatient with him.\r\nDespite 18 months of reforms, the unemployment rate has barely budged and hovers over 9 percent. The economy is growing at a meager rate, around 1.7 percent.\r\nIn small-town France, where there has been a steady retreat of services, underway long before Mr. Macron took office, the negative feelings are especially sharp. They have been made more acute by his proposal to do a way with a crucial tax on which these towns depend, the lodgings tax.\r\n“I’m a little bit perplexed. The numbers just aren’t there,” said Gilles Bosseboeuf, a retired electronics company manager who is mayor of the village of Champagné-Saint-Hilaire, outside Poitiers. “Very disappointed, in fact.”\r\nPollsters confirm these sentiments.\r\n“He’s no longer seen as renewing the office of the presidency,” said Frédéric Dabi, a pollster at IFOP, the French Public Opinion Institute. “And public opinion has become extremely demanding. His reforms are seen as unjust. People are thinking that the majority isn’t benefiting.”\r\nMr. Macron’s defenders say that his agenda is for the long haul, and that it is too soon to pass judgment.\r\n“We didn’t say that we were going to change the country in a year and half,” said Stanislas Guerini, a lawmaker from Paris who is a spokesman for Mr. Macron’s movement, La République en Marche (The Republic on the Move).\r\n“If we really want to change the country deeply, we’ve got to take the time to undertake deep reforms,” Mr. Guerini said.\r\nHe pointed to what he called “weak signals” that Mr. Macron’s program was having an effect: 40 percent more youth enrolled in apprenticeship programs; 15 percent fewer disputes before labor tribunals; 15 billion euros, or $17.6 billion, invested in job training programs; a doubling of classes in troubled areas.\r\n“All of our policies are geared toward emancipation, so that no matter where you start, you will have the same chance as anybody else,” said Hervé Berville, another spokesman for Mr. Macron’s movement. “We want people to leave poverty, not live better in poverty.”\r\nHowever, many people complain that the burden of moving the economy forward has been foisted on the less fortunate of an aging population.\r\n“Macron’s falling, and the grace period is finished,” said Mr. Pain, the mayor, who is a retired schoolteacher. “The results just aren’t there. There’s no improvement in the unemployment rate. France’s reindustrialization is not taking off.”\r\n“They’re hitting retirees hard,” he added — a widely shared perception, and a dangerous one for Mr. Macron in a country where most retire at 62 or earlier and the ratio of retired people to workers is expected to be one to one by 2030.\r\nAround 60 percent of retirees — those earning over $25,000 — have seen a social security tax on their state pensions increase by nearly 2 percent under Mr. Macron, while the value of their pensions is not keeping pace with inflation.\r\n“He’s nicking money from me,” said Roger Coquillaud, 65, a retired army officer at the modest central cafe in Civray.\r\nFacing angry reactions, the government announced this past week that it would exempt some 300,000 retirees from the tax increase.\r\nMr. Macron’s perceived imperious manner — in a country where toppling leaders is part of the national DNA — has only compounded the fears of social and economic slippage.\r\nThe persistent litany of complaints about him — that he is arrogant, that he doesn’t listen to the less fortunate, that he is authoritarian, that his policies favor the well-to-do — are self-reinforcing and feed on one another.\r\n“When you’ve already got a bad opinion of a politician, the slightest thing can add to it. There’s a bad atmosphere around it,” said Jean-Michel Clément, the local representative in Parliament who broke with Mr. Macron over the president’s toughening line on immigration, and who has been effectively shut out ever since.\r\nThe cross-fertilizing element in the complaints about Mr. Macron was evident in the responses of many.\r\n“For me, I think he’s moving further and further away from the population,” said Jean-Marie Peigner, a retired phone company worker who is now the part-time mayor of the adjoining village of Saint-Pierre-d’Exideuil. “I have quite a few who regret having voted for him.”\r\nAmong the regretful is Bernard Blanchet, 61, who directs a music school in Montmorillon.\r\n“There’s a kind of spirit of royalism in him,” said Mr. Blanchet, who had stopped between two market stalls to discuss politics.\r\nMr. Macron once declared to an interviewer that the French missed their king — forgetting that they had also executed him.\r\n“You can’t disagree with him,” Mr. Blanchet said. “It’s clear: I won’t vote for him again.”','2018-09-23',''),(30,'French schools say \'Non!\' to cellphones','CNN','Society',11,'https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/03/opinions/france-smartphone-ban-opinion-bociurkiw/index.html','Michael Bociurkiw ','(CNN)Starting Monday, primary, junior and middle school students will head back to classrooms in France sans smartphones. A new law will require them to leave these addictive devices at home or keep them switched off during the entire school day.\r\nAffecting French children aged 3-15 years, the draconian law is the result of a campaign promise by French President Emmanuel Macron who, like many other European leaders, see the devices as a technological scourge that needs to be dealt with through sledgehammer legislation. It\'s similar to those enacted in other European jurisdictions such as Spain\'s Castilla-La Mancha region which acted in 2014 to introduce a ban to end the \"daily battle\" between teachers and students.\r\nIn enacting the law, which extends an existing ban to cover breaks and meal times, French legislators may have had their eye on such research as a 2015 London School of Economics paper which found that schools banning phones produced students with higher test scores.\r\nFrench officials hope the ban will encourage kids to swap their screen time for healthy time in the schoolyard -- or singing in the school choir. \"These days the children don\'t play at break time anymore, they are just all in front of their smartphones and from an educational point of view that\'s a problem,\" said French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer, according to news reports.\r\nI think the French policy is regressive and could potentially freeze French students in the technological Stone Age. Rather than an outright ban, better to integrate them into teaching and offer incentives to students to stay off social media during the school day.\r\nMoreover it is an extremely disingenuous policy from a man like Macron. He has vowed to transform France into a \"startup nation\" -- going to great lengths to emphasize his tech-savviness by inviting tech chief executives to Paris and even posing in his official portrait with two iPhones.\r\nIn the course of many months of research for my forthcoming book on screen addiction as a global health crisis, I\'ve found that it\'s clear that there is no policy at home or at school which a determined teenager cannot circumvent. Conversations with parents in many countries show that the need for parents and their kids to stay in touch in these uncertain times -- especially in the US with frequent school shootings -- make all-school-day bans intolerable.\r\nIndeed, in 2015, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio scrapped a decade-long ban on smartphones covering about 1.1 million students on the basis that it hindered \"modern parenting.\"\r\nCalifornia teacher and author Diana Graber, told me that students benefit by having accessible technology in the classroom. \"As a teacher myself, I hate it when devices distract students in the classroom. But for older kids there are benefits to learning how to use technology wisely and mindfully. Devices are great research tools and can be used as calculators, documentation tools, for note-taking, to watch or make instructional videos.\"\r\nOf course allowing technology into the classroom needs to be done wisely. There is no lack of teachers frustrated with the intrusion of the phones and their alerts and distracting features.\r\nResearch psychologist and university professor emeritus Larry Rosen says students\' ability to listen to a lecture while eyeing an active smartphone screen is hardly as good as many students believe. This spring, I spent two separate mornings observing his students in a lecture hall at California State University Dominguez Hills; many had a laptop, smartphone or iPad with chats and other programs active while Rosen delivered a lecture on the dangers of multitasking. They couldn\'t peel themselves away to focus solely on the lecture.\r\nDespite his observations, Rosen said he is adamantly against outright bans, such as the one about to start in France. He reasons that the fear of missing out phenomenon (FOMO) and dependence on their phone (nomophobia) places too much stress on students. \"You\'re going to lose the kids\' brains ... the proper way to do it is to give them periodic access during the day. Carve out times that are tech times.\r\nThat approach appears to be becoming more popular with teachers, who say they are no match for the seductive powers of smartphones and social media apps.\r\nJoyce Moriana, a dramatic arts teacher at Bishop Allen Academy in Toronto, said the phones serve as a useful tool for creating characters, documenting plots and interpreting texts. And one Toronto physical education teacher told me she meets the kids halfway by providing a charging station during class so that the devices are out of sight and out of mind during teaching.\r\nWhether in the US or England or Sweden, policies on smartphones in schools resemble a patchwork quilt, with school boards leaving it up to individual schools or schools leaving it up to individual teachers. Instead of banning smartphones outright, jurisdictions should introduce digital literacy courses that teach students how to navigate an \"always on\" world. The \"cybercivics\" digital literacy curriculum developed by Graber and her team is now used in more than 40 US states and internationally.\r\nThe impact of smartphones on young people even has its original developers concerned. \"Steve Jobs used to say that the computer was like a bicycle for the mind. With that analogy, the smartphone (given its intimacy) is more like an automobile. It comes with tremendous power and autonomy. You have to have the discipline and understanding to know how to handle it,\" says Imran Chaudhri, the iPhone\'s original user-interface designer.\r\nI like the approach adopted by the Greenwood School, a private facility in the shadow of Silicon Valley, where many tech executives send their kids: teach kids early on about the ethical and safety issues related to technology usage. The school even offers an organic chemistry class in the eighth grade where pupils are taught about the research-verified, harmful dopamine hit smartphones trigger in the brain.\r\nWhile by now the harm unregulated smartphone use can do is well documented -- in fact Rosen showed me jaw-dropping research of how the brain literally hijacks the smartphone user when the urge surfaces to go for a social media hit -- banning them entirely throughout the school day is shortsighted and doomed to failure.\r\nLet\'s focus on raising the younger generation into competent citizens able to cope as best they can in this era of digital distraction. And legislators and school boards should get their act together with uniform policies based on proven results.\r\nFinally, if countries such as France are going to ban smartphones outright in schools, they should make sure to better prepare students for navigating the digital age -- just like a car on a highway.','2018-09-03',''),(31,'Macron Announces Changes to France\'s Health Care System','The New York Times','Health',11,'https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/09/18/world/europe/ap-eu-france-health-care.html','N/A','PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday unveiled plans to make France\'s health care system, considered one of the best in the world, more efficient and sustainable for the next 50 years.\r\nMacron announced organizational changes at hospitals, in the recruitment of doctors, and a better use of digital technologies to provide health care to patients across the country, regardless of where they live.\r\nMacron said \"a lot of our neighbors envy the excellence of our health care system. We are attached to our model which associates hospital medicine — public and private — and private medical practice.\"\r\nFrance came out number 1 in a World Health Organization report comparing 191 countries in 2000.\r\nBut the country\'s health care system is struggling with increasing costs and lack of doctors in some rural region and poor neighborhoods.\r\nOne short-term measure consists in hiring 400 family doctors — paid by the state— in so-called \"medical deserts.\"\r\nThe current rule that sets quotas on the number of students in medicine, dentistry and pharmacy will be abolished in 2020.\r\nHospitals will be classified into in three categories: local health care, specialized care and ultra-specialized care — each focusing on its priorities, to optimize patient care.\r\nPrivate doctors and other health care professionals will be required in the coming years to organize themselves into \"communities\" to be able to respond to daily emergency calls from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day in their geographic area — leaving hospitals for only the most serious cases.\r\nThe set of measures is estimated to cost 3.4 billion euros ($4 billion) by 2022.\r\n\"My ambition is clear: I want what we call the health care system to be one of the pillars of the welfare state of the 21st century,\" Macron said. \"A health care system that prevents and protects against today\'s and tomorrow\'s health risks.\"\r\nFrance\'s health care system involves a state-funded health insurance that reimburses patients for most medical interventions and medicines prescribed by a doctor.\r\nFrance\'s health insurance budget in 2018 is 195.2 billion euros ($229 billion) — financed by taxes.\r\nIn addition, the French can also apply to private insurance to increase their health coverage.','2018-09-18',''),(32,'French residents are fighting to keep their McDonald’s','New York Post','Society',11,'https://nypost.com/2018/09/01/french-residents-are-fighting-to-keep-their-mcdonalds/','Brad Hamilton','Save our Golden L’arches!\r\nBecause this McDonald’s is a real haute spot.\r\nFrench residents of Marseille are vowing never to surrender in their fight to save the town’s fast-food joint, an unlikely cultural hub in a nation of artisanal-cheese-chomping snobs, The Telegraph reports.\r\n“There’s nothing left in areas like this, and McDonald’s is a center of community life, a place where families can sit down and relax with their kids,” said Salim Grabsi, a member of a residents association battling to stop the chain from shutting its restaurant.\r\n“My neighbors bring their grandchildren every week,” said Annick Villanueva, a retired teacher.\r\nFrance’s foodie snoots are known to snipe over “malbouffe” (junk food), but Marseille’s conservative mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin, and a Socialist senator, Samia Ghali, have joined the cause célèbre.\r\nThey’re cooking up opposition to McDonald’s through­out Marseille if the company goes ahead with plans to abandon its branch in Saint-Barthélémy, a north Marseille neighborhood plagued by gang violence, drug trafficking and high unemployment.\r\nWith a staff of 77, this Mickey D’s is the second-biggest private-sector employer in Saint-Barthélémy, which has an unemployment rate of 30 percent, more than triple the national average. Supporters say McDonald’s has won locals’ hearts and minds by hiring school dropouts and young people desperate for work after serving prison terms. Many now fear losing their jobs.\r\nThe area’s bakery, butcher’s shop and hairdresser have already closed.\r\nThe franchise-holder, Jean-Pierre Brochiero, says the restaurant operates at a loss. Staff obtained a court order last week suspending its sale on the grounds that he had failed to comply with a legal obligation to consult employees. The court is to rule Monday.\r\nFrance has long raged against McDonald’s.\r\nJosé Bové, a radical French farmer, made international headlines two decades ago when he bulldozed a McDonald’s in a protest against US taxes on Roquefort cheese and other French dairy products.\r\nBut since then, the American fast-food chain has become a huge success story in France, which is now one of Mickey D’s most profitable markets.','2018-08-01',''),(33,'French restaurants look to asylum seekers to fill jobs','Reuters','Society',11,'https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-france-restaurant/french-restaurants-look-to-asylum-seekers-to-fill-jobs-idUSKCN1LT2OE','Johnny Cotton','Restaurateurs in France want the government to speed up its asylum process and make it easier to identify suitable staff to help them fill thousands of jobs they say are increasingly snubbed by French workers.\r\nThe hotel, cafe and restaurant union GNI-Synhorcat says some businesses are downsizing or shortening their opening hours as a result of the shortage of manpower.\r\nUnder France’s immigration laws, asylum seekers have to wait six months from lodging the application for refugee status before they can work.\r\n“It’s frustrating,” said Alain Fontaine, owner of the Parisian bistrot Le Mesturet where waiters’ cries of “chaud devant” — or watch your back — mix with the lunchtime chatter.\r\nFontaine has employed several refugees in recent years, but only once they have waited months for their papers.\r\n“Here you have a workforce, you’ve got potential, you’ve got people who want to work, and on the other hand you can’t hire them,” Fontaine said.\r\nUnemployment in France hovers above 9 percent, a headache for President Emmanuel Macron who promises his business-friendly reform drive will create more economic growth and jobs.\r\nHowever, restaurateurs say the long hours and often low pay of their trade puts off some jobless French people.\r\nFrance rewrote its immigration law this year and the target is to halve the time it takes to process asylum requests to six months from the average of 11 months when Macron won power last year.\r\nYet even when migrants become eligible to work, the paperwork can be daunting.\r\nAn Interior Ministry spokeswoman acknowledged the process was bureaucratic and said reform was under way to streamline it.\r\nMalian Bakary Kanoute fled his home country at the age of 15. By then he had already developed a love for cooking and once he secured his immigration papers in France he sought work in a kitchen. He was hired by Fontaine.\r\n“When you work, you’re helping your boss and helping yourself,” the 22-year-old said.\r\nThe GNI-Synhorcat union wants to work closer with migrant charities to identify potential workers for the cafe and restaurant industry earlier in the asylum process. It is holding consultations with lawmakers on how processes can be made more efficient.\r\n“The moment a migrant is awarded refugee status ... we say bingo! We’ll train them and hire them,” GNI-Synhorcat union boss Didier Chenet said. “We want to pre-empt that moment.”','2018-09-13',''),(34,'Tennis: Isner Welcomes Wimbledon\'s New Tiebreak Rule','The New York Times','Sport',12,'https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/10/21/sports/tennis/21reuters-tennis-isner.html','Martyn Herman','\"LONDON — Tennis\'s marathon man John Isnerhas welcomed Wimbledon\'s decisionto introduce tiebreaks at 12-12 in the final set.\r\nThe American became something of a Wimbledon cult hero when beating France\'s Nicolas Mahut 70-68 in the fifth set in 2010 - a record-breaking duel lasting 11 hours five minutes and spanning three days and in which the last set alone (eight hours 11 minutes) would have broken the previous longest-match record.\r\nAfter his 2010 exploits Isner, 33, was involved in the second-longest Wimbledon match in this year\'s semi-finals when he went down 26-24 in the fifth set to South Africa\'s Kevin Anderson - a battle lasting six hours and 36 minutes.\r\nThat led to further callsto bring in sudden-death tiebreaks and Wimbledon\'s organizers announced this week that next year\'s Championships would use them after 24 games in deciding sets.\r\n\"\"I have said all along 12-all is good,\"\" he told BBC Radio 5 on Sunday. \"\"That is sensible - you\'re getting people who like the advantage and people who like tie-breaks.\r\n\"\"It is bucking tradition but a lot of people believe that is not a bad thing.\"\"\r\nThe world number 10 even joked that the new ruling should be named after him.\r\n\"\"The next match that gets to that, they should just say we will now play the Isner Rule,\"\" he said.\r\n\"\"I don\'t think they are going to do that, but I think I\'ve been a big driving force for it.\"\"\r\nWimbledon has followed the U.S. Open which has employed tiebreaks at 6-6 in deciding sets, but by allowing a set to reach 12-12 organizers say they are maintaining tradition and allowing dramatic deciding sets to evolve.\r\nThe Australian and French Opens do not have final set breakers.\r\n\"\"It may be that Wimbledon acting like this could drive them to do it as well,\"\" Isner said.\r\n\"\"There is dramaenough in a tie-breaker. You could argue there is more drama in that.\"\"\"','2018-10-21',''),(35,'Paris Fashion Week: Celine\'s rock \'n\' roll makeover sparks controversy','CNN','Lifestyle',12,'https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/paris-fashion-week-spring-summer-2019-highlights/index.html','Alice Pfeiffer','\"Each season, Paris Fashion Week closes a four-week marathon, suggesting future trends and providing an important look into France\'s cultural psyche. Since fashion is one of the country\'s most profitable industries (France is home to the LVMH and Keringluxury groups, and fashion attracts valuable tourist dollars), it is a reliable social mirror, reflecting the nation\'s politics and priorities.\r\nNew York Fashion Week: Rihanna, diversity and drag queens\r\nSo it\'s no surprise that this season offered the usual blend of pretty clothes, subtle politics and strong statements. Here were some of the key discussions from the Spring-Summer 2019 shows.\r\nhe end of an era\r\nediSlimane\'s first collection as creative director of Celine was bound to be a controversial one. Slimane, known for a rock \'n\' roll aesthetic that prioritizes youth and skinniness (which he championed while at Dior Homme and Saint Laurent), was replacing Phoebe Philo, a slick minimalist who created sophisticated, easy clothes designed with grown women in mind.\r\nSo it was no surprise, then, when Slimane sent out his usual wave-inspired tapered suits, babydoll mini dresses and bold leather looks. But still, fashion insiders and Celine devotees couldn\'t help but mourn the loss of a certain aesthetic that so many aspired to.\r\nIn the New York Times, fashion critic Vanessa Friedman put it succinctly: To those who, upon hearing of Slimane\'s appointment, \"\"feared that the days when this brand defined what it meant to be a smart, adult, self-sufficient, ambitious and elegantly neurotic woman were at an end -- you were right.\"\"\r\nppreciation trumps appropriation\r\nFrance has an especially problematic fashion history, one heavily interspersed with remnants of its horrific colonial past. The word \"\"nègre,\"\" which is used as an anti-black racial slur, is still used to designatea shade of grey, and designers continue to produce collections around stereotypical, non-specific African or \"\"Oriental\"\" themes. However, a new generation of designers is presenting a more multicultural definition of Gallic chic, in a respectful -- and highly political -- manner.\r\nAdutAkech: The South Sudanese refugee making fashion history\r\nTake Christine Phung, creative director of Leonard Paris, who found her influences in the Maasai tribes of Kenya and Tanzania.\r\nAdding a layer of authenticity to her collection, she collaborated with Maasai artisans to produce a series of traditional earrings and necklaces. Elsewhere, veiled model FerielMoulaiwalked the Koché runway in a finely embroidered hijab and matching top. This was a bold move in a country that has passed a law banning face-covering garments, including niqabs and burkas, in public. (And remember the burkini fiasco of 2016?)\r\nAt Balmain, Olivier Rousteing, one of the few black designers leading a major fashion house, showed a collection that celebrated the visual impact of Egypt on the French capital (such as the Louvre Pyramid by Chinese architect I.M. Pei), suggesting that Parisian aesthetics owe more to other cultures than one might think.\r\nSpeaking \'Franglais\'in the shadow of Brexit\r\nSavile Row tailoring met couture finesse at Givenchy, the Paris-based househelmed by British designer Clare Waight Keller. The lines, straddling garçonne chic and dandyism, could certainly be read as asartorial rebellion against Brexit. This feeling also pervaded the fusion of London boho chic and French bobo (bourgeois-bohème) at Loewe, the Spanish houseowned by French luxury group LVMH and designed by Northern Irishman Jonathan Anderson\r\nSome, including Vogue critic Sarah Mower, also detected a sense of Brexit malaise at London brand Marques\'Almeida\'s Resort 2019 collection, shown in Paris for the first time. Portuguese founders Marta Marques and Paulo Almeida played a soundtrack of traditional Fado music, which often riffs onthemes of loss, resignation and melancholy.\r\nReacting to Macron\'s entrepreneur obsession\r\nTo many, French President Emmanuel Macron\'s aggressively capitalist viewsclash with the country\'s traditional socialist persuasions. To fight back, a number of small brands are working toward a slower, less competitive fashion world.\r\nWhat will Versace look like under Michael Kors?\r\nAbout a Worker is a label with no creative director, where each piece is made by a single textile worker. Its show this week consisted of a public street performance followed by a discussion about inclusivity and sustainability. Speaking over the phone, founder Kim Hou said this was \"\"a sign of resistance against our individualistic consumer culture that pushes you to compete rather than (cooperate).\"\"\r\nCasa93, France\'s first free fashion school, paired up with Manifeste011, a vegan concept store, to present a collection designed by studentsusing recycled textiles. \"\"We need to work horizontallyto resist the irresponsible capitalist culture that has become a norm,\"\" Nadine Gonzales, the university\'s founder, said in a phone interview.\r\nDressing after \'Balance ton Porc\'\r\nAs women in the English-speaking worldrallied behind the #MeToo movement, the French incarnation, \"\"Balance ton Porc\"\" (rat out your pig), was faced with harsh criticism from unexpected sources. Earlier this year, a number of key cultural figures, including Catherine Deneuve and author Catherine Millet, signed an open letter in the newspaper Le Monde, defending men\'s \"\"freedom to pester\"\" women.\r\nBut on the runway, fashion has made it its businessto support the movement\'s message of strength and solidarity, albeit subtly. Think modernized \"\"power wear,\"\" as Mugler\'s Casey Cadwallader put it.\r\nFor his first collection at the house, he decided to reinterpret founder Thierry Mugler\'s fearless femininity: \"\"Monsieur Mugler showed his support (for) women by creating blazers with large shoulder pads. Today this means making clothing with a sense of shielding, empowerment, self-expression,\"\" he said in a phone interview.\r\nAnd at Off-White, Virgil Abloh, recently appointed head of menswear at Louis Vuitton, cast eight athletes to walk the track-inspired runway, providing a striking visual alternative to the omnipresent waif.\"','2018-10-04',''),(36,'Prix de l\'Arc de Triomphe returns home to Longchamp Racecourse','CNN','Sport',12,'https://edition.cnn.com/2018/10/03/sport/prix-de-larc-de-triomphe-longchamp-racecourse-spt-intl/index.html','Bianca Britton','\"Aftera $145 million facelift, Paris\' Longchamp Racecoursewill once again host Europe\'srichest race, the Prix de l\'Arc de Triomphe, Sunday.\r\nThe prestigious race has been held at leafy Longchampsince the days of Napoleon IIImore than 150 years ago, and after a two-year residency at Chantilly while its home was redeveloped, it\'s back.\r\nThe winner of the \"\"Arc\"\" -- a one-and-a-half-mile test of speed and staminafor three-year-olds and above -- will earn five million euros ($5.7 million), making it the third richest horse race in the worldbehind the Pegasus World Cup and the Dubai World Cup.\r\nTens of thousands of spectators are expected to attend this weekend\'s two-day meeting, which commands a total purse of 9.7 million euros ($11.1 million).\r\nREAD: Roaring Lion claims victory at Irish Champion Stakes\r\nBased in the wooded Bois de Boulogne area in western Paris,Longchamp closed it gates in October 2015 to undergo its significant upgrade.\r\nThe new grandstand offers \"\"transparent\"\" views both east and west. On one side, visitors will have 180 degrees of unobstructed views of the racecourse and the Eiffel Tower, and to the west, racegoers can enjoy views of the River Seine.\r\nREAD: The white-faced horse who\'s the talk of the racecourse\r\nThe French architect behind the design, Dominique Perrault, writes: \"\"The main challenge of this project is for it to be able to host the (Prix de l\'Arc de Triomphe),which draws up to 60,000 spectators, under exceptional conditions, while also welcoming a much smaller crowd on ordinary racing days.\"\"\r\nerrault is also the designer behind the athletes village for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics as well as the Olympic Tennis Stadium in Madrid which is the home of the Madrid Open.\r\nTwo grandstands dating back to the 1960s have been replaced by a single 10,000-seater grandstand at Longchamp.\r\n\"\"The public is always in visual contact and proximity to the horses and professionals, without ever coming into direct contact,\"\" Perrault says.\r\nWith solar panels and heating generated from geothermal energy, the new design is also eco-responsible.\r\nREAD: Stradivarius scoops 1.28M in virtuoso season\r\n\"\"It will really be a green bubble for Parisians, just 10 minutes from L\'Arc de Triomphe,\"\" Olivier Delloye, who heads governing body France Galop, told CNN Sport last year.\r\nPerrault says the inclined stand, which slightly overhangs from its base, is inspired by the movement of a galloping horse, and its color scheme is inspired by the reds and golds of autumn leaves in October, its busiest time.\r\nVisitors also have the choice of three dining areas, from fine dining with panoramic views to an affordable garden party-themed restaurant and a French gastronomy brasserie.\r\nWith racegoers flooding through Longchamp\'s gates each October, the remainder of the yearthe stands have previously remained largely empty. Around 30 race meetings are held there annually, attracting just a few thousand spectators each time.\r\nSotit\'s hoped that the new grandstand will attract business when racing events aren\'t being staged.\r\nCurrently, the racecourse also doubles as a music festival venuein the summer months, hosting events like Lollapalooza and Solidays.\r\nDespite the major upgrade, the rest of the racecourse, dating back to 1857, remains unchanged.\r\nREAD: Superstar mare Winx retains top spot in world rankings\r\nNonetheless some trainers have voiced concerns about the state of the track following Arc trials earlier in September.\r\nJohn Gosden, British trainer of defending champion and this year\'s Arc favorite Enable, told Racing UK that he had \"\"enormous concern\"\" about the ground and suggested itmight not have received the attention it should have during the development.\r\nJockey Frankie Dettorirode Enable to victory in the 2017 Prix de l\'Arc de Triomphe at Chantilly.\r\nEnable has also won a string of races including the Cheshire Oaks, Epsom Oaks, Irish Oaks, and the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot.\r\nVisit CNN.com/horseracing for more news and videos\r\nGosden says the filly\'s biggest threat will be trainer Williams Haggas\' Sea of Class, a winner of the Irish Oaks and Yorkshire Oaks.\"','2018-10-03',''),(37,'Ryder Cup 2018: Dominant Europe takes USA to brink of defeat','CNN','Sport',12,'https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/29/golf/ryder-cup-day-two-paris-le-golf-national-spt-intl/index.html','Rob Hodgetts','\"Le Golf National, France (CNN)Paris is known as the \"\"City of Light\"\" but the USA is facing dark times after Europe edged to a commanding 10-6 lead heading into Sunday\'s final singles session at the Ryder Cup.\r\nThe home side was the underdog coming into the colourful, raucous team event but took a stranglehold with a 3-1 victory in the fourballs and two foursomes wins on a sizzling Saturday at Le Golf National outside the French capital.\r\nCaptain Thomas Bjorn\'s men need another 4½ points from the 12 singles matches to win back the Ryder Cup for the first time since 2014 and clinch a seventh victory in nine editions of the biennial clash.\r\nThe USA, which needs 14 points to retain the Cup, has not won on European soil since 1993 and will need to emulate Europe\'s remarkable 10-6 comeback at Medinah in 2012, or its own resurgence from 10-6 down at Brookline in 1999.\r\nOn Bjorn\'s Ryder Cup debut as a player in 1997, Europe led 10½-5½ heading into the singles, only holding on for a narrow 14½-13½ win.\r\n\"\"There\'s plenty of examples of these scorelines not meaning a lot and there\'s 12 singles to play,\"\" Bjorn told Sky Sports. \"\"We\'ll just keep going hard. It\'s a completely different game and it\'s a lot of refocusing.\r\n\"\"We need every single man to do their bit and really play hard and be determined to win this Cup back. It can go any way but we\'re really, really, really happy with how it\'s gone these first two days.\"\"\r\nWhen the order for the singles was announced, it paired Europe\'s Rory McIlroy against American Justin Thomas in the first match. Tiger Woods will face Spain\'s Jon Rahm in the fourth group.\r\n\"\"We need to start hot and we need to be the better team. No bones about it,\"\" said USA captain Jim Furyk, who described the 2012 loss in which he played as \"\"one of my worst nightmares in golf.\"\"\r\nHistory makers\r\nAfter USA\'s strong start, Europe won eight straight matches, beginning with the final game Friday morning, to turn the tide and surge into a 8-4 lead at the midpoint of Saturday.\r\nThe decisive run included an historic 4-0 whitewash in Friday\'s afternoon session, Europe\'s first ever in foursomes.\r\nEurope was inspired by the stunning partnership of Englishman Tommy Fleetwood and Italy\'s British Open champion Francesco Molinari, who were unbeaten in all four matches together, including a third victory over Woods -- this time with Bryson DeChambeau -- in Saturday afternoon\'s foursomes.\r\nThe last pair to go unbeaten in its four matches was Americans Lanny Wadkins and Larry Mize in 1979. No European pair has ever done it.\r\nFleetwood, who was second in the US Open in June, also became the first European rookie to win all four of his opening matches. Both he and Molinari, playing in his third Ryder Cup, can become the first Europeans to remain unbeaten in all five matches Sunday.\r\n\"\"I\'m a little bit emotional,\"\" Fleetwood told Sky Sports. \"\"To make a piece of history together is very special. I\'m just glad we\'ve done our job for the team.\"\"\r\n\'Still got a chance\'\r\nWoods, who sealed a remarkable return from injury with a first PGA Tour win for five years last week, went through the team portion of the Ryder Cup without gaining as much as half a point.\r\nThe duo of world No.2 Justin Rose and Henrik Stenson added Europe\'s other point Saturday afternoon with victory against top-ranked Dustin Johnson and 2018 double major champion Brooks Koepka as the USA struggled for a lifeline.\r\nThe defending champion scored a crucial point through Bubba Watson and Webb Simpson\'s 5&4 win against Sergio Garcia and Alex Noren before Jordan Spieth and Thomas added a second with a 4&3 victory against McIlroy and Ian Poulter.\r\n\"\"We\'ve got a lot of work to do, but we\'ve still got a chance,\"\" Simpson told Sky Sports.\r\nLeading 5-3 on a piercing, chilly Saturday morning, Europe edged further ahead with a 2&1 victory from McIlroy and Garcia against Koepka and Tony Finau.\r\nEnglish pair Paul Casey and Tyrrell Hatton downed Johnson and Rickie Fowler 3&2, while Fleetwood and Molinari beat Woods and the out-of-sorts Patrick Reed 4&3.\r\nOnly Thomas and Spieth were able to add to the USA\'s account with a 2&1 victory over Poulter and Spanish rookie Rahm. Europe\'s Thorbjorn Olesen and Phi Mickelson for USA both sat out Saturday completely.\"','2018-10-30',''),(38,'France will throw cross-channel trade into chaos \'by BLOCKING Calais until Britain pays £39bn Brexit divorce bill\', Cabinet minister warns','Mail online','Politics',12,'https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6309777/France-throw-cross-channel-trade-chaos-blocking-Calais-Brexit.html','Charlie Moore','\"• French President Emmanuel Macron could introduce extra checks for lorries \r\n• He may do this to pressure Britain into paying a £39bn Brexit divorce bill \r\n• Chaos could force British factories under and leave food produce rotting\r\nFrance will deliberately disrupt British imports and exports through Calais if the UK leaves the EU without a deal, a Cabinet minister has claimed. \r\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron could introduce extra checks for lorries taking parts to British factories and trucks taking British food into Europe, causing major delays and disruption.\r\nHe may do this to pressure Britain into paying a £39bn Brexit divorce bill, the anonymous minister said. \r\nIn a presentation to Cabinet yesterday, Home Secretary Sajid Javid said that French border police could cause huge traffic delays by asking every driver their reason for travel.\r\nThis would add an extra 50 seconds to the usual 25-second checking time on each truck, causing miles of tailbacks.  \r\nThe chaos could force British factories out of business and leave food produce rotting at the border.\r\nThis means that no matter how well Britain prepares for a no deal Brexit, the country is powerless to stop massive disruption if France wishes it. \r\nA Cabinet minister told The Sun: \'We can spend whatever we want to prepare on our side of the channel, but we are completely powerless to compel the French to do the same, and that is a very serious vulnerability for us.\r\n\'There is simply no alternative to Dover for just-in-time manufacturers or food exporters, and they together support a significant number of jobs.\r\n\'It would do northern French a lot of damage too, and really decimate Ireland, but we expect President Macron will initially attempt some heavy disruption in Calais to turn the screw on us to pay up.\'   \r\nIt comes after MailOnline revealed that more than 10,000 lorries could be parked in Kent to cater for queues of trucks heading for France in event of a no-deal Brexit.\r\nFirst lorries would be parked at Dover, Manston Airport and the M20. \r\nDover has room for 1,720, Manston Airport near Margate, which has been purchased by the Department for Transport, could fit 4,000 and 4,500 could be parked on the M20 - as happened when \'Operation Stack\' was triggered in 2015.\r\nThis means that more than 10,000 HGVs would already be stationary in one of southeast England\'s most-farmed counties. \r\nHighways England told MailOnline: \'As part of wider resilience planning, Highways England has been asked by the Department for Transport to develop plans to utilise the M26 to hold heavy goods vehicles, should further capacity be required in the future.\r\n\'We will be undertaking site surveys on the M26 during October leading to the installation of two gates in the central reservation to support the safe management of freight in the future, if needed.\'\r\nThis suggests one carriageway could be converted to a lorry park while the gates would allow for a contraflow system to keep the other side moving both ways. \r\nRoad Haulage Association chief executive Richard Burnett warned traffic jams of that length would mean trips became unprofitable.\r\nHe said: \'Last year 2.6million trucks passed through the port of Dover with another 1.6million travelling to mainland Europe through the Channel Tunnel and their passage through borders has been frictionless.\r\n\'If border controls include full customs procedures, with each truck taking potentially, 45 minutes to check, the number of HGVs caught up in the resulting tailbacks will be massive.\r\n\'Turning motorways into car parks won\'t help. It\'ll just mean more congestion and more pollution. An HGV driver could be stuck in a queue for 15 hours or more with no access to toilet facilities, water or food.\r\n\'If the Garden of England becomes the lorry park of England, the repercussions will be a disaster for the people of Kent and the entire economy.\'\r\nInitial preparatory work to use the M26 as a lorry park started on October 10, with the motorway repeatedly closed at night last week. \r\nBrexit breakthrough? EU \'set to offer May a UK-wide customs deal\' in a bid to solve the Irish border issue and unblock the crunch talks \r\nBy Kate Ferguson \r\nHopes there could be a breakthrough in Brexit talks were raised on Tuesday amid reports the EU has offered a compromise to try to unblock the stalled talks.\r\nBrussels will reportedly offer Theresa May a UK-wide customs union in a bid to get around the thorny Irish border issue - which has stopped a negotiation being thrashed out.\r\nUnder the proposal, the EU Withdrawal Agreement would contain a legal article pledging the commitment of Brussels to a UK wide deal.\r\nBut it will say the commitment would need its own separate legal agreement to enshrine it.\r\nHowever, the EU will still insist that a Northern Ireland backstop stays in place - effectively creating a \'backstop to the backstop\', according to the report on RTE.\r\nMrs May has repeatedly flatly ruled out this proposal - saying that this would allow the EU to hive off Northern Ireland and slap a border down the Irish Sea.\r\nShe said this is a plan which is totally unpalatable and which no British Prime Minister can ever accept.\r\nWhile the small but powerful Northern Irish DUP party - whose ten MPs are propping the Tories up in Downing Street - have also slammed the proposal.\r\nThey have said it would cross their \'blood red\' line and warned they could topple the Government if it wavers on its opposition.\r\nSpeaking in the Commons yesterday, where she updated MPs on the crunch talks, Mrs May said the divorce deal was 95 per cent finished.\r\nAnd she hailed a \'substantive\' shift from the EU to ensure the so-called Irish backstop is UK-wide and not Northern Ireland only.\r\nOutlining the remaining issues, Mrs May said Britain needed agreement the Irish backstop would be UK wide.\r\nShe said she wanted the option to extend transition to avoid ever using the backstop if a trade deal is close in late 2020.\r\nMrs May said neither the backstop or extended transition period could be never ending - and vowed in all circumstances Northern Ireland\'s business would get guarantees on full access to the UK markets.\r\nIn her speech, Mrs May told MPs \'the shape of the deal across the vast majority of the Withdrawal Agreement is now clear.\' \"','2018-10-24',''),(39,'Meet the cannibal who became a folk hero in Japan','New York Post','Society',12,'https://nypost.com/2018/10/20/issei-sagawa-the-cannibal-who-became-a-folk-hero-in-japan/','Michael Kaplan','\"Cannibalism rarely serves as a good career move. But it has sustained Issei Sagawa, now 69, since the 1980s. Books, movie roles, a comic book, countless talk-show appearances in his native Japan — even a verse in the Rolling Stones song “Too Much Blood” (“And when he ate her he took her bones/To the Bois de Boulogne”) — all stem from a horrendous act he committed in 1981.\r\nWhile pursuing a Ph.D in comparative literature at the Sorbonne in Paris, Sagawa lured classmate Renée Hartevelt to his apartment under the premise that he needed help learning German. Hartevelt turned her back; Sagawa produced a gun and prepared to shoot the Dutch woman from behind. But he lost his nerve and could not pull the trigger.\r\nUnfortunately, she paid him a second visit. This time, he shot her.\r\n“He killed her and raped her and started eating her,” said Verena Paravel, co-director of the documentary “Caniba,” playing at Museum of the Moving Image through next Sunday. “But he had issues with the [raw] flesh and cooked her. He made a teriyaki.”\r\nAs the remains began to smell, Sagawa decided to dispose of Hartevelt. He put her dismembered corpse into two suitcases and brought them to a large park outside Paris. “How he did it was so stupid,” Paravel told The Post. “He did it before sunset, when there were many people in the park.” Sagawa was spotted trying to dump the blood-dripping suitcases in a lake, and authorities were summoned. “I think he wanted to be caught,” Paravel added.\r\nUpon capture, Sagawa confessed: “I killed her to eat her flesh.”\r\nFrench psychiatrists deemed that Sagawa — who would later tell Vice that he’d been fascinated with cannibalism since staring at a classmate’s thigh in the first grade — to be “completely crazy and irresponsible.” (He also allegedly had intended to dine on a sleeping German woman in 1970 in Tokyo, but fled when she awoke.)\r\nAfter his arrest, he was committed to a psychiatric hospital and kept there until 1983, when the French shipped him back to Japan.\r\nIncredibly, he was not tried in his homeland. Although it’s unclear why, one theory suggests that the Japanese could not obtain key prosecutorial documents from \r\nBy the time the filmmakers caught up with Sagawa in 2015, he was suffering from diabetes and had suffered two heart attacks.\r\nShunned by most of his family, Sagawa now lives quietly outside Tokyo. He is confined to a wheelchair, reliant on public assistance and looked after by his brother Jun — who displays his own peculiar fetish in the movie: wrapping his arms in barbed wire and digging at the wounds with sharp tools.\r\nTo make the film, the directors spent several months with the brothers, often staring at Sagawa and exchanging no words while forming a bond of trust. This approach paid off when Sagawa walked the filmmakers through the panels of his illustrated confessional, a highly graphic mangacomic book. Written and illustrated by Sagawa, it is currently out of print and available on Amazon for $248. The graphics depict him committing his heinous act and exposes the insecurities that led him there.\r\nStanding less than 5 feet tall and with tiny hands, Sagawa, who never married, believed that he was too ¬repulsive for physical intimacies that may have sated his desires.\r\nSelf-loathing is explicit in the ¬illustrations. “I don’t think there is anything as obscene as him reenacting and recounting what he had done,” said Castaing-Taylor.\r\nBrother Jun agreed. “He got angry at us after the manga [was discussed with the documentary cameras rolling],” recalled Paravel. “He said, ‘It’s going to ruin my brother’s reputation.’ I thought that was completely hilarious. It is my ¬favorite line in the movie.”\r\nThat said, for all the shock value in “Caniba,” the directors aimed to convey something old-fashioned. “I think it is a brotherly-love story — but fraught with hatred and profound competition,” said Castaing-Taylor. “At some point Jun asks, ‘As your brother, would you eat me?’ ” The only response is prolonged silence.\r\nLike much of Sagawa’s life, Castaing-Taylor added, the moment “is frightening and comic and very disturbing.”\"','2018-10-20',''),(40,'Brexit: France\'s Macron makes English faux pas over visas','BBC ','Politics',13,'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45907657','Néant','\"Emmanuel Macron had meant to say that British people would not need visas in such circumstances.\r\nThe confusion came as Mr Macron was speaking to the media in English at the end of an EU summit in Brussels.\r\nInstead of \"\"we will not stop visas\"\" he meant to say \"\"we will not start visas\"\", the Elysée Palace explained.\r\nUK citizens currently enjoy visa-free travel in the EU, but that could change with Brexit. The UK is set to leave the 28-nation bloc on 29 March 2019.\r\nThe BBC\'s Gavin Lee raised the visa issue with President Macron at Thursday\'s news conference, after leaders had failed to achieve a breakthrough on Brexit.\r\nLost in translation\r\nBy Gavin Lee, BBC News, Brussels\r\nThe mix-up came after I asked President Macron whether newspaper reports of UK citizens needing visas for work or holidays in the event of a no-deal was true.\r\nThe president\'s response was that \"\"we will not stop visas, it is fake news, as some other leaders would say\"\", and he went on to say \"\"we will definitely deliver visas for people\"\".\r\nHis team now say it was a case of a \"\"second language\"\" slip-up, and that President Macron meant to say \"\"we will not start visas for British people\"\".\r\nThe press team for the Elysée Palace say the position of the French for their \"\"no-deal\"\" contingency planning is one that would categorically not mean visas for British people, UNLESS the UK suddenly imposed them on French workers and tourists in the UK.\r\nThey say they would aim for a deal which allows for a \"\"special status\"\" agreement for workers and tourists for both countries, that avoids the need for any \"\"official visa system\"\".\r\nIn the event of a no-deal Brexit, Mr Macron said, measures would be taken to cover flights, ferries and businesses as well.\r\nA draft law has been tabled in the upper house of the French parliament that will let the government set new rules for Britons visiting France after Brexit. The draft suggests they will be treated as \"\"third country\"\" visitors - a similar category to Americans or Chinese. The preamble of the bill raises the possibility that visas may be imposed.\r\nBut, in the event of a no-deal Brexit, the bill also gives the government the power to adapt or suspend the need for visas and residence permits for UK citizens.\r\n\'Willingness to find solution\'\r\nA deal remains elusive mainly because of wrangling over the future Northern Ireland border. Brexit risks reinstating physical controls at the border, which were scrapped under the Northern Ireland peace settlement.\r\nThe current Brexit plan is for a transition period of 21 months from the end of March, to smooth the UK\'s path to a future relationship outside the EU.\r\nUK Prime Minister Theresa May said that transition could be extended \"\"for a few months\"\", if needed. But some Brexit campaigners have reacted angrily to the suggestion.\r\n\"\"I do prefer a deal and I want a deal, but I will never favour a bad deal,\"\" Mr Macron said on Thursday.\r\n\"\"In case of no deal our responsibility is to ensure that the life of our people will not be so far impacted.\"\"\r\nMr Macron described the \"\"dynamic\"\" of the Brexit negotiations as \"\"positive because there is a willingness on the British side to find a solution\"\".\r\nHe said \"\"now it\'s for Prime Minister May to propose a solution, but we will not compromise on the key elements of the mandate we gave to [EU negotiator] Michel Barnier\"\".\r\nThe French president also denied suggestions that the UK prime minister had been snubbed late on Wednesday, when four EU leaders went out for a drink in the Grand Place in the centre of Brussels.\r\nHe told the BBC that Theresa May had left the summit earlier, and said she would certainly be invited in future.\r\n\"\"I am always happy and open to share a drink with the different leaders, so obviously Theresa May will be very much welcome,\"\" he said.','2018-10-19',''),(41,'Trump spars with Macron as Air Force One lands in France','CNN','Politics',13,'https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/09/politics/emmanuel-macron-donald-trump-military-nato/index.html','Maegan Vazquez and Michelle Kosinski','\"President Donald Trump picked a fight with French President Emmanuel Macron over European defense just as Air Force One landed in France on Friday.\r\n\"\"President Macron of France has just suggested that Europe build its own military in order to protect itself from the U.S., China and Russia. Very insulting, but perhaps Europe should first pay its fair share of NATO, which the U.S. subsidizes greatly,\"\" Trump tweeted minutes after landing in France. He is set to spend the weekend in Paris to commemorate the centennial of the end of World War I.\r\nTuesday on Europe 1 radio, Macron called for a \"\"real European army\"\" within the European Union, according to AFP.\r\n\"\"We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,\"\" Macron said.\r\nMacron also suggested that since the start of Trump\'s presidency, the US has been seen as a less reliable ally.\r\n\"\"When I see President Trump announcing that he\'s quitting a major disarmament treaty which was formed after the 1980s euro-missile crisis that hit Europe, who is the main victim? Europe and its security,\"\" he said.\r\nMacron has been advocating a similar position for months.\r\nA senior French official said Friday night that Trump took Macron\'s words out \"\"out of context.\"\"\r\nAccording to the official, Macron will likely want to respond to Trump\'s tweet directly himself, and likely Saturday.\r\nThe official, though, clarified the language Macron used, saying that the French leader did not mean he wanted a European army but better coordination and funding of Europe\'s already-existing resources.\r\nThe official said that Macron was conveying that Europe should organize better to protect itself. There is already a European defense project, and Macron would like to see more capability, the official said.\r\n\"\"Not a European army. He did not mean Europe should form an army,\"\" the official said. \"\"And this is all complementary to NATO, not separate from it.\"\"\r\nFurther strain in Trump-Macron relationship\r\nTrump\'s tweet on Friday could preview another high-level international meeting in which the US President distances himself from traditional American allies. Unlike the tense G7 summit in June, however, Russian President Vladimir Putin will be present at this weekend\'s commemoration.\r\nWhile both Trump and Macron appeared to be off to a warm start following Trump\'s inauguration, their relationship appears to have soured.\r\nDuring a call about trade and migration in June, sources familiar with the call told CNN that it didn\'t end well.\r\n\"\"Just bad. It was terrible,\"\" a source told CNN. \"\"Macron thought he would be able to speak his mind, based on the relationship. But Trump can\'t handle being criticized like that.\"\"\r\nAnd more recently, a senior diplomatic source told CNN that Trump was \"\"ranting and venting on trade\"\" with Macron during their bilateral meeting in September.\r\nThere was \"\"some rapport\"\" between the two, \"\"but it\'s not what it (once) was,\"\" the source said.\r\nMacron isn\'t the only European leader to raise the prospect of Europe doing more for its own defense.\r\nEU President Donald Tusk made a similar suggestion in May after Trump had pulled out of the Iran deal and the Paris climate agreement, threatened a series of trade disputes with Europe and constantly criticized NATO.\r\n\"\"Europe must do everything in its power to protect, in spite of today\'s mood, the transatlantic bond. But at the same time we must be prepared for those scenarios, where we will have to act on our own,\"\" Tusk said.\r\nTusk also said that the EU \"\"should be grateful\"\" to Trump \"\"because, thanks to him, we have got rid of all illusions.\"\"\r\n\"\"Looking at the latest decisions of President Trump, someone could even think: With friends like that, who needs enemies?\"\" Tusk said, later adding, \"\"He has made us realize that if you need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of your arm.\"\"\r\nTrump\'s tweet on Friday continues his oft-repeated misunderstanding of the way NATO works. The President has consistently complained that NATO members don\'t adequately contribute to the shared defense agreement, suggesting the other 28 members somehow owe the US money. Actually, all alliance members commit to spending 2% of their GDP on defense. While few have reached that threshold, most members have increased spending in recent years and are nearing the suggested level of spending.','2018-11-10',''),(42,'As Slums Teeter in Marseille, a Poverty Crisis Turns Deadly','The New York Times','Society',13,'https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/world/europe/france-marseille-building-collapse.html','Adam Nossiter','The red-helmeted marine firefighter was firm. “Right,” he told the anxious families gathered around him, “we’re closing up the building. ”Bewildered and frightened, they climbed the darkened, rickety staircase of their building on the Rue Jean Roque, past the chunks of missing plaster and thick lines of cracks, some big enough to put an arm into. On the firefighter’s orders, they gathered their belongings and then left, for the last time. Their decrepit five-story apartment building, long ignored by city officials, was now deemed unsafe. Marseille city leaders, on the defensive after ignoring expert warnings, were racing to respond to a public outcry after two buildings collapsed this month, killing eight people. Nervous officials have since evacuated 1,054 people, and counting, from 111 crumbling apartments in the heart of the ancient and dingy Mediterranean port. But a 2015 report written for France’s minister of housing found that 40,000 dwellings in Marseille were unsafe — which is 10 percent of all unsafe buildings in France, and affects 100,000 of the city’s inhabitants. Marseille, France’s second-largest city and one of Europe’s poorest, is facing a housing crisis that, more deeply, is a crisis of poverty. More than a quarter of the population is officially poor.\r\nMany are asking why it has taken officials so long to address the dire conditions and what Marseille’s persistent poverty says about the neglect of “the other France” — in part immigrant and poor — whose decline long preceded President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-market changes, and easily threatens to outlast them. As the city has poured millions into sports facilities and dazzling museums for tourists, little has gone to shore up the hundreds of buildings in the city center, some dating to the 18th century and earlier, which house the poor. Inspections have been haphazard and cursory, alarming reports have been ignored and official efforts understaffed. Despite the 2015 report’s determination that 40,000 buildings were unsafe, only a tiny fraction were officially declared unsafe by the city in all of 2016, according to an activist group. On Oct. 18, two and a half weeks before the buildings collapsed on the Rue d’Aubagne, an expert sent by the city declared the first floor of No. 65 unsafe. Not the rest of the building, though. Those who were killed — including an immigrant mother of eight, a student, a painter and an out-of-work African migrant with no papers — reflected the gap between those who have housing, clean water, education and job opportunities, and the rest, even in a country with an extensive social safety net. In response, thousands of people have poured into the city’s streets to protest the authorities’ perceived negligence.\r\n“Gaudin, Murderer!” they shouted last Wednesday night, referring to the city’s powerful longtime mayor, Jean-Claude Gaudin. “The street’s justice will condemn you!” they yelled, 10,000 strong in a noisy march on the Baroque City Hall building facing the water. “There is no particular fault for which we reproach ourselves,” Mr. Gaudin told the local news media after one of the marches. But the response of city officials has been sparing.\r\nThe people of Marseille, both the smartly dressed and the ragged, have trooped day after day to the makeshift memorial of flowers and candles erected near the disaster site. “It wasn’t the rain!” — an ironic reference to City Hall’s initial explanation, and already an icon of the protest — was scribbled on the wall. “Who died there?” said Rabah Ramdani, a shopkeeper who had come to pay tribute. “Only the poor. And it isn’t over.”\r\nDown long and narrow Rue Jean Roque, shady in the autumn sunshine, Bintou Cissé stood outside her tiny alterations shop around the corner from the collapsed buildings, refusing to go inside. “Because I’m afraid,” she said. “Everything is rotten here. It’s nothing but slums.” “You can see it,” she added, looking up at the facade’s cracks. In the dilapidated old buildings of the Noailles neighborhood in the city center, where the poor live, fear has taken over. Children say they are afraid to come home from school, working mothers say they wake at night at the slightest vibration, university students sleep somewhere else. “Up until now we’ve been ashamed to bring people here,” said Laura Spica, a musician who lives on the street. “Now, we’re not only ashamed, we’re afraid.” Dazzling and pastel-hued, Marseille is a concentration of France’s postindustrial urban pathologies — “a sort of French Detroit,” said the sociologist Michel Peraldi. It has never recovered from the double blows of deindustrialization and decolonization, Mr. Peraldi said. The industries that transformed cheap raw materials no longer exist, and neither do the once closely linked colonies that supplied them. The biggest contemporary employer is the public hospital administration. Unemployment is nearly 50 percent higher than the national average. Immigrants have come in waves since the 1950s from North Africa. “There are three generations of unemployed,” Mr. Peraldi said. “There has never been any clear policy to reintegrate these classes into society.” Of the two buildings that fell on the Rue d’Aubagne, No. 63 was vacant, boarded up and missing much of its roof, and had been taken over by the city. It is thought that the collapse of that structure, feebly supporting the already weakened and inhabited No. 65, brought down No. 65, like a house of cards. “What this has revealed is a state of total decadence, and a total insouciance on the part of the elected officials,” said Patrick Lacoste, head of an activist group, Center-City for Everybody. “This is a political catastrophe,” Mr. Lacoste added, “because for 23 years City Hall has let the neighborhood die.” Enter any building, at random, in the Noailles neighborhood and the staircases tilt queasily downward. It is advisable to hold the handrail. “When the neighbor goes up the stairs, the whole place shakes,” said Khedidja Dhamani, a middle-aged woman who lives on the Rue d’Aubagne down the street from the collapsed buildings.\r\nCeilings are missing expanses of plaster, and old wooden beams are often exposed and rotten. In Ms. Dhamani’s kitchen, water from the neighbor’s bath streamed through a large crack. Elsewhere in Noailles, fabled for generations as a food-shopping district, it is common to see rusty steel girders propping up staircases. Stephanie Rose, a young mother of two, tells her children to wear tennis shoes when it rains; the water comes right into the apartment. Nearby on the Rue de l’Arc, Saida Ouaheb’s downstairs neighbor asks her not to use her washing machine, because it makes the ceiling shake. Ms. Ouaheb’s three young daughters are now scared to be in their small two-bedroom apartment. Her 9-year-old refused to leave school one day this week. “We’re not sleeping well here,” said Ms. Ouaheb, who works as a cleaner in a restaurant and whose monthly rent of 640 euros, or about $730, is heavily subsidized by the state. Her Moroccan husband speaks no French, doesn’t have the right papers, and doesn’t work. “Since Monday I am afraid,” she said. “I would like to leave.” At the week’s protest marches, immigrants who live in the downtown slums were largely outnumbered by white, bourgeois residents of Marseille, mostly unaffected by the grim housing conditions. Many nonetheless expressed shame over the deadly disaster. “It’s incredible that something like this could have happened, here, in France,” said Elise Sut, a musician who joined one march.\r\n\r\n\r\n','2018-11-26',''),(43,'Protests over spiraling French fuel prices leave 1 dead, dozens injured','CNN','Politics',13,'https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/17/europe/macron-france-fuel-protests-intl/index.html','Eva Tapiero, Matthew Robinson and Laura Smith-Spark','A protester was accidentally run over and killed by a car during a demonstration over rising fuel prices, a top official in eastern France said Saturday. Mass demonstrations causing roadblocks across the country are part of the \"gilets jaunes\" or \"yellow vests\" movement, which opposes mounting gas prices and eco-taxes on polluting forms of transport. The death occurred when a driver \"panicked\" and ran over someone after arriving at a blockade for an undeclared protest not far from the city of Lyon, Louis Laugier, the prefect of the Savoie region, said at a news conference. A further 227 people were injured -- six severely -- in protests across the country, and 73 people were taken into police custody, the Interior Ministry said in a statement. Five police officers suffered slight injuries, and one was severely injured. Another five gendarmes were hurt as well. Speaking about the death, French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said: \"That\'s the reason why we were worried to have people (who are) not experienced organizing protests.\" Ecology Minister François de Rugy called on citizens to \"respect caution and safety recommendations\" in order for protests to go ahead \"without a new tragedy,\" in a tweet Saturday. He also offered his condolences to the family of the victim.\r\nMore than 1 million people were expected to turn out Saturday for demonstrations across the country. Partway through the day, the numbers were much lower than that. About 280,000 people participated in more than 2,000 demonstrations, the Interior Ministry said. \"Honestly we\'re satisfied, even if it\'s true we are not hundreds of thousands people here, but still, people have come. The day is not over yet, and we\'re glad that there are no incidents here,\" Thierry Paul Valette, who helped organize a protest on the Champs Elysées in Paris, told CNN. \"We can\'t stand Macron\'s taxes any more. It\'s too much. We couldn\'t make ourselves heard through political parties or trade unions, so we had to do something.\" People wearing yellow vests block the motorway in Antibes, southeastern France, on Saturday. The protest was billed as likely to be one of the toughest tests yet of Emmanuel Macron\'s 18-month-old presidency. Website blocage17novembre said protests were planned in all 95 of France\'s mainland departments, while a petition on change.org calling on the French government to lower the cost of fuel has gotten more than 850,000 signatures.\r\nIn addition to concerns over spiraling fuel prices, the protests also reflect long-running tensions between the metropolitan elite and rural poor.\r\nPrice hike Diesel prices have surged 16% this year from an average 1.24 euros ($1.41) per liter to 1.48 euros ($1.69), even hitting 1.53 euros in October, according to UFIP, France\'s oil industry federation. The price hike is largely caused by a leap in the wholesale price of oil, with Brent crude oil -- a benchmark for worldwide oil purchases -- increasing by more than 20% in the first half of 2018 from around $60 a barrel to a peak of $86.07 in early October. French protesters are, however, not directing their anger at OPEC for reducing oil production, or at the US administration for implementing tariffs on Iran, crippling its oil exports. Macron is instead bearing the brunt of widespread French discontent, with many protesters furious at the current leader\'s extension of environmental policies implemented under François Hollande\'s government. Notably, taxes were increased by 8 centimes last January on diesel, and by 4 centimes on petrol. Tax on diesel will also increase by another 6.4 centimes in 2019, and by 2.9 centimes for petrol. These rises follow many decades of under-taxation of diesel in France. Macron criticized\r\nThe growing resentment has also been a springboard for partisan political attacks, with opponents of Macron\'s centrist En Marche party attempting to energize their bases to fuel further revolt. \"This government hasn\'t understood the anger of the French,\" Olivier Faure, head of the French Socialist Party, said Wednesday. \"Macron has not heard the French,\" Laurent Wauquiez, leader of the center-right party Les Républicains, added in an interview for BFMTV and RMC radio. Meanwhile, Macron\'s former nemesis, Marine Le Pen, leader of France\'s far-right National Rally, said: \"We were the first party to express our total support for this movement.\" Castaner hit back at Macron\'s opponents, branding the protests \"political\" and accusing Les Républicains of being behind them. \"It\'s a political protest with the Republicans behind it, and it\'s irrational because the rising taxes have been compensated by the decline in the oil market,\" he told CNN\'s French affiliate BFMTV. \"We hear the protests, we hear the anger, I know the situation, but we have to explain that it\'s essential that we exit fossil fuels.\" The minister said police would be present to break up any dangerous roadblocks. \"I am asking for the roads to not be completely blocked,\" Castaner said. \"Where there is a roadblock -- which means there\'s a risk for emergency services -- there will be police.\" Macron struck a more conciliatory tone in an interview Wednesday, saying: \"I hear the anger, and it\'s a fundamental right in our society to be allowed to express it.\" He nevertheless admitted that he was \"wary because many different people are trying to piggyback on this movement.\" Prime Minister Edouard Philippe also announced close to 500 million euros in aid to low-income motorists in a key concession Wednesday.\r\n','2018-11-26',''),(44,'New Caledonia will remain part of France after voting ‘no’ in referendum on independence','South China Morning Post','Politics',13,'https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/2171616/new-caledonia-poised-remain-part-france-after-referendum','N/A','Macron raised concerns over increasing Chinese influence in the Pacific, where Beijing has invested heavily in Vanuatu, which broke from France and Britain in 1980.\r\n Macron has talked up France’s Pacific presence to propose an axis of democratic Asian maritime powers that would include India and Australia\r\nSome 18,000km from the French mainland, New Caledonia is home to a quarter of the world’s known supplies of nickel – a vital electronics component – and is a foothold for France in the Pacific where China is gaining influence.\r\nOn the final count, 56.4 per cent of people rejected the proposition that New Caledonia become independent. Turnout was high at 80.63 per cent.\r\nPresident Emmanuel Macron expressed his \'immense pride that we have taken this historic step together\' in an address to the nation, adding it was \'a sign of confidence in the French republic, in its future and its values\'.\r\nBut the winning margin on New Caledonia, sometimes referred to in France as \'the pebble\', might cause some concern in Paris, as well Australia which has been alarmed by Beijing’s designs in the Pacific and its investment in island nations.\r\nPolls beforehand had forecast an emphatic 63-75 per cent of New Caledonians would vote \'no\' when asked if the archipelago should \'attain full sovereignty and become independent\'.\r\nUnder a 1998 deal called the Noumea Accord to devolve powers to the territory, two further votes on independence can be held by 2022 – a right independence leaders look set to invoke.\r\n\'We’re a short step away from victory and there are still two votes to come,\'Alosio Sako, head of the separatist movement FLNKS, said after the results were announced.\r\nMacron had largely stayed clear of the campaign in New Caledonia, but during a visit to Noumea in May he declared “France would be less beautiful” without the territory.\r\nAs well as being home to French troops and being a source of nickel, the territory gives France a large, exclusive economic zone in the Pacific and rich fishing resources.\r\nThe 40-year-old French leader has also raised concerns over increasing Chinese influence in the Pacific, where Beijing has invested heavily in Vanuatu, a territory which broke from France and Britain in 1980.\r\nAccusing the US of “turning its back on the region in recent months”, Macron said China was “building its hegemony step by step” in the region – suggesting an independent New Caledonia could be Beijing’s next target.\r\nDuring visits to New Delhi and Canberra since taking power last year, Macron has talked up France’s Pacific presence to propose an axis of democratic Asian maritime powers that would include India and Australia.\r\nThere were fears that the referendum in New Caledonia could inflame tensions between indigenous Kanak people, who tend to favour independence, and the white population which has settled since France annexed the islands in 1853.\r\nSeveral cars were burned and a couple of incidents of stone-throwing were reported late Sunday, local authorities said, but the vote was otherwise peaceful.\r\nTensions in New Caledonia boiled over into ethnic strife in the 1980s which claimed more than 70 lives. That led to the 1998 Noumea Accord which paved the way for a steady devolution of powers, as well as Sunday’s referendum and possibly two others before 2022.\r\nIn recent years, France has faced protests and calls for independence in several of its overseas territories, which are a legacy of the country’s colonial history and are sometimes dubbed \'the confetti of the French empire\'.\r\nFrench Guiana in South America and the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte have been rocked by major protests over living standards and perceived neglect.\r\nCloser to home, the Paris government also faces renewed calls for independence from nationalists on the Mediterranean island of Corsica, which have been rebuffed by Macron.\r\nSeparatists had urged Kanak voters to choose self-determination for Kanaky, their name for New Caledonia, and throw off the shackles of the \'colonial\' authorities in Paris.\r\nThe Kanak community is economically disadvantaged compared with the white population and plagued by high school dropout rates, chronic unemployment and poor housing conditions.\r\nBut indigenous people make up less than 50 per cent of the electorate and some Kanaks back staying part of France, not least due to the €1.3 billion (US$1.5 billion) the French state hands to the islands every year.\r\nGoing it alone, “I’m not sure we have all the assets we’d need to succeed,” said Marc Gnipate, a 62-year-old pensioner.','2018-11-04',''),(45,'France investigating reports of babies born without arms in rural areas','New York Post','Health',13,'https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-health-babies/france-investigates-reports-of-babies-born-without-arms-in-rural-areas-idUSKCN1N51MV','Geert De Clercq','France has launched a nationwide investigation into why some two dozen babies have been born without hands or arms in a handful of rural areas since 2000 after several new cases were reported this week, the health minister said on Wednesday. A separate investigation has also been opened into reports that calves and possibly chickens have been born without limbs in the same three heavily agricultural areas, an official told Reuters. Public health agency Santé Publique France said it had identified 11 additional cases of babies born with limb defects between 2000 and 2014 in the rural Ain department of eastern France, near the Swiss border, where seven cases were already reported in 2009-14. There have also been malformed births in two departments in western France: four in the Morbihan, Brittany area between 2011 to 2013 and three in neighboring Loire-Atlantique in 2007 and 2008. Ain and Morbihan are several hundred kilometers apart.The reports have raised alarm among the French public that some kind of toxin in food, water or air could be responsible.‘I want to know, I think all of France wants to know,” Health Minister Agnès Buzyn told BFM TV. “It could be an environmental factor. Maybe it is due to what these women ate, drank or breathed in.’ An initial inquiry in early October found the incidence of limb defects in the affected regions to be no greater than elsewhere in the country, but now the probe has been widened. The new inquiry will be run jointly by the health agency and the sanitation, food and environment agency, Buzyn said. ‘It is very complicated, we need to investigate the history of families in cases which sometimes date back ten years or more,’ she said. First conclusions were due by Jan. 31 and a full report by June. Epidemiologist Emmanuelle Amar, who first revealed the birth defects in Ain, told Reuters the only thing mothers of the affected babies had in common was that they lived in cereal-growing areas amid fields of corn and sunflower. She said most of the defects had been reported between 2009 and 2014 and that since then there had been no new cases. She criticized the health ministry’s initial findings and said congenital defects in the affected regions had been way higher than what would normally be expected. ‘It is a terrible tragedy for the families,’said Amar. The parents of a girl born without forearms in the village of Guidel, in the Morbihan, said the inquiry should focus on the 2011-13 period when most of the cases appeared. ‘No point in looking ahead. Focus on what happened then’ the girl’s father Samuel Bernard told BFM TV earlier this month. Amar said that in the Ain region farmers had also reported calves being born without tails and without flanks. An official at the national food safety agency Anses told Reuters it had now opened a separate investigation into legless calves in the three same regions. Poultry may also be investigated as there are suspicions about chickens being affected. Hospital registries show limb defects occur in 1.7 of every 10,000 births, or about 150 cases per year in France. Birth defects can have multiple causes, including chromosome disorders, drug use or exposure to toxic substances.In the late 1950s and early 1960s, about 10,000 babies worldwide were born with malformed or missing limbs after their mothers received the drug thalidomide to treat morning sickness\r\n','2018-11-27',''),(46,'The Last of the Old-Fashioned Davis Cup Tournaments, and the Future of Team Tennis','The New Yorker','Sport',15,'https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/the-last-of-the-old-fashioned-davis-cup-tournaments-and-the-future-of-team-tennis','Gerald Marzorati','The increasingly crammed and drawn-out tennis season ended this past weekend with the Davis Cup final, and with it went one of the game’s oldest and—at one time, anyway—most celebrated tournament formats. The format will change drastically next year: the International Tennis Federation, which oversees the Cup, has more or less placed it in the hands of an investment group, headed by Gerard Piqué, the Spanish soccer great. The group will provide most of the funding and will look to turn a profit. What you think of this likely says a lot about your feelings toward professional tennis as it adjusts—or tries to adjust—to contemporary notions of time and worth, and, beyond, to broader habits of mind and heart, what the French refer to, suggestively, as mentalité. This year’s final—the hundred and seventh in a tradition that began when Dwight Davis, fresh from Harvard, invited a team of young British men to play Americans at the Longwood Cricket Club, outside Boston—was played in France, in the northern city of Lille. The location was chosen by the French Davis Cup team, which won the final last year. They reached it again this year, after winning their “tie” (that’s Davis-Cup speak for a best-of-five series of matches) against Spain, in September, in the fifth and final rubber (Davis-Cup speak for a best-of-five-set match). The Spanish team was playing without Rafael Nadal. To those who’ve been pushing for a new format, an absence of that kind is the problem—or one of the problems. When the Spain-France tie was played, Nadal was recovering from an injury to his right knee. But the truth is that, for years now, the top players on the men’s side have regularly foregone Davis Cup play. Nadal has never faced Roger Federer, for instance, in the Davis Cup, because it’s been a once-in-a-while thing for both of them, not an annual event. Nadal did play Novak Djokovic once, and Djokovic once faced Federer, way back when, but Djokovic has never squared off against Andy Murray. The Big Four players, and not only the Big Four, have too many other money-making, point-garnering tournaments keeping them busy to make time for the three rounds—over weekends in the winter, spring, and late summer—required to reach the Davis Cup final. This year, in the final, France suited up only one singles player in shouting distance of the Top Twenty. Still, more than twenty thousand fans filled the Stade Pierre-Mauroy to watch and cheer each day of the weekend in Lille. France’s opponent, Croatia, had, for its singles’ rubbers, the twelfth-ranked Borna ?ori?, one of the tour’s toughest young stars and a brilliant defender, and Marin ?ili?, who reached No. 3 in the world this year and owns a U.S. Open title. ?ili? also has a frightening serve and, at thirty, an improved forehand that he can flatten out and launch with a startling bang from a fully open stance. As the home team, France got to choose the playing surface, and perhaps it was that ?ili? pace that led the team to choose a court of gritty red clay, which can slow down the ball a bit. Très Français, la terre battue—except that France’s best players, of this era, have been hard-court players.\r\nIt probably wouldn’t have mattered. On Friday, the first day of play, ?ori? beat Jérémy Chardy in three straight sets. Then ?ili? beat the injury-plagued Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in three straight sets. These matches were followed by the “reverse singles,” in which the players switch up their previous opponents. But, on Sunday, the French team captain, Yannick Noah—in the Davis Cup, the captain is a coach and does not play—called on Lucas Pouille, rather than Chardy, to face ?ili?. ?ili? beat him in straight sets, too, securing the cup for the Croats. In all of the singles matches, no French player secured a break of serve, never mind a set. The only competitive tennis of the weekend occurred on Saturday, when, in keeping with Davis Cup tradition, just one match was played—a doubles match. It was a long and hard-fought four-setter, which France won, thanks to the fluid court-savvy choreography and big-point cool of Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Nicolas Mahut, one of the best doubles teams in men’s tennis of recent years. Mahut struck a near-impossible reflex volley at the net to seal the victory, and the home-town crowd went berserk for Les Bleus: flags were hoisted, iPhone lights were waved in unison, trumpets were blown, tears were wiped from cheeks. Mahut, thoughtful and passionate, has been among the most outspoken players lamenting the changes coming to the tournament. “The Davis Cup is dead,” he posted on Twitter last summer, after the International Tennis Federation voted for the new format. But this last of the old-fashioned finals was a poor advertisement for tradition—it was hardly “The World Cup of Tennis,” as the I.T.F. calls it. And the changes coming next year might make that appellation more fitting. There will be an eighteen-team final phase, to be held in Madrid, in November. There will be two singles matches per tilt, not four, along with one doubles match. Sets will be best-of-three, not best-of-five. Things will be sped up, in other words. One tent-pole event will be good for TV, and good for Nike and Adidas and so on. Why shouldn’t it draw the international fans who jet to the U.S. Open and Wimbledon? Its chief battle may not be with traditionalists but with the Association of Tennis Professionals, which oversees men’s tennis. The A.T.P. has its own team competition in mind, which will be held in Australia, in January, 2020, as a curtain-raiser to the Australian Open. The format that has been proposed is similar to the new Davis Cup format, and the prize money, fifteen million dollars, is just a bit shy of what Davis Cup is promising. There is also a crucial difference: the A.T.P. team tournament will offer ranking points. Players on the men’s side are backing the A.T.P. tournament more strongly than the newfangled Davis Cup, because, ultimately, ranking points mean better seedings in other tournaments, better sponsorship deals—more money. It is hard to see how an already too-long season can make room for both tournaments. Why, in all this scheming, no one has proposed a team tournament that brings together top men and women is beyond me, by the way. (Women currently play a Davis Cup equivalent, called the Fed Cup.) It’s probably the one major sport on earth that could pull it off. Tennis needs team play of some kind, whatever shape it takes. For the players, it provides an opportunity to shake, just for a while, the too-clarifying loneliness of being on court, and to represent something larger than one’s gladiatorial self. It is bracing for fans, too, who get to enjoy their brimming Victorian silences as points are played and yet participate, with fellow-feeling attendees, in loud and shared sports-arena delirium when games and matches are won. Team play has a way of feeling more like play, for everybody. The tangle of tennis bureaucracies and interests should get it right. Whether they will is another matter\r\n','2018-11-26',''),(47,'France fuel unrest: \'Shame\' on violent protesters, says Macron','BBC','Society',15,'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46331783','N/A','French President Emmanuel Macron has lashed out at demonstrators who clashed with police in Paris during the latest protests sparked by rising fuel prices. \"Shame on those who attacked\" officers, he tweeted. \"There is no place for violence in the [French] Republic.\"\r\nThere was chaos on the Champs-Elysées on Saturday as police used tear gas and water cannon to disperse protesters.\r\nThe demonstrations had been billed by the \"yellow vest\" movement as \"act two\" in a campaign that began a week ago.\r\nNamed after their distinctive high-visibility attire, the protests initially focused on a rise in a fuel duty on diesel.\r\nThey later grew to reflect anger at rising living costs, particularly in rural areas, and other grievances against President Macron\'s policies.\r\nMore than 100,000 people took part in about 1,600 protests across France on Saturday, the interior ministry said. Most passed off peacefully - except in the capital, where 8,000 demonstrators gathered. On Tuesday, Mr Macron is due to address the nation and announce new measures as part of a speech on ecological transition. He is expected to mention the protests and call for nationwide \"grassroot debates\" on government policies. What happened on the Champs-Élysées? Five thousand police had been deployed in Paris. They had set up metal barriers around the Champs-Élysées to stop protesters reaching key buildings such as the president\'s office and the national assembly.\r\nA spokesperson for the demonstrators insisted that they were peaceful. \"We are not here to pick a fight with cops. We just want the government to listen to us,\" Laetitia Dewalle told AFP news agency. But in the morning, some tried to break through the police cordon. They lit fires, tore down street signs, erected barricades, pulled up paving stones and hurled them at police while shouting slogans against Mr Macron. The chaos continued into the evening, when police cleared most of the area. Officials say 19 people were injured in the clashes, including four officers. Forty people were arrested. What about unrest elsewhere in France? Demonstrations were staged around the country. Roadblocks were set up to slow down traffic. Some motorway toll booths were taken over to let vehicles through. There were a number of minor clashes. Overall 130 arrests were made. The protests and the violence were on a much smaller scale than the previous week. Last Saturday more than 280,000 people took part, two people were killed and more than 600 people injured. How did Macron and his government react? In his tweet, the president praised the security forces for \"their courage and their professionalism\". He added: \"Shame on those who attacked them. Shame on those who assaulted other citizens and journalists.\" French state media reported that several reporters had been attacked in the southern cities of Toulouse and Béziers.\r\nInterior Minister Christophe Castaner accused the protesters of being influenced by the leader of the far-right National Rally party, Marine Le Pen. But she accused him, on Twitter, of dishonesty. Why are drivers on the warpath? The price of diesel, the most commonly used fuel in French cars, has risen by around 23% over the past 12 months to an average of €1.51 (£1.32; $1.71) per litre, its highest point since the early 2000s, AFP reports.\r\nWorld oil prices did rise before falling back again, but the Macron government raised its hydrocarbon tax this year by 7.6 cents per litre on diesel and 3.9 cents on petrol, as part of a campaign for cleaner cars and fuel. The decision to impose a further increase of 6.5 cents on diesel and 2.9 cents on petrol on 1 January 2019 was seen as the final straw. The president has blamed world oil prices for three-quarters of the price rise. He also said more tax on fossil fuels was needed to fund renewable energy investments. Not just about fuel Analysis by Lucy Williamson, BBC News, Paris The spark for the protest is clear, but there\'s not much that unites the \"yellow vests\" beyond their high-visibility gear and their anger at rising taxes and living costs. In a country where protests are often tightly managed by one political party or trade union, this is a movement with no recognised national leader, no formal structure or affiliation, which unites voters of all ages, from the far-left, the far-right, even those who once supported President Macron. Their new co-operation is a sign that Mr Macron has failed to restore their faith in politicians, and that deep divisions remain. These are not France\'s most marginalised citizens, but those who say they struggle even while working, who feel they\'re bearing the brunt of France\'s economic problems, while businesses and the rich get tax breaks. The government has blamed ultra-right gangs for the violence in Paris, but there are many peaceful citizens - both at the barricades and at home - who support the movement too. Its diversity and democracy has been its strength so far, but also makes its ultimate vision unclear, and its membership hard to control. Why wear yellow vests? All drivers in France have to carry the jackets in their cars as part of safety equipment for use in a breakdown. Along with the familiar red reflective triangle which must be placed behind a broken-down vehicle on the side of a road, the high-visibility jacket - or \"gilet jaune\" - must be worn by the driver outside the car. Failure to wear the jacket after a breakdown or accident can result in a €135 (£120; $153) fine under a law introduced in 2008.\r\n','2018-11-25',''),(48,'One family’s heartbreaking fight to cure son’s rare disease','New York Post','Health',15,'https://nypost.com/2018/11/26/one-familys-heartbreaking-fight-to-cure-sons-rare-disease/','Jane Ridley','One of Léo Vauclare’s favorite bedtime stories is “Be Brave Little One,” about a parent’s hopes for a child’s journey through life.\r\n“When I look at you, shining bright as the sun, I wish for you this … be brave, little one!” writes Marianne R. Richmond. Léo certainly has courage. At two-and-a-half, he’s fighting a rare genetic disease that doctors have described as “Parkinson’s mixed with Alzheimer’s for kids.” The neurodegenerative condition, called Infantile Neuroaxonal Dystrophy (INAD), has no known treatment or cure. Only about 150 children worldwide are currently diagnosed with the disease. Like other neurodegenerative diseases, it leads to a dangerous iron buildup in patients’ bodies, leading to poor motor function, involuntary eye movements, seizures, hearing loss and difficulty swallowing and breathing. Heartbreakingly, the life expectancy for such children is often just 5 to 10 years. But that hasn’t stopped Léo’s parents, Deborah and Antoine, from doing everything they can. “When you have a sick child, that’s what you do,” Deborah, 37, tells The Post. Now the couple has launched a campaign called BisousForLeo.org (“Kisses for Léo”) to raise an initial half a million dollars. Stars including Eva Longoria, Isla Fisher and Zoe Saldana have lent their support. The money — $98,000 has been donated so far — will fund scientific research for treatments and a cure for INAD and related disorders.\r\n“People are busy working on cures such as gene and enzyme-replacement therapy,” Deborah says. Antoine, 44, adds, “We’re lucky that it’s a time when scientists are starting to find something — but we are still unlucky, because [Léo’s diagnosis] is too soon.” The pair was overjoyed when they welcomed their 8-pound, 1-ounce baby to their home city of Paris in April 2016. Antoine, who is French, and Deborah, who’s from New York, met six years earlier, when Deborah had crossed the Atlantic to intern at his architecture office. It seemed like a magical, international affair of the heart. But they each carried a rare genetic variation — an impairment in the PLA2G6 gene that helps control the metabolism of cells — which would be passed on to their firstborn. “It’s just crazy to think that I went all the way to France and found someone that I fell in love with, and we were both carriers of this rare genetic mutation,” Deborah says, through tears. Léo developed normally until he was about a year old. That’s when he started having problems, mainly with mobility. “We thought he would walk by his first birthday,” says Deborah, an interior designer. But it wasn’t until 14 months that he started to take his first steps alone. “He would take five or six steps, then — boom! — he’d fall. He was trying his best, but it wasn’t happening. When he was still doing that at 18 months, we were concerned.” Their pediatrician initially diagnosed a global delay (a failure to reach milestones on time), which would likely resolve itself with therapy. But when Léo’s speech began to regress, the Vauclares sought second opinions. “He wasn’t calling us Mommy and Daddy [at all], and that was a big sign,” says Antoine. Experts who met their son came up with suggestions, including autism. Then, a relative in the medical field suggested genetic testing. The couple and Léo, who by then had reverted to crawling and was nonverbal, had their bloodwork done in April. On June 22, Deborah and Antoine were met by distraught faces at their geneticist’s office at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. \"They didn’t even explain the disease to us,” says Antoine. “They just gave us the diagnosis.”\r\nDeborah, then seven months’ pregnant with Leo’s sister, Eva, was dumbstruck. “They said, ‘You will have a million questions, but you are in so much shock’ .?.?. I did have a million questions, but at that point, I didn’t know what to ask.” Antoine managed to inquire about life expectancy.\r\nHis voice cracking, he recalls: “I asked how long Léo had to live, and they said, ‘We don’t know, but it is shorter.’ I said, ‘Much shorter?’ and they replied: ‘Much shorter. Without treatment, it’s 5 to 10 years.’?” It was a devastating blow — made worse when they learned that there was a 25 percent chance that the baby girl Deborah was carrying would also be affected. In France, terminations can be permitted any time during a pregnancy under certain circumstances. Geneticists scrambled to run tests. Five days later on June 27, the couple received some good news: Their daughter was safe. “I had to go on bed rest because I was a wreck,” says Deborah, who spent her time obsessively Googling INAD and trying to stay healthy, for the baby’s sake. But she was gutted to learn the effects of the disease. “It makes the muscles soft and mushy, making it hard to crawl and walk,” she says. “Then they eventually harden and stiffen. It can be painful.” Antoine was devastated as well. He remembers thinking, “I have to reset my brain .?.?. Léo was only going to be with us for five, six, seven, 10, 11 more years — that’s it. There’s no hope.” But soon, the couple would feel a little less alone. Two weeks after Léo’s diagnosis, they connected with the INADcure Foundation, a US-based nonprofit run by parents of an afflicted 4-year-old girl in Fairfield, NJ. They put the Vauclares in touch with a number of doctors whose research into the fields of gene editing and enzyme-replacement have provided rays of hope for the couple. Last week, Léo started to take part in a limited clinical trial at the Goryeb Children’s Hospital in Morristown, NJ, for a drug called RT0001. If all goes well, the medication will slow the progression of Léo’s disease by regulating the buildup of iron within his cells. “We’re cautiously optimistic, and we’ll see how it goes,” the leader of the trial, Dr. Darius Adams, tells The Post. As for Léo, he doesn’t know he’s ill, although he sometimes gets frustrated at not being able to walk. He continues to be a happy child who loves his baby sister, Eva, born in August. “He’ll kiss her and is curious about her,” says Deborah, who has yet to find out if Eva, like her parents, is a carrier of the disease. “When she cries, he crawls over to her because he is concerned.” He adores colorful picture books, and follows a healthful diet that excludes polyunsaturated fatty acids, found in vegetable oils and nuts, because it could possibly interfere with the medicine he receives. The Vauclares are leaving no stone unturned in their pursuit of treatments and a cure. “We’re trying to push the urgency to these scientists, doctors and researchers because we are on a time crunch,” says Deborah, who is pinning hope on the “Bisous for Léo” campaign to fund research as far afield as St. Louis, Mo., and London. “Otherwise, Léo is not going to live.” INAD innovations Doctors around the world are researching possible treatments and cures for INAD, which could help adults with other more common neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Here are some highlights:\r\n•? A team at London’s University College is investigating the use of gene therapy in mice with INAD. Dr. Manju Kurian, the lead researcher, tells the newsletter of the Neurodegeneration With Brain Iron Accumulation Disorders Association: “These studies have effectively demonstrated that gene therapy is a technology that can have significant therapeutic benefits in terms of life span, movement, coordination and overall quality of life.”\r\n•? In St. Louis, Mo., neurologist Paul Kotzbauer is investigating the use of gene editing or enzyme-replacement therapy to control the buildup of the alpha-synuclein protein, which affects the central nervous systems of people with INAD, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.\r\n•? At Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Hugo Bellen, Ph.D., is researching how mutations in certain genes cause degeneration. The FDA has already approved his team’s “compassionate use” trial of the antidepressant desipramine, which could help adults and children like Léo Vauclare with neurodegenerative diseases.\r\n','2018-11-26',''),(49,'French Film Industry Pays Tribute to Samuel Hadida','Yahoo!','Art',15,'https://www.yahoo.com/news/french-film-industry-pays-tribute-125259215.html','Elsa Keslassy','\"Members of the French film industry have been paying warm tribute to Samuel Hadida, the co-founder of Metropolitan FilmExport, who died suddenly in Los Angeles on Monday.\r\nHadida was not only one of France’s most respected and successful distributors; he was also loved by the independent film community and boasted strong relationships with major film groups such as Lionsgate, DreamWorks, Nu Image, Constantin Film and FilmNation.\r\n“What a shock!” tweeted Stephane Celerier, a fellow French distributor who founded of Mars Films. “I just learned of the sudden demise of Samuel Hadida. Huge movie man. Great enthusiast. Infinite respect for this life out of the ordinary.”\r\nQuel choc ! Je viens d’apprendre la disparition soudaine de Samuel Hadida. Immense homme de cinéma. Formidable passionné. Infini respect pour cette vie hors du commun. pic.twitter.com/8PCCuMX1XX\r\n— Stephane Celerier (@stephanecel) November 27, 2018\r\nBorn in Morocco, Hadida and his brother Victor have been credited with bringing popular American movies such as Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs,” David Fincher’s “Seven” and martial-arts pics starring Jean-Claude Van Damme to French theaters in the 1990s. Hadida was also well-known for his collaboration with Tony Scott on “True Romance,” with Constantin Film on the “Resident Evil” franchise and with Christophe Gans on “Silent Hill.”\r\nA true film buff, Hadida was also one of the first foreign distributors to invest in Asian talent, such as John Woo and Jackie Chan. Before his death, Hadida was active with projects including a U.S. remake of the Israeli hit comedy “The Last Band in Lebanon,” Roger Avary’s pulp action thriller “Lucky Day” and Caroline Fourest’s feature debut about female Kurdish warriors.\r\n“Samuel, his talent, his taste in projects. We loved him,” Cannes Film Festival president Pierre Lescure said. He called Metropolitan “a key player in the exchange between French and US films.”\r\nJean Labadie, founder of Le Pacte, called Hadida’s death “terrible” news. “Samuel was a huge producer and distributor and especially a great man.”\r\nLa mort de Damuel Hadida est un choc \r\nCette nouvelle est terrible\r\nSamuel était un immense producteur et distributeur et surtout un homme formidable\r\nJe pense à sa famille, ses amis et à tout le cinéma \r\nSamuel je ne t’oublierai jamais\r\n— JeanLabadie (@LabadieLePacte) November 27, 2018\r\nGilles Jacob, the former president of the Cannes Film Festival, remembered Hadida as a “great (and playful) distributor with his brother Victor at Metropolitan….A loss to the film industry.”\r\nDécès subit de Samuel Hadida grand (et enjoué) distributeur avec son frère Victor au sein de Metropolitan. Avait par exemple coproduit Scorsese (Hugo Cabret). Une perte pour la profession cinématographique. Condoléances à la famille.\r\n— gilles jacob (@jajacobbi) November 27, 2018\r\nVincent Maraval, co-founder of Wild Bunch, described Hadida as a passionate “man of cinema” whose death “will leave a huge void and it will take time to get used to it.”\r\nChoc terrible que la disparition de sami hadida , un passionné, un homme de cinema qui aura marqué l histoire de son metier. Il va laisser un vide immense et cela prendra du temps de s’y habituer. Je garde de grands souvenirs et je pense a son frere a sa famille et a Metro\r\n— VINCENT MARAVAL   (@MARAVALV) November 27, 2018\r\nMaxime Saada, the CEO of Canal Plus Group, said Hadida was “one of the biggest film distributors in France with his brother Victor via Metropolitan. They have carried so many films that we have loved.”\r\nBeaucoup de peine dans les équipes de @canalplus à l’annonce du décès de Samuel Hadida l’un des plus grands distributeurs de Cinéma en France avec son frère Victor via Metropolitan. Ils ont porté tant de films que nous avons aimés. Toutes nos pensées à sa famille et à ses proches\r\n— Maxime Saada (@maxsaada) November 28, 2018','2018-11-28',''),(50,'French parliament votes in favour of ban on smacking children','Channel NewsAsia','Politics',15,'https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/world/france-parliament-vote-ban-smacking-children-corporal-punishment-10983174','Néant','\"PARIS: The French National Assembly voted on Friday (Nov 30) in favour of a largely symbolic ban on parents smacking their children, a practice which though condemned by the United Nations (UN) still enjoys widespread support in the country.\r\nThe Bill on \"\"corporal punishment or humiliation\"\" seeks to ensure that parental authority is exercised \"\"without violence\"\" of any sort, including \"\"physical, verbal or psychological\"\" violence.\r\nMembers of parliament voted it through 51-1 early Friday morning, after a late-night debate, and it will now pass to the senate.\r\nAttempts by previous governments to ban the practice have run afoul of conservatives.\r\nA 2016 Bill condemning the smacking of children was later struck down by the Constitutional Council, which vets legislation, because it was adopted in the form of an amendment to an unrelated piece of legislation.\r\nAccording to the non-governmental Childhood Foundation, 85 per cent of French parents resort to corporal punishment, to the dismay of many European neighbours, including Sweden and Germany.\r\n Schools have long been banned from physically punishing children, but not parents.\r\nCrucially, the Bill would not sanction parents who continue to \"\"discipline\"\" their children as its main goal is \"\"educational\"\" - a way to encourage society to mend its views, according to Maud Petit, the MP who sponsored the measure.\r\nBut it will slap down a 19th-century addendum to the Civil Code\'s definition of parental authority, which is read out to couples taking their wedding vows and which specifically allows for \"\"disciplining\"\" children.\r\nIt will also bring France into line with international legislation.\r\nIn March 2015, human rights organisation the Council of Europe singled out France for failing to ban smacking, unlike most other European countries.\r\nA year later, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child took up the issue, calling on France to \"\"explicitly prohibit\"\" all forms of corporal punishment of children.\r\nThose in favour of the ban say scientific studies prove that children suffer both mental and physical consequences when smacked.\r\nIf the Bill is adopted, France will become the 55th state to ban corporal punishment of children, a move started by Sweden in 1979','2018-11-30',''),(51,'Emiliano Sala: little hope player and pilot are alive, say rescuers','The Guardian','Sport',16,'https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jan/23/emiliano-sala-search-resumes-for-lost-plane-carrying-cardiff-player','Steven Morris,  Josh Halliday, Matthew Weaver, Kim Willsher ','Rescuers fear that there is little hope of finding the footballer Emiliano Sala and an experienced pilot alive after their light aircraft went missing over the Channel Islands. The search for the new Cardiff City striker Sala and the pilot, who has been named as Dave Ibbotson from Lincolnshire, was postponed as darkness fell on Guernsey on Wednesday. A decision on whether to resume the search would be made early on Thursday, police said. It is understood that a French navy vessel had been directed to the area to assist. Earlier on Wednesday, Guernsey police had raised hopes by saying searchers were focusing on the possibility that the pair had made it into a life raft. But some of those involved in the rescue said that even if this was the case, there was little chance they would have survived since Monday night in cold, choppy conditions. Sala, 28, and Ibbotson, 59, have been missing since their plane disappeared from radar over the Channel as the footballer was being flown to Cardiff having been sold to the Welsh club by Nantes for £13m. The search has focused on a 280 sq mile area north of Guernsey that is close to shipping lanes and dotted with reefs.\r\nSala, who is Argentinian, is believed to have sent a voicemail message to his father saying he was frightened that the plane was about to break up. He said: “I’m here on a plane that looks like it’s about to fall apart, and I’m going to Cardiff … If in an hour and a half you have no news from me, I don’t know if they are going to send someone to look for me because they cannot find me, but you know … Dad, how scared am I!” Sala’s former girlfriend Berenice Schkair, 27, wrote on social media: “I want to wake up and all of this to be a lie. Please investigate because I cannot believe this accident.” In a separate post, which was later deleted, Buenos Aires-born Schkair wrote: “Investigate the football mafia, because I don’t believe this was an accident.” Ibbotson is an experienced flyer and a member of the British Parachute Association (BPA), from the small town of Crowle near Scunthorpe. Debra Middleton, the mayor of Crowle and Ealand, said Ibbotson was “very well known and very well liked” and that residents were hoping desperately for a positive outcome. “We all really do feel for his family. Everybody’s listening to the news and hoping everything’s OK.”\r\nHumberside police said: “We can confirm that north Lincolnshire man David Ibbotson is believed to be the pilot of the light aircraft that went missing near Guernsey. Specially trained officers are supporting Mr Ibbotson’s family, who have asked for privacy at this difficult time.”\r\nGuernsey police had said on Wednesday morning that rescuers were working on four possibilities:\r\n•	Sala and Ibbotson landed elsewhere but have not made contact.\r\n•	They landed on water and have been picked up by a passing ship but have not made contact.\r\n•	They landed on water and made it into a life raft police know was onboard.\r\n•	The aircraft broke up on contact with the water, leaving them in the sea.\r\nThe police said the search was focusing on the life raft option. Capt David Barker, the Guernsey harbourmaster, leading the operation, said there was still a chance that the pair could be alive if they had made it into a life raft. “Nobody here, including me, is giving up,” he said. John Fitzgerald, the Channel Islands Air Search chief officer, said: “We’re out there looking for something you don’t expect to see, whether it’s a whole aircraft, a life raft or bits of whatever. We have seen lots of things in the water, but that’s not to say they’re from the plane. They could be from the ship, from the land, anywhere.” Fitzgerald suggested it was unlikely the pair would survive for days even if they were in a raft. “The sea is 8-9C. That takes your core temperature away very quickly. Unless you are in a survival suit and really know how to look after yourself, you will have severe issues.” Privately, others directly involved in the rescue said there was very little hope. \r\nThe UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch said the plane was unlikely to have been fitted with a flight recorder, or black box. A vital tool for crash investigators, black boxes are mandatory on airliners and business jets, but not on light aircraft such as the Piper PA-46 Malibu that Sala was travelling in. The plane took off at 7.15pm on Monday and was flying at an altitude of 5,000ft (1,500 metres). On passing Guernsey, it “requested descent”, but Jersey air traffic control lost contact with it while it was at 2,300ft. Cardiff City said Sala had arranged the flight himself. The club chairman, Mehmet Dalman, told BBC Radio Wales: “We spoke to the player and asked him if he wanted us to make arrangements for his flight, which would have been commercial. He declined and made his own arrangements.” It is believed that a football agent may have helped him arrange the flight.  Guernsey police said: “After an intensive search using multiple aircraft and one lifeboat over the last nine hours, we have found no trace of the missing plane. With the light now fading, the search will be suspended for the night. A decision about whether to recommence will be taken early tomorrow morning.” In a statement, Sala’s agent, Mark McKay, expressed his sadness at the news. “I knew Emiliano well,” he said. “He was a wonderful person and I count myself fortunate to have known him.” He made it clear that neither he nor anyone in his family owned the aircraft.\r\n','2019-01-23',''),(52,'France\'s Macron launches \'grand debate\' following protests','Los Angeles Times','Politics',16,'https://www.latimes.com/sns-bc-eu--france-protests-20190115-story.html','Sylvie Corbet','French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday encouraged people to list their grievances and propose changes to the country\'s economy during a \"grand debate\" aimed at appeasing the yellow vest movement, following weeks of anti-government protests. Macron formally launched a three-month national debate during a meeting with about 600 mayors and local officials in Grand Bourgtheroulde, a small town in Normandy. He said he was there to hear the concerns of the French. He started his journey with a stop in the small town of Gasny to attend a local officials\' meeting, where some expressed their concerns over the loss of purchasing power of retirees and civil servants. Macron said he wants to help \"people in a difficult situation\" find their way out of poverty by making them \"more responsible,\" because \"some are doing the right thing, and some are messing around.\" The expression, using a vulgar verb in French, was highly commented on social media. The outspoken 42-year-old leader had previously made comments perceived by many French as arrogant, including when he told a jobless man that he just had to \"cross the street\" to find work or when he suggested some French workers are \"lazy.\" Macron said the yellow vest crisis was a chance to make deeper changes in the country. He notably pledged to reform the pension system this year to make it fairer because some workers currently have more benefits than others depending on their jobs. Despite a high security presence, a ban on traffic and restricted access to the town, more than 100 yellow vest protesters gathered in Grand Bourgtheroulde to express their discontent. Some brief scuffles between demonstrators and police broke out and a few people have been arrested, an AP photographer reported. Security forces used tear gas to push back protesters to a good distance from the meeting with Macron. \"We are being prevented from accessing the village,\" said protester Florence Clement. \"I was crossing the road with my yellow vest but I was asked to remove it because it\'s forbidden.\" Macron this week addressed a \"letter to the French\" to encourage people to express their views. \r\nThe consultation will take place through local meetings and on the internet. The debate will focus on taxes, public services, climate change and democracy. The French leader, whose popularity ratings hit record lows at the end of last year, hopes the process will help quell anger over his economic policies. About 84,000 people turned out last weekend for the ninth round of anti-government demonstrations across France, according to the French Interior ministry. The yellow vest movement, born in November from discontent over a tax hike on diesel fuel, has expanded to encompass demands for wider changes to France\'s economy to help struggling workers. Protesters have denounced Macron\'s pro-business policies as favoring the rich. The movement is named for the fluorescent garments all French motorists are required to keep in their vehicles.\r\n','2019-01-15',''),(53,'Macron vowed to fight the populists. Now he\'s being engulfed by them','CNN','Politics',16,'https://edition.cnn.com/2019/01/11/europe/france-macron-yellow-vests-populism-intl/index.html','Melissa Bell','Paris (CNN)When French President Emmanuel Macron won the presidential election in May 2017, beating Marine Le Pen, the leader of France\'s far-right National Front, the markets heaved a sigh of relief. The populist wave that had led the United Kingdom to vote to leave the European Union and that propelled Donald Trump to the White House appeared to have been stopped -- at least in France.  Macron embraced this victory and presented himself as the new leader of the free world: a champion of a newly unfashionable multilateralist, globalist vision.  Having changed the French political landscape with his candidacy, which he ran on the independent ticket \"En Marche,\" Macron promised to fix Europe, fight climate change, stand up to the US and take on the populists gaining ground elsewhere in the EU. So it is perhaps surprising that he should have been so slow to see the populist threat growing from within.  As the \"gilets jaunes\" or, \"yellow vests\" began appearing at roundabouts and toll booths around the country in early November, the government seemed deaf to the growing rumble of discontent. The protests -- named for the yellow high-visibility jackets French motorists must carry in their vehicles -- began as a reaction to an eco-tax on gas but have since morphed into a much more political protest against Macron. Even after some 282,000 people took the streets at the first mass yellow vest protest on November 17, it seemed that Macron had neither a clear strategy on what to do, nor even a grasp of the looming crisis. This reinforced the sense of a president out of touch with the common citizen, one insensitive to their plight.  As one political analyst, Alexis Poulain, told me at the time: \"Macron is the ultimate technocrat. He is at home in Davos. But here you have a man used to talking about millions of Euros, trying to listen to those counting in centimes. It cannot work.\" Especially when those who count in centimes are suddenly calling the shots.  After weeks of protests that turned violent, Macron eventually introduced some concessions. First, a cancellation of the tax increase that had sparked the movement. Then, a 10 billion Euro (approximately US $11.5 billion) package of social reforms, including an increase in the minimum wage, aimed at helping the purchasing power of those least well-off.  But by then the damage was done. The yellow vest movement, having felt it was being ignored, now felt it was winning. So why stop?  Last Saturday, on the first weekend of 2019, the numbers of yellow vest protestors demonstrating on the streets were back up from the week prior, a suggestion that the yellow vests aren\'t done yet. But while the movement has stayed strong, it has changed in its focus and is now looking to change in its form.  From a fiscal revolt, to a battle over spending power, the yellow vest movement is now calling for more power to be given to \"the people\" through mass popular votes or \"referenda d\'initiative citoyenne\" (RIC).  Next week, in yet another concession toward the protesters, Macron will send a letter to the public, outlining the themes of a big national debate.  The topics of that debate will span from spending power to the functioning of the institutions and climate change initiatives. But even before that debate begins, the government has already ruled out a U-turn on Macron\'s reform agenda or institutional reform.  So, what can emerge if not dissatisfaction with the debate, argue some observers of French politics who warn of the dangers involved in the process itself. By placing himself in a dialogue with \"the people,\" they say, Macron -- having already destabilized France\'s representative democracy by the very nature of his candidacy -- risks now taking on a mob that could yet force the dissolution of parliament and a set of legislative elections. Meanwhile, some yellow vests have already decided to go into politics themselves, and are now preparing candidacy lists for the European elections this May. An Ipsos poll, ordered by Macron\'s party, showed those candidates could potentially win about 12% of the vote, mainly at the expense of the far-right and far-left. Macron has long warned that he expects that poll to be decisive to the future of Europe.  Le Pen\'s far-right party is currently leading voting intentions in France. Other European populists, many of them Eurosceptics, are also expected to do well in May\'s election. Now, another populist force looks set to enter the European Parliament, becoming a new force and feature of the political landscape in France. Far from putting an end to the populist wave, Macron appears to have overseen its expansion.\r\n','2019-01-14',''),(54,'Tiny killer threatens giant clam, aquatic emblem of the Med','Yahoo!','Society',16,'https://news.yahoo.com/tiny-killer-threatens-giant-clam-aquatic-emblem-med-030441338.html;_ylt=AwrC2Q7s.0pcoTAA1w3QtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTByaWg0YW05BGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwM4BHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg--','Claudine RENAUD','\"Villefranche-sur-Mer (France) (AFP) - With wing-shaped shells lined with iridescent mother-of-pearl and producing the fibres of rare and delicate sea silk, the noble pen shell clam is one of the most emblematic species in the Mediterranean and a bellwether for marine environmental health.\r\nBut the giant mollusc, the world\'s second biggest, is under mortal threat from a parasite that has ravaged populations since it was identified along Spanish coasts in 2016.\r\nScientists fear that climate change and warming waters will intensify the devastation, which they now class as an emergency.\r\nThe noble pen shells, or Pinna nobilis, can live for up to 45 years and grow to about 1.2 metres (four feet).\r\nThey are only found in the Mediterranean Sea, standing proudly upright like ships\' sails, their tips anchored in sandy seagrass meadows by sinewy fibres.\r\nOn the tranquil surface of the water at Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice in southern France, there is little evidence of the carnage below.\r\nBut dive down and the seafloor is a graveyard of noble pen shells.\r\nDeath has shrivelled the flesh of the molluscs and dulled the mother-of-pearl to a rusted brown inside the shells, in an area abandoned by the usual myriad of tiny cohabitors -- little crabs, shrimps and orange sea fans.\r\n- Weakened, then starved -\r\n\"\"We cannot find a living one,\"\" said diver Olivier Jude, emerging, camera in hand, from the bay after an unsuccessful attempt to photograph the Pinna nobilis for his Phoctopus website.\r\nThe French Riviera is the latest site of the die-off, caused by the relentless assault of a new parasite that weakens the clam, quickly starving it to death.\r\nThe pathogen has almost eradicated the noble pen shell population off the Spanish coast, where it is now listed as critically endangered, and has spread to other coastal areas.\r\nIt is now attacking the clams from France to Turkey.\r\n\"\"The situation is deeply alarming,\"\" Maria del Mar Otero, a marine expert at the International Union for Conservation of Nature\'s (IUCN) Centre for Mediterranean Cooperation, adding that the species was \"\"on the verge of disappearing\"\" in Spain.\r\n- \'Everything was dead\' -\r\nFields of the giant molluscs clustered on the coastlines of the Mediterranean have been known to coastal communities for centuries.\r\nIn ancient times, fine threads plucked from their tufted beard-like growths were spun into sea silk, an incredibly rare gossamer material that shimmers like gold.\r\nSome believe that this fabric fished from the sea could have been the basis for the legend of the Golden Fleece sought by Jason in Greek mythology.\r\nNow their very existence appears to hang in the balance.\r\nNoble pen shells are seen as an indicator of the ocean\'s health, recording on their long-lived shells the chemical and physical changes in the waters.\r\nAn IUCN map of the affected region, periodically updated since the beginning of the crisis, is studded with a growing number of red dots corresponding to mortality rates of above 85 percent.\r\nThe southern Spanish coast is hemmed almost entirely in crimson, while scarlet spots are also clustered around the French island of Corsica, in Italy, Turkey, Cyprus and Greece.\r\nFrench marine biologist Nardo Vicente, of the Paul Ricard Institute of Oceanography, has monitored a field of noble pen shells off the coast of Corsica since the early nineties.\r\nNestled on the seabed between 26 and 40 metres underwater, the clams are around 30 years old and have grown to around 80 cm.\r\n\"\"In 2017 the field was in perfect health,\"\" he said.\r\n\"\"This year, everything was dead, absolutely a hundred percent!\"\"\r\n- Tiny assassin -\r\nThe parasite, found in the digestive systems of several of the dead noble pen shells, is from the haplosporidium genus, blamed in the United States for the mass die-off of oysters in Delaware Bay in the 1950s.\r\nIt is not yet clear what brought the tiny killer to the Mediterranean or how it is spreading so fast, although it could have arrived on the hulls of merchant ships.\r\nBut the disease appears to thrive in warming waters.\r\nVicente said global warming was acting to stimulate \"\"a bunch of germs, viruses and parasites\"\" that had lain dormant but \"\"act fully with the rise in temperature\"\".\r\nThe waters around the Corsican field he monitored were 20 degrees C even at 40 metres, when normally they would be 13 or 14 degrees C.\r\n\"\"It\'s completely abnormal,\"\" he said.\r\nHe said he was \"\"devastated\"\" but hopes that rescue programmes will be able to re-populate the affected areas and save the species.\r\n- Racing against time -\r\nIn Spain, a few noble pen shells have been preserved in aquariums -- though not all survived -- while Italy and France have strengthened coastal monitoring.\r\nLagoon areas are another source of hope, where the noble pen shells appear to be more resilient.\r\nBut as experts race against time before summer raises the water temperatures, there are fears that the noble pen shell\'s fate might be a warning sign for the health of the sea.\r\nIn Villefranche-sur-Mer, the coastal waters are relatively well protected with zones where boats are prohibited from dropping anchor.\r\nLidwine Courard, a diver with the NaturDive association, said the molluscs began to die off in October along the French Riviera.\r\n\"Some say it might be the beginning of the extinction of other species.\"','2019-01-25',''),(55,'Marion Marechal-Le Pen: Oxford Union criticised for invitation','BBC ','Politics',16,'https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-46921475','Néant','\"The Oxford Union has been criticised for inviting far-right French activist Marion Marechal-Le Pen to speak.\r\nOxford East MP Annaliese Dodds said the debating society seemed \"\"determined to invite very controversial figures\"\".\r\nMs Marechal-Le Pen was an MP for the National Front (FN) and had a leading role in anti-gay marriage rallies.\r\nLabour MP Ms Dodds said it would be \"\"sensible\"\" if the Oxford Union, which has been approached for comment, uninvited the controversial activist.\r\nShe said the Oxford Union, one of the country\'s oldest debating societies, was inviting \"\"people from movements who most commentators would view as racist\"\".\r\nIn November last year the union was criticised for inviting controversial former adviser to Donald Trump, Steve Bannon.\r\nIn the same month, the leader of far-right German party Alternative for Germany (AfD), Alice Weidel, pulled out of an Oxford Union debate due to concerns about security.\r\nMs Dodds added the latest \"\"stunt\"\" on 22 January, which she described as \"\"an attempt to garner publicity\"\", would stretch police resources in the city.\r\n\"\"Yet again the police will have to expend resources on this because there will be a reaction against it, I already know that they\'re stretched,\"\" she said.\r\nCampaign group Oxford Stand Up To Racism said it was intending to protest against the event.\r\nIn an open letter it said it was \"\"appalled that the Oxford Union has once again shown its willingness to invite extreme right-wing racist politicians to speak\"\".\r\nIt added: \"\"The invitation to Marion [Marechal-]Le Pen is especially disgusting since it is scheduled during the run up to Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January.\r\n\"\"The National Rally party in France is well-known for its extreme anti-Semitism.\r\n\"\"Founding member and beloved grandfather of Marion Maréchal, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has stated on many occasions that the Holocaust was just an insignificant detail of the Second World War.\"\"\r\nIt also called her a \"\"vicious Islamophobe [who] believes that Muslims can only be regarded as French if they follow a Christian culture\"\".\r\nIn 2015, more than 200 people protested against a speech given by Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front and the aunt of Ms Marechal-Le Pen.\r\nWho is Marion Marechal-Le Pen?\r\nMs Marechal-Le Pen is the granddaughter of the founder of the French National Front Jean-Marie Le Pen.\r\nShe was elected to the French National Assembly in 2012 at the age of 22, and at the time she was France\'s youngest parliamentarian in modern history.\r\nShe was seen by some as a future leader of the far-right party, but after Marine Le Pen lost the 2017 presidential election to Emmanuel Macron, she quit frontline politics for \"\"personal and political reasons\"\".\r\nThe 29-year-old is a conservative Catholic and played a leading role in anti-gay marriage rallies, favouring what she called the \"\"traditional family\"\".\r\nShe has repeatedly spoken of the \"\"true French\"\" identity, demanding Muslims in France adopt values rooted in Christianity.\r\nAnd one phrase she has repeatedly used about herself is that she is a \"\"Francaise de souche\"\" - of native French stock.','2019-01-18',''),(56,'SEC Investigates Nissan Over Carlos Ghosn’s Pay Disclosures','The Wall Street Journal','Economy',16,'https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-investigates-nissan-over-disclosures-on-executive-pay-11548658741 ','Sean McLain','\"TOKYO—The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Nissan Motor Co. NSANY 2.72% in connection with former Chairman Carlos Ghosn’s pay disclosures, requesting documents from both the car maker and Mr. Ghosn, according to people familiar with the matter. \r\nNissan said Monday it received an inquiry from the SEC and was cooperating with the financial regulator, but declined to provide further information.\r\nNissan and Mr. Ghosn have been charged in Japan with underreporting his compensation by more than $80 million on eight years of the company’s financial reports. \r\nMr. Ghosn says he is innocent of the charges by Tokyo prosecutors. He says he kept a record at Nissan of how much he thought he was worth, but it was hypothetical and didn’t bind Nissan to pay him anything beyond his publicly reported compensation. Nissan has expressed regret over the potential impact to shareholders, but hasn’t said whether it will contest the charges.\r\nThe investigation by the SEC appears to be at an early stage and hasn’t extended beyond a request for information, one of the people said. It couldn’t be determined whether the SEC will open a broader investigation. \r\nThe regulator has broad authority to police the sale of securities in the U.S., potentially exposing both Mr. Ghosn and Nissan to penalties. Nissan shares don’t trade on a U.S. stock exchange, but the company does issue a form of American depositary receipts through a U.S. bank, which allow investors in the U.S. essentially to own Nissan shares in U.S. dollars. \r\nMr. Ghosn was arrested on Nov. 19 following a secret investigation within Nissan. He has been denied bail thus far, and remains in jail until at least March 10, when a judge is scheduled to review his detention.\r\nPeople familiar with Nissan’s internal investigation have said Mr. Ghosn sought to lower the amount of his compensation that was publicly disclosed and planned to collect the undisclosed money after retirement. Nissan Chief Executive Hiroto Saikawa has said Mr. Ghosn was “too powerful,” allowing him to circumvent oversight of his actions. \r\nNissan and Tokyo prosecutors believe that those future payments should have been disclosed in the company’s financial statements. Mr. Ghosn has said any discussions about future payments were preliminary and would need board approval to become binding\"','2019-01-28',''),(57,'French ambassador returns to Italy following dramatic spat','Washington Post','Politics',17,'https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/france-sending-ambassador-back-to-italy-following-spat/2019/02/15/bef42b04-30fc-11e9-8781-763619f12cb4_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.0eb4807f62ec','Frances D\'Emilio / Sylvie Corbet?','\"France\'s ambassador returned to Italy on Friday, professing confidence that the two neighbors could deal with disagreements and work through their most serious diplomatic dispute since World War II. \r\nItalian President Sergio Mattarella received the returning ambassador, the presidential Quirinal Palace in Rome said.\r\nAmbassador Christian Masset gave him a letter from French President Emmanuel Macron inviting Mattarella to France.\r\n\"President Mattarella, in expressing thanks, has cordially accepted the invitation,\" the palace said in a statement.\r\nFrance recalled Masset last week to protest perceived Italian meddling in French domestic politics, after Italian Deputy Premier Luigi Di Maio met with French yellow vest activists seeking to run for the European Parliament.\r\n\"I was very happy to turn the lights back on in Palazzo Farnese,\" home of the French embassy in Rome, Masset told reporters Friday evening in a frescoed salon of the 16th-century Renaissance palace. \"And I want them always to be on.\"\r\nIn response to France\'s decision, Di Maio, who heads the populist 5-Star Movement, said he was glad France sent the ambassador back to Rome.\r\n\"I\'ll ask him for a meeting,\" Di Maio told reporters.\r\nMasset for his part welcomed what he perceived as openness by Di Maio to dialogue and the Italian leader\'s distancing, in remarks on Friday, from any violent elements in the French opposition movement to Macron.\r\nAs for relations between Italy and France, which share a border and are major trading partners, Masset said: \"We don\'t deny that there are differences or disagreements on themes, but all can be faced through dialogue and in reciprocal respect\" in the interest of both countries.\r\nIn remarks in Rome earlier on Friday, Di Maio appeared to want to tamp down speculation the 5-Stars were making alliances with violent elements in the French movement.\r\n\"We don\'t have any intention of dialoguing with that mind-set (of the movement) that speaks of armed struggle or civil war,\" Di Maio said.\r\nDi Maio has been courting support from fellow populists elsewhere in the European Union with the aim of creating a like-minded faction in the European Parliament after elections this spring.\r\nAdding to the French-Italian tensions, Di Maio\'s fellow deputy premier, Matteo Salvini, has sharply attacked France lately on migrant policies. Salvini has also demanded France extradite to Italy several Italians who were convicted of domestic terrorism decades ago but who took refuge in France.\r\nEarlier this week, Macron called Mattarella to discuss the removal of Masset. At the time, Mattarella\'s office said the two presidents\" re-affirmed the importance, for each of the two countries, of the French-Italian relationship, which nourishes itself with historic, economic, cultural and exceptional human ties.\"\r\nBoth men further noted that the two countries\" have a special responsibility to work in concert for the defense and relaunching of the European Union,\"\" the Italian presidential office said.','2019-02-15',''),(58,'Why are hundreds of dead dolphins washing up on French beaches?','The Local','Society',17,'https://www.thelocal.fr/20190218/why-are-hundreds-of-dead-dolphins-washing-up-on-french-beaches','Emilie King','\"Since the beginning of the year alone, a record number of up to 600 dolphins have washed up on France\'s Atlantic coast. So what\'s going on?\r\nWhat\'s the story?\r\nSince the start of 2019, up to 600 dolphins have washed up on beaches along France\'s Atlantic coast.\r\nAccording to two different surveys, the numbers of carcasses found this year is between 400 and 600 - but even the lower estimate is higher than any previous year at the same period.\r\nWhile dead dolphins wash up on beaches in France each year scientists say the situation is alarming.\r\n\"If you compare these figures to last year\'s over the same period, there are already more dead dolphins that the previous years, which were already record years,\" said researcher Hélène Peltier from the Pelagis marine life observatory which carries out surveys.\r\n\"Will things calm down? That is the question now, we\'ll need to look at the numbers at the start of spring to make an accurate assessment of the situation,\" she said.\r\nThe dolphins washed up on the stretch of Atlantic coast running all the way from southern Brittany to the Spanish border with large numbers of carcasses found in the departments of Vendée and in the Charentes Maritimes.\r\nScientists say these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg as many when dolphins die, many just sink to the bottom of the ocean or are washed out to sea rather than ending up on the beaches.\r\nThese deaths could also threaten the dolphin populations in the years to come, researchers say.\r\nWhy is this happening?\r\nAlthough hundreds of dead dolphins wash up on French beaches every year, this is a record number so early on in the year.\r\nMost of the dead dolphins found bear injury marks which researchers say are caused by big fishing boats and the large fishing nets they use.\r\n\"Among the carcasses found, 93 percent show signs that they have been captured by fishing vessels and their equipment such as mutilations, amputations and fractured jaws,\" according to the French environmental charity France Nature Environnement (FNE).\r\nThe dolphins get caught in the vast nets used to catch fish like hake and sea bass, which the dolphins like to eat. Some of these nets are fixed in the sea bed and when dolphins get stuck in them, they can\'t come up for air to breathe and they suffocate.\r\nTrawlers are also a problem as they drag large fishing nets behind them which dolphins also get caught in and suffer injuries and die. When they get stuck, dolphins panic, and the stress can also kill them.\r\nIs there a solution?\r\nAn obvious solution would be to reduce the number of large fishing vessels.\r\nEnvironmental organisations want the number of big trawlers and other large fishing boats - which belong mainly to France and Spanish fleets - allowed to fish in those waters to be cut immediately. They are calling for a better coordination between the French and Spanish governments to find a solution to the problem.\r\nThey also want observers to be allowed to board these vessels to control the fishing practices, but in practice, they say this isn\'t happening as the boats are reticent to do so.\r\nOther solutions include putting acoustic \'repellents\' on boats to keep the dolphins away. These are called \'pingers\' and this year, for the first time all French pelagic trawlers were equipped with some.\r\nBut given the record numbers of dolphin deaths this year already, the pingers seem to have little effect.\r\nFNE has pointed out that one of the problems could be that the pingers are not attached to the large nets on the sea beds, where many dolphins get caught.','2019-02-18',''),(59,'Restoring an Avenue in Paris Meant for Kings','The New York Times','Society',17,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/business/paris-champs-elysees-renovation.html','Tiffany Hsu','PARIS — The sidewalks are cracked along “la plus belle avenue du monde” — the most beautiful street in the world. Each day, 60,000 cars clog the lanes. Walkways are cluttered with abandoned scooters. The Avenue des Champs-Élysées was built for royalty and named after paradise. But its last major renovation was more than 20 years ago. New retail tenants have been intermittent. Parisians avoid the area with the resolution of New Yorkers steering clear of Times Square. As Paris prepares to host the 2024 Olympics, hundreds of millions of dollars are flowing into construction projects on the avenue, one of the most visited areas of the city, as it tries to re-establish and redefine its place. Apple and WeWork moved in recently, and will be followed by the Galeries Lafayette department store. Planned improvements will beautify and expand space for cyclists. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent refurbishing historic monuments, including the 119-year-old Grand Palais exhibition center. The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels crafted a vortex-like entrance into the four-story Galeries Lafayette department store.CreditElliott Verdier for The New York Times “We want to prevent the image of the Champs-Élysées from falling,” said Jean-Noël Reinhardt, the president of the Comité Champs-Élysées, a community group. The project is a complicated undertaking. Commercial rents along the promenade are among the highest in the world, at $1,519 per square foot per year, compared with $2,250 on Fifth Avenue, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Construction in the Beaux-Arts buildings that line the street is heavily regulated, and any changes made to accommodate tourists and global chains risk further alienating locals.\r\nWithout the renovation, Champs-Élysées’ risks losing its prestige as a world-class destination, said Jean-Louis Missika, the deputy mayor of Paris for urban planning and economic development. The Champs-Élysées ranks among grand boulevards such as Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and Oxford Street in London. Other streets, such as Des Voeux Road in Hong Kong and Khao San Road in Bangkok, are trying to position themselves as major attractions. The avenue, stretching nearly 1.2 miles from Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, has inspired streets in the Bronx, New Orleans, Prague and, recently, Tokyo. Joe Dassin sang in 1969, over perky piano chords, that the Champs-Élysées had “everything you want.”\r\nNamed after the Elysian fields of Greek mythology, the street was commissioned in the 1600s for the French royal family. Napoleon III added fountains and pathways in the 1800s. Later in the 19th century, a regionwide urban design overhaul led by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann erected the uniform stone buildings that still populate many Parisian streets. Parisians celebrated their city’s liberation from the Nazis in 1944 and their nation’s World Cup victories there. A restoration in the 1990swidened sidewalks, added trees and moved parking underground. But the glamorous charm that made the Champs-Élysées a quintessentially Parisian street has waned. The theaters that dot the avenue have shed millions of moviegoers. Shopping arcades set farther back from the street are often deserted. The Arc de Triomphe, a testament to military might that has become a monumental symbol of the extreme affluence and global consumerism in its shadow, was recently vandalized by so-called yellow vest protesters objecting to high taxes and income disparity. In 2007, the city government, wanting to resist the “banalization” of the strip, tried to block H & M from opening an outlet on the avenue. The fast-fashion chain arrived anyway, along with two Zara stores and an Abercrombie & Fitch housed in a sumptuous mansion behind a gilded gate. “Having always the same brands, it’s not good for the place, because people don’t know where they are,” Mr. Missika said. “They could be in London or Tokyo.” Ideally, he said, the Champs-Élysées would host a balanced mix of fast-food outlets, sit-down restaurants, global retailers and local designers. But the city has few legal tools to shape the commercial composition of the street. “There must be a good equilibrium of commercial activity,” Mr. Missika said. “When a place is totally deserted by local people, it’s a big problem; the soul of the city disappears.” The Champs-Élysées is being repopulated by tenants that hope to draw both Parisians and tourists.\r\nA 70,000-square-foot extension of the Galeries Lafayette chain will open between Rue La Boétie and Rue du Colisée at the end of March, becoming the largest retail site on the street. The nearly 90-year-old property, a former bank, is owned by the Qatar Investment Authority. The Danish architect Bjarke Ingels uncovered a hidden cupola and crafted a vortex-like entrance into the four-story store. A food court with communal tables will welcome shoppers and the 180,000 people who work around the Champs-Élysées. Galeries Lafayette follows Apple, which opened a store in November at the corner of Rue Washington in a 19th-century apartment building that was once home to the Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont. Architects from Foster & Partners restored the original wood and marble staircase and added a glinting, kaleidoscopic roof over an interior courtyard. Negotiations over construction permits took months, in part because of the building’s history. The 59,000-square-foot property was purchased in April for more than $650 million for Bayerische Versorgungskammer a German pension fund. Other companies are finding their way onto the street. In December, Norges Bank Real Estate Management of Norway bought nearly 110,900 square feet of retail and office space at 79 Champs-Élysées. Thomas Jefferson once lived at 92 Champs-Élysées, where WeWork opened its 48,000-square-foot outpost in June. Hermé, known as the “Picasso of pastries,” teamed up with the beauty brand L’Occitane en Provence to open a 10,000-square-foot lifestyle store at 86 Champs-Élysées in early 2018. New boutiques from Dior and Nike are in the works. Conventional retail, with its large signs and rushed customers, “will eventually just disappear” from the Champs-Élysées, said Stefan Behling, the lead architect on the Apple project. Instead, concept stores and experiential spaces will take over. “The subtlety is the right thing,” he said. But although stores take up most of the Champs-Élysées, only 23 percent of visitors come to shop, according to data from the neighborhood committee. Many are looking for culture and leisure, for reasons to interrupt their sidewalk strolls with a stop in a gallery or an elevator ride up to an expansive view. City rules that were relaxed in recent years will allow more development of the Champs-Élysées’ rooftops, with bars, restaurants and up to a dozen pools, including one planned for a SO Sofitel hotel. Initiatives to expand green space have already taken root. The Champs-Élysées has been closed to cars one Sunday per month since 2016. One night in July, it became an open-air cinema where the fantasy film “Les Visiteurs” played on a towering screen near the Arc de Triomphe. Helen Mirren and Jane Fonda strutted down the middle of the street for a 2017 fashion show. Last year, the city began constructing a dedicated bike lane on the Champs-Élysées, which it expects to complete by early 2020. A government effort — with an assist by Chanel — to upgrade and expand the exhibition and event spaces at the Grand Palais will start next year. There is also talk of sprucing up the gardens along the eastern part of the Champs-Élysées, where Jeff Koons’s towering 35-foot-tall sculpture “Bouquet of Tulips” will be permanently placed this year. The French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, supported by private funding, are redesigning several fountains along the street. “This is part of a global transformation of the city,” Mr. Missika said\r\n','2019-02-26',''),(60,'Dior celebrates 1950s rebels at fashion week lacking Lagerfeld','Reuters','Lifestyle',17,'https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-fashion-paris-dior-idUKKCN1QF2FF','Sarah White, Michaela Cabrera','PARIS — Christian Dior lit up the Paris catwalk with a celebration of 1950s youth culture on Tuesday while designers paid tributes to this fashion week\'s big absentee, late Chanel creative director Karl Lagerfeld. The nine days of runway presentations in Paris, which began on Monday evening with young labels including France\'s Jacquemus, follows fashion weeks in New York, London and Milan that also showcased styles for next autumn and winter. Highlights in France will include designer debuts at storied couture house Lanvin, which is striving for a turnaround under new Chinese owner Fosun, as well as at Nina Ricci. But all eyes will be on Karl Lagerfeld\'s last collection for Chanel, the brand known for its tweed suits which he turned into a luxury powerhouse in more than 35 years as creative chief. Styles referenced the \"Teddy Girls\" - 50s era girl gangs, who like their \"Teddy Boy\" counterparts wore Edwardian-inspired clothes that came to define this quirky, rebellious subculture. Chiuri told Reuters she was inspired to return to this period and explore Dior\'s relationship with Britain when the brand decided to put on a retrospective exhibit along these lines at London\'s V&A museum. PVC rain hats, chunky boots and tartan prints added to the British feel of the collection, where Chiuri also revisited the pleated, longer skirts and see-through textures she has come to favor. \"ALCHEMIST\" LAGERFELD Chiuri paid homage to Lagerfeld in her show calling him an \"alchemist of elegance and beauty\" in a press note.\r\n\"I was so honored to meet him initially in my career in Fendi,\" she told reporters, saying his death was a \"time for reflection\" about the past and future of fashion. At the star-studded Dior show, where actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Lily Collins sat on the front row, guests also paid tribute to Lagerfeld\'s unique qualities. \"His crazy way of thinking, his freedom of expression, his constantly renewed creativity in all the arts linked to fashion, whether it be textiles, embroidery,\" former Socialist minister Segolene Royale told Reuters. \"It\'s a true joy to see this creativity continue and resist the trivialisation of globalisation.\" The first full day of Paris Fashion Week was set to close on Tuesday with the latest collection by Kering brand Saint Laurent.\r\n','2019-02-26',''),(61,'French town cracks down on barking dogs, angering activists','New York Post','Society',17,'https://nypost.com/2019/02/12/french-town-cracks-down-on-barking-dogs-angering-activists/','Natalie O\'Neill','A French town has banned dogs from barking too much — and animal rights activists say the rule is too “ruff.”\r\nPooch owners who fail to keep Fido quiet in the small northern village of Feuquières will be hit with a $68 fine for “prolonged or repeated barking,” according to reports. “The aim is not to ban dogs and we won’t be fining people for the slightest hint of a yap,” Jean-Pierre Estienne, the mayor, told Le Parisien newspaper. “The town has nothing against dogs but when you decide to have them, you educate them.” But so-called “animal freedom” boosters are barking mad over the vocal crackdown, which they say is too strict. “You may as well stop church bells ringing on Sunday morning! If dogs have mouths, it’s so they can bark,” Stéphane Lamart, president of For the Defense of Animal Rights, told Le Monde newspaper.\r\nThe draconian doggy law may even end up increasing home break-ins, he said.“People are very happy about it when they sound the alarm in case of burglary.” The move to muzzle mutts comes after dozens of residents signed a petition, griping about owners with loud pooches driving them nuts. The residents focused on one extra-bad offender who owns several large and loud dogs, according to Le Monde. “We have made several attempts to establish a dialogue with her, to no avail. The noise pollution is getting worse and worse,” Estienne said, according to the paper.\r\nOn Monday, as the crackdown began, he urged owners to keep dogs inside when they’re not home and to use anti-barking collars.\r\nThe rule was a last resort after residents had begun yapping about the problem to cops, he said, according to a translation by the UK Telegraph.\r\nPolice in the town, he said, “have other fish to fry.” Other cities have banned prolonged barking, including Centennial, Ohio, where pooch owners have howled over fines up to $75.\r\n','2019-02-12',''),(62,'The force awakens in France as lightsaber duelling becomes official sport','Euronews','Lifestyle',17,'https://www.euronews.com/2019/02/19/the-force-awakens-in-france-as-lightsaber-duelling-becomes-official-sport','Lindsey Johnstone  & AP','\"The French Fencing Federation (Fédération Française d\'Escrime) has officially recognised lightsaber duelling as a competitive sport.\r\nThe iconic weapon from a galaxy far, far away now has the same status as the foil, épée and sabre, the traditional blades used at the Olympics.\r\nThe LED-lit, rigid polycarbonate lightsaber replicas may not be able to slice a Sith lord in half, but they look and sound remarkably close to what Star Wars fans see on screen.\r\nLightsaber manufacturer Christian Levieuge said: \"\"We have some very basic ones which are just with on-off buttons, with different colours or shapes. But there are much, much, much improved weapons which can have sounds, blade effects.\"\"\r\nThe fencing federation is now equipping fencing clubs with lightsabers and training would-be instructors in the ways of the Force.\r\nDuellists compete in intense three-minute bouts of slashing, feinting and stabbing. The physicality of lightsaber combat is the reasoning behind the federation\'s support of the sport. Like virtuous Jedi knights, it sees itself as combatting a Dark Side: the sedentary habits of 21st-century life.\r\nPolice officer Philippe Bondi, 49, practised fencing for 20 years before switching to lightsaber duelling. When his local club in Metz club began offering classes, as a lifelong Star Wars fan Bondi couldn\'t resist.\r\n\"Points are awarded depending on where the blows land: five points for the head, three for the legs. The first to 15 points wins,\" he explained.\r\nHe fights in the same wire-mesh face mask he used for fencing and spent around €350 euros on his protective body armour (sturdy gloves, chest, shoulder and shin pads) and his federation-approved lightsaber – opting for luminous green, also the preferred shade of both Luke Skywalker and Jedi master Yoda.','2019-02-19',''),(63,'France Shows Britons Splendor of Citizenship as Brexit Looms','The New York Times','Politics',18,'https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/03/24/world/europe/ap-eu-brexit-becoming-french.html','The Associated Press','PARIS - Catherine Norris Trent, a British citizen who has lived in Paris since 2007, rushed to become French before her native country left the European Union. She worried Brexit might force her to leave her French partner and their two young children.\r\nWhile the EU has promised to allow Britons living in France and other member countries to stay after the U.K. pulls out, Norris Trent said she saw French citizenship as the one certain way to protect her right to remain. \'Brexit was definitely a factor that gave my request urgency,\' Norris Trent, 38, a television journalist who is among France\'s estimated 150,000 British residents, said. \'I don\'t want my family to be split apart. It\'s a terrifying prospect.\' As France conferred her second nationality during a spectacular one-hour ceremony last week, Norris Trent left her politics-induced fears at the door of Paris\' monumental Pantheon, where French literary luminaries such as Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Emile Zola are buried. She, along with a throng of others who sought to become citizens, were welcomed by a school choir that sang French national anthem \'La Marseillaise\' beside a floodlit bust of Marianne, the national symbol. They watched a film called \'Become French\' that explained \r\nFrench national values such as secularism, respect for cultural diversity and gender equality. The new citizens proudly clutched French birth certificates, excerpts from the French Constitution and a signed letter from French President Emmanuel Macron saying, \'France is proud and happy to welcome you.\' Hundreds of kilometers away in Brussels, British Prime Minister Theresa May waited to find out if the leaders of the 27 remaining EU countries would agree to delay Brexit day. For almost two years, Britain\'s departure was set to take effect this month, on March 29.\r\nBut U.K. lawmakers have refused to approve the agreement on withdrawal terms and future relations May\'s government negotiated with the EU, creating fears of a disruptive \'no-deal Brexit\' that could lead to shortages of food and medicine, tie up traffic on roads, airports and ports where border controls area reintroduced, and upend the lives of ex-pats throughout Europe. The European leaders refused to extend the Brexit deadline until June 30 as May requested. Instead, they said Britain\'s pull-out could wait until May 22 if the prime minister could persuade Parliament to pass the twice-rejected agreement. If lawmakers still refuse the deal, the leaders gave Britain until April 12 to choose between leaving the EU without a divorce deal and setting a radically different path such as revoking the decision to leave. \'I don\'t recognize the rhetoric in the U.K. anymore. I don\'t want to close the door on the European project,\' Norris Trent said. \'This is about protecting my family against populism and closing borders,\' she said. France\'s Interior Ministry recorded 3,173 British citizens who became French ones in 2017, an eightfold increase compared to the year before, when U.K. voters decided to leave the EU. Numbers for 2018 are not yet available. France has its own problems, of course, including persistent discrimination against residents with immigrant backgrounds despite a national motto proclaiming equality for all. On the day Norris Trent became a citizen, French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe spoke during another naturalization ceremony at the Pantheon about the country\'s alarming rise in anti-Semitism. But Macron is a fierce champion of the European Union, both its practical elements such as open borders and the idea it represents of European unity built from the ashes of World War II. \'Generations of men and women... contributed to give (France) the identity it has today: a welcoming nation that protects human values,\' Macron said in the letter addressed to each new French citizen. The Pantheon has only been used for French citizenship ceremonies since 2017. The monument, a former church built in the 18th century that has become a famous mausoleum, has symbolism of its own. Several of the well-known figures buried there were born in other countries and became naturalized French citizens, including French-Polish scientist Marie Curie. Norris Trent suggested French authorities chose the location to impress new citizens with the splendor and inclusive history of their adopted country. \'What a stunning place to become French. It\'s better than a pokey town hall,\' Norris Trent said. \'You really feel privileged, and so it\'s quite a clever strategy.\'\r\n','2019-03-24',''),(64,'An Ice Marathon Across a Frozen Russian Lake: \'I Ran Twice as Fast\'','The New York Times','Sport',18,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/world/europe/russia-lake-baikal-ice-marathon-siberia.html','Neil MacFarquhar','LAKE BAIKAL, Russia - The ice rumbled and then shook underfoot. No one had warned Véronique Messina about that. Ms. Messina, a French speech therapist working in Cambodia, came to Lake Baikal in distant Siberia to run a marathon across its frozen surface. She ventured onto the ice for her first trial run just a day before the race. \'I am afraid of water to begin with, and you can see that you are running on water,\' she said. The booms and tremors rippling across the ice as it shifts, sometimes called the \'Baikal Symphony,\' proved an even worse surprise. \'It was horrible,\' said Ms. Messina, 40. \'The ice was shaking. I was shaking. Each time it cracked, I think I ran twice as fast.\' Marathon runners often use races to explore the world, and every March the Baikal Ice Marathon attracts a small group to the lake, a Unesco World Heritage Site, both for its exotic, ethereal beauty and the unpredictable, grueling conditions. Edged by distant snow-capped mountains, the winter lake is a vast plain of white snow interrupted by extended swaths of dark blue ice swept clear by the wind. Microclimates generate tempests that sabotage weather forecasts. \'Science cannot help us,\' said Aleksey P. Nikiforov, 58, the charming, voluble, occasionally cantankerous founder of the race, held this year on March 2. Many runners said testing their limits drew them to Baikal, the Earth\'s largest, deepest body of fresh water, some 2,700 miles east of Moscow. \'My 30th birthday is later this month so I wanted to do something crazy,\' said Sabrina Kwong, a Hong Kong banker, adding nervously, \'I signed up before thinking how extreme it would be.\' The ice and the weather ensure that no two races are identical. \'Baikal prepares new surprises, especially for you runners, every time,\' Mr. Nikiforov said during a briefing the night before this year\'s race. \'That makes it more interesting,\' he added, provoking nervous laughter. Asked in 2005 to organize a marathon skirting the lake, Mr. Nikiforov, who owns a small Siberian tourism company, thought: \'Why not across it?\' The Baikalsky Nature Reserve on the eastern shore is 23.2 miles from Listvyanka, the main tourist village on the western side, three miles short of a marathon\'s official 26.2 miles. To add them, the headache is identifying a smooth, meandering path devoid of cracks or impassable berms of broken ice. Mr. Nikiforov scouts the ice repeatedly for weeks before the race. He tests the thickness with a trusty Soviet hand drill; 17 inches can support a tank. This year the ice was about 27 inches thick. Thundering like distant cannon fire, random cracks cleave open and slam shut in the frozen, floating crust. Cracks present more of a danger of twisting an ankle than falling through, although one year such a large hole opened that runners avoided the water by scrambling across three small, parked hovercraft. Last year, a fierce, glacial wind blew up from nowhere, reducing visibility to a few yards. Disoriented runners stumbled off the route marked by short red flags. Some got frostbite. Mr. Nikiforov reluctantly canceled the race for the first time and evacuated everyone. Drawing from the local shamanistic traditions, he considers Lake Baikal a living being. \'People think that I am crazy when I say that Baikal is alive, that it is breathing, but they come here and they feel it,\' he said. Two Russian and French running partners, Vladimir V. Voloshin, 44, and Laurent N. Lecamp, 41, forced off the lake in 2018, kissed the ice when they arrived this year. \'It was part of our investment in good weather,\' Mr. Voloshin said. During the briefing, Mr. Nikiforov casually mentioned that he had just discovered a new crack. One anxious question: \'Can you explain a little more about the crack - how wide is it?\' \'It might close, it might get wider, we don\'t know,\' he responded, adding that boards could be laid over the 11-inch fracture if needed. Race day started with a 55-minute ride on 10 small hovercraft across the lake to the starting point. This year 97 men and 30 women participated from 23 countries, with a quarter of the racers from Russia. Of the total, 24 people ran a half-marathon. Mr. Nikiforov keeps the race small, not least so he can evacuate everybody if necessary. The race motto is \'Clean Water Preservation Run,\' but the competition is less an active environmental effort than an attempt to raise consciousness about protecting the mile-deep lake. It holds about 20 percent of the fresh surface water on Earth. Thick clouds threatened snow as the runners departed in a pack. Within an hour, they had spread out over three miles, little black dots on an all-white planet where the snowy lake merged with the overcast sky. Then the sun emerged and at 26 degrees Fahrenheit, balmy for Siberia in March, one Russian runner stripped to just shorts. Spotting him, Mr. Nikiforov leapt from his hovercraft. \'You will either lose your testicles on your own or we will help you!\' he bellowed in Russian, using a more earthy term and threatening expulsion if the man did not dress. \'The rules have to be tough, this is Baikal,\' he muttered. The recommended wardrobe included a balaclava; face tape; goggles or glasses; a light, windproof jacket and pants; two layers of thin thermal underwear and heavy gloves. Snap-on crampons or running shoes with spikes were also critical. Runners sometimes slog through snow, sometimes navigate bare ice. Alex E. O\'Shea, 44, a firefighter from Cork, Ireland, fashioned do-it-yourself spikes by hammering metal studs into his shoes. Their flat heads proved useless on hard ice, and he fell once. Ms. Messina set off with some trepidation. Fretting about the crack, she decided to stick with other runners. She soon found herself solo, however, eyeballing the thick white veins in the ice and wondering where to leap if one burst open. \'It was also beautiful,\' she said, \'You are alone on Baikal, it is your race, you are alone with yourself.\' The distance did not faze her. She has run longer races, like traversing 250 miles of the Gobi Desert. Unique for a marathon, the finish line is tantalizingly visible from the start. The endless white offers no perspective, however. To the runners, the distant, sherbert-colored hotel behind the finish line or the aid stations providing tea and snacks roughly every four miles appeared to float in space without getting closer. For some runners, that and the absence of spectators made the race drag, so they imagined cheering throngs. Keith A. Gayhart, 64, a Los Angeles public relations executive who compared himself to a castaway, sang along to playlist favorites like \'Highway to Hell\' by AC/DC. The race ended with little fanfare. Tourists crowding the ice mostly ignored the runners, who maneuvered to the finish line past obstacles like ice skaters, dog sleds and tourists snapping selfies. Anton Dolgov, 44, a wiry Moscow IT executive, won in 3:05:05 hours. Ekaterina Lykasheva, 30, from nearby Irkutsk, was the first woman at 3:49:30, joyfully sliding the last few feet on her knees into the arms of her husband and young son. Ms. Messina was the sixth woman across at 4:30:54. \'I did it, I ran on water!\' she said triumphantly, describing the overall experience like being an astronaut exploring another planet. \'I was just so happy to be there!\' Would she do it again? \'I love to see new places, other things,\' she laughed.\r\n\r\n','2019-03-24',''),(65,'France set to make language test for French citizenship harder','The Local','Politics',18,'https://www.thelocal.fr/20190322/france-set-to-make-language-test-for-french-citizenship-harder ','-','People applying for citizenship in France will soon need a higher level of French than is currently required, with the government expected to propose measures to enforce the change by the summer, the prime minister has revealed.\r\nThe move will no doubt be unwelcome news for many of the British and Americans living in France.\r\n\'By the summer, the Minister of the Interior will propose measures to strengthen the level of French required for people applying for citizenship,\' said French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe at a welcoming ceremony for new French citizens at the Pantheon in Paris on Thursday.\r\nHowever there was one piece of good news for people planning to apply for French citizenship - the government has said that for those who meet the criteria, the process will be made speedier.\r\n\'On the other hand, for those who clearly fulfill the criteria, the steps will be faster\' for example by making the application process \'paper free\', said Philippe.\r\nPeople applying for citizenship in France will soon need a higher level of French than is currently required, with the government expected to propose measures to enforce the change by the summer, the prime minister has revealed.\r\nThe move will no doubt be unwelcome news for many of the British and Americans living in France.\r\nThe prime minister added that in 2018 the number of people who became French citizens dropped by seven percent (to 77,778), with 30 percent of applications rejected due to the fact that the applicant did not meet the requirements.\r\n\'To become French is demanding and it must remain so because this requirement is the best way to guarantee the cohesion of our nation,\' said Philippe. \'That\'s why we have already raised the required level of proficiency in the French language for those applying for a residence card.\'\r\n\'Those who claim that France is suffering from a system that is too lax are wrong and are deliberately choosing to deceive,\' he said.\r\nTo pass the French citizenship language test at the moment, you need to be able to demonstrate that you are comfortable with the language at \'a pre-intermediate level\', or B1 according to the DELF scale.\r\nA person with B1 level French, by definition, is able to handle day to day matters that arise in school, work or leisure.\r\nThey should be able to get by while travelling in an area where only French is spoken, and should be able to describe events and justify things like opinions, plans, or even ambitions.\r\nIf this sounds like you, then at the moment you shouldn\'t have a problem with the test.\r\nTo demonstrate your level of French you have to take a test somewhere that is officially recognized by the Préfecture and being able to provide a certificate.','2019-03-22',''),(66,'France Tries to Contain Oil Spill as 2000 Cars, Freighter Sink Off Coast','Interesting Engineering','Society',18,'https://interestingengineering.com/france-tries-to-contain-oil-spill-as-2000-cars-freighter-sink-off-coast',' John Loeffler','The cargo vessel Grande America sank in the Bay of Biscay 10 days ago, taking 2,000 cars down with it to the ocean floor and creating an oil slick that is now threatening the beaches of Western France.\r\nCities and towns around the Bay of Biscay in France are bracing for the landfall of a major oil spill in the coming days, as 2,200 tons of heavy fuel makes its way to shore after the sinking of the Italian container vessel, Grande America.\r\nTimeline of the Sinking of Grande America\r\nGrande America, a 28,000 ton container vessel operated by The Grimaldi Group-based in the Italian city of Naples-left the Port of Hamburg, Germany on March 8th to start a multi-leg journey across the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil, visiting ports on the West and North African coast along the way, beginning with the Algerian port city of Casablanca.\r\nAs the vessel passed the city of Brest, France in the early hours of March 10th, however, a fire is believed to have begun on one of the car decks of the ship, a roll-on/roll-off cargo hauler that vehicles are driven onto and off under their own power.\r\nThough the crew of 26 tried to combat the fire, within hours, it had begun to spread to the cargo containers on the weather deck of the ship. Soon, the fire was engulfing entire sections of the deck, and there was little that any of the crew members, or their single passenger, could do but attempt to save themselves.\r\nOn March 11, the Captain radioed authorities to notify them that they would be abandoning the ship, about 150 miles off the coast of La Rochelle, in the Bay of Biscay. Boarding a lifeboat, the 27 people on board Grande America were picked up by a British naval vessel, HMS Argyll, which diverted to the area to provide assistance to their French counterparts, the Marine Nationale, who had taken charge of operations around the Grande America.\r\nThe Marine Nationale, along with local maritime firefighting units, tried unsuccessfully to put out the fires burning on the cargo vessels deck; they couldn\'t even slow it down. Fueled by the fires below deck that the responders\' fire hoses could not reach, the flames continued to spread to more of the cargo containers while below deck, the intense heat likely weakening the structural integrity of the ship\'s starboard bulkheads and hull.\r\nBy March 12th, Grande America had started to heavily list to its starboard side, and with an inferno that French firefighters weren\'t even close to containing, the Marine Nationale called off any further attempts to save Grande America. \r\nThe priority now was to prepare to contain the imminent environmental disaster that was sure to follow the sinking of the Grande America and they had to move fast. The sun hadn’t even set on the 12th before Grande America capsized and quickly went under, accelerating in its descent through the 15,000 feet of water between daylight and the floor of the Bay of Biscay. \r\nBefore the ship had gone down, thick, heavy engine fuel was already spilling out into the ocean from ruptured fuel tanks, and whatever fuel tanks were still intact likely didn\'t stay that way once Grande America smashed into the ocean floor. \r\nAuthorities in the region began preparing for the worst: 2,200 tons of heavy fuel from Grande America spilling out into the ocean, spreading out into a patch about 10 kilometers long and a kilometer wide, steadily drifting with the waves and currents of the Atlantic towards the shores of the coastal departments of Western France. \r\nBrittany, Pays de la Loire, and Nouvelle-Aquitaine together form the contiguous front along the Atlantic Ocean that runs from the border with Spain to the northwesternmost peninsula of the country, a shoreline that might as well be a cupped hand, scooping up oil, and dumping it onto the beaches along the bay.\r\nFuel, Acid, and 2,000 Cars on the Ocean Floor\r\nWhen Grande America left Hamburg, it was loaded up with just over 2,200 cars, predominantly Audis, ranging from the $32,500 Audi A3 to the $81,900 Audi RS4. More than two thousand cars, with a mean price of $57,200, are now destined to steadily rust and leach toxic chemicals into the water around the sunken ship, becoming a potentially toxic curiosity for the diverse range of aquatic life that lives at 15,000 feet below sea level. \r\nNotably, there were 37 Porsches on board Grande America when it sank on their way to buyers in Brazil-four of which were some of the last Porsche 911 GT2 RS models-valued at nearly $300,000-the company had produced, having discontinued the vehicle last year. \r\nAfter news of the sinking of Grand America made the news, Porsche issued a statement promising to deliver for their elite buyers.\r\nPorsche Brasil confirms that 37 of its new cars, in route from Hamburg, Germany, to Santos, Brazil, were aboard the vessel Grande America that suffered a maritime incident near the coast of Brest, France, on March 12, 2019. Among the fleet were four 911 GT2 RS units.\r\nIn a special decision and to uphold its commitment to its valued Brazilian customers, Porsche has ensured that those units will be reproduced in the order in which they were originally confirmed.\r\nAs for Audi and the other automakers who had shipped out this latest round of inventory to their dealerships in Africa and South America, it will likely take time for the automaker to manufacture or source replacement vehicles for the ones swallowed up by the sea.\r\nAssuming an average value for the non-Porsche cars was around $55,000, then the vehicles on board Grande America by themselves were worth around $125 million.\r\nThis dollar figure doesn\'t even factor in the 365 shipping containers on board Grande America, packed with all sorts of consumer goods and commodities that were also a complete loss. Taken together along with the vehicle inventories, it wouldn\'t be a stretch to say that maybe a quarter of a billion dollars just sank to the bottom of the ocean, possibly more. Worse still, no one seems to know what exactly happened or how the fire that sank Grande America began, at least not yet.\r\nReopening Old Wounds\r\nMany of the residents around the Bay of Biscay understandably get anxious at the mere mention of an oil spill. \r\nOn March 16, 1978-almost 41 years ago to the day of Grande America sinking-the Amaco Cadiz, an oil tanker heavily laden with light crude oil from Saudi Arabia and Iran, ran into rough weather and, as a result, sustained substantial damage to its steering equipment.\r\nUnable to direct itself, tug boats were called in to bring the Cadiz safely to port. The weather hadn\'t improved much since the Cadiz was disabled, so the tug boats could not safely carry out the operation, which led to a delay of several hours.\r\nMeanwhile, the Cadiz continued to drift closer toward the shores of Brittany, making it even more perilous to attempt to tow the ship to safety.\r\nOnly 12 hours after they Cadiz was disabled, it ran aground. It\'s engine compartments flooded and this grounding also placed enough stress on the ship\'s structure that the vessel soon snapped across its midsection almost as if its back had been broken.\r\nThis rupture allowed the 2.2 million tons of crude oil to empty directly onto the shorelines up and down the Bay of Biscay, an environmental catastrophe that took decades to recover from.\r\nNow, the oil slick making its way towards the coastline of La Rochelle is one-thousandth the size of the Cadiz oil spill, the largest ever in history, but you can hardly blame the residents for feeling anxious about the impact the sinking of Grande America will have on their local environment. \r\nThey only just recently got the place cleaned up, so having to confront another oil spill along their coastline is bound to agitate the residents all around the bay.\r\nIt shouldn\'t be a surprise then that the regional prosecutor has opened up a criminal investigation into the disaster. French authorities aren\'t taking any mess from The Grimaldi Group either, issuing Grimaldi Lines, which operated Grande America, an official demand to quickly assess the damage sustained by the sunken ship and do whatever they possibly can to prevent any additional fuel still contained within the ships fuel tanks from leaking out.\r\nThe company, for its part, is expressing a strong desire to cooperate with the investigation and recovery efforts. According to a statement from the company: \'In the framework of its antipollution plan, the Grimaldi Group has immediately dispatched in the place of sinking of the Grande America the Anchor Handling Supply vessel Union Lynx which is monitoring any ship\'s fuel spill and is organising the recovery of any floating container.\r\nA Grimaldi-appointed team of experts in marine casualties and pollution prevention is already in Brest in order to monitor the environmental situation and advise any further measures, always in coordination with the French Authorities.\r\nMoreover, in agreement with the French Authorities, the Grimaldi Group will undertake a submarine survey of the wreck, located at 4,600 meters sea depth, by means of the vessel Pourquoi Pas, equipped with a modern ROV (Remotely Operated Vessel).\r\nOthers point out that the oil leak isn\'t the only environmental disaster taking place. Down on the ocean floor, all of these vehicles are likely to have toxic chemicals leached out of them and into the ecosystem as the ocean currents perform their slow and steady erosion of the cars.\r\nThese chemicals have enormous implications for the marine ecosystem in the vicinity around the sunken container ship. Now we might look at the ocean floor around the boat and see a colorful, vibrant marine environment full of fish, crabs, eels, coral reefs, and who knows what else. In just a few years though, after the Bay of Biscay spends this time steeping those 2210 cars in ocean water like teabags, all sorts of toxic, poisonous chemicals are going to leach out into the water, possibly poisoning everything in the area.\r\n\'Two thousand vehicles,\' said Jacky Bonnemains, spokesperson for Robin des Bois (Robin Hood), a French environmental NGO,\'-it\'s a car crash at the bottom of the sea, representing hundreds of tonnes of toxic materials in an area very rich in fish, plankton and marine animals.\'\r\nRobin des Bois have reportedly signaled that they plan to file a criminal complaint about the environmental damage from the sinking of Grande America.\r\nGildas Le Moal, a French climate activist, seems to have summed up the general feeling of the communities along the Bay on Twitter this week as they await the oil slick that is certain to come ashore within the next few days.\r\n\'I live near this catastrophe. The toxic wastes carried by the #grandeamerica are way too deep underwater to be picked up. And fauna and flora are gonna pay for it, not the shipowner, not us for consuming useless stuffs produced everywhere on the Planet...\'\r\n\'We have to change.\'','2019-03-23',''),(67,'France targets Google, Amazon and Facebook with 3% digital tax','CNBC','Economy',18,'https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/06/france-3-percent-digital-tax-targets-google-amazon-and-facebook.html ','Elizabeth Schulze ','- The French government introduced a digital tax on Wednesday aimed at internet companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.\r\n- The 3 percent tax will apply to the French revenues of big tech companies.\r\n- An EU-backed effort to pass a 3 percent tax on the revenues of internet companies failed last year\r\nThe French government on Wednesday introduced a tax aimed at internet giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook, forging ahead with stricter regulation on big tech without broad-based support from the European Union. The 3 percent tax will apply to the French revenues of roughly 30 major companies, mostly from the U.S. France\'s Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire estimated the tax will raise roughly 500 million euros ($565 million) per year. The French tax alone would represent just a sliver of the revenues of American tech giants. But it could pave the way for further regulation of U.S. tech companies in Europe, including an EU-wide digital tax. An EU-backed effort to pass a 3 percent tax on the revenues of big internet companies failed last year amid concerns from countries including Ireland and Germany, who feared retaliation from the U.S. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is currently examining a global digital tax but has said it won\'t come to a conclusion until 2020. France\'s Le Maire has been an outspoken proponent of a digital tax, arguing Google, Amazon and Facebook benefit from lower tax rates than European companies. The French minister has said France would withdraw its own tax once the OECD reaches an agreement.\r\nOther countries including the U.K., Germany and Spain are also working on their own digital tax measures. The French tax would apply to companies that generate worldwide revenues on their digital services of at least 750 million euros ($847 million), with 25 million euros ($28 million) from within France. \'We always pay all of the taxes due and comply with the tax laws in every country we operate in around the world. Google pays the vast majority of its corporate income tax in the United States, and we have paid a global effective tax rate of 23% over the last ten years,\' a spokesperson for Google told CNBC via email on Wednesday. In an emailed statement to CNBC, Facebook said it pays all taxes required by law in the countries where it operates, adding it will continue to comply with French and European legislation. \'In France, we voluntarily set up a new sales and invoicing structure in 2018. From now on, all revenues from advertisers supported by our teams in France are recorded in France. We hope that the OECD will finish its work and create a clear, sustainable global agreement on tax,\' a Facebook spokesperson said. Amazon was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.','2019-03-06',''),(68,'France to consider feminising job titles','Euronews ','Society',18,'https://www.euronews.com/2019/03/01/france-to-consider-feminising-job-titles','Shafi Musaddique','The gatekeepers of the French language could soon be introducing new words to cover feminine alternatives for all occupations.\r\nThe Academie Francaise, which is in charge of authorising words into the French language and responsible for compiling the French dictionary, said on Thursday that it is seeking to feminise job titles in order to \'reduce of this gap\' with male terms. The majority of job titles are by default masculine, with exceptions such as nurse (infirmiere) or childminder (nourrice) exacerbating old stereotypes on women in work. The Academie has traditionally been resistant to approving major changes in French but seems to be considering a U-turn in a report produced by members. \'There is no obstacle in principle to the feminisation of the names of trades and professions\', the Academie report said. \'The Academie considers that all developments in the language aimed at recognising the place women have in society today can be envisaged.\' In most cases, feminine forms will just need the addition of \'e\' at the end of the male alternative. Examples include; - \'Maire\' (\'Mayor\' in French) could be \'mairesse\' for women\r\n- \'Sapeur-pompier\' (\'Fireman\' in French) could be \'sapeuse-pompière\' for women The governing authority said the use of -eure in docteure did not pose \'a threat to the structure of the language\' if the final \'e\' remained silent. A vote will come later in March on whether to rubber stamp the female-friendly versions for professions. Critics have long campaigned for the French language to reform its male-centric structure. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has previously publically stated his support for a female-inclusive form of the language, whereby the \'masculine is a neutral form which should be used for terms liable to apply to women\'. In 2015, France\'s High Council for Equality Between Women and Men issued a guide urging public bodies to use feminine forms for jobs like \'firefighter\' and \'author\'.','2019-03-01',''),(69,'French ex-PM Fillon and British wife face fake jobs trial','BBC','Politics',19,'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48023180','N/A','Two years after French presidential favourite François Fillon became caught up in a public funding scandal, investigating judges have recommended that he and his wife Penelope Fillon should go on trial. His campaign collapsed when allegations emerged that Mrs Fillon had been paid for years as a parliamentary assistant without having a parliamentary pass. The Fillons have always insisted she had carried out the work. A trial could start by the end of 2019. Who is François Fillon? It was January 2017, and Mr Fillon, the Republicans party candidate, was leading the polls three months ahead of the first round of presidential elections. A prime minister under Nicolas Sarkozy until 2012, he was a safe pair of hands for the centre right. But then came a raft of allegations published by satirical weekly Le Canard Enchainé, surrounding hundreds of thousands of euros paid in wages over several years to Penelope Fillon while she was employed by her husband and then by his successor as MP, Marc Joulaud.\r\nMr Fillon\'s ratings dived as the judiciary announced a full inquiry and he came third in the first round of the election, with 20% of the vote. What have investigators decided? According to French reports, investigating judge from France\'s financial prosecution office have called for the Fillons and Mr Joulaud to go to court. Mr Fillon is cited for alleged misuse of public funds, concealing the misuse and failing to declare it to French authorities, says Le Monde, quoting a 150-page document handed to officials last Friday. Penelope Fillon is alleged to have concealed the misuse of public funds and Marc Joulaud is also facing accusations of misuse of public funds, it adds. Mr Fillon\'s lawyers complained that the news had emerged in French media before their client had himself been told. It shows just the sort of spirit in which this entire inquiry has been handled, and we\'ll react on the substance of it when we\'ve had a chance to look into the document, Antonin Lévy told AFP. Mrs Fillon\'s lawyer was also damning of the breach of investigative secrecy. Everything about this case is abnormal, said Pierre Cornut-Gentille. There was talk of the case beginning by the end of the year, he said, even though such cases usually took at least 12 months to get under way.\r\n','2019-04-23',''),(70,'Sibeth Ndiaye: Who is the French government\'s new spokeswoman?','BBC','Politics',19,'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47772604','N/A','The newest member of the French government has been a citizen of France for less than three years - but now, she will speak for the country.\r\nSibeth Ndiaye, the new government spokeswoman, was born in Dakar, Senegal, and only obtained her citizenship while helping to run President Emmanuel Macron\'s election campaign in 2016. But the 39-year-old\'s close connection to the president - and some of her comments in her time as his media advisor - have made her a target for criticism by opposition politicians. She famously once told a newspaper that she was \'perfectly comfortable lying to protect the president\'. From Dakar to Paris Ms Ndiaye was born in 1979 in the former French-colonised republic of Senegal, to a family who engaged her in politics from a young age. Her father was heavily involved with the Senegalese Democratic Party, while her mother was a high-ranking judge on the country\'s constitutional council. Educated in Senegal and in Paris, she was involved in the French national students\' union - later telling news outlet Jeune Afrique that she felt a desire to make changes to the lives of other students. She said her leap to national politics was prompted by the 2002 French presidential election, in which the far-right National Front\'s Jean-Marie Le Pen made it to the second round. She joined the Socialists - and began her career in politics. She first met Mr Macron when he was the deputy secretary general at the Élysée, and she was working for the economy minister - a job that Mr Macron would take over in 2014. When he declared his presidential ambitions, she joined his campaign team. That decision led to her becoming a media advisor to the President of the Republic. \'My professional career was mainly built around beautiful encounters, with people who knew to trust me, and I always tried to be worthy of this trust,\" she told Jeune Afrique. Communication breakdown Her appointment to the government in the weekend\'s minor reshuffle has been met with a great deal of criticism and debate in France. Her time as a media advisor to Mr Macron saw journalists ejected from the Élysée, and a hardening of policy about staff members speaking with journalists.  Much of the criticism surrounds a report carried by French newspaper L\'Express in 2017, when she said she would lie to protect Mr Macron. Opponents have questioned what such a statement - which she had previously denied saying - meant coming from the government spokeswoman. Ian Brossat, spokesman for the French Communist Party, tweeted: \'With the practices of this government, it actually seems to be fitting for the position of spokesperson.\' Julien Sanchez, spokesman for the far-right National Rally, echoed the sentiment, saying: \'The liar officially becomes the government spokesperson\'.  Speaking at her first official press conference on Monday, Ms Ndiaye said the quote had been taken out of context. \'It was my job at the time to defend and protect the President of the Republic... today, I have new responsibilities,\' she told journalists. Others take issue with the president appointing a close ally to a government position. Earlier, Ms Ndiaye spoke about the importance of her role in government as a naturalised citizen. \'I take this step with pride in serving France, the country I chose for myself,\' she said. \'Even before I was French, I was one of the people involved in this country, especially in [Paris suburb] Seine-Saint-Denis, where nothing is simple, but where everything is possible.\' \'France has given me a lot, today it is my turn to give something back,\' she said.\r\n','2019-04-01',''),(71,'What We Know and Don’t Know About the Notre-Dame Fire','The New York Times','Society',19,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/15/world/europe/notre-dame-fire-what-we-know.html','N/A','The fire that broke out at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, destroying its spire and severely damaging its roof, was extinguished Tuesday morning.\r\nWhat we know about the fire\r\n• Rémy Heitz, the Paris prosecutor, said that a first fire alarm was triggered at 6:20 p.m. Monday, but that no fire was found after checks were carried out.\r\n• A second alarm was triggered at 6:43 p.m., and a fire was found under the roof in a network of wooden beams, many dating from the Middle Ages, that is nicknamed \'the forest.\'\r\n• No one was killed, officials said, but a firefighter and two police officers were injured.\r\n• Investigators were treating the fire an accident, Mr. Heitz said. \'Nothing at this stage suggests a voluntary act.\' His office said on Tuesday night that \'about 30 witnesses,\' including workers from companies involved at the construction site and Notre-Dame security staff, had been questioned so far.\r\n• The cathedral’s rector, Msgr. Patrick Chauvet, told the radio station France Inter that the cathedral had fire monitors who checked the wooden framework under the roof three times a day. Notre-Dame did not have automatic sprinklers in the framework of the roof, and its attic space was not compartmentalized with fire-breaking walls, said Frédéric Létoffé, a construction expert.\r\n• Mr. Heitz said most people had been evacuated before the fire was found because a Mass had started in the cathedral. Not long after the doors were shut, witnesses said, smoke could be seen rising from the spire. Shortly after that, flames appeared at scaffolding around the spire’s base, part of extensive renovations that were underway.\r\n• Around 500 firefighters were deployed to Île de la Cité, the island in the heart of the city where Notre-Dame is situated. Officials declared the fire fully extinguished over 12 hours after it began.\r\nWhat we know about the damage\r\n• By 11 p.m. Monday, the Paris fire chief, Jean-Claude Gallet said that the structure, including its two front towers, had been \'saved and preserved as a whole,\' but that two-thirds of the roof had been destroyed.\r\n• Laurent Nuñez, France’s junior interior minister, said that \'overall the structure is holding\' but that \'vulnerabilities\' had been identified in the cathedral’s arched vault and in a gable of the northern transept.\r\n• Franck Riester, the culture minister, said that there were \'three important holes\' in the stone vault of the cathedral, one caused by the collapse of the spire.\r\n[As a French landmark went up in flames, the symbolism for the troubled country was hard to miss, our architecture critic writes.]\r\n• The 295-foot spire, a wood-frame structure covered in lead that was built when the cathedral was renovated in the 19th century, was destroyed.\r\n• Some of the cathedral’s art was saved because of recent renovations. Last week, for instance, 16 copper statues representing the Twelve Apostles and four evangelists were removed with a crane to be cleaned and restored.\r\n• Gabriel Plus, a spokesman for the Paris firefighters, said that firefighters in nearby stations carried out two training exercises last year to practice preserving artworks in the cathedral, and that 100 of the 500 deployed firefighters had removed pieces of art.\r\n• The saved artwork included linen fabric associated with St. Louis, the crown of thorns and the cathedral’s treasury, according to Monsignor Chauvet. Lt. Col. José Vaz de Matos, an official who inspects France’s national monuments, said that there were still several large pieces of art inside, \'some of which have been affected by the fire but that can be restored,\' but that teams could not be sent in at this juncture.\r\n• Mr. Riester said that the cathedral’s famous stained-glass \'rose\' windows did not appear to have been damaged but would be examined more closely.\r\n• President Emmanuel Macron said he hoped the cathedral could be rebuilt within five years — though at least one expert said it could take three times that long.\r\n• At least 600 million euros, or more than $675 million, has already been promised to help rebuild Notre-Dame: The billionaire Pinault family of France, the French energy company Total, and L’Oréal and the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation, which is backed by the family that founded the cosmetics giant, each pledged €100 million; the family of Bernard Arnault, owners of the luxury goods group LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, plans to contribute €200 million.\r\n• On Tuesday evening, France’s culture ministry announced that the government had set up an online portal for all of those wishing to donate for reconstruction efforts.\r\nWhat we don’t know\r\n• The exact cause of the fire remains unknown.\r\n• The condition of many works, inside the cathedral and part of its structure, also remains unclear. The flames could have destroyed or damaged the church’s three organs and dozens of paintings and sculptures, some dating from the 17th century.\r\n• Notre-Dame, like many cathedrals in France, is the property of the French state. That means the government will be responsible for rebuilding it, and it’s unclear how much that would cost.','2019-04-30',''),(72,'Paris Is Going All Out for London’s Brexit Exiles','Bloomberg','Politics',19,'https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/paris-is-going-all-out-for-london-s-brexit-exiles',' Fabio Benedetti Valentini, Angeline Benoit et Geraldine Amiel ','The French capital hasn’t always been seen as welcoming, but its government, schools and businesses are determined to make new residents feel at home.\r\nOn floors 24 to 27 of the Europlaza tower in La Defense, on the outskirts of Paris, workers hammer away as they prepare the offices of the European Banking Authority, unperturbed by the twists and turns of the seemingly never-ending Brexit negotiations.\r\nThe regulator in charge of setting standards for European lenders and conducting bank stress tests will be fully operational from Paris with a 200-strong staff on June 3, ending its eight-year existence in London regardless of when exactly the U.K. leaves the European Union.\r\n\'We will continue operating as we did from London,\' Executive Director Adam Farkas said in an interview. \'Staff members enjoyed the offerings of London. I’m pretty sure they’ll find a way to enjoy Paris soon.\'\r\n\'We have an increasing number of English-speaking clients. They don’t even try to speak French\'\r\nWinning the bid to host the body was a coup for the French capital after it competed with Frankfurt, Dublin, Madrid and Amsterdam to be known as the EU’s financial epicenter. Now, the butchers, hairdressers and schools of Paris, like its government, are going all out to ensure Brexit-driven movers are made to feel at home, bringing imperceptible changes to life in a city that hasn’t always been seen as welcoming.\r\nUnlike the Germans and the Dutch, for example, the French have been reluctant speakers of English in spite of the country’s ranking among the world’s top tourist destinations. That’s changing.\r\nLaurent Dumont and his wife Nathalie, who run their family butcher’s shop, Boucherie des Arênes, on rue Monge in the fancy 5th arrondissement of Paris, roll their tongues around unfamiliar-sounding English words these days to describe their offerings of Porc Noir de Bigorre or Boeuf de race Parthenaise.\r\n\'We have an increasing number of English-speaking clients,\' said Nathalie. \'They don’t even try to speak French; they launch straight away into English and we’ve had to adapt. There are two of us speaking English in the butcher shop, which is obviously a good thing.\' She’s now working on boosting her employees’ English skills.\r\nFlorence Charlet, a 46-year-old hairdresser at Thomas C Coiffure in Paris’s fashionable 8th arrondissement, has a similar tale to tell. \'We’re having to speak English more and more,\' she said. \'The last hairdresser I hired had to speak English—it’s a required skill.\'\r\nFor Valerie Ficara, the headmistress of the Lucie-Aubrac school in Courbevoie, near La Defense, it’s been about fielding phone calls from Brexit-fleeing parents whose kids will start their academic year in France in September. \'We’re getting 30 calls a day,\' she said.\r\nMari-Liis Garcia at France Global Relocation has been busy providing logistical support for families. \'We’ve seen an increase in requests ahead of Brexit,\' she said. \'We help mostly with administrative procedures, notably visas and residency permits.\' She’s being inundated with requests for short-term rentals.\r\nThe Paris region government has been a key driver of France’s Project Brexit. Alexandra Dublanche, who’s in charge of economic development in the region, has worked on 161 Brexit-related projects since 2016, directly or indirectly representing about 7,000 jobs, 80 percent of them in finance.\r\n\'We’ve been on roadshows since 2016,\' said Dublanche. \'Many companies are still in a wait-and-see mode and we expect many more decisions in the mid and long term.\'\r\n\'The first question people ask is about schools, the second is how to find work for their partner or spouse\'\r\nHSBC Holdings Plc has said it’s moving 1,000 jobs to Paris, while Bank of America Corp. is transferring 400 jobs. Others include Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., H2O Asset Management, Polar Capital and Smart Lenders Asset Management. The moves out of London have been on a much smaller scale than previously estimated, however.\r\nTo add to Paris’s appeal a law was passed this month exempting white-collar workers moving to France from contributing to the country’s pension-insurance plan for up to six years. A new court has been created for international commercial contract disputes, with proceedings possible in English.\r\nThe region is bending over backwards, said Dublanche, offering companies free services to help with administrative issues such as visa applications or free French classes for spouses.\r\nIn the EBA’s case, a team was dispatched to London to help the body’s employees with housing and other administrative procedures. EBA staff were given tours of residential districts in and around Paris, and French classes are being offered to those who’ve asked for them.\r\nThe government body charged with attracting foreign investment has 80 counselors to help families relocate, organizing workshops in London on life in Paris.\r\n\'The first question people ask is about schools, the second is how to find work for their partner or spouse,\' said Lionel Grotto, its head.\r\nSeveral new schools have popped up to meet the expected demand in and around Paris. The Education Ministry has set up a bilingual information website, and is also pushing bilingual education in French schools, with a program that started this year that will eventually include 4,500 students just in the Versailles area, west of Paris.\r\nSome Brexit exiles are French people coming back home. Erich Bonnet, 56, for example, who created Smart Lenders in London five years ago to invest in U.S. peer-to-peer loans, moved to Paris with his Russian wife and their six-year-old daughter, fearing the consequences of Brexit. While Bonnet enjoyed London’s \'exceptional\' cosmopolitan lifestyle, he’s happy to be back home.\r\n\'There’s a pretty strong wind of modernization in Paris, while you also feel that French culture is still present,\' especially in terms of public services, he said. \'You need to return to rediscover it.\'\r\n','2019-04-23',''),(73,'US-EU trade talks','Los Angeles Times','Economy',19,'https://www.latimes.com/sns-bc-eu--europe-us-trade-20190411-story.html','SYLVIE CORBET','\'The European Union appears set to approve new trade talks with the U.S. despite resistance from France because of President Donald Trump\'s rejection of the Paris climate accord.\r\nAn official in French President Emmanuel Macron\'s office said Thursday that France will vote against starting the talks.\r\nBut he said the stance is \'purely symbolic,\' because most EU members support the negotiations. The official was not authorized to be publicly named according to presidential policy.\r\nEU officials expressed hope Thursday the talks can move forward soon. Trump and the EU Commission president agreed last year to start talks to calm fears of a trade war prompted by U.S. tariffs on foreign steel.\r\nMacron has sought to stand up to Trump on the international stage and to show French voters he\'s standing up for the climate.','2019-04-15',''),(74,'France’s far-right boy wonder','Politico','Politics',19,'https://www.politico.eu/article/france-french-far-rights-boy-wonder-leads-european-charge-jordan-bardella-marine-le-pen-national-rally/ ','RYM MOMTAZ','COGNAC, France - Jordan Bardella leaned into the wooden cask, inhaled deeply and let out a satisfied \'Aaaah!\' like he was reconnecting with an aroma from distant childhood.\r\nAt 23, Bardella - the standard-bearer for Marine Le Pen\'s National Rally (RN) in next month\'s European Parliament election - is too young for any memory to be very distant. And as someone who grew up in a rough Paris suburb, it\'s safe to say wooden casks in rural France were not a big part of his childhood.\r\nBut his visit to the barrel-maker\'s workshop in Cognac and a tour of the region famous for the brandy that bears its name showed he\'s already the consummate politician.\r\nBardella has never held national public office, but his position at the top of the National Rally\'s electoral list all but guarantees him a seat in the European Parliament. As the new face of the French far right, he will be well placed to play a prominent role at the heart of a new, enlarged Euroskeptic bloc - a group composed of right-wing populists from big parties in France, Germany, Italy and Austria as well as a myriad of smaller forces.\r\nJoined together by opposition to mass migration, hostility to Islam and a desire to transfer powers back to national governments, the new group will seek to radically alter the EU. Whether it will be successful is open to question; pro-EU parties are projected to have a majority in the Parliament, and previous efforts to unite Euroskeptics have foundered. But Bardella will be in the thick of the fight.\r\n\'I joined the National Front for Marine Le Pen - more for her than the party\' - Jordan Bardella\r\nTall, clean-shaven Bardella represents everything Le Pen wants her rebranded movement to be: shorn of the Holocaust denial, anti-Semitism and open xenophobia it has been known for since it was founded in the 1970s by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.\r\nHaving ditched the name National Front last year, the party presents itself as the political home for salt-of-the-earth folk, rooted in French traditions, who love their country and want to protect it from meddling Brussels technocrats and fear that Muslim migrants will take French jobs and replace French culture. Under the surface, however, it\'s not clear that the party has shed many of its old attitudes. \r\nStruggling in the suburbs\r\nBardella was raised by a single mother who struggled to make ends meet as a teaching assistant in the troubled Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, known for large ghettos of descendants of immigrants from North Africa and other parts of that continent.\r\nHe was drawn to Le Pen\'s politics even as a teenager. He started hanging up campaign posters in his neighborhood when he was 16, for her first presidential campaign in 2012.\r\n\'I joined the National Front for Marine Le Pen - more for her than the party,\' Bardella told POLITICO in Cognac.\r\nThe admiration is mutual. Le Pen picked Bardella to lead the RN list in the European election even though many senior party members were not sold on him, and rival factions were jockeying for the position.\r\n\'I needed convincing, I was worried about his age, I wasn\'t the only one either... But Marine Le Pen had a personal preference for him,\' said Gilles Lebreton, an outgoing RN MEP who was campaigning alongside Bardella in Cognac.\r\nLebreton said he had been won over by Bardella\'s assured performances since his nomination.\r\n\'For a young man who is 23, he has a bright future, he is very at ease, we can now say it was a very good choice,\' Lebreton said.\r\nAt the barrel-maker\'s workshop, Bardella wandered affably around with the owner, listening with apparent great interest to the minutiae of the craft. He lamented that \'traditional artisanal jobs are not valued anymore,\' when the owner told him he is having a hard time recruiting.\r\nThe owner\'s struggles are not because the traditional French business of Cognac-making is in decline. Far from it. The business is booming, with exports, mainly to the United States, increasing by 11 percent in 2018.\r\nBut when, at his second stop of the day, a distiller explained to Bardella that they ran their own collective quota system locally and managed stocks, he immediately exclaimed, \'You see? Wherever the European Union doesn\'t get involved, things work!\'\r\nHe later told a rally that \'the EU is a zombie, a life-impeder.\'\r\nThe new Euroskepticism\r\nWhen Bardella reaches Brussels, polls predict he will join a widely expanded battalion of Euroskeptics - with Italy\'s League set to send the largest contingent. Other far-right parties, including the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), are expected to make gains and send larger delegations to Parliament too.\r\nBecause these parties favor national interests, to the point of being branded as xenophobic, they face an inherent challenge in uniting behind common policies, but the League’s leader, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, has expressed confidence that he can build an association of Euroskeptics that will be a major force over the next five years.\r\nWhile Bardella will have instant stature as one of Le Pen’s key lieutenants, he will also have to vie for influence with the AfD’s Jorg Meuthen, and other sharp critics of the EU with long experience in Brussels, including Polish MEP Ryszard Legutko, who is a leader of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group.\r\nLike other far-right parties, National Rally has shifted its line on the EU in response to the political debacle in the U.K. over Brexit.\r\nThe party now puts more emphasis on the idea it can change the EU from within, with its allies from other countries. It has rowed back from its trademark calls for France to abandon the euro and to quit the EU altogether.\r\nInstead, its election program is built on turning the current EU into a \'European Alliance of Nations,\' getting rid of the European Commission, scrapping the Common Agricultural Policy, and setting strict new guidelines for the parts of the EU that are left. In effect, that would mean the end of the EU as it is currently conceived, with huge knock-on effects for the euro and other cornerstones of the European project. But that\'s not something the RN chooses to emphasize.\r\nAznavour before hip-hop\r\nIn Cognac, Bardella was pleased to hear how well the region\'s signature business is going - \'a sign of the value of French terroir.\' But he was quick to underline he isn\'t a fan of American hip-hop, whose artists have helped make the drink popular.\r\nHe said his favorite song is \'His Youth\' by Charles Aznavour, the legendary French crooner who is most popular among the retired. The song is a call to take advantage of every moment of one\'s twenties. Aznavour sings \'we must drink our youth until intoxication.\'\r\nBardella chooses to interpret that exhortation differently than many people his age. He spends most of his time campaigning. But he says his life is like that of \'maybe not every 23-year-old, but almost.\' In his downtime, he said, he likes seeing friends and watching series on Netflix: \'Narcos,\' \'La Casa de Papel,\' \'Dark.\' He doesn\'t mention a single French series.\r\nThe region of Cognac is not in the post-industrial wastelands that have traditionally been far-right hunting grounds. Emmanuel Macron handily won both rounds of the presidential election here in 2017. Nevertheless, much less stigma seems to surround the far-right party than it did a few years ago.\r\nBardella\'s next stop was a local distillery, which almost exclusively supplies Cognac giants like Hennessy and Rémy Martin. Barely 15 minutes after his arrival, the owner suggested Bardella marry one of his daughters - an offer he carefully deflected.\r\nDespite the National Rally\'s rebrand, the party\'s DNA does not seem fundamentally changed. At rallies and campaign stops, its supporters readily expressed xenophobic and Islamophobic views to POLITICO.\r\n\'Islam is a threat, we are invaded by them,\' retiree Georges Clot said. \'We give so much to migrants who don\'t pay taxes,\' added Dominique Rayrat, who runs one of the distilleries. \'Islam is not compatible with France. France is a Christian nation,\' said Pascal, an artisan.\r\nDespite being the party\'s new face, Bardella employs tactics long associated with it, like pushing false information and fear-mongering about immigrants replacing white, Christian French people. He has claimed that the Treaty of Aachen signed by France and Germany in January would lead to Paris sharing its seat at the United Nations Security Council. Confronted with the fact that the treaty says no such thing, Bardella told a French radio interviewer that \'we have the right to have a different opinion.\'\r\nHe told POLITICO that what pushed him into politics was \'seeing first-hand\' the effects of violence, Islamism and immigrant populations not assimilating to French society, but was unable to provide a specific example.\r\nFive days after a gunman shot and killed 50 worshipers at two mosques in New Zealand, Bardella did not disavow the theory of  \'the great replacement\' cited by the alleged killer and embraced for years by the French far right. Instead, he backed tenets of the theory, according to which white French people are being replaced by Muslim immigrants, that have been dismissed by scholars as based on distorted statistics.\r\nHe declared on television that the suburb he grew up in is \'submerged by mass migration... by Islamist fundamentalism... there is a substitution of population.\'\r\nTaking on Macron\r\nThe day after his visit to Cognac, Bardella held a rally with Le Pen in the town of Mer in the Loire Valley. He told the crowd he wants the May 26 election to be \'a referendum on Macron\'s policies.\'\r\nA couple of hours earlier, some local people were unaware of the big political event about to take place in their midst. But some expressed the same grievances about the lack of public services and unease about immigrants that the National Rally has campaigned on.\r\nIn a well-kept municipal park, Christophe and Sophie watched their three children play in the warm, early spring sunshine.\r\n\'One of our sons needs a speech therapist, but there aren\'t any left in Mer. We called 20 in the area, we finally found one but he put us on a waiting list for four months before he could see us, and he was still 20 kilometers away,\' Sophie said. She\'s a legacy leftist who recently switched to the Greens.\r\nHer husband agrees with some of the far right\'s ideas, especially when it comes to immigration. \'When I was a child in school here in Mer, Turkish immigrant kids would call me a pig,\' he said. \'I didn\'t understand then why they did, but as I grew older I realized some of them don\'t want to mix with us.\' Nevertheless, he said, he has given up on politics and no longer votes.\r\nIn the town hall up the street, a scene reflected the changing France that many National Rally voters struggle to accept. A Turkish-French man was marrying a French convert to Islam, in the secular wedding room, officiated by a female deputy mayor. All the women wore Islamic headscarves, and guests were seated according to gender, with women on the right and men on the left.\r\n\'It doesn’t bother us that the RN is holding a rally up the street, we are in a free country, with free speech,\' said Ilhami, the 43-year-old brother of the groom. His father brought him over when he came to Mer in the 1970s to work in a factory. About a hundred families from the same village in Turkey followed suit and stayed. But they don\'t all feel French. Ilhami said he will not apply for French citizenship, even though his 19-year-old son was born in France and is a citizen.\r\n\'I\'m not interested in becoming French, I have a country and a president,\' he said in reference to Turkey and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan.\r\nThis kind of divided loyalty is one of the issues Le Pen and her party underscore when denouncing immigration.\r\nIt\'s a message that resonates. According to POLITICO\'s projections, the National Rally is on course to win 20 European Parliament seats in May\'s election, a close second behind Macron\'s La République En Marche with 21 seats.\r\nThe party\'s success has some in the area worried. A small group of locals gathered outside Bardella and Le Pen\'s rally, carrying signs that read \'no to racists and nationalists\' and \'no to the far right, a threat to our future.\'\r\n\'The [far right] is growing, it’s real and we will see it in the next election, I expect them to even get into power [in France],\' said Angélique, breaking down in tears as she hugged her two young children aged 8 and 5, whom she is raising with her Moroccan husband.\r\n\'I brought my children here today to show them that there are people who will defend them and stand up for them,\' she added.','2019-04-24',''),(77,'How French expats in Washington are preparing for an election back home','The Washington Post','Politics',21,'https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/how-french-expats-in-washington-are-preparing-for-an-election-back-home/2019/05/17/c0801926-6b7e-11e9-8f44-e8d8bb1df986_story.html?utm_term=.01d4f452f3fa','Andrew L. Yarrow','One evening in late March, about 20 activists gathered at a cafe in Dupont Circle to discuss their campaign strategy for an upcoming election, in which thousands of Washington-area residents are eligible to cast ballots. How can we best get out the vote? What happens if a new party enters the race? How do we counter the far right?\r\nIt was shaping up to be one of the more important elections of recent years. What election might that be, you ask? Not the one that will decide who controls the Virginia legislature. That’s in November. And despite the growing horde of presidential candidates, the Iowa caucuses are not until February. No, the people gathered at the cafe weren’t Bernie Bros and they weren\'t wearing MAGA hats. The voters they were seeking to influence weren\'t even American, but French.\r\nEver since a 2008 reform came into effect, French expats have had an intriguing political relationship to their home country. In elections for the French National Assembly, overseas citizens now vote for candidates to represent them where they live. French residents of the United States and Canada, for instance, have a representative in the 577-member assembly — as do French voters in 10 other overseas constituencies.\r\nThe day of the meeting in Dupont Circle, a different type of campaign was on the agenda: the election for the European Parliament, set for May 26. French expats do not have specific representatives in the European Parliament; like all French voters, they cast ballots for a party\'s list, with seats allotted based on how many overall votes the party wins. Still, France’s system of representation in the National Assembly gives expats a more relevant stake in their country’s politics — and arguably shapes their involvement in all elections.\r\nEveryone in attendance at the meeting was a partisan of La République En Marche (LREM), France\'s governing party. They sat around a long oval table filled with croissants, cafe au lait and policy documents. There were college students and economists, policy wonks and retirees, some wearing jeans or spring dresses, others still spiffy in their work clothes. They spoke in French about politics and strategy, occasionally lapsing into English.\r\nBéatrice Leydier, a young employee of an international-development NGO, urged the committee to do outreach with families whose children go or went to Rochambeau, the French international school in Bethesda, Md. Laughing, she recalled leafleting before the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections outside a local French bakery on weekends, where she had gone in hopes of finding French people.\r\nThis year’s European elections are important for many reasons, some of the LREM supporters told me. In the wake of Brexit and often virulent anti-European Union sentiment across the continent, the key issue, at least symbolically, is the survival of the 28-nation union. \'Many far-right nationalist parties in Europe tap into long-standing fears about globalization and a dilution of national identity, and are hostile to immigration, Islam and the E.U. itself,\' said Kaltoum Maroufi-Colle, an art teacher at Montgomery College.\r\n\'We want to improve the E.U., but the nationalists have no vision for Europe and don’t believe in the E.U.,\' Guillaume Deybach, the chief executive of a local insurance company, said as he sipped a glass of red wine.\r\n\'We\'re in a bubble here,\' cautioned Jeremy Lagelee, a young lawyer who recently moved back to Paris. \'President Macron is very popular here.\' Lagelee recalled finding almost no supporters of the far-right and far-left candidates when he campaigned for LREM in Washington in 2017.\r\nIndeed. Although Emmanuel Macron has been beset with \'yellow vest\' protesters in recent months, he was a big favorite of the 160,000 French nationals in America, and in Washington especially. He won more than 92 percent of the D.C.-area vote in the second, decisive round of the 2017 election, when his opponent was Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Front. By contrast, in France, Macron won 66.1 percent.\r\nAlexandre Kleitman, who co-directs LREM’s Washington \'committee\' with Leydier, said they would try to reach the more than 15,000 French voters in the D.C. region mostly through social media and existing networks. (The party has 17 committees working for it in the United States. Other French political parties also have committees, although they are fewer and far less active.) But turning out the vote for European Parliament seats can be tough because that election draws less attention than French parliamentary ones. In 2014, during the last campaign for the European Parliament — where France currently has 74 of 751 seats — turnout among French voters in the United States was only about 10 percent. Compare that to the 2017 presidential election, when voter turnout among U.S.-based French nationals was 44 percent, according to France-Amérique, a magazine published by the French Embassy.\r\nLaurence Sage, a retired World Bank employee living near Friendship Heights, likes France’s post-2008 practice of electing overseas representatives to the National Assembly. \'We need a representative who is conscious of matters that concern those of us with a foot in both continents,\' Sage explained. Nabil Bessaha, a 45-year-old in North Bethesda who has spent most of his working life in D.C., added, \'We want to make sure that France doesn\'t treat us like second-class citizens.\'\r\n\'French living abroad have different issues from those living in France,\' Roland Lescure, the representative for the United States and Canada in the French National Assembly, told me from Paris. \'They\'re concerned about things like what benefits can they qualify for, funding for overseas French schools, and moving in and out of the country.\'\r\nLescure, 52, was just another French expat when he was elected in 2017. He now represents one of the world’s geographically largest political constituencies, stretching from Puerto Rico to Yukon. A financier in Montreal whose parents had been Communists, he had never been a politician, but like many LREM candidates, he was seduced by Macron’s potential to alter the French political landscape. \'French politics needed a change,\' he said. \'The usual suspects had been around too long, and many of us wanted to break the old left-right divide.\'\r\nLescure not only represents his U.S. and Canadian constituents but also chairs a parliamentary economic-affairs committee, focusing on making France more competitive and business-friendly. \'It\'s a pretty fast pace,\' he said of his job. \'I make about 15 trips a year\' to Washington and elsewhere in North America.\r\nBack in Dupont Circle, Deybach slyly reflected on the benefits of being a Frenchman voting in Washington. Because overseas French are exempt from most French taxes if they spend more than six months of the year outside of France, he said: \'Unlike D.C. residents, who have taxation without representation, we have representation without taxation.\'','2019-05-20',''),(78,'Tradition vs modernity: Debate over future Notre-Dame spire sparks controversy','France 24','Culture',21,'https://www.france24.com/en/20190511-france-notre-dame-fire-fast-reconstruction-law-macron-controversy-modern-architecture-mps','Henrique VALADARES','French MPs approved Friday a law to rebuild Notre-Dame within five years. But many fear the reconstruction will be rushed and experts are still divided on whether to rebuild the monument in its original form or to give it a more contemporary look.\r\nFrench President Emmanuel Macron vowed to rebuild Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral in less than five years after a major fire on April 15 largely destroyed the 850-year-old Gothic cathedral’s roof and spire.\r\nFrench lawmakers approved on Friday a controversial government draft bill, aimed at managing donors’ funds, which allows it to bypass current legislation in order to speed up the construction process.\r\nOnly 47 out of 577 MPs were physically present in the National Assembly when the bill was adopted, after 13 hours of debate. It still needs to pass through the Senate, dominated by right-wing opposition party Les Républicains, where it will be presented from May 27.\r\nExperts ‘worried’ by a rushed restoration\r\nUnder the new legislation, a public body under the direct supervision of the president will be created to oversee and carry out the work within a rapid time frame.\r\nAlthough France’s Culture Minister Franck Riester \'guaranteed’ existing rules \'for the restoration\' of national monuments \'will be applied\', experts claim that the new bill would allow the government to move in \'haste\', overriding regulations on urban planning, heritage conservation and environmental protection.\r\n\'We are really concerned by this bill, especially when it comes to preventive archaeology, because we need to be familiar with each part of the cathedral and its surroundings before taking any decision,\' Olivier de Châlus, a medieval researcher at Sorbonne University in Paris and spokesperson for the Association of Experts in Service of the Notre-Dame Restoration, told FRANCE 24.\r\n\'Although, we do understand the process needs to be done quickly,\' he added.\r\nIn late April, more than a thousand architects, conservationists and academics from around the world also urged Macron to be cautious with his plans to restore the cathedral.\r\nRiester tried to reassure MPs, saying that five years was \'an ambitious timeframe\' for renovating Notre-Dame, which took 200 years to build, but stressed that the project would \'not be done in haste\'.\r\nMany French prefer an identical reconstruction\r\nMany opposition MPs also regretted the new bill did not specify any architectural norms, as many lawmakers were keen to push through legislation stating Notre-Dame should be rebuilt exactly as it was before the fire.\r\nIn the days after the fire, many questioned whether the Gothic cathedral should be rebuilt in its original form or whether modern architecture should be added.\r\nSome even said Notre-Dame should not be rebuilt at all and its ruins kept per se and secured, as a \'21st century Memento Mori\' monument, wrote Bérangère Viennot in a tribune in Slate.\r\nBut according to a YouGov opinion poll, 54 percent of French people would like the Gothic cathedral to be rebuilt as it was before the April fire, with only 25 percent opting for an \'architectural initiative\'.\r\nInternational architectural contest to be held\r\nTwo days after the fire Prime Minister Édouard Philippe sparked controversy by announcing that the government would hold an international architectural contest to redesign the cathedral’s spire, originally designed by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859. Philippe expressed interest in \'a new spire adapted to the techniques and the challenges of our era\'.\r\nContemporary additions to the monument could lead to accidents, such as during renovations at the Chartres Cathedral, when the \'iconic Black Madonna\' was \'whitewashed\', architecture writer Juan Sebastian Pinto argues in a Forbes tribune.\r\nA dozen architects have already unveiled their projects. British architects Foster + Partners envision a glass roof and a crystal spire while Slovakian Vizum atelier saw Notre-Dame restored with a light beam towards the sky. Russian architect Alexander Nerovnya has also submitted his idea, respecting the original Viollet-le-Duc spire.\r\n\r\nBut restoration and conservation experts like De Châlus think that “research needs to be done before” having the discussion on identical versus modern, he said.\r\n\'Before asking questions on whether it should be a modern or an identical building, we need to know if we have all the material needed to rebuild it as it was,\' De Châlus said. \'And we should also ask ourselves if the building would hold that wooden structure nowadays: the walls were deformed over time and the whole cathedral could crumble.\'\r\nEven though his association refuses to take part in the debate, De Châlus also warns that the existing building should not be seen as a blank page. \'There are many things that will need to be restored and conserved, including things nobody knew of,\' he says, citing newly discovered medieval paintings on the cathedral’s canopy.\r\nGovernment could bypass experts\r\nSo far, nearly one billion euros has been donated or pledged for the cathedral – a sum that will go \'entirely and exclusively\' to Notre-Dame’s restoration, Riester said.\r\nThe total cost of rebuilding could come to between 600-700 million euros, according to estimations quoted by AFP.\r\nAs Philippe announced in the wake of Notre-Dame’s fire, the legislation approved on Friday also allows an extra fiscal incentive for individual donors, with the usual tax break being bumped to 75 percent, instead of usual 66 percent, for donations up to a thousand euros.\r\nRestoration experts are keen to be included in the reconstruction process. \'Nobody has tried to contact us yet, and the best Notre-Dame experts are in our association,\' De Châlus said.\r\n','2019-05-12',''),(79,'Tennis and Tropical Plants: New French Open Court Is Wild','The New York times','Sport',21,'https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2019/05/26/world/europe/ap-ten-french-open-new-court.html?searchaResultPosition=24','The Associated Press','PARIS — Tennis and tropical plants: The stunning new court at the French Open is, quite literally, wild.\r\nSurrounded on all four sides by greenhouses filed with exotic plants, the Court Simonne Mathieu saw its first French Open match on Sunday, a triumph for tournament organizers who overcame strong opposition from critics who long sought to block construction in a 19th-century garden of the 5,290-seat arena.\r\nAutomatic sprinklers periodically doused the lush greenery from Africa, Asia, South America and Australia as Garbine Muguruza, too busy to notice, beat Taylor Townsend of the United States 5-7, 6-2, 6-2.\r\nMuguruza, the 2016 champion, later gave a big thumbs-up to the sunken arena that is now the third-biggest at Roland Garros, after the 9,829-seat Court Suzanne Lenglen and the 14,962-seat showcase Court Philippe Chatrier that is in the process of being rebuilt.\r\n\'It\'s a very cute court. It\'s not small, but it\'s, you know, cozy,\' Muguruza said. \'It\'s like in a garden. It\'s a different feeling.\'\r\nSpectators were impressed, too.\r\n\'It\'s like being in a forest,\' said Parisian Kelly Orsinet. \'It\'s relaxing and pleasant.\'\r\nSinking the red clay court and surrounding it with tasteful modern hothouses filled with leafy plants prevented it from being an eyesore in its historic surrounds, the Auteuil gardens that date back to 1898 and are loved for their majestic steel and glass greenhouses for prized botanical collections.\r\nExpanding into the gardens is part of a massive, partially completed 380-million euro ($425 million) revamp of Roland Garros, the smallest of tennis\' Grand Slam venues that can feel uncomfortably cramped in its busiest opening week.\r\nGilles Jourdan, the project manager overseeing the modernization, was on hand to savor the new arena\'s atmosphere with its first crowd, a landmark in what has been a difficult birth, complicated by legal challenges from opponents.\r\nNeighbors who overlook the site had \"said \'It\'s a disgrace! A disgrace!\" Jourdan recalled. \'Fewer and fewer are saying it\'s a disgrace now.\'\r\n\'You can\'t see the court. That\'s very important and that was the most fundamental idea,\' he said. \'If you\'re not flying overhead in a helicopter, you wouldn\'t know there\'s a court there.\'\r\nLike other showcase courts at Roland Garros, the lower of the arena\'s two tiers is tastefully fitted with cream-colored, hand-finished seats of chestnut wood from eastern France. Upper-tier spectators, some of whom have a view of the Eiffel Tower, are seated on benches, because fitting seats up there would have blocked lines of sight, clogging the arena\'s airy, open feel, Jourdan explained.\r\nNamed after the French Open women\'s champion in 1938 and 1939, the Court Simonne Mathieu was about half-empty for the start of the match but continually filled as Muguruza fought back from her unsteady start in a westerly breeze that shook leaves on the tall trees overlooking the arena.\r\nModernization work will resume after the tournament. The Chatrier court, largely torn down after Rafael Nadal won his 11th title there last year, has been rebuilt but is still missing the retractable roof planned for next year.\r\nIn the meantime, organizers have done a good job of making the project-in-progress look spic and span for the next two weeks.\r\n\'It\'s a bit like at the theater: You look backstage and go \'Ooops,\' Jourdan said. \"We\'ve hidden everything, and 10 days after the tournament, we\'ll start again.\'\r\n','2019-05-26',''),(80,'Louvre museum pays tribute to pyramid’s architect Pei','The Washington Post','Politics',21,'https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/the-louvre-museum-pays-tribute-to-pyramids-architect-pei/2019/05/17/2dbd6b08-7889-11e9-a7bf-c8a43b84ee31_story.html','Néant','PARIS - The Louvre museum in Paris paid tribute Friday to the architect of its giant glass pyramid, I.M. Pei who died earlier this week at the age of 102 at his home in New York City.\r\nDozens of employees of the Louvre gathered under the pyramid, which serves as the museum\'s monumental entrance, for a minute’s applause.\r\nThe President-director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, expressed his \'huge sadness\' to the China-born Pei, whose creation helped cement the Louvre, home of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and countless other artistic treasures, as one of the world’s must-go destinations.\r\nFrance\'s former culture minister, Jack Lang, who was in office when the pyramid plan was unveiled in 1984, remembered an \'extraordinary gentle man\', who \'inspired respect because he himself was very respectful of the history of the country.\'\r\nThe project launched by President Francois Mitterrand was met with much controversy.\r\n\'It shows that you must never fear to be audacious because in the end, when you bet on intelligence and beauty, it’s a success\', Lang told The Associated Press on Friday.\r\nMany of the French vehemently opposed such a modern addition to the Louvre, which was once a royal palace.\r\nBut Mitterrand and his supporters prevailed, and the pyramid was finished in 1989. It is the symbol of two decades of renovation of the museum, Lang stressed.\r\n\'The Louvre was dirty, abandoned with very few visitors,\' Lang said. \'Our dream was to realize one of the most beautiful museums in the world and this ambition we could realize it because Pei was a courageous, intelligent, creative man and nothing could stop his commitment.\r\nAnne-Laure Beatrix, deputy administrator of the Louvre, described the pyramid as a \'piece of art in itself\' that the museum\'s millions of visitors every year admire.\r\nShe stressed that the museum was celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the pyramid.\r\n\'Throughout the year we have seen videos of Pei, so we were able to listen to his voice again and see his smile. We all know what we owe him because with this pyramid the Louvre entered modern era.\'','2019-05-17',''),(81,'Cannes 2019: All the winners and losers at this year\'s festival','CNN','Art',21,'https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/cannes-2019-festival-highlights/index.html','Thomas Page','Bong Joon-ho of South Korea won the Palme d\'Or, the Cannes Film Festival\'s top prize, on Saturday for his seventh feature film, \'Parasite.\' It\'s the first time the director has won what is considered by many the highest honor in world cinema.\r\nFrench-Senegalese director Mati Diop, in her first time at Cannes and as the first black woman in competition in the festival\'s 72-year history, won the Grand Prix award for her first narrative feature \'Atlantics,\' a magical-realist take on migration in Senegal.\r\n\'Les Miserables\' by Ladj Ly and \"Bacurau\" by Brazilian duo Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles shared the Jury Prize, the festival\'s approximate of third place.\r\n\r\nAll four prize-winning films addressed hot-button issues: migration in West Africa, contemporary working class struggles in France and South Korea and a satirical riposte to right-wing politics in Brazil.\r\nMeanwhile, the prize for best director went to the Dardenne brothers for \'Young Ahmed\' and the screenwriting prize was awarded to Celine Sciamma for \'Portrait of a Lady on Fire.\'\r\nEmily Beecham was named best actress for her performance in Jennifer Hausner\'s \'Little Joe\' while Antonio Banderas won the best actor prize for Pedro Almodovar\'s \'Pain and Glory,\' in which he played a version of the director in Almodovar\'s fictionalized autobiography.\r\nCamera d\'Or, the award for best first feature, went to Cesar Diaz for \'Our Mothers,\' screening in the Critics Week strand of the festival.\r\n\r\nSpeculation abounded as to whom the Alejandro Inarritu-led jury would bestow honors, particularly given this year\'s director-heavy ranks including Yorgos Lanthimos (\'The Favourite\'), Alice Rohrwacher (\'Happy As Lazzaro\'), Kelly Reichardt (\'Certain Women\') and Pawel Pawlikowski (\'Cold War\'). Predicting the Palme d\'Or has long been considered a fool\'s errand, and this jury contained many strong, distinctive voices.\r\nThe decision to award Bong the Palme was not wholly unexpected and was a welcome choice among critics, many of whom had lobbied hard for the film as it competed against films by other Cannes heavyweights including Almodovar, Quentin Tarantino and Ken Loach.\r\nFor more festival highlights, read on.\r\n\r\n12 days of cinephilia\r\nCannes in festival fever is a curious beast: a place where you can walk past \"Avengers: Endgame\" co-director Joe Russo wandering the street unmolested, but where Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noe is mobbed after subjecting an audience to 10 straight minutes of strobe lighting.\r\nThat\'s not to say multibillion-dollar franchises hold no currency here -- the busy film market keeps the lights on for everyone, after all -- but the festival knows what it likes and isn\'t about to change its stripes any time soon.\r\nAfter much Netflix-related hand-wringing it ended up being a classic year. The Cannes old boys\' club was out in force, with new films from Jim Jarmusch, Almodovar, Loach, Terrence Malick, Tarantino and Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. Some were well received, others considered lesser works, but most showed seasoned directors sticking to their respective lanes.\r\nTarantino\'s \'Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood\' and Malick\'s \'A Hidden Life\' were described as a return to form. The former was a typically garrulous eulogy to Hollywood\'s golden era co-opting the murder of Sharon Tate, the latter an ode to personal faith via the story of conscientious objector Franz Jaegerstaetter. Both directors played fast and loose with history and had critics wondering whether some cuts -- particularly in Tarantino\'s third act -- might have helped their causes here.\r\nThe Dardenne brothers\' \'Young Ahmed,\' about the radicalization of a young Muslim in Belgium, was less provocative than it looked on paper. The same couldn\'t be said for Abdellatif Kechiche\'s \'Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo,\' a \'three-and-a-half-hour testament to twerking\' and male gaze bonanza.\r\n\r\nOffering a tonic were first-timers Sciamma and Diop, who respectively lit up the competition with \'Portrait of a Lady on Fire,\' a lesbian romance set in 18th-century France, and \'Atlantics,\' a magical-realist take on Senegalese migration.\r\n\r\nDiop became the first black woman in competition in the festival\'s 72-year history, while Leyna Bloom became the first transgender lead in the official selection in \'Port Authority,\' a New York-set love story revolving around the kiki ballroom scene.\r\n\r\nBurnishing her film\'s credentials, Sciamma, one of the founders of the \'5050x2020\' gender equality moment, proved it wasn\'t hard to make amazing cinema with women on both sides of the camera and for the film\'s news conference brought out an all-female panel.\r\nBut for all the buzz at the Palais, the festival\'s undisputed breakout hit was to be found over at the Directors\' Fortnight sidebar.\r\nRobert Egger\'s riotous \'The Lighthouse\' placed Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson\'s salty seadogs on a rocky crag and let them fight like the last two rats in a barrel. Among Cannes\' most avant-garde titles, Egger\'s hallucinogenic shanty watched like sniffing glue then passing out to \'Moby Dick\' on TCM. Festival staff had to contend with umbrella-totting crowds queuing around the block to catch a glimpse.\r\n\r\nRed carpet drama\r\nAvoiding the rain, \'Rocketman\' and \'Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood\' vied for the title of busiest gala.\r\nElton John arrived sequined and ready to rock for his biopic and by the time the credits rolled, he and star Taron Egerton were both in tears. There were tears of frustration, meanwhile, at the Tarantino premiere as many guests were turned away from the gala despite holding much-prized invitations (the festival later apologized).\r\n\r\nThe undisputed queen of the red carpet this year was Elle Fanning. Still riding a wave of Met Gala praise, the 21-year-old juror cycled through Gucci and Valentino before peaking with a \'40s-inspired Dior couture confection at the Tarantino premiere. Not receiving the positive PR was Prada: Fanning said she fainted in a 1950s Prada prom dress at a party the night before, later claiming on Instagram that it was too tight.\r\n\r\nProtests returned to the steps of the Palais again this year when pro-choice activists made their voices heard at a special screening of Juan Solanas\' Argentine abortion documentary \'Let It Be Law.\'\r\nFestival report card\r\nAs the press leave the French Riviera, exhausted and afraid to look another bottle of rosé in the eye, what are the main takeaways?\r\nWell, cinema and its spiritual home is still alive.\r\nCannes has manned the barricades against the streaming giants, mandated in part by French law stipulating a three-year gap between theatrical and streaming release. The festival\'s policy has no doubt offered pause for thought to some directors tempted by Netflix\'s juicy deals, but how long that will hold, given the illustrious lineup at Venice last year, remains to be seen. But no one really believes the impasse between Cannes and Netflix can last forever.\r\nPerhaps instead a bigger programming battle the festival faces is between a clique of venerable filmmakers on a downward curve occupying competition slots that a fresh generation are more than capable of filling with radical new visions.\r\nWe\'re seven months out from the Academy Awards, but some offerings here already have Oscar buzz. \'Parasites\' could well become South Korea\'s first Best International Feature Film nominee, and Antonio Banderas is being chalked up as an outside bet for the best actor race. And in the wake of \'Call Me By Your Name,\' could \'Portrait of a Lady on Fire\' -- a more elegant take on a similar story -- enter the fray?\r\nThat\'s all a long way off, but for now one thing is certain: it hasn\'t been dull.','2019-05-25',''),(82,'Eurovision: What is it and what time is it on?','CNN','Art',21,'https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/18/europe/eurovision-explainer-2019-intl/index.html','Rob Picheta','(CNN)Ah, Eurovision -- the kitsch, camp, glitzy annual spectacle that captivates a continent and profoundly confuses the rest of the world.\r\nThe annual singing competition attracts hundreds of millions of viewers, has given the world acts including Abba, Celine Dion and Olivia Newton-John, and may even have brought Europe together in the wake of the World War II.\r\nBut truly understanding the joys and many, many oddities of Eurovision is trickier than it seems. It blends geopolitical skullduggery and skin-tight leather trousers like no other international event can. It sees entire countries glued to their televisions, certain in the knowledge that victory alone can secure a unifying sense of national pride.\r\nAnd -- most importantly -- it tears through copious amounts of glitter, crates of pyrotechnics and wardrobes full of frilly national dress, all in the name of transboundary cooperation.\r\nMake sense yet? Don\'t worry -- here\'s an explainer.\r\nWhat is Eurovision?\r\nIn simple terms, it\'s an international singing competition organized by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). It takes place once a year, and is hosted by the previous edition\'s winning country. There are two semi-finals, and a grand final, which this year is taking place on Saturday in Tel Aviv, Israel.\r\nOf course, it\'s also so much more than that. The show features awkward back-and-forths between presenters, plenty of political messaging, a few big talking points and a controversy or seven. This year, Madonna is even performing during the interval.\r\nBut the contest\'s lore throughout Europe comes mainly from the downright absurdity of the contestants taking part. Just how weird are we talking? We\'ll get to that...\r\nHow did it all start?\r\nThe story of the origins of Eurovision is surprisingly noble. Tasked with bringing together a continent torn apart by war, the fledgling EBU organized a musical contest. Seven countries took part the first time around, with the live event testing the limits of the new and shiny technology called \"television.\"\r\nThe contest rapidly expanded, and its message of peace and harmony was eagerly embraced -- that\'s why, today, Europe remains a united and carefree region with a contented population and almost no cross-boundary divisions to note. OK, we may be exaggerating that last part.\r\nWho takes part?\r\nAny member country of the EBU can take part, and that includes countries on the fringes of Europe such as Morocco, Jordan and this year\'s hosts, Israel. The Vatican is technically a member too, but their long-overdue entry into the Eurovision fray is tragically yet to materialize. Australia, though not quite within the boundaries of Europe, also takes part.\r\nThis year, 41 countries entered, but those were whittled down to 26 via two semi-finals. Because they\'re the five biggest financial contributors to the EBU, the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy all qualify for the final automatically -- a reward worth paying any price for.\r\nEach country performs a three-minute song once, during a very, very long and somewhat emotionally draining broadcast. Singers can sing in any language -- most choose English, but plenty opt for their own -- and they don\'t even need to be from the competing country. Many countries choose their contestant in a televised competition. The possibilities are endless -- washed-up boybands, regional superstars, novelty acts and more all take part on an annual basis.\r\nThen, for those viewers still sober enough to process numbers, the results are announced -- each country hands out points to their favorite competing nations, separately revealing the scores from an expert jury and the public vote. Countries give 12 points to their top dog, 10 to their second-favorites, and between one and eight for their honorable mentions.\r\nVotes are read out, via satellite link, by a national celebrity in each of the countries that entered the contest, so we get a whistlestop tour of over 40 European capital cities. \'Hello Tel Aviv!\' they\'ll all shout, before milking their fifteen seconds in the spotlight and desperately trying to keep it together despite an excruciating delay in the video link. Scores are are announced in English and French -- and so the dreaded prospect of \'nil points\' hangs over every nation until they finally get on the board.\r\n\r\nWait, why is Australia in Eurovision?\r\nNo one\'s quite sure. The country was invited to join as a \'one-off\' in 2015, to celebrate the contest\'s 60th anniversary, but it has stuck around ever since.\r\nIn theory, it\'s because Australians have loved Eurovision for decades -- despite it starting in the early hours of the morning, it is broadcast annually by TV channel SBS. If Australia won, the following year\'s contest would likely be held in a European country of its choosing -- which probably presents Britain\'s best chance of ever hosting the competition again.\r\nHow popular is it?\r\nOh, it\'s huge. Around 186 million viewers watched last year\'s competition, according to the EBU. Certain regions within Europe take it especially seriously -- Scandinavian nations have long been obsessed and can boast a long list of winners.\r\nIn Iceland in 2018, more than 95% of television sets were tuned in to Eurovision -- despite the country not even qualifying for the final.\r\nPopularity varies from country to country, but few nations can honestly say they\'re uninterested. The UK likes to pretend it\'s above the whole thing, but Brits are secretly seething that the once-successful nation hasn\'t taken home the crown since 1997. They like to put the drought down to all manner of political motivations -- currently, Brexit seems the most logical explanation -- and stubbornly refuse to accept the possibility that their entries are just not very good.\r\n\r\nWho\'s won the most?\r\nIreland has the most wins, with seven, but the majority of those were from the early days of the contest, and Sweden need just one more victory to equal their record. Monaco are the smallest country to have won, with their David vs. Goliath triumph coming in 1971.\r\nOverall, 27 countries have won the contest. Portugal was the most recent new winner, taking home the title in 2017.\r\nOK, how weird are these performances?\r\nI thought you\'d never ask. In recent years, Eurovision has seen an ethno-pop band called Buranovskiye Babushki comprised of eight Russian grandmothers; a pair of rapping Montenegrin astronauts; an all-female Polish group who churned butter throughout their performance; a Ukrainian dancer in a hamster wheel; and Ukrainian superstar Verka Serduchka, who... well, it might just be easier to see for yourself.\r\nThat came in second.\r\nNot quite every country opts for such an over-the-top spectacle. On Saturday, as is the case every year, there will be a handful of drab ballads about peace, and a few more about love. But with every nation keen to stand out from the pack, even the most straightforward tunes can be presented in some eyebrow-raising ways.\r\nThe chorus to Greece\'s 2013 ska-punk entry was the statement \"alcohol is free\" sung ad nauseum, while Estonia\'s 2008 performance included dancers in bikinis holding up pictures of onions, for no clear reason.\r\nAnd Eurovision always manages to stay current -- so current, in fact, that San Marino\'s 2012 entry was called \'The Social Network Song,\' and featured the lyrics: \'If you wanna come to my house, then click me with your mouse.\' But most topical expressions are political: Ukraine\'s winning 2016 song, \'1944,\' for example, detailed the deportation of the Crimean Tatars in the Soviet Union and severely angered Russia.\r\nSo expect bright colors, perhaps some magic tricks, a few questionable hairstyles... and most importantly, expect the unexpected.\r\nIs it always so controversial?\r\nAbsolutely. Eurovision vaguely resembles Christmas Day -- it\'s circled on the calendar months before, and millions look forward to it with bated breath. Then, when it finally arrives, everyone falls out with each other and the whole thing descends into one giant shouting match. With sequins.\r\nOfficially, no \'lyrics, speeches (or) gestures of a political nature\' are allowed during the contest -- but if you believe that, you\'ll believe anything.\r\nIn fact, Eurovision\'s history has always been connected with the continent\'s politics. It\'s been alleged that, as early as 1968, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco oversaw a campaign of vote-buying to hand victory to Spain, over the heavily favored British entry Cliff Richard.\r\nMore recently, Lebanon pulled out of its scheduled Eurovision debut in 2005 during a spat over its refusal to broadcast the Israeli performance. And in 2009, a year after Russian-Georgian tensions reached a flashpoint in South Ossetia, Georgia withdrew its entry for the Moscow contest, after unsuccessfully arguing that their entry \'We Don\'t Wanna Put In\' had nothing to do with the Russian President.\r\nAnd then there\'s the ever-present complaint of political voting, with clear regional blocs of nations always seeming to gift each other plenty of points. That explains why more isolated nations really need to go above and beyond to win.\r\nEditions in cities such as Baku have also drawn complaints over the human rights records of competing nations. This year\'s contest, in Tel Aviv, has been particularly controversial, coming at a tense time for the country after a flare-up of violence between militants in Gaza and the Israeli military.\r\nWho\'s going to win this year?\r\nThere\'s plenty of money on the Dutch entry this year. Their entry is 25-year-old superstar Duncan Laurence. You know, Duncan Laurence. You haven\'t heard of Duncan Laurence?\r\nIn fact, he\'s little-known even at home. But his debut single \'Arcade\' is attracting plenty of buzz among Eurovision experts and performed well in the semi-finals -- meaning the Netherlands are in pole position to claim their first Eurovision title since 1975.\r\nAustralia are also in the running, but if they pulled off their first ever Eurovision victory it would likely cause chaos back in Europe. With Brexit, political division and regional disputes dominating headlines, it would surely be a cruel step too far if Europe can\'t even win its own singing competition.\r\nThe Swiss entry has earned some love, and Sweden are always a good bet. But watch out, too, for Iceland -- their techno-bondage-synth-punk act Hatari have raised eyebrows already, and they\'re sure to provide one of Saturday\'s most memorable performances.\r\nEurovision sounds great. How do I watch it?\r\nThat\'s the spirit. If you\'re in Europe but you\'ve so far held out against embracing the wondrous tradition that is Eurovision, you\'ll likely be able to find it on a terrestrial broadcaster. US networks only began showing the event in recent years, and there are no plans to broadcast it this time -- but worry not, as there\'ll be an official live stream on YouTube. Swedish broadcaster SVT will also put up an on-demand repeat, which can be watched anywhere.\r\nIt starts on Saturday night at 8 p.m. in the UK (3 p.m. ET).\r\n','2019-05-18',''),(83,'Europe to experience \'intense heat\' in multi-day heat wave','CNN','Politics',22,'https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/22/europe/europe-heat-wave-intl/index.html','Emily Dixon','Europe will be struck by a \'potentially dangerous\' heat wave next week, according to forecaster Accuweather, with temperatures expected to reach a high of 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday and Thursday.\r\nThe expected heat wave is the result of \'a storm stalling over the Atlantic Ocean and high pressure over central and eastern Europe,\' which will \'pull very hot air from Africa northward across Europe,\' Accuweather said.\r\nSpain will feel the first wave of \'intense\' heat over the weekend, before the high temperatures spread into France, Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Italy. The heat wave could last until the start of July, Accuweather predicted.\r\nFrench national forecaster Meteo-France warned that the heat wave would begin on Sunday, particularly in the east, with temperatures of 35 to 40 degrees Celsius across most of the country.\r\n\'Although brief, this heat wave could be remarkable for how early it has come as well as its intensity,\' Meteo-France said.\r\nThe French health ministry advised that cool public spaces like parks and gardens remain open to poor and homeless people, while elderly and disabled people should register with local authorities to receive support.\r\nOn Twitter, German meteorological service Deutscher Wetterdienst warned that an \'extreme\' heat wave would reach Germany on Monday, reaching its height on Wednesday or Thursday.\r\nA heat wave also scorched Europe in 2018, resulting in multiple deaths in Spain and Portugal and drought conditions in Germany and Sweden. The continent experienced its hottest August on record the same year, according to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts\' Copernicus Climate Change Service.\r\nThe World Weather Attribution initiative associated the 2018 European heat wave with climate change, saying, \'the probability to have such a heat or higher is generally more than two times higher today than if human activities had not altered climate.\'\r\n\'With global mean temperatures continuing to increase heat waves like this will become even less exceptional,\' the global association of climate institutes said.\r\nAccording to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2018 was the world\'s fourth hottest year on record, after 2016, 2015 and 2017.\r\n','2019-06-23',''),(84,'Electric scooter rider killed in Paris amid \'anarchy\' claims','CNN','Politics',22,'https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/11/europe/electric-scooter-killed-paris-scli-intl/index.html','Amy Woodyatt, Sam Bradpiece, Antoine Crouin and Celia Heudebourg','A man on an electric scooter has died after being hit by a truck in Paris on Monday, according to officials in the French capital.\r\nThe fatal accident, which occurred in the northern neighborhood of Goutte d\'Or, is the first involving an electric scooter in the city, Agence France-Presse reported. The truck driver has been detained and prosecutors have opened an investigation into \'involuntary homicide,\' the news agency said.\r\nThe City of Paris and the Paris Police Prefecture confirmed the incident to CNN.\r\nElectric scooters -- and the lack of regulation surrounding their use -- have become a contentious issue in the French capital. Last week, the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said it was time to put an end to the \'anarchic\' increase in their numbers, but said that there were no clear legal guidelines in place to regulate their use in the city.\r\nHidalgo announced a raft of new measures to come into effect from July, including bans on electric scooters in parks and gardens, and on parking on sidewalks, as well as speed limits of 20 kilometers per hour (12 miles per hour) for roads.\r\nParis has become home to nearly 20,000 e-scooters since their introduction just a year ago, with 12 companies operating scooter-sharing systems in the capital. The City of Paris has pointed to predictions that electric scooters could number 40,000 by 2020.\r\nIn May, France\'s transport minister Elisabeth Borne announced a nationwide ban on electric scooters on sidewalks from September, after locals grew frustrated with the vehicles congesting public areas and causing an increase in accidents.\r\n\'The development of these (scooters) was very rapid and a little anarchic. We didn\'t see it coming and it became the law of the jungle,\' Borne told Le Parisien. \'And it is true that we are seeing an increase in accidents and but also an increasing sense of unease on our pavements.\'\r\nBorne announced riders will be fined 135 euros ($150) from September if they use e-scooters on sidewalks.\r\nUS e-scooter rental firm Lime has aggressively entered the European market in the past year, with Paris as one of its flagship locations. It has been followed by companies including Tier, Bird and Uber offshoot Jump.\r\nQuestions have been raised over the safety of e-scooters -- in May, a US study found especially high rates of accidents among new riders.\r\nOne in three injured riders were hurt on their first trip and about 63% had ridden nine times or fewer before their injury, the study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Texas\' Austin Public Health Department found. The researchers concluded that additional training may be necessary for e-scooter riders.\r\n','2019-06-11',''),(85,'French parties unite in call for referendum on Macron\'s airports sell-off','The Guardian','Politics',22,'https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/24/french-call-for-referendum-macron-airports-sell-off','Angelique Chrisafis','Emmanuel Macron’s plan for the biggest wave of French privatisations in a decade is under threat after opposition politicians took the unusual step of joining ranks to push for a referendum on the sale of Paris airports.\r\nThe centrist French president wants to sell the state’s controlling stake in Aéroports de Paris, the profitable operator of Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports, which are used by more than 100 million passengers each year. It would be among the biggest privatisation operations in French history, alongside Macron’s plans to sell other stakes in the national lottery as well as the gas and power group ENGIE.\r\nThe privatisation on the Paris airports is a crucial part of Macron’s modernisation plans for the French economy. A source close to the president said the state was not best qualified to run airport shopping and, with Charles de Gaulle ranked low for passenger experience, private managers could improve that. Profit from the sale – expected to be more than €7bn (£5.5bn) – would be redirected into a new investment fund for startup companies and technology, and would also help plug the national debt.\r\nBut political opponents accuse Macron of “flogging the family silver” and letting go of strategic state infrastructure. They say the UK, with its privatised Heathrow airport and privatised railways, illustrates a potential nightmare scenario of key transport infrastructure run for profit.\r\nIn an extraordinary move, a highly unlikely coalition of French politicians who are normally each other’s bitter enemies – ranging from communists and the hard-left to free-marketeers from Les Républicains, Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing party – have joined force against the Paris airports’ privatisation. They have been authorised by France’s constitutional council to make the first ever use of a people’s referendum mechanism introduced by Sarkozy in 2008. If they can get the signatures of 10% of the French electorate – 4.7 million people – within the next nine months, a national referendum will be held for or against the airports’ privatisation.\r\n\'It would be the first time the people would be able to decide on such a massive issue of privatisation,\' said Laurent Russier, the communist mayor of Saint-Denis, north of Paris. At a time when gilets jaunes (yellow vests) anti-government protesters have called for more of a say in politics, and Macron has promised to listen more to citizens, a potential referendum is a test for French politics.\r\nA race is now under way to gather the 4.7m signatures. \'It will be extremely difficult but not entirely impossible, said one campaigner, urging French voters from all regions and living abroad to sign. At least 17,000 signatures would be needed per day, but the government online platform for people to sign up is seen as difficult to use and prone to crashing. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have signed up since 13 June.\r\nThis week, the first public meeting to garner support was held in a crowded trade union building in Saint-Denis. In the French capital’s northern suburbs, Charles de Gaulle airport is a key employer. There were unusual scenes, with communist-voting trade unionists waving flags and applauding rightwingers whom they once would have jeered.\r\n\'The public interest comes first, said Eric Coquerel of the hard-left party La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), arguing that it was not an anti-Macron political game, but a drive to protect state infrastructure. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally was not invited to join the group, but she has urged her supporters to sign up to reach the 4.7m target.\r\nOn the right, politicians said Macron was using the same arguments as the Thatcher government over Heathrow’s privatisation in the 1980s – that there would be \'better services provided for airline passengers\'. Gilles Carrez, a rightwing lawmaker, said: \'Many major airports have stayed under state control. The obvious exception is Heathrow and today the British regret the privatisation of Heathrow.\'\r\n\'Pollution,\' shouted a woman in the crowd, concerned over airport expansion like Heathrow’s third runway. The historian Patrick Weil said: \'We’re in a third world war against the climate crisis, a battle which should be mobilising all of humanity. Selling Aéroports de Paris to the private sector is like handing arms to our enemy.\'\r\nThe recent months of gilets jaunes demonstrations have highlighted privatisation in France – particularly the private companies which run French motorways. Last autumn, gilets jaunes protesters blockaded scores of motorway toll booths around the country, expressing anger at the rise in toll prices since privatisation in 2005.\r\nLes Républicains MP Philippe Dallier said: \'I bitterly regret supporting motorway privatisation and vowed to never make the same mistake [again]. That’s why I’m fighting Paris airport privatisation.\'\r\nNot everyone agrees. Gérard Lacher, a member of Les Républicains and head of the Senate, said the referendum drive amounted to a hijacking of democracy.\r\nAmong those who have already signed the petition for a referendum, Michel (surname withheld), 80, said: “A referendum is a good thing because I don’t trust politicians. The people should decide.”\r\nDanielle (surname withheld) said: \'Selling off Paris airports is one privatisation too far. We’ll end up looking like Britain in a Ken Loach film. An airport is not just about selling macarons or perfume – it’s security and the environment.\'\r\nClaire (surnamed withheld) had worked in baggage-sorting at Charles de Gaulle for 25 years. She said: \'We need to keep it human. It’s not a profit machine.\'\r\n','2019-06-24',''),(102,'Notre Dame donations coming from regular Americans, French billionaires ‘haven’t paid a cent’','New York Post','Politics',22,'https://nypost.com/2019/06/14/notre-dame-donations-coming-from-regular-americans-french-billionaires-havent-paid-a-cent/ ','Chris Perez','The French billionaires who vowed to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to help rebuild the Notre Dame cathedral \'haven’t paid a cent,\' according to church officials.\r\nInstead, regular Americans have been emptying their pockets in hopes of resurrecting the Parisian house of worship — with an estimated 90% of donations coming from the US.\r\n\'Americans are very generous toward Notre Dame and the monument is very loved in America,\' explained Michel Picaud, president of the church’s Friends of Notre Dame charity.\r\n\'Six out of our 11 board members are residents in the US,\' he told the Associated Press.\r\nSmall French donors have also been contributing to the rebuild, while their rich countrymen have remained on the sidelines.\r\n\'The big donors haven’t paid,” said senior Notre Dame press official Andre Finot. \'Not a cent.\'\r\nNearly $1 billion had been promised in the wake of the Notre Dame fire, with French billionaires — such as Francois-Henri Pinault, chairman and CEO of Kering, the luxury group behind Gucci, Balenciaga and other world-renowned brands — making massive pledges.\r\nAccording to Finot, none of the cash has been seen yet.\r\n\'They want to know what exactly their money is being spent on and if they agree to it before they hand it over, and not just to pay employees’ salaries,\' he told the AP.\r\nThe Friends of Notre Dame will be transferring the first private check toward the rebuild — an estimated $4.1 million — after amassing funds from the Americans and its sister Notre Dame Foundation. The French state has also donated money toward the operation.\r\nOfficials say the cash with be going toward paying the bills and salaries of the roughly 150 people who’ve been working at Notre Dame since the April 15 blaze nearly destroyed it.\r\nThe rebuilding process is expected to take months, but that won’t stop churchgoers from attending mass at the iconic cathedral. The first gathering is slated to take place on Sunday. The mass will be held on the anniversary of the consecration of the Gothic gem’s altar, which is celebrated every year on June 16.','2019-06-14',''),(103,'Job seekers in one country face the worst racial discrimination','New York Post','Politics',22,'https://nypost.com/2019/06/19/job-seekers-in-this-country-face-the-worst-racial-discrimination/','Meera Jagannathan','While racial discrimination in hiring plagues many developed countries, one nation may have particular trouble bidding it adieu.\r\nFrance has the highest level of hiring discrimination against non-white groups, according to a meta-analysis of data from nine countries published this week in the peer-reviewed journal Sociological Science. Researchers analyzed findings from 97 hiring field experiments that included more than 200,000 job applications.\r\n\'In every country we consider, nonwhite applicants suffer significant disadvantage in receiving callbacks for interviews compared with white natives with similar job-relevant characteristics,\' the study authors wrote. \'This difference is driven by race, not immigrant status.\'\r\nWhile white immigrants also experience discrimination compared to white natives, that difference tended to be small and not statistically significant. With respect to hiring, they added, \'some countries do discriminate more than others.\'\r\nFrance’s aversion to measuring or discussing race and ethnicity in official capacities doesn’t seem to have paid off in reducing discrimination, the authors wrote.\r\n\'The French do not measure race or ethnicity in any official — or most unofficial capacities — which makes knowledge of racial and ethnic inequality in France very limited and makes it difficult to monitor hiring or promotion for discrimination,\' study co-author Lincoln Quillian, a sociology professor at Northwestern University, said in a statement.\r\nThe US, on the other hand, requires large employers to report their racial and ethnic makeup to the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Quillian pointed out. Corporate diversity initiatives abound in the US, as do affirmative action programs.\r\n\'Discrimination ratio\'\r\nThe researchers determined each country’s \'discrimination ratio\' by calculating the ratio of the percentage of job-application callbacks white natives received versus that of minority applicants — in other words, \'the number of applications that must be submitted by a minority applicant to expect an equal chance of a callback as a white applicant.\'\r\nSweden had the next-highest discrimination ratio after France, followed by Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and the US. Field experiments from Germany showed the lowest levels of hiring discrimination, though its difference in discrimination ratio from the US wasn’t statistically significant.\r\nWhite applicants in France and Sweden received between 65% and 100% more job callbacks than non-white minorities on average, the researchers found, while white applicants in Germany, the US and Norway got between 20% and 40% more callbacks than their non-white counterparts.\r\nDiscrimination levels against folks of African, Middle Eastern/North African and Asian descent were about equal, the study found. People of Asian descent in the sample were largely South Asian.\r\nThese findings shouldn’t be generalized to a country’s overall tendency toward discrimination, the authors said, as they specifically concern hiring. For example, Germany ranked low for hiring discrimination, but the country doesn’t fare as well on housing discrimination.\r\nEmployees in Germany are required to include \'far more extensive background information\' in job applications, even dating back to high school — a policy, the researchers suggested, that may help lessen discrimination.\r\n\'We suspect that this is why we find low discrimination in Germany — that having a lot of information at [the] first application reduces the tendency to view minority applicants as less good or unqualified,\' Quillian said.\r\n','2019-06-16',''),(104,'Dominant Lewis Hamilton wins the French Grand Prix as Vettel slips back','The Guardian','Politics',22,'https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/jun/23/lewis-hamilton-french-grand-prix-vettel-mercedes','Giles Richards','With a winning edge honed over 12 seasons in Formula One, Lewis Hamilton, it seems, expects his skills to become keener still after victory in the French Grand Prix. His desire to win, and indeed win well, has had a bludgeoning impact on his rivals this season yet it has been his clinical execution, as displayed at the Circuit Paul Ricard, that has made the difference.\r\nIt may not make for the most thrilling of encounters but this is hardly Hamilton’s fault. He was operating here with the finesse of a conductor, and the rest of the grid were simply following his lead. The Briton won from pole by 18 seconds from his Mercedes teammate Valtteri Bottas. The Finn, lest it be forgotten in identical machinery, could stay with Hamilton for only the opening laps.\r\nBy the time the pit stops were complete Hamilton had a gap that looked like they were racing in different classes. Indeed, Ferrari appeared to be in a different race for much of the 53 laps, with Charles Leclerc finishing 19sec back, even after having run a very strong final third to close on Bottas and challenge him into the last corners. Max Verstappen in the Red Bull was fourth with Sebastian Vettel recovering his Ferrari to fifth from seventh on the grid.\r\nHamilton’s 79th career victory means he now has six wins from eight grands prix this season, including the last four in a row. He has extended his lead over Bottas to 36 points in the world championship, while Vettel has fallen to 76 points back. Ominously for his rivals, the five-times world champion is revelling in these victories with the same joyous abandon that accompanied his remarkable success during his debut season in 2007.\r\n\'It has been a really good weekend,\' he said. \'I have been racing a long time and it never gets old and it is such a challenge out there, finding the edge and building the gap.\r\n\'We are creating history together and I am so proud to be part of this team. It wasn’t easy at all and everything is on the edge. I had quite big blisters on the front two tyres but this has been the best start of the year.\'\r\nThe history of which he speaks is represented by the relentless numbers Hamilton is racking up for Mercedes, who are still unbeaten this year.\r\nAs Hamilton clocks these achievements with what has seemed sometimes to be effortless superiority, the remarkable history he looks very much like making marches ever closer. He now trails Michael Schumacher’s record of 91 wins by just 12. Schumacher’s dominance was similarly marked by criticism that the racing had become boring, an issue that was addressed by Hamilton after the race.\r\nThat more wins are to follow this season seems inevitable. Mercedes, who gained their first F1 win at the French Grand Prix in Reims with Juan Manuel Fangio in 1954, have been in control all weekend and Hamilton was able to turn the dominance he showed in qualifying into a fearsome performance at racing pace.\r\nAfter qualifying Hamilton had suggested he would only get stronger and on this form it is a claim hard to disagree with. He did not allow his teammate a look in across the 53 laps in yet another display of flawless driving.\r\nVettel, who qualified poorly, and Leclerc, managed to maximise what they could with a car that was demonstrably not as quick through the corners. Leclerc was the better of the two over the weekend and can be pleased with a creditable performance in pushing Bottas to the wire, although the Finn was suffering with a misfire for the last seven laps.\r\nFerrari had brought aerodynamic upgrades here but struggled to make them work and their issue in finding the balance and grip for their car remains. Any straight line speed advantage they enjoy is being more than matched by the Mercedes through the corners. As things stand, as Hamilton has suggested, the title fight is at best now a two-horse race between the British driver and his teammate.\r\nHamilton had held his lead from Bottas into turn one, with the Finn just holding off Leclerc to maintain second. Verstappen had a good look at Leclerc into turn two but could not quite get his nose in front and the leading four held their grid positions to the end of the first lap. After which Hamilton held all the cards.\r\nHe swiftly opened up two seconds on Bottas by lap seven, with the gap to Leclerc already at five seconds and the British driver was in control, putting in a series of fastest laps which Bottas could initially only match.\r\nMaintaining his lead through the only pit stops where the leaders switched to the hard tyres, Hamilton described the race as “eventful”.\r\nWhich it may have been for him, working the wheel and having complained of an issue with his seat, but from outside the cockpit it looked positively serene.\r\nIn no mood to relinquish any pressure, he pumped in a series of quick laps in the final third and even a late virtual safety car to deal with a loose bollard added no drama to the finale. The victory that followed was as assured and, indeed, ominous a win as he has had all season.\r\nMcLaren finished with Carlos Sainz in sixth while Britain’s Lando Norris, who had looked on for seventh until stymied by hydraulic problems, could manage only ninth. Daniel Ricciardo in the Renault was in seventh but received two five-second penalties for failing to rejoin the track safely and leaving the track and gaining an advantage and was demoted to 11th. His teammate Nico Hülkenberg finished in eighth. Kimi Räikkönen in the Alfa Romeo was in seventh with Red Bull’s Pierre Gasly in 10th.','2019-06-23',''),(105,'Adani protest: French journalists arrested while filming anti-coal activities','The Guardian','Politics',23,'https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jul/22/adani-protest-french-journalists-arrested-while-filming-anti-coal-activities','Ben Smee','Journalists charged with trespassing after filming Frontline Action on Coal activists include Hugo Clément.\r\nFour journalists working for the public television network France 2 have been charged with trespassing for filming a protest near the Abbot Point coal terminal, in north Queensland, targeting the operations of the Adani group.\r\nThe group of journalists includes Hugo Clément, a reporter well known in France for his documentaries about climate change and environmental issues.\r\nClément and a crew were arrested while filming anti-coal activists from the group Frontline Action on Coal, which early on Monday morning set up a blockade outside the Abbot Point port. About 20 members of the environmental group gathered outside the port entrance from 7am. Two locked themselves to a concrete barrel on the roadway.\r\nIn a statement Frontline Action on Coal said Clément and others were told by police they were \'obstructing the railway\' while filming the protests.\r\n\'Without warning, all four Frenchmen were immediately placed in handcuffs and put into police vehicles,\' the statement said.\r\nThe group was taken to a police station in the nearby town of Bowen. They were released on bail on Monday afternoon and ordered to face the local magistrates court in September.\r\nClément said he spent several hours in a cell after being arrested while filming a protest, which included two demonstrators locking their hands inside a concrete barrel.\r\n\'We were just filming the action at the blockade of the highway and police came straight to us and arrested us without a word, without saying anything,\',Clément said. \r\n\'They took us into a cell for seven hours.\'\r\nHe said he and his crew, who work for French public broadcaster France 2, were charged with trespassing and released on conditional bail, which included that they not go within 20km of the Carmichael site.\r\n\'We didn’t understand why they arrested us because we weren’t doing anything wrong, we were just doing our jobs by filming the action,\' he said.\r\n\'I had a good picture of Australia ... this is not a very democratic thing to say to a film crew, to say you cannot go there.\'\r\nIn a statement, Queensland police confirmed they arrested seven people, including three French nationals who were charged with one count of \'trespassing on a railway\'.\r\n','2019-07-22',''),(106,'Geraint Thomas insists he is ready for strong finish in Tour de France','The Guardian','Sport',23,'https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/jul/22/geraint-thomas-tour-de-france-team-ineos','Jeremy Whittle','• Welshman says there is no rivalry with Egan Bernal \r\n• Six riders have leader Julian Alaphilippe in sights\r\nGeraint Thomas says he is \'relishing the Alps\' as the 2019 Tour de Franceheads across the Rhône valley towards a triptych of decisive mountain stages at the end of this week.\r\n\'I feel motivated to get there and try and finish this Tour off well,\' the defending champion said. \'It’s been slightly up and down, compared to last year. I’m itching to go now. I much prefer the Alps. I’ve got a lot better memories of there.\r\n\'I finished the stage feeling really strong yesterday,\' he said of the final Pyrenean stage to Foix Prat d’Albis on Sunday. \'Halfway through I didn’t, but then I came through that. Finishing really well, as I did, was good for the confidence and I am really relishing the Alps now. It’s almost like the rest day is in the way.\'\r\nSpeaking to the BBC Bespoke podcast and the Guardian, the 2018 champion insisted that there was no rivalry with Team Ineos co-leader Egan Bernal and that both riders — currently separated by only 27 seconds — were still riding with a common objective.\r\nBut Thomas then added: \'Obviously, I want to be the one to win. The main thing is that we don’t race against each other and throw away the race. We’ve got to be honest with how we are feeling. If I’m on a really bad day and I just tell Egan to stay with me and we ride together and both lose a minute then that’s obviously not the way to go. I’m confident that we can keep that communication and honesty going.\'\r\nThe team principal, Dave Brailsford, dismissed any suggestions of a building rivalry between the pair, but accepted that the situation remained unpredictable.\r\n\'There’s no sign of a rivalry at the moment,\' he said. \'The situation changes second by second. That’s what we saw yesterday. That whole dynamic is live. There’s no set play.\'\r\nBut Brailsford also acknowledged the building momentum of the Tour’s French renaissance. \'If a French guy won the Tour de France then I think it would be a brilliant thing for the sport, for the Tour and it would be something that would light it all up,” he said. \'We’d have to go back to the drawing board but I think it would be a shot in the arm for the whole sport.\'\r\nWith five meaningful stages and two summit finishes still to come before the Champs Élysées, Brailsford and his team are in unknown territory, having always been in control of the overall classification by this stage of the Tour in their wins in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.\r\nThis year’s race, however, is very different. Six riders are within a little over two minutes of Julian Alaphilippe’s yellow jersey, and with a weaker Ineos team, compared to the Sky of previous Tour successes, neither Thomas nor Bernal can be assured of final victory.\r\n\'We’ve won this race in a similar kind of fashion where we get a lead and defend a lead,\' Brailsford said. \'It’s like defending a 1-0 lead, whereas this feels more like racing, which is why I loved the sport in the first place. It’s a different challenge.\'\r\n\'Nobody, myself included, expected Alaphilippe to hang on this long into the race,\' he said. \'Everyone was thinking ‘We have to do something to get rid of this guy’, but we don’t want to overcook ourselves getting rid of him because we were thinking inevitably he was going to go anyway. Everybody has been caught in the middle waiting to see what everyone else would do which is why the race is so uncontrolled.\'\r\n','2019-07-22',''),(107,'France Nudges Europe Into Space Race, Where It Lags Behind','The New York Times','Politics',23,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/world/europe/france-europe-space-race-apollo-11-anniversary.html ','Norimitsu Onishi','Thousands of soldiers paraded down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, on foot, on horseback, in tanks and even on a flying hoverboard. But the real action, increasingly, was somewhere far away: outer space.\r\nPresident Emmanuel Macron of France set the stage for last Sunday’s annual Bastille Day military parade by announcing the creation of a space command within France’s air force.\r\nStressing that France and Europe’s independence was at stake, the president said that the command would \"ensure our defense of space within space.\"\r\nThe move by France, the Continent’s leader in space, was the latest sign that the era of fighting in space — disabling or even shooting down satellites on which warfare on earth is increasingly dependent — was getting closer.\r\n\"Space is increasingly seen as a strategic asset, not only by the major space powers, but also by secondary powers like France,\" said Jean-Jacques Tortora, director of the European Space Policy Institute in Vienna. \"Space might potentially be the theater of military operations, and this justifies the setting up of dedicated space commands to manage these sorts of operations.\"\r\nBut for now, Europe is playing catch up. Pooling resources has helped Europe keep its leadership in the civilian use of space, experts say. But when it comes to militarizing space, Europe remains divided, with France facing resistance from Germany and other nations.\r\nThe result is that Europe’s military capacity in space ranks far behind the United States, China and Russia. The lack of a unified vision could constrain France’s ambitions for its space command.\r\nIn space-related activities in Europe, \"France is the biggest and most important country, but going it alone would be close to impossible,\" said Thomas Hoerber, a professor at the Essca School of Management and co-editor of the book, \"European Space Policy.\"\r\nMr. Macron hinted as much in his speech announcing the creation of the space command. While he spoke of reinforcing France’s \"strategic autonomy,\" he added that it must take place in a \"European framework.\"\r\nBut even there, the challenges were apparent.\r\nJust as Mr. Macron was set to announce the creation of the space command, Galileo, Europe’s satellite navigation system and its biggest joint project in space, was experiencing a systemwide \"outage.\"\r\nAll of its 22 orbiting satellites had gone offline. “The signals are not to be used,” Galileo’s operators said.\r\nInstead, Galileo’s users, including owners of the latest smartphones, were switched to signals from America’s Global Positioning System or other competitors.\r\nGalileo represented a united Europe’s lofty ambitions to carve out, in space, a place for itself among the world’s traditional and rising powers. But the systemwide shutdown was a reminder of how those ambitions have often been undermined by the European Union’s competing national interests and comparable lack of resources.\r\nLast year, the European Commission said it would merge its space-related activities in a single body called the E.U. Space Program.\r\nEmphasizing the need for European autonomy, the commission announced a budget of 16 billion euros from 2021 to 2027, about $18 billion, a 44 percent increase over the previous six-year period.\r\nMost of the money would go to programs with mainly civilian uses, like Galileo and Copernicus, a satellite observation system that allows for the precise monitoring of earth from space.\r\nMore satellites would be added to Copernicus’s constellation, increasing its capacity to monitor the environment and climate change, as well as manage the security at borders and at sea.\r\nThe plan also calls for increasing military capacity by beefing up the Governmental Satellite Communications system, which provides \"access to secure satellite communications for national authorities.\"\r\nThe growing threats in space, some experts said, could soften the view of Germany and other European nations toward military use.\r\n\"So France starts first,\" Mr. Tortora said, “and will call the more motivated to join.\"\r\nLast year, President Trump called for the establishment of a space force as a sixth branch of the American armed forces. Russia created its own space command in 2011. And China identified space as a critical part of its military strategy in a 2015 white paper on defense.\r\nFor France — a nation with longstanding military and civilian ambitions in space and with the biggest budget devoted to space activities in Europe — joining the club was a natural step, said Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of the Centre National d’Études Spatiales, the French space agency','2019-06-18',''),(108,'MH370 pilot was in control of plane ‘until the end’: investigators','New York Post','Politics',23,'https://nypost.com/2019/07/12/mh370-pilot-was-in-control-of-plane-until-the-end-investigators/ ','Yaron Steinbuch','The apparently depressed pilot of the Malaysian airliner that disappeared more than five years ago with 239 people aboard was in control of the plane \"until the end\" and made \"abnormal turns\" before crashing, according to French investigators.\r\nThe team was given access to a \"considerable amount\" of flight data from the doomed Boeing 777, which vanished shortly after taking off for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 8, 2014, news.com.au reported.\r\nThe data \"lends weight\" to suspicions that Capt. Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, who is widely believed to have been depressed, deliberately sent Flight MH370 into the Indian Ocean in a murder-suicide, according to a report in Le Parisien.\r\n\"Certain abnormal turns made by the 777 can only have been carried out manually. Someone was in control,\" said a source close to the inquiry, according to news.com.au.\r\n\"There is nothing to suggest anyone else entered the cockpit,\" the source added.\r\nLast month, Shah’s friends told aviation specialist William Langewiesche that he had become obsessed with two young models he had seen online after his wife left him — and that he \"spent a lot of time pacing empty rooms,\" the UK’s Telegraph reported.\r\n\"There is a strong suspicion among investigators in the aviation and intelligence communities that he was clinically depressed,\" Langewiesche wrote in The Atlantic magazine.\r\n\"Zaharie’s marriage was bad. In the past he slept with some of the flight attendants. And so what? We all do,\" one old pal told the magazine.\r\n\"You’re flying all over the world with these beautiful girls in the back. But his wife knew,\" the friend added.\r\nAn electrical engineer quoted in the mag said that after depressurizing the plane, the pilot probably made a climb that \"accelerated the effects of depressurizing, causing the rapid incapacitation and death of everyone in the cabin.\"\r\nOxygen masks in the main cabin were only designed to last 15 minutes, but the cockpit crew would have had access to oxygen that could have lasted for hours.\r\n\"The cabin occupants would have become incapacitated within a couple of minutes, lost consciousness, and gently died without any choking or gasping for air,\" wrote Langewiesche, who said Shah could have killed his co-pilot.\r\nIn July 2018, investigators released a 495-page report, saying the plane was taken off course by someone who deliberately manipulated the controls — but they were unable to determine who did it.\r\nThe only nation still conducting a judicial investigation into the crash is France, where two magistrates are looking into the deaths of three citizens, the wife and two children of Ghyslain Wattrelos.\r\nWattrelos, an engineer who met the judges on Wednesday, told le Parisien that he hoped \"that by analyzing all the data collected at Boeing they will discover a problem that will be obvious to them.\"\r\n\"For example, we know that the data initially provided by Malaysian authorities on the plane’s altitude were wrong,\" he said, adding that he remained convinced the plane was \"taken down\"\r\nThe judges informed him that Boeing had finally granted them access in late May to the vital flight data - including data from UK-based satellite company Inmarsat - at the plane maker’s headquarters in Seattle.\r\nAmong various conspiracy theories in the plane\'s disappearance are that it was shot down, flown to a secret location as a result of sensitive material aboard or even hijacked to North Korea, according to the UK’s Sun.','2019-07-12',''),(109,'French inventor to attempt to cross Channel on jet-powered flyboard ‘Flying soldier’ Franky Zapata expects to cross from France to England in 20 minutes','The Guardian','Sport',23,'https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/21/flying-soldier-to-attempt-channel-crossing-flyboard-franky-zapata','Kim Willsher','A former jetski champion and French military reservist who became known as the flying soldier after he invented a jet-powered hoverboard will attempt to cross the Channel this week.\r\nFranky Zapata, who impressed France with a demonstration of his flyboard at this year’s Bastille Day parade, has said he will make the crossing on Thursday to mark the 110th anniversary of Louis Blériot’s first cross-Channel airplane flight.\r\nZapata, 40, expects to cross from Sangatte near Calais to St Margaret’s Bay near Dover in 20 minutes, refuelling halfway and reaching speeds of up to 86.9mph (140km/h).\r\nIt’s the realisation of a dream, the inventor told Le Parisien, adding that he was very stressed. He said the Bastille Day demonstration was easy by comparison.\r\nI used 3% of the machine’s capabilities and I’ll need 99% for the Channel. It won’t be easy at all and I reckon I’ve a 30% chance of succeeding, he said.\r\nZapata said his flight had been approved by civil aviation authorities but not maritime officials who insisted stationing a ship to refuel the flyboard would pose a risk to shipping in the busy Channel.\r\nWe have advised against the crossing because it is extremely dangerous given the traffic in the Channel, one of the busiest (shipping) straits in the world, the French maritime authority said.\r\nAn official added that authorities were not banning the crossing and had asked Zapata to inform the French coastal search and rescue team before he took off in case of any problems.\r\nZapata said the decision had forced him to refuel once midway, instead of twice as he had planned – once in French waters, once in UK waters.\r\nThis has made the challenge 10 times more difficult, Zapata said. It’s a completely arbitrary and unreasonable decision.\r\nHe added that the take-off time would depend on weather conditions and he had not yet decided whether to refuel the kerosene-powered flyboard by landing on a ship or hovering over it, the latter being more risky but which would enable him to claim a true cross-Channel flight.\r\nAt France’s Bastille Day parade on 14 July, the president, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and other European leaders watched as Zapata flew above the Champs-Elysées brandishing a rifle.\r\nFlorence Parly, the French armed forces minister, said the flyboard could be tested for different kinds of uses, for example as a flying logistical platform or, indeed, as an assault platform.\r\nZapata was awarded a €1.3m grant for his Flyboard Air from the French government defence and procurement agency) last December. It is powered by five mini turbo engines and can run autonomously for about 10 minutes and reach speeds of up to 118mph (190km/h).','2019-06-21',''),(110,'France Moves to Tax Tech Giants, Stoking Fight With White House','The New York Times','Economy',23,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/business/france-digital-tax-tech-giants.html','Liz Alderman','PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron’s government waded into a potentially messy fight with the White House on Thursday as French lawmakers voted to impose a tax on Facebook, Google and other American technology giants despite a blunt warning from the Trump administration.\r\nThe measure, which the White House said could amount to an unfair trade practice, is likely to be signed into law by Mr. Macron within two weeks, placing France squarely in the cross hairs of President Trump’s escalating trade wars.\r\nThe finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, told the French Senate before the vote that Steven Mnuchin, the United States Treasury secretary, and Robert Lighthizer, the White House’s top trade negotiator, phoned him on Wednesday to say the United States is opening an investigation into the French tax using a mechanism Mr. Trump had already employed to impose sweeping tariffs on China.\r\nIt was the first time in the history of French-American relations that the United States had taken such a step, Mr. Le Maire said. “I believe that between allies we can and must sort out differences in other ways than by using threats,” he said.\r\n“France is a sovereign nation that decides its own tax rules. And this will continue to be the case,” he added.\r\nFrance has moved independently from the European Union to seek a tax on technology companies after little progress was made in creating Europe-wide rules to tax the largest tech platforms. Mr. Macron accelerated the French tax plan this year after waves of so-called Yellow Vest protesters forced his government to make billions of euros in spending concessions that widened the country’s budget shortfall.\r\nMr. Le Maire described Thursday’s vote as a pivotal moment in which governments needed to stand up to digital behemoths that he said were becoming the equivalent of sovereign states acting with virtual impunity as they maneuvered to keep their tax bills low across the world.\r\n“We’re being confronted with the emergence of economic giants that are monopolistic and that not only want to control the maximum amount of data, but also escape fair taxes,” he said. “It’s a question of justice.”\r\nFrance is seeking a 3 percent tax on the revenues that companies earn from providing digital services to French users. It would apply to digital businesses with annual global revenue of more than 750 million euros, or about $845 million, and sales of €25 million in France. That would cover more than two dozen companies, many of them American, including Facebook, Google and Amazon.\r\nThe government expects to collect around €500 million, or about $563 million. France’s General Assembly passed the bill last week.\r\nIn a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Lighthizer said the United States was “very concerned that the digital services tax which is expected to pass the French Senate tomorrow unfairly targets American companies.”\r\n“The president has directed that we investigate the effects of this legislation and determine whether it is discriminatory or unreasonable and burdens or restricts United States commerce,” Mr. Lighthizer said.\r\nThe European Commission last year proposed modernizing tax policies across the bloc as a way to keep pace with the digital economy, but countries have been unable to reach an agreement.\r\nThe Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is also trying to hammer out a deal for taxing digital companies across countries, but the slow pace of the talks has frustrated European nations.\r\nMr. Le Maire said that if anything, the disarray underscored the need for the United States to help formulate an accord on the international taxation of digital services. He urged Mr. Mnuchin to participate in accelerated talks at a meeting of finance ministers of the Group of 7 richest nations in Chantilly, France, next week.\r\nGovernments across Europe fear their tax base will fall as more commerce moves online because digital businesses are able to make use of subsidiaries in low-tax countries to avoid paying taxes elsewhere in Europe. The European Commission estimates digital companies pay an average effective tax rate of 9.5 percent, compared with 23 percent for more traditional businesses.','2019-07-11',''),(111,'French wine-makers hope for G7 detente with Trump over tariffs','The Guardian','Politics',24,'https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/23/french-wine-makers-hope-for-g7-detente-with-trump-over-tariffs','Angelique Chrisafis ','French wine-makers are increasingly concerned about Donald Trump’s threats to introduce high tariffs on French wine in retaliation for Emmanuel Macron’s tax on global technology companies, as world leaders gather for the Biarritz G7 summit this weekend.\r\nA new front in Trump’s international trade wars could open up across France’s vineyards, damaging the livelihoods and jobs of small producers, if the US president decides to substantially increase tariffs on French wine as punishment for what he has called the \'foolishness\' of the new levy on the annual revenues of technology companies.\r\nAlthough alcohol has no connection to Macron’s drive to make companies including Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple pay more and \'fairer\' tax, French wine is seen as a symbolic target by Trump. The US president sees the tech tax as attacking US companies and wants to retaliate, although Franceargues the tax is aimed at all tech firms, not just American ones.\r\nTrump began tweeting furiously about French wine last November, while attacking Macron over nationalism and world wars. He said of France’s own tariffs on imported wine, which are set by the EU: \'Not fair, must change!\'\r\nLast month he ramped up threats to hit French wine directly, tweeting that he would soon announce a \'substantial reciprocal action\' on what he called Macron’s “foolishness” over the technology tax. He added: \'I’ve always said American wine is better than French wine!\'\r\nThis month Bloomberg reported that Trump had floated the idea of going as far as putting a 100% tax on French wines at a business roundtable in the Hamptons.\r\nTrump is a proud teetotaller, but he recently told reporters he had \'always liked American wines better than French wines even though I don’t drink\'. He explained why: \'I just like the way they look.\'\r\nHis tweets prompted the inevitable joke in France: \'Make America grape again.\'\r\nFrance is a major wine-producing nation and the US is its biggest export market in value terms, accounting for 18% of French wine exports and worth €1.7bn (£1.5bn), up almost a third over the past five years. Wine is a crucial part of France’s identity and economy – its second-biggest export after aerospace in value terms.\r\nAmerican tariffs could prove hugely damaging to the many small French wine producers whose middle-market products sell for affordable prices in the US, particularly rosé wine, which is increasingly popular. Producers of the more expensive and exclusive \'grands crus\' vintage wines would likely be able to compensate elsewhere.\r\nBut small French producers, already concerned about difficulties in exporting to the UK after Brexit, are hoping the row can be contained at the G7 summit in Biarritz. They have seen how the high tariffs Trump put on Spanish olives hit farmers in Andalucía.\r\n\'We’re extremely concerned, it’s a worrying situation, you can’t deny it,\' said Marcel Perinet, a small organic and natural wine-maker in south-eastern France who makes sparkling rosé and exports 40% to the US and Canada.\r\nHe previously worked in the restaurant business and said he remembered a row in 2003 when France did not support the US-led war in Iraq and some French wines were poured down drains in protest. \'I lived through the impact of anti-French wine feeling in 2003 – it sorted itself out eventually but it was costly for a while,\' he said.\r\nPerinet said he had begun diversifying into different Asian markets to prepare and his US importer was already stocking up by ordering in more French wine in anticipation of a possible tariff rise. \'So far this year I’ve exported more volume to the US because of people stocking up,\' Perinet said. \'But I’m worried.\'\r\nThomas Montagne, the head of the European Confederation of Independent Winegrowers, is a producer in the Luberon, southern France. He said: \'Clearly we’re concerned all across France. The US is our first market in terms of value, and the UK, which is our second, is also facing uncertainty over Brexit.\'\r\nHe said people working in agriculture – including wine-makers – did not want to be \'hostages\' to politics any longer. Small producers account for 55% of the French wine harvest, and stood to lose the most, he said.\r\nThe French Federation of Wine and Spirit Exporters said it was \'extremely vigilant\' and urged the US and France to find a way to stop Trump’s threats being put into action.\r\nLast month, the French agriculture minister called Trump’s rationale in hitting French wine \'completely moronic\'.\r\nMacron stood by his technology tax this week, saying the current \'crazy\' system under which tech companies were able to book profits in low-tax countries, no matter where the revenue came from, gave them \'permanent tax haven status\'.\r\nFrance’s levy of 3% on the total annual revenues of the largest tech companies providing services to French consumers is not specifically aimed at US companies, but the big four of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are the highest profile.','2019-08-23',''),(112,'Rule 1 at the G7 Meeting? Don’t Get You-Know-Who Mad','The New York times','Politics',24,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/t-magazine/sota-atsumi-maison.html?searchResultPosition=13 ','Peter Baker','For a day, at least, everyone was on their best behavior when the cameras were on, eager to present a show of bonhomie after so many previous meetings ended in discord.\r\nBut behind the scenes at the annual gathering of some of the world’s leading powers, President Trump still found himself at odds with his counterparts on Sunday over issues like trade, climate change, North Korea, Russia and Iran.\r\nEver so gingerly, as if determined not to rouse the American’s well-known temper, the other Group of 7 leaders sought to nudge him toward their views on the pressing issues of the day, or at least register their differences — while making sure to wrap them in a French crepe of flattery, as they know he prefers.\r\nIt was far from clear the messages were received, or in any case at least welcome.\r\nLike other presidents, and perhaps even more so, Mr. Trump tends to hear what he wants to hear at settings like this, either tuning out contrary voices or disregarding them. Through hard experience, other leaders have concluded that direct confrontation can backfire, so they have taken to soft-pedaling disagreements.\r\n\r\nEven Trump favorites like Boris Johnson, the populist new prime minister of Britain, tread carefully. On Sunday, Mr. Johnson expressed qualms about Mr. Trump’s trade war with China, but appeared to take pains not to offend the easily offended president.\r\nAs the two met for the first time since the new prime minister’s installation a month ago, Mr. Trump said none of the other leaders in Biarritz had expressed concern about his guns-blazing trade war.\r\n\'No, not at all,\' he said. \'I haven’t heard that at all, no. I think they respect the trade war.\' He added: \'The answer is, nobody has told me that, and nobody would tell me that.\'\r\n\r\nBut Mr. Johnson proceeded to tell him exactly that, while characterizing it oh-so-deferentially as a \'faint, sheeplike\' dissent. \'We’re in favor of trade peace on the whole, and dialing it down if we can,\' the prime minister said.\r\nADVE\r\nFor his part, Mr. Trump largely stuck to diplomatic niceties, refraining from hate-tweeting his colleagues and leaving aside his caustic complaints about their military spending, economic policies or even French wine. He did not repeat his aides’ criticism of France for focusing the meeting on \'niche issues\' like climate change and African development rather than the global economy.\r\nWhile the president relishes confrontation, he tends to avoid conflict in person, saving his vitriol for long-distance social media blasts.\r\nNo one can say how the remainder of the meetings will go, or what will happen after he leaves. But everyone seemed determined to avoid the sort of blowup that marred last year’s Group of 7 meeting in Canada, when a stormy Mr. Trump refused to sign the final communiqué and lashed out at the host, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.\r\n\'Thus far, this has been really a great G-7,\' Mr. Trump gushed on Sunday, \'and I want to congratulate France and your president because they have really done a great job.\'\r\nThe lunch he had with President Emmanuel Macron was \'the best hour and a half I’ve ever spent with him,\' he said, and the dinner on Saturday with the other leaders \'was fantastic.\' And Prime Minister Johnson, he said, was \'the right man for the job.\'\r\nStill, even by Mr. Trump’s own account, the dinner did include a \'lively\' discussion about his desire to invite Russia to return five years after it was expelled from what was then called the Group of 8 for annexing Crimea through force of arms. The other leaders have rejected doing so until Russia reverses its intervention in Ukraine, saying it would reward aggression.\r\n\r\nAs host of next year’s Group of 7 meeting, to be held in the United States, Mr. Trump could theoretically invite Russia to attend as an observer, but he said he had not made up his mind about that yet.\r\n\r\n\'I think it’s advantageous,\' he said. \'I think it’s a positive. Other people agree with me, and some people don’t necessarily agree.\'\r\nThe dinner discussion on Saturday night also focused on Iran, an issue on which Mr. Trump broke with American allies by abandoning the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. Mr. Macron, who has tried to resolve the dispute, emerged thinking he had a consensus to convey to Iran: that the leaders agreed it should not have a nuclear weapon or destabilize the region.\r\nBut when Mr. Trump was asked about that on Sunday, he looked blank, as if he did not recall such a conversation.\r\n\'No, I haven’t discussed that,\' he said. Within hours, the Iranian foreign minister was making a surprise visit to Biarritz, invited by Mr. Macron, while American officials maintained a grim silence.\r\nThe president likewise found himself striking a different note than Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan regarding the recent string of short-range missile tests by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. Mr. Trump brushed them off, saying that while he was \'not happy\' about them, \'he’s not in violation of an agreement.\'\r\nBy that, Mr. Trump meant that Mr. Kim had not violated the understanding the two leaders had when they first met a year ago in Singapore that North Korea would not test long-range ballistic missiles or nuclear explosives.\r\n\r\nBut while Mr. Trump may not care about short-range missiles, Mr. Abe does, since they can easily reach Japan. He pointed out that the recent round of tests \'clearly violates the relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions\' and called them \'extremely regrettable.\'\r\nStill, as the two agreed on principles for a new trade pact, Mr. Abe, too, sought to avert a rupture with Mr. Trump.\r\n\'I would like to make sure that we — meaning, myself and President Trump — will always stay on the same page when it comes to North Korea,\' he said.\r\n\'Ultimately, we’re always on the same page,\' Mr. Trump agreed.\r\nIn his inaugural encounter with Mr. Trump as peers, Mr. Johnson demonstrated that he had learned from the difficulties his predecessor had with the American president. Even as he spoke out on the trade wars, Mr. Johnson was careful to first heap praise on Mr. Trump.\r\n\'Look, I just want to say I congratulate the president on everything that the American economy is achieving,\' Mr. Johnson said. \'It’s fantastic to see that.\'\r\nHaving dispensed with the compliments, he noted his country’s experience on trade.\r\n\'The U.K. has profited massively in the last 200 years from free trade and that’s what we want to see,\' Mr. Johnson said. \'We don’t like tariffs on the whole.\'\r\n\r\nMr. Trump took it in stride, but could not restrain himself entirely from poking back.\r\n\'How about the last three years?\' he said, challenging Mr. Johnson with a smile and referring to Britain’s anemic economy of late. \'Don’t talk about the last three. Two hundred, I agree with you.\'\r\nMr. Johnson laughed and left it at that. Any further disagreement would wait until the cameras left the room.\r\n','2019-08-25',''),(113,'The Parisian Chef Reimagining Classic French Cuisine','The New York Times','Art',24,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/t-magazine/sota-atsumi-maison.html?searchResultPosition=13','Alice Cavanagh','Sota Atsumi was part of a wave of rebellious French chefs. Now, he’s stepping out on his own, with a surprisingly traditional new project.\r\nAs spring turned to summer in 2018, one of the most coveted reservations in Manhattan offered a taste of a Paris restaurant that hadn’t yet opened. At Chefs Club, the NoLIta venue that invites culinary talent from around the world to take over its kitchen, the chef Sota Atsumi shared a preview of his eagerly awaited Maison, set to open in Paris this September. Over the course of the three-month residency, the Tokyo-born chef — who electrified the French food scene with his fresh interpretation of bistro dining at Clown Bar in Paris — served dishes like sardine beignets and savory pain perdu with lentils, egg and cuttlefish ragù, and with them, a thoughtful new proposal for French cuisine.\r\n\r\nAtsumi, 33, is a member of a new guard of Parisian chefs who have shrugged off their starched kitchen whites and traded the foam-finessed-foods of la grande cuisine française for something more personal and spontaneous. Along with Taku Sekine of Dersou and Bertrand Grébaut of Septime, Atsumi infused casual French bistro cuisine with the artistry of gastronomy, highlighting the integrity of biodynamic produce and funky natural wines. From the kitchens of small informal restaurants, these chefs embraced a more accessible attitude (and price point), distilling the best produce available into deceptively simple dishes with sometimes revelatory effect. Now, with Maison, Atsumi is about to make what might be his most rebellious move yet — with a turn toward traditional fine dining.\r\n\r\nThough undeniably entrenched in the adventurous bistronomiescene, Atsumi holds his formal training in the highest regard. \'The chefs I worked with really respect classic cuisine,\' Atsumi said one spring afternoon in Paris, in off-duty chef attire of baggy black pants, a white T-shirt and slip-on shoes. Tradition, for him, is thestarting point in a quest for new and unexpected ways of working with familiar ingredients and flavors. \'If I hadn’t had those foundations, I wouldn’t be able to do my work now,\' he said.\r\n\r\nAtsumi studied at the Tsuji Culinary Institute’s Lyon campus before cutting his teeth in the rigorous, Michelin-starred kitchens of the French superstar chefs Joël Robuchon and Michel Troisgros. He found his own beat when the acclaimed chef and restaurateurPierre Jancou recruited him in 2012 to cook for the pint-size 10th Arrondissement bistro Vivant. It was a turning point for Atsumi, not just because of the recognition he received but because he was introduced to the seasonal neo-bistro way of working with produce, in which nature dictates what is on the menu.\r\n\'In my previous restaurants, we would order everything from Rungis, the big wholesale food market outside of Paris, but at Vivant we dealt directly with suppliers and farmers,\' Atsumi says. \'You don’t order from a long list; they would just give you the best of what they had that day.\' There, he created dishes like celeriac cream with burrata and garden peas, and monkfish with grilled artichokes and poultry bouillon — though diners rarely encountered the same dish twice.\r\nAfter two years, Atsumi moved to the newly opened Clown Bar, a cozy contemporary bistro in a decadent belle epoque bar adjacent to the historic Cirque d’Hiver. A fashionable haunt with shareable small plates, Clown Bar became wildly popular largely because of Atsumi’s talent for fusing hearty French fare, like sweetbreads and brains, with unexpected flavors. His signature there was pithiviers de canard, a savory puff pastry pie assembled with equal parts duck breast and foie gras, served with a bright date-and-yuzu purée.\r\nAt the end of 2017, Atsumi left Clown Bar to begin work on Maison, collaborating with like-minded chefs on pop-ups from New York to Tokyo along the way. Maison returns him to a more reverential approach — right down to attentive service led by Aurélien Robert of the modern French favorite Table. \'I find restaurants in Paris too casual now. There’s too much loud music, drinking and smoking,\' Atsumi says. \'I want to return to a place that is a little quieter, more elevated.\'\r\n\r\nThe 40-seat restaurant will be in a two-story building with a gabled roof in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement, a hub of hip bars and bistros. Helping develop the concept is Atsumi’s wife, Akiko Otsu, who works at the famous lithography studio Idem Paris and serves as Maison’s artistic director, bringing in creative collaborators like the architect Tsuyoshi Tane, whose firm is renovating the space, and David Lynch, who created the Maison logo, a rendering of the restaurant’s name in cheery characters including a house, a fork and a sun.\r\nWhen Atsumi takes the reins in Maison’s spacious, exposed kitchen, he will compose menus strictly featuring French ingredients and sauveurs. But fans of the chef know to expect something more subtle than retreads of old favorites. \'Because of my background, I do want to do things a little differently,\' Atsumi says. \'It won’t be ‘classic’ — I will find another way.\'\r\n','2019-08-07',''),(114,'Macron insists any Brexit deal must guarantee stability in North','Irishtimes','Politics',24,'https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/macron-insists-any-brexit-deal-must-guarantee-stability-in-north-1.3994527','Lara Marlowe','French president Emmanuel Macron and British prime minister Boris Johnson have agreed to work through September for an agreement between the EU and UK on a negotiated Brexit.\r\nBut, Mr Macron insisted, any accord on the UK’s departure from the union must guarantee the stability of Ireland and the integrity of the EU’s single market.\r\nFollowing his meetings with Mr Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel this week, Mr Johnson has secured a commitment from the EU’s most important leaders that they will listen to proposals to change the withdrawal agreement by inserting alternatives to the Northern Ireland backstop in the coming weeks.\r\nHowever, both leaders, and the Government in Dublin, have made it clear that any proposals must achieve the same outcome as the backstop, and guarantee there will be no return to a hard border in Ireland. There is no expectation on the EU side that any new British proposals will achieve this.\r\nSpeaking to journalists earlier, the French president stressed the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the need to protect the peace there – the key point for the Irish Government since the Brexit process began.\r\nBoth leaders agreed Brexit must take place, out of respect for what Mr Macron called \'the sovereign choice made by the British people to leave the European Union\'.\r\n\r\nMr Johnson said the UK would \'under no circumstances . . . be instituting or imposing checks or controls at the Border\'. The British prime minister claimed there were \'ways of protecting the integrity of the single market and allowing the UK to exit from the EU whole and entire and perfect as it were\'.\r\nMr Macron said: \'The key elements of the withdrawal agreement and the Irish backstop are not just technical constraints or legal quibbling. They are genuine, indispensable guarantees to preserve stability in Ireland and the integrity of the single market, which is the basis of the EU.\'\r\n\r\nReigniting\r\nIn an earlier meeting with the Presidential Press Association, Mr Macron implied that Mr Johnson did not take seriously enough the risk of reigniting the conflict in Northern Ireland.\r\n\'There are still families whose children, brothers and sisters died in this conflict,\' the French president said. \'To think of reviving that, because it suits us, would be irresponsible. I consider that Irish peace is European peace. We must not allow it to be threatened by a political and institutional crisis in Britain.\'\r\nMr Macron also said Irish reunification and integration of the entire island in the EU \'would solve all the problems, but it is not up to France\'.\r\nIn Dublin, a Government spokeswoman noted the \'very strong solidarity from our European colleagues on the need for the backstop\'.\r\n\'It has been welcome to see the British prime minister reaffirm his desire to leave the EU with a deal, while also acknowledging that the onus is on the UK to come up with viable alternatives to the backstop,\' the Government said in a statement.\r\n\'It’s worth noting that the withdrawal agreement already allows for alternatives to the backstop, if they exist.\'\r\nIn Copenhagen, where he was meeting his Danish counterpart and addressing a meeting of diplomats, Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney said that the EU was not willing to unwind the withdrawal agreement, but would listen to whatever proposals the British government came forward with.\r\nIrish Government sources said they were happy with the strong stance taken by both Mr Macron and Dr Merkel in their meetings with Mr Johnson. While both held open the possibility of alternatives to the backstop, they also stressed the need for any British proposals to achieve the same outcome.\r\nMr Macron received Mr Johnson in the courtyard of the Élysée Palace, before French and EU but not British flags. The atmosphere between the two men was light-hearted, despite dire threats of shortages in Britain and transport chaos in the event of a \'hard Brexit\' on October 31st.\r\n','2019-08-23',''),(115,'Europe\'s next generation of football stars shine across the continent','CNN','Sport',24,'https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/19/football/eduardo-camavinga-joao-felix-kai-havertz-spt-intl/index.html','Matias Grez','With Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in the twilight of their careers, football fans are fretting about the gaping hole the pair will leave in the game once they retire.\r\nBut despite their inevitable departure appearing on the horizon, the sport looks to be in safe hands as several of the world\'s most promising stars shone for their teams across Europe\'s top leagues this weekend.\r\nSome of the best performances came from Joao Felix, Kai Havertz and precocious 16-year-old talent Eduardo Camavinga.\r\nAngolan teenager Camavinga - appearing in only his 10th senior game for Ligue 1 side Rennes - played a starring role in the victory over powerhouse Paris Saint-Germain, assisting for Romain Del Castillo to head home to winner.\r\nAfter a few breakthrough games last season, his performances this term have really started to turn heads as Rennes narrowly lost to PSG in the Champions\' Trophy and opened its Ligue 1 campaign with back-to-back wins.\r\nCamavinga was born in Angola and moved to France at the age of two, reports L\'Equipe. He was spotted by Rennes playing football in Fougères, 50 kilometers from the city, at the age of 13.\r\nHe signed his first professional contract with Rennes in December and, in an attempt to tie down his future at the club a little longer, signed an extension this week until 2022.\r\nThough a native of Angola, L\'Equipe say Camavinga is in the process of becoming a French citizen with a view to playing for the national team.\r\nBefore Sunday\'s win over PSG, Rennes manager Julien Stéphan warned of the exposure - and subsequent necessary protection - Camavinga will need.\r\n\"Exposed, because if he repeats the kind of performance that he achieved against Montpellier (1-0 on the opening day), he has chances to take a greater place in the team,\" Stephan explained.\r\n\"But also protected, because he is not yet seventeen years old, he is still building himself on a muscular level and he has not experienced a Ligue 1 sequence of matches with the intensity it requires yet.\"\r\nCamavinga was on the receiving end of several cynical fouls from frustrated PSG players - many of who cost tens of million of dollars - who rarely got anywhere near the ball when it was at his feet.\r\nHe may be tall for a 16-year-old - standing at six foot - but Camavinga\'s frame is slight, though it\'s not a part of the game his boss worries about.\r\n\"He\'s a very well-built person,\" Stephan said after the physical match. \"Who knows how to question himself, who knows how to do the right thing.\r\n\"He has a very interesting game, I\'m going to have to deal with it. I will talk to him so that he can grow up in conditions of serenity.\"\r\nFelix\'s flair\r\nIn Spain, Felix showed no signs of being weighed down by his hefty $142 million price tag as his dancing feet ran Getafe\'s defense ragged.\r\nDiego Simeone made the teenager the fifth most expensive player of all time in the summer but so far the Benfica academy product looks worth every penny.\r\nAfter receiving man of the match recognition in the 7-3 pre-season demolition of city rival Real Madrid, Felix began his La Liga career with a performance that showcased his immense talent.\r\nAtleti\'s new signing Kieran Trippier crossed for Alvaro Morata to head home the opening goal, before Felix\'s trickery -- a run which started with a nutmeg inside his own half -- won a penalty in the second period.\r\nMorata failed to convert but Atletico held on for victory at the first attempt in the post-Antoine Griezmann era.\r\nKai shines for Bayer\r\nBayer Leverkusen star Kai Havertz is by now accustomed to breaking records.\r\nIn 2016 he became the youngest debutant in Bundesliga history; in 2018 he became the youngest player to make 50 Bundesliga appearances; and last season he hit 17 goals to become the highest scoring teenager in a Bundesliga season.\r\nAfter narrowly missing out on the German player of the year award to Marco Reus, reports suggested several of Europe\'s major clubs would try and prize Bayer\'s star possession away.\r\nBut the 20-year-old remains at the club and scored a delightful chip in Saturday\'s opening-day 3-2 victory over Paderborn, becoming the second youngest player in history to reach 25 Bundesliga goals.\r\nBig things are predicted of the youngster this season, who seems more than likely to eclipse his performances from last season.\r\nTimeless talent\r\nThough this article may be about the stars of the future, a word has to go to 38-year-old Aritz Aduriz -- the veteran striker who continues to defy Father Time.\r\nPlaying in his final season of professional football, he came off the bench for Athletic Club with two minutes remaining in the opening game of the La Liga season.\r\nBut two minutes were all he needed, scoring a stunning bicycle kick to inflict an opening-day defeat on Barcelona.','2019-08-19',''),(116,'Couple face up to six years in jail for taking sand from Italian beach','CNN','Society',24,'https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/sardinia-sand-theft-arrest-scli-intl/index.html','Livia Borghese and Rob Picheta','We\'ve all been tempted to bring a little bit of paradise home from our holidays. But the urge has backfired on a French couple, who are facing up to six years in prison for removing sand from a beach in Sardinia, where they had been on vacation.\r\nThe Italian island\'s white sand is protected, and tourists face fines and even jail time for removing it from local beaches - but the couple say they did not realize they were committing a crime.\r\nPolice in the northern city of Porto Torres found the sand while making routine checks on cars waiting to board a ferry to Toulon in southern France.\r\nThey spotted some bottles filled with sand through the window of the car, and arrested the couple, a man and woman in their 40s, police told CNN.\r\nOverall, 14 plastic bottles containing around 40 kilograms (88 pounds) of white sand were seized, police said.\r\nThe couple were reported to a court in the city of Sassari for aggravated theft and they risk a fine of up to €3,000 ($3,300) and between one and six years\' imprisonment.\r\nPolice told CNN that the tourists said they were unaware of the laws about removing sand, but noted that the island\'s beaches have signs in several languages informing visitors.\r\nTheft of white sand and rocks from Sardinia\'s beaches is very common, a police officer said, and there is an illegal market for them on the internet.\r\n\"The people of Sardinia are very angry with tourists that steal shells and sand, because it\'s a theft (from) future generations that also puts at risk a delicate environment,\" the officer told CNN.\r\nSand thieves are usually picked up at airports, in bag searches and by scanners.\r\nA Facebook page, \"Sardegna Rubata e Depredata\" - \"Sardinia, robbed and plundered\" - which was set up by a group of security officials from the island\'s airports, campaigns against the depletion of Sardinia\'s beaches.\r\n\"The purpose of the page is to raise public awareness about this problem,\" one of the page administrators previously told CNN Travel.\r\n\"During the last 20 years of activity we have seized tens and tens of tons of material ... Every year we take care to bring everything back to the places of origin at the end of the summer season.\"','2019-08-19',''),(117,'Nearly 1,500 deaths linked to French heat waves','CNN','Society',25,'https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/08/europe/france-heat-wave-deaths-intl-hnk-scli/index.html','Joshua Berlinger','A pair of heat waves in France have been linked to the deaths of 1,435 people this summer by the country\'s health ministry.\r\nTwo bouts of record-setting heat hit France and other parts of Europe from June 24 to July 7, and July 21 to July 27. The French Health Ministry said in a news release that the death rate during the two heat waves was 9.1% percent higher than usual.\r\nFrance and much of Europe saw record-breaking temperatures this summer. France recorded its highest-ever recorded temperature -- 45.9 degrees Celsius (114.6 Fahrenheit) -- on June 28 in the southern town of Gallargues-le-Montueux, according to the French national weather service.\r\nExperts worry heat waves such like these, driven by rising temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions, could become the new normal for Europe.\r\nMuch of the continent isn\'t built to cope with extreme heat. Fewer than 5% of all European households are air-conditioned, according to a 2017 report, and public transport can grind to a halt in intense heat.\r\nElderly populations are particularly vulnerable. The French Health Ministry said 974 of the people whose deaths were linked to the summer heat were older than 75. Ten people died while working, the ministry said -- eight during the first wave and two in the second. The majority had been working outdoors.\r\nFrance has seen deadly heatwaves before. Similar episodes during the summers of 2015 and 2018 saw the death rates rise by 10.1% and 15%, respectively, the ministry said.\r\n','2019-09-09',''),(118,'France Upsets U.S. at Basketball World Cup','The New York Times','Politics',25,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/11/sports/basketball/world-cup-usa-loses-france.html?searchResultPosition=2','Marc Sten','The United States men’s national basketball team arrived at this FIBA World Cup fearing Giannis Antetokounmpo of Greece and, most of all, Nikola Jokic of Serbia. It turns out that the Americans, on top of their roster limitations, should have been worried most about Rudy Gobert of France.\r\nGobert and Evan Fournier, France’s inside-outside combination from the N.B.A., combined to torment the United States virtually from start to finish Wednesday night and inflict a stunning 89-79 quarterfinal defeat upon the two-time defending champions.\r\nThe United States had won 58 consecutive games in FIBA and Olympic competition, dating to its defeat to Greece in the 2006 world championship in Japan, which led to a bronze medal. It responded by winning the next five major championships in international basketball, including Olympic gold in 2008, 2012 and 2016.\r\nWednesday’s loss dumped the Americans into the fifth-place bracket and validated a summer’s worth of fears that they were vulnerable because of high-profile players declining to participate.\r\n\r\nThe early exit also heaped more disappointment on Coach Gregg Popovich’s national team career, which has been filled with uncharacteristic setbacks compared with his two decades of success in the N.B.A. with the San Antonio Spurs.\r\nThis World Cup was Popovich’s first competition as U.S.A. Basketball’s head coach after painful stints as an assistant coach in 2002 and 2004, when the United States finished sixth in the world championships in Indianapolis and third in the Athens Olympics.\r\n\'Any loss hurts,\' Popovich said. \'This situation hurts more, but life goes on. This is very important. We would have loved to have won, just like any other team would love to win all their games in this tournament. But we’re all grown. We all have families, lives, and life goes on.\'\r\nAfter falling behind by 7 in the fourth quarter, France rallied behind Gobert, Fournier and the Knicks’ much-maligned guard, Frank Ntilikina, who scored 7 crucial points in the final quarter and ended with 11.\r\nDonovan Mitchell of the Utah Jazz led the United States with 29 points in a breakout game, but he was scoreless in the fourth quarter as the United States’ team play, which had erased a 10-point deficit, fizzled at the worst time. The Americans also missed six fourth-quarter free throws.\r\n\r\nDespite all of its high-profile absentees, Popovich’s team arrived at the Dongguan Basketball Center with a 5-0 record. The United States was also buoyed by the knowledge that Serbia — widely considered the tournament’s foremost threat to the United States — had been eliminated by Argentina on Tuesday night in the World Cup’s other standout upset thus far.\r\nBut the French didn’t flinch. Showing its depth in the wake of the recent retirements of the longtime national team standouts Tony Parker and Boris Diaw, France advanced to a semifinal on Friday in Beijing against Argentina. Spain and Australia will meet in the other semifinal.\r\nThe United States, meanwhile, will be forced to play in Dongguan again Thursday night, against Serbia, in the consolation bracket. Many had expected those two teams to meet in the final.\r\nWednesday’s game was played on France’s terms virtually from start to finish — apart from a second-half stretch in which an extremely small lineup used by Popovich briefly neutralized Gobert.\r\nFournier, of the Orlando Magic, scored a team-high 22 points, while Gobert, also of the Jazz, amassed 10 free-throw attempts in the first half alone with his repeated drives to the rim and finished with 21 points and 16 rebounds.\r\nFrance grabbed its first double-digit lead early in the second half when Nicolas Batum of the Charlotte Hornets capitalized on a foul by Joe Harris of the Nets to complete a 4-point play.\r\nAlthough the Americans were undefeated in the first two rounds, there had been warning signs that their 13-year winning streak was in jeopardy. The United States lost an exhibition game in Australia last month and needed Turkey to miss four consecutive free throws with less than 10 seconds remaining in overtime in this tournament to escape with a 93-92 victory.\r\n\r\nThe United States on Wednesday was without the Boston Celtics’ Jayson Tatum, who sprained his left ankle in overtime in the Turkey game.\r\nThe only solace for the Americans is that they qualified for the 2020 Olympics before the loss to France by finishing in the top two of Western Hemisphere teams, alongside Argentina.\r\n\'It’s the best French team I’ve seen, because they play both ends of the court,\' Popovich said.\r\n','2019-09-11',''),(119,'How do you stop French tech firms from moving to the US once they start eyeing the big time? Part of the solution is finding them access to funding at home in France.','The Local','Economy',25,'https://www.thelocal.fr/20190919/france-makes-major-investment-in-homegrown-start-ups','N/A','French President Emmanuel Macron has made the continent\'s latest move to muster help for homegrown start-ups, promising five billion euros ($5.5 billion) of tech investments over the next three years.\r\nThe funds, pledged by banks, insurers and other big investors, include two billion euros earmarked for \'late stage\' projects requiring significant amounts usually out of reach to burgeoning EU firms.\r\n\'The battle we\'re fighting is one of sovereignty,\' Macron told tech executives and venture capitalists at an Elysee Palace dinner on Tuesday.\r\n\'If we don\'t build our own champions in all new areas -- digital, artificial intelligence -- our choices... will be dictated by others,\' he said.\r\nOfficials across Europe fear being left behind as American giants, and more recently Chinese firms, increasingly dominate the cutting-edge technologies crucial to future economic growth.\r\nYoung European start-ups generally have plenty of access to venture capital, with $23 billion (20.8 billion euros) invested last year, according to the investment firm Atomico.\r\nThe problem is that after getting an idea off the ground, firms often struggle to find the larger amounts of money needed to propel a business into the big leagues.\r\n\'There aren\'t any large funds with the capacity for putting up 50, 100 or 200 million euros,\' Olivier Novasque of Sidetrade, a business software editor, told AFP.\r\n\'But in the digital realm, you have to be thinking right away about conquering the world\' and quickly scaling up operations before a rival does, said Novasque, a former vice president of the Tech in France trade body.\r\nFrench \'unicorns\'?\r\nUS laws also make it easier to give employees stock options, an attractive tool for young firms that are ramping up operations.\r\n\'Policies that currently govern employee ownership across Europe are often archaic and highly ineffective. Some are so punishing that they put our startups at a major disadvantage to their peers in Silicon Valley and elsewhere,\' the Notoptional collective of tech entrepreneurs wrote in an open letter in January.\r\nAs a result, European firms often jump the Atlantic to tap into the much deeper American capital markets, where pension funds and other institutional investors are more willing to make big bets on tech.\r\nIn the first quarter of this year alone, nearly $31 billion was poured into start-ups in the US, with so-called \'mega rounds\' of financings larger than $100 million making up 29 percent of the total, according to TechCrunch.\r\nIn Europe, however, pension funds are barely present in the tech sector, with Atomico estimating they have invested just $350 million a year in aggregate since 2013.\r\n\'That\'s less than 0.01 percent of total assets under management of European pension funds of around $4 trillion,\' the firm wrote in its State of European Tech report in December.\r\n\'We can write checks of up to 45 million euros,\' said Jean-Marc Patouillaud of Partech Ventures, a major investor in French start-ups.\r\n\'But you have to be able to raise more than that, and we wouldn\'t want to be on our own for major capital-raisings\', he said recently on BFM television.\r\nIf firms had access to bigger investment pools, \'there\'s no reason why we can\'t see tech giants emerge in Europe,\' said Yann du Rusquec, managing director of investment firm Eurazeo Croissance.\r\n\'The competence and ambitions of European entrepreneurs are really quite strong -- that wasn\'t so much the case 10 or so years ago,\' he added.\r\nMacron said Tuesday his ambition is to see 25 \'unicorns\' -- firms valued at more than $1 billion ahead of expected share offerings -- by 2025.\r\nAs his digital affairs minister Cedric O regularly points out, the last time an unlisted French company was valued that high was in 1996, with software group Dassault Systemes.\r\n\'The important thing is for Emmanuel Macron to send a message to the entire French financial sector, that it has to invest in tech,\' du Rusquec said.','2019-09-19',''),(120,'Thieves tie up French chateau owners and steal €2m of jewels and cash','The Guardian','Society',25,'The Guardian','N/A','The owners of a 17th-century French castle were tied up as their opulent home was ransacked by robbers who fled with a haul worth €2m (£1.8m), authorities have said.\r\nThe Vaux-le-Vicomte palace, set amid sumptuous gardens about 30 miles south-east of Paris, has been owned by the same family since 1875. Patrice and Cristina de Vogüé opened the estate to the public in 1968, and run it with their three sons.\r\nBéatrice Angelelli-Lamotte, a prosecutor, said there were six thieves and they did not appear to be armed.\r\nThe chateau was built by Louis XIV’s finance minister Nicolas Fouquet, who according to legend fell from grace in 1661, shortly after the building work was finished, when he staged an elaborate party there and aroused the Sun King’s envy.\r\nFouquet spent the rest of his life in jail. The monarch then seized the castle and moved its most precious artworks and other objects to Versailles.\r\nIt is the largest privately-owned heritage site in France, sprawled over 500 hectares (1,200 acres), and gets about 250,000 visitors each year.\r\nThe chateau often stands in for Versailles for movie and television productions, including the Roger Moore James Bond film Moonraker and Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette.\r\nIt has also become a prize spot for celebrity wedding parties, such as the 2007 wedding of the French basketball star Tony Parker and the Desperate Housewives actor Eva Longoria. They later divorced.','2019-09-19',''),(121,'France OKs bill legalizing IVF for lesbians, single women','The Washington post','Society',26,'https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/french-lawmakers-to-vote-on-giving-ivf-to-lesbians-singles/2019/10/15/8fbb839a-ef4d-11e9-bb7e-d2026ee0c199_story.html','Sylvie Corbet and Catherine Gaschka','France’s lower house of parliament on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a bill that aims to give single women and lesbian couples legal access to in vitro fertilization, egg freezing and fertility medication.\r\n\r\nThe assisted reproduction measures are part of a broader bioethics bill voted by the National Assembly, the lower house, where French President Emmanuel Macron’s government has a majority. The bill passed 359-114. It must still go to the Senate for debate.\r\n\r\nFrance’s health care system would cover the cost of the assisted reproduction procedures for all women under 43.\r\n\r\nFrench law currently allows in vitro fertilization and related procedures only for infertile heterosexual couples. Many ineligible French women travel abroad to undergo IVF treatment.\r\n\r\nSandrine Rudnicki, 38, a single woman who lives near Orleans in central France, went to Denmark for IVF treatment and now is the mother of a 10-month-old daughter, Emilia.\r\n\r\nShe said she’s \'delighted\' in-vitro fertilization is set to become legal for women like her because she feels like her family of two is \'not accepted\' under the current situation.\r\nRudnicki estimated it cost about 10,000 euros ($10,997), travel included, for her to get IVF in another country.\r\n\r\n\'This erases all sorts of inequalities,\' she said added.\r\n\r\nLesbian couples, single women or both already have legal access to medically assisted reproduction in 18 of the European Union’s 28 countries.\r\n\r\nFrance’s pending legislation also would allow children conceived with donated sperm to find out the donor’s identity upon demand when they reach age 18, a change from France’s current strict donor anonymity protections.\r\n\r\n\'For me it’s something which is indispensable. It will enable these children to have a foundation, a reference\' Rudnicki said.\r\n\r\nThe legislation does not address surrogate motherhood arrangements, which are banned in France.\r\nEarlier this month, tens of thousands of conservative activists of all ages marched through Paris to oppose the bill. The Oct. 6 protest was organized by the same groups behind 2013 demonstrations against France legalizing same-sex marriages.\r\n','2019-10-15',''),(122,'New Zealand’s Julian Savea scores hat-trick in nine-try rout of France','The Guardian','Sport',26,'https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/oct/17/new-zealand-france-rugby-world-cup-match-report','N/A','No French frolics this time, just pure black magic. The record books will show that New Zealand cruised into the World Cup semi-finals without a backward glance but give little hint of the cruel beauty of this nine-try exhibition. This was attacking rugby par excellence, performed by a side who prefer the stiletto to the lead piping. If they keep playing like this, the Webb Ellis Cup is heading in only one direction.\r\nTheir next opponents, South Africa, will offer a rather stiffer challenge than France were able to do but the Springboks are not in the same league in terms of making neutrals gasp at the quality of their execution. New Zealand scored four tries in the first half alone and three of them, in their different ways, ranked alongside any of the excellent scores previously seen at this spectacular tournament. To be in Cardiff to witness them was to be simultaneously entranced and grateful.\r\nEven France can console themselves they lost out to a good side playing like a great one. In the space of 15 minutes towards the end of the first half, in particular, the All Blacks were irresistible. Nehe Milner-Skudder’s devastating sidestep, Dan Carter’s sweet back-handed off-load, Julian Savea’s scarily convincing Jonah Lomu impression … all three suggested a New Zealand team whose days of freezing on the big occasion, particularly against French opposition, are long gone.\r\nFrom the moment Freddie Michalak’s attempt at a clearing punt was charged down by the marauding Brodie Retallick to give the All Blacks the softest of try-scoring starts after just 10 minutes the outcome was never in doubt. Louis Picamoles, until being sent to the sin-bin for trying to wipe the smile off the prone Richie McCaw’s face, was a one-man band of bristling resistance while Scott Spedding at full-back also gave everything – but they fought a forlorn battle.\r\nThe pressure is now well and truly on the northern hemisphere.\r\nJust as Wales’s near miss made life a little harder for France, the onus is now on Ireland and Scotland to paper over the shortcomings of others. If not it will be the first time in World Cup history that the south have enjoyed a clean sweep. Given where the tournament is being staged it would be a deeply uncomfortable statistic.\r\nAll they can do, in the short term, is marvel at New Zealand’s ability to make the brilliant look pretty routine. Savea had previously scored five tries without setting Britain alight. His hat-trick here, however, not only brought him level with Lomu and Bryan Habana for the most tries ever scored in a World Cup tournament but maintained a Test strike rate that ranks with that of any player in the history of the game.\r\nHe now has 38 tries in 39 games, few of them better than the 38th-minute stunner that took him past and through Picamoles, Brice Dulin and Rabah Slimani in a manner reminiscent of Lomu’s flattening of Mike Catt in Cape Town in 1995.\r\nHe was far from alone. It is often the little things that make the difference with New Zealand and their massive victory was founded on impeccably constructed foundations. When Guilhem Guirado charged down Carter’s attempted drop goal early in the second quarter, for example, it briefly seemed as though France might have a glimmer of an opportunity.\r\nInstead, in the blink of an eye, there were three All Blacks back behind the ball, offering a means of escape. A couple of rucks later and Ma’a Nonu’s reflex catch and sympathetic pass to Milner-Skudder saw the winger pinball off his right foot and leave Dulin for dead.\r\nAn isolated instance of class? Hardly. Carter is supposed to be past it but his arcing run, change of pace and perfectly timed flip out of the back door to Savea six minutes later recalled his heyday in Wellington against the Lions in 2005. New Zealand, in the process, became the first team to score 300 tries at Rugby World Cups. No one else has even topped 200.\r\nThe chances of the All Blacks being overhauled from 24-6 down were nonexistent, even after Picamoles charged through to restore a little order. Savea’s party piece made it 29-13 at half-time, however, and what followed was total carnage. Jerome Kaino benefited from Beauden Barrett’s artful scoring pass, Savea stormed unstoppably clear for his third, the replacement scrum-half Tawera Kerr-Barlow scored a quickfire brace and Nonu came close to adding a 10th try with a vivid late surge.\r\nBefore kick-off the World Cup authorities did their best to ramp up expectation by replaying excerpts from the 2007 quarter-final between these sides. The supposed sequel bore no similarity whatsoever.\r\nTalk about southern comfort. At least the 2015 World Cup party has embraced all-comers off the field. This was a Cardiff rugby weekend in excelsis: French, Kiwis, Argentinians and Irish pouring into city pubs along with the half of Wales who were not actually at Twickenham. Had more of them been able to gain entry, rather than standing in the street, the bar profits would have been monumental. Not only were people watching from outside through the windows they were even doing so from the pavement on the other side of the road.\r\nThe chasm separating New Zealand at their best from the pedestrian European majority is wider still.\r\nNew Zealand B Smith; Milner-Skudder (Barrett 42), C Smith, Nonu, Savea; Carter, A Smith; Crockett (Moody 28), Coles, O Franks, Retallick, Whitelock, Kaino, McCaw (capt), Read Tries Retallick, Milner-Skudder, Savea 3, Kaino, Read, Kerr-Barlow 2 Cons Carter 7 Pen Carter.\r\nFrance Spedding; Nakaitaci, Dumoulin, Fofana, Dulin; Michalak (Tales 10), Parra; Ben Arous, Guirado, Slimani, Pape, Maestri, Dusautoir (capt), Le Roux, Picamoles Sin-bin Picamoles 47 Try Picamoles Con Parra Pens Spedding, Parra\r\n','2019-10-17',''),(123,'Paris’s digital art museum launches ambitious interactive competition','The Guardian','Politics',26,'https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2019/oct/18/paris-atelier-des-lumires-festival-graphic-and-immersive-digital-design-competition','Brid Stenson','Out of the darkness of the large stone foundry in Paris, Alice in Wonderland emerges. Flitting between the dimly lit woodland which has popped up around us and in search of adventures, Alice is off to explore a succession of surreal worlds as pop music thuds around the venue and it feels like we – gallery visitors – are running through the trees with her. In the distance, the moonlight glistens on the water. The black and white animated short, an adaptation of Lewis Carroll\'s Alice\'s Adventures in Wonderland, is the creation of Cutback, a France-based studio best known for providing musicians such as Johnny Hallyday with graphic screens and backdrops for concerts.\r\nBut on Friday night, it\'s one of 11 artistic collectives from France, Ireland and Turkey competing in Paris\'s first Interactive art festival at the Atelier des Lumières in north-east Paris operated by Culturespace, a French museum foundation that specialise in immersive art displays. This year, for its inaugural immersive art festival, the focus is on digital design as a form of artistic expression in its own right.\r\nEach evening between 18 and 24 October, the 11 competing teams will put on a four-minute immersive show that will flow around the large space, using techniques that combine video, photography, motion design and specialised sound, immersing audiences in their art.\r\nOne of the greatest talking points and most frightening parts of the screening was the large monstrous spider wandering alongside me as I leant on a concrete wall. Cokau Lab has created an imaginary planet by photographing real life creatures, including centipedes and tarantulas, using an innovative lighting technique.\r\nEach evening between 18 and 24 October, the 11 competing teams will put on a four-minute immersive show that will flow around the large space, using techniques that combine video, photography, motion design and specialised sound, immersing audiences in their art.\r\nOne of the greatest talking points and most frightening parts of the screening was the large monstrous spider wandering alongside me as I leant on a concrete wall. Cokau Lab has created an imaginary planet by photographing real life creatures, including centipedes and tarantulas, using an innovative lighting technique.\r\nThe focus of this project may be to give the public a chance to experience new artists through innovative technologies, but it also shows how visitors can engage and share art when digital design and interactive experiences are combined on such an ambitious scale.\r\nMuseum goers can interact and vote on the creations via an app and, combined with a jury, a winner will be announced on October 24 and house an exhibition in the Atelier for six months.\r\nThis experimental festival opens possibilities to innovation and storytelling in ways I had never previously imagined. It\'s possible the museum of the future starts here.','2019-10-18',''),(124,'Macron ally exposes ONLY condition EU will grant Brexit delay amid threat to veto request','Express','Politics',26,'https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1193466/Brexit-news-Macron-EU-extension-delay-Boris-Johnson-deal-BBC-today-radio-4-UK','Katie Westion','FRENCH MP Bruno Bonnell outlined the EU\'s one condition for a short term Brexit extension and warned the bloc could refuse a delay, during an interview on BBC’s Today Programme.\r\nThe French businessman told BBC Radio 4\'s Today Programme: \'First of all I think that the EU doesn’t want any extension.\r\n\'It seems to be necessary for some in case of an agreement by October 31, but I don\'t see an extension coming without conditions.\r\n\'Meaning that especially this regulation that you have to put in place at the Parliament to make the Withdrawal Agreement effective, I think that would be probably a condition for a short-term extension at this point.\'\r\nBBC host Mishal Husain asked: \'When you say the EU doesn\'t want it, is it possible that they might actually refuse it?\'\r\nMr Bonnell replied: \'Well it might as said before and many times in the papers, there is a feeling of being upset with the situation. The EU needs to protect itself, and October 31 was a really slow deadline.\r\n\'Now pushing it further for technical reasons might be okay, but pushing it further in the midst of no decision might probably be a no.\'\r\nThe BBC radio presenter questioned: \"And that is led by President Macron, that view?\'\r\nThe French MP said: \'That\'s the position of President Macron, just for the mere fact that the EU needs to move on and it\'s blocking a decision right now and this endless postponing doesn\'t make any good, neither for UK or for Europe at this point.\'\r\nThe comments follow Mr Johnson tabling a meaningful vote on his newly agreed Brexit deal in the Commons this afternoon, but Speaker John Bercow could scupper his plans. The Commons Speaker will have the final say on whether the vote is held and could block the request after MPs passed the Letwin amendment on Saturday, to delay making a decision on the withdrawal agreement.\r\nMr Bercow, who is due to resign at the end of the month, told MPs during Saturday\'s special sitting: \'Rather than pronounce with sound and fury now, I will reflect on the matter and report to the House on Monday.\'\r\n','2019-10-21',''),(125,'Bricks of ‘very pure’ cocaine keep washing up on French beaches ','New York Post','Society',27,'https://nypost.com/2019/11/11/bricks-of-very-pure-cocaine-keep-washing-up-on-french-beaches/','Michael Kaplan','It takes a lot to shock on a French beach, where topless sunbathing is the norm.\r\nBut giant bricks of cocaine littering the beaches have managed to raise a few eyebrows.\r\nPackages of \'very pure\' cocaine and other drugs have been washing up on France’s southwestern shores over the past several weeks, the Guardian reports. The drug parcels — wrapped in clear or black plastic and labeled \'diamante\' or \'brillante\' — have been plaguing a 310-mile or so strip of the country’s Atlantic coast, stretching from the regions Loire-Atlantique (which includes Nantes) to Landes (near the Spanish border).\r\nNew bundles are appearing daily. So far, about 1,675 pounds of the dangerous substances — valued in excess of $66 million — have surfaced on French shores. On Sunday alone, 30 pounds of drug packages were found in Pornic, a beach town about an hour’s drive from Nantes.\r\nFrench authorities believe the drugs \'very probably\' originated in South America, and are investigating the possibility that a drug trafficker’s boat sank in the ocean.\r\nIn the meantime, French police are urging beachgoers not to touch any of the packages, and to report them immediately to the authorities.\r\n\'It’s a very pure product that must not be consumed in this form because there is a very high risk of overdose,\' Philippe Astruc, a public prosecutor from the French town of Rennes, told France 2. \'There is absolutely an immediate health risk.\'\r\n','2019-11-11',''),(126,'Digital democracy will face its greatest test in 2020','The Guardian','Politics',27,'https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/25/digital-democracy-will-face-its-greatest-test-in-2020','Siva Vaidhyanathan','After a decade of shallow proclamations of their democratic potential, it’s clear that Facebook, Twitter and Google are major threats to democracy\r\nBetween the December 2019 elections in the United Kingdom and the November 2020 elections in the United States, the major global tech platforms will probably scramble to neutralize calls for their regulation or dismemberment.\r\nUnder the oxymoronic rubric of “self-regulation”, Facebook, Twitter and Google are already considering ways to appear responsible and protective of the integrity of those two elections. Twitter has pledged to stop running political ads, and both Google and Facebook are considering suspending precise targeting of political ads.\r\nIn 2016 Facebook played pivotal roles in the election of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, the Brexit referendum and the electoral college victory of Donald Trump in the United States.\r\nThe shocks of 2016 awakened journalists and regulators to the ways that social media undermines democracy. After a decade of shallow proclamations of their democratic potential, it’s clear that Facebook, Twitter and Google are, in fact, major threats to democracy.\r\nFirst, their targeted advertising services sever any sense of democratic accountability from the campaigns and parties that deploy them. Ads only reach the eyes for which they are intended – and thus never face scrutiny or response from opponents, critics or journalists.\r\nSecond, their algorithms amplify divisive, emotionally triggering content that can distract or disgust voters and undermine trust in democratic politics, institutions and ethnic or religious minorities.\r\nAnd third, Facebook, Twitter and Google are designed to motivate people to do things like shop or vote. They undermine efforts to deliberate or think deeply about problems. Democracies need both motivation and deliberation.\r\nThe fate of Trump – lifted into office in 2016 in part by the power of Facebook to motivate and organize his core white nationalist supporters – preoccupies both critics and champions of Facebook, Twitter and Google.\r\nBut more than 60 countries will hold elections in 2020. Facebook and Google will be important variables in almost all of them. The first of these elections will be in January in Taiwan, where more than 89% of adults use Facebook regularly – a much higher percentage than almost any other country. With an eye on the unrest in Hong Kong and the mainland government’s brutality toward Muslim groups in western China, tensions will be high. Expect agents of the People’s Republic of China to flood Facebook with propaganda.\r\nOther 2020 elections where Facebook and Google are likely to play a role include those in Poland, Greece, Moldova and France. The French senate elections are likely to be flooded by propaganda from ethno-nationalist forces domestically and anti-European Union efforts from outside. Parliamentary elections in Serbia, Lithuania, Georgia, Peru and Venezuela are also sure to be fraught.\r\nBut developed countries like France and the US should be able to take care of themselves. Their public spheres are robust and diverse. Citizens of both countries have many sources of information and many ways to communicate with each other. Despite seeing its two major postwar parties crumble in recent years, voters in France have managed to keep proto-fascists out of power in most of the country. And Trump’s unpopularity is firm, widespread and could grow as impeachment efforts progress.\r\nInstead, we should attend to the places where citizens have little but Facebook through which to view their countries, governments and the world.\r\nMyanmar and Sri Lanka will both hold parliamentary elections in 2020. Both countries also have Buddhist majorities that have grown violent and defensive in recent years. Sri Lanka only recently emerged from a decade of civil war against its Tamil, mostly Hindu, minority. In Myanmar, nationalists use Facebook to stoke hostility toward a minority Muslim ethnic group, the Rohingya.\r\nDespite years of pleas and warnings by human rights groups, Facebook has failed to make any major changes to how it operates in Sri Lanka or Myanmar.\r\nIn an effort to head off serious regulatory scrutiny in Europe and North America, the big three – Facebook, Twitter and Google – have all lately taken to proposing various internal reforms. Yet their efforts have been focused on the experiences of Europeans and North Americans.\r\nAdvertisement\r\nDon’t judge their efforts by how things go for Donald Trump in 2020. Look to Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar.\r\n','2019-11-25',''),(127,'A bout with soufflé: chef\'s fight with Michelin guide reaches French court','The Guardian','Society',27,'https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/nov/27/a-bout-with-souffle-chefs-fight-with-michelin-guide-reaches-french-court','N/A','It began with the alleged snubbing of a cheese soufflé and turned into one of the most vicious battles in French restaurant criticism.\r\n\r\nThe row between the celebrity French chef Marc Veyrat and the Michelin guide will go before a French court on Wednesday as the chef tries to force inspectors to hand over their confidential judging notes to explain why his restaurant in the French Alps was stripped of its coveted third star.\r\nThe case is the first time a chef has sued the French institution to force it to hand over the notes of anonymous inspectors.\r\n\r\nVeyrat\'s La Maison des Bois restaurant in Manigod was demoted to two stars from the maximum three in January, a year after he secured the industry’s highest ranking.\r\n\r\nHe claimed the downgrade came after a Michelin inspector mistakenly thought he had adulterated a cheese soufflé with English cheddar, instead of using France’s reblochon, beaufort and tomme varieties. \"I put saffron in it, and the gentleman who came thought it was cheddar because it was yellow. That\'s what you call knowledge of a place? It’s just crazy,\" Veyrat told France Inter at the time.\r\n\r\nThe Michelin guide entry on the restaurant did not mention cheese soufflé.\r\n\r\nVeyrat, 69, made his name with his so-called \"botanical\"cooking, using the wild herbs gathered around his restaurants in his native Haute Savoie region. He has described how botanists collect the plants for use daily in his kitchen, while eggs and milk come from animals raised nearby.\r\n\r\nThe chef, known for his wide-brimmed black Savoyard hat, recently told radio and TV programmes that the downgrade had left him depressed for eight months, that his whole kitchen team cried at the news, and he only found the strength to keep going thanks to his partner\'s support. He told Le Quotidien TV programme last month: \"I come from a rural background, we have honour. And when honour is hit like that in such an unjust way, it\'s terrible.\"\r\n\r\nVeyrat maintains that he has a right to know the detailed reasoning that led the Michelin guide to demote him. He has sought to make the guide hand over the inspector\'s notes and the bill to prove they had eaten at his restaurant. He also hopes the court will order Michelin to provide details on its judging criteria, its evaluation methods and how it trains the inspectors working for its restaurant guide.\r\nThe chef previously asked for his restaurant to be removed from the guide but Michelin, which says it serves its readers, would not comply.\r\n\r\nVeyrat\'s lawyers have said they hope the court in Nanterre, west of Paris, would make the Michelin guide hand over relevant documents. Veyrat is asking for a symbolic €1 (85p) in damages.\r\n\r\nWhen Veyrat announced he would sue, the Michelin guide responded that the chef was merely asking for documents and this showed he had no case against them. The guide said it understood the chef’s disappointment but said its \"first duty\" was to inform consumers.\r\n\r\nThe Michelin guide\'s lawyer, Richard Malka, told Agence France-Presse that Veyrat\'s case went against the constitutional right to freedom of expression, calling it a case of \"pathological egotism\". The guide is asking for €30,000 in damages.','2019-11-27',''),(128,'These French researchers are stranded in Antarctica. Help is finally on the way','Washington Post','Politics',27,'https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/11/26/these-researchers-are-stranded-antarctica-help-is-finally-way/','Kayla Epstein ','The French research crew had endured a long, difficult winter at their station on a tiny cluster of islands just off the Antarctic coast, but relief was on the way.\r\n\r\nUntil it wasn\'t.\r\n\r\nThe French icebreaker L\'Astrolabe was set to deliver supplies and a fresh batch of explorers to the Dumont d\'Urville research station south of Australia, but on Nov. 15, France\'s Polar Institute announced the ship\'s propeller had been damaged. \"In the ice you have to take no risk with the security of the passengers and of the crew,\" Capt. Celine Tuccelli told ABC News Australia this week.\r\n\r\nA total of 42 researchers were stranded, possibly for weeks, in a situation that the leader of France\'s mission at Dumont d\'Urville, Alain Quivoron, told ABC was \"frustrating.\"\r\n\r\n\"Most of the younger members of the mission would have been happy to stay longer, but the older ones find the situation inconvenient and would have preferred to come back to their families,\" Quivoron said.\r\nFortunately, Australia is coming to the rescue.\r\n\r\nLast week, the Australian government pledged to dispatch an icebreaker to Dumont d\'Urville and another French Italian research base at Concordia. The Aurora Australis will arrive in Hobart, Tasmania, at the end of the month and then push south in early December to bring the weary explorers home.\r\n\r\nL\'Astrolabe, the faulty ship, is just over two years old, completed in 2017 to replace an older vessel of the same name.\r\n\r\n\"There is a great spirit of cooperation and support among the nations working in Antarctica and we are very happy we can help our French colleagues when needed,\" Australian Antarctic Division Director Kim Ellis said in a statement.\r\n\r\nIt wasn\'t just people who wanted to get out of Antarctica that were held up; crew members eager to get to the remote research station celebrated Australia\'s intervention, as well. French meteorologist François Gourand celebrated the news on Twitter and on his blog and expressed his relief that the trip would continue despite the hiccup.\r\n\r\nFrench Polar Institute Director Jerome Chappellaz praised the decision, noting that without the intervention, \"keeping our research stations running and undertaking scientific research would have been extremely difficult.\"\r\n','2019-11-27',''),(129,'Empty Hotels and Salmon Stuck in Traffic: Strike Bites French Economy','The New York Times','Society',28,'https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/business/france-strike.html?searchResultPosition=7',' Liz Alderman','Rail and subway strikes are causing lost sales, lost bookings and lost time throughout the country.\r\nPARIS — Glittering with Christmas decorations, Galeries Lafayette, a famed department store in central Paris, typically draws up to 80,000 visitors a day during the holidays.\r\nBut on a recent weekday morning, an uncharacteristically small crowd browsed designer clothes and artisanal chocolates in the grand halls. Employees smiled and pointed to discount signs, though few were ringing up sales.\r\nIn front of the store, Gabriel Vassor, a barista, tried to lure customers to his sidewalk coffee stand with free cookies, to no avail. \'Revenue is 40 percent lower than what it should be at this time of year,\' he said, as harried pedestrians marched past. \'We’re taking a big hit.\'\r\nAs France heads into a third week of rail and subway strikes over a planned overhaul of the country’s pension system, the nation’s economy, Europe’s second largest after Germany, is beginning to feel the bite. After the government and French unions failed to reach an agreement on Thursday, there were few signs that the gridlock was about to let up.\r\n\r\nIn Paris and other cities where protests have brought half a million demonstrators into the streets, consumer spending is down. Restaurants and retailers face staff shortages as employees spend hours trying to get to work, if they can make it at all.\r\n\r\nTrucks sit in hundreds of miles of traffic jams outside major cities, on highways choked with drivers who normally would be taking a train, delaying deliveries of items like TVs and toys. Tourism is starting to slide, especially in Paris, leaving restaurants, shops and hotels short of free-spending clients.\r\nAround three-quarters of Paris-area business owners plan to freeze hirings that were set to begin in January because of a loss of economic activity, MEDEF, France’s main employers association, said this week.\r\n\'It’s a catastrophic situation,\' said Bernard Stalter, president of the National Chamber of Trade Crafts, which represents small businesses and artisans across France. If the gridlock persists, he added, the hit to the economy — and jobs — could worsen.\r\n\r\nThe risk grew more pronounced after Philippe Martinez, the head of the combative Confédération générale du travail, said Thursday that members of his union, which includes train drivers, port dockers and electricity workers, would keep striking during the holidays. The union, which counts 650,000 members, plans another round of nationwide demonstrations on Jan. 9.\r\n','2019-12-21',''),(130,'Macron’s new year address falls flat as pension row deepens','The Guardian','Politics',28,'https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/01/macrons-new-year-address-falls-flat-as-pension-row-deepens','Kim Willsher','French president calls for ‘rapid compromise’ in attempt to end four-week-long protests\r\nEmmanuel Macron was labelled arrogant, self-satisfied and out of touch with reality by critics as he vowed to push through controversial changes to France’s pension system in the face of calls for more widespread strikes across the country.\r\nIn his New Year’s Eve address, the president urged his centrist government to find a \'rapid compromise\' to end the protests that have run for four weeks and have disrupted transport networks.\r\nHowever, he sounded a more steely note by declaring the pension reforms \'will be carried out\'.\r\nSupporters lauded his determination as Macron offered an olive branch to opponents in talks that will restart on 7 January. The peace gesture, however, failed to defuse the tensions caused by the contested reforms; hardline unions said they were equally determined to continue their industrial action, calling for greater disruption and another day of mass protests on 9 January.\r\n\'These aren’t (new year) wishes, but a declaration of war against millions of French people who reject his reforms,\' Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the head of the hard-left France Insoumise (FI) party, said. \'The rest of his discourse sounded false and hollow. An extraterrestrial has spoken,\' he tweeted.\r\nMacron has remained out of the pensions fray until now, leaving his prime minister, Édouard Philippe, to deal with the crisis.\r\nYves Veyrier of the Force Ouvrière union said he was disappointed the president appeared not to realise the French did not want pension reform.\r\nOpinion polls have suggested the country is in favour of pension changes, but not this particular reform, and in any case does not trust Macron to carry it out.\r\n\'I call on as many workers as possible to mobilise in support of those who are on strike so that they will end up hearing us,\' Veyrier said.\r\nThe far-right leader Marine Le Pen of the Rassemblement National (formerly the National Front) dismissed the president’s speech. \'Once again … nothing,\' she tweeted.\r\nOlivier Besancenot, a former presidential candidate for the far left and one of the founders of the Nouveau Parti anticapitaliste said Macron \'prefers to present us with rubbish from his legendary world\'.\r\n\'It’s worrying to be so out of touch and contemptuous in the face of a majority refusing his proposals. The battle will carry on to the end.\'\r\nMacron gave his address wearing a sombre suit and tie and – unusually – standing in front of the French and EU flags rather than sitting behind a desk.\r\nHe said he understood how \'decisions taken could hit people and raise fears and opposition\', but added: \'Should we then give up trying to change our country, our daily lives? No. Because to do so would be to abandon those already abandoned by the system, to betray our children and in turn their children, who would be left to pay the price of our renunciation. That is why the reform of the pension system will be carried out.”\r\nDuring his 18-minute speech, Macron also evoked Brexit, saying the UK’s departure from the European Union was a \'challenge\' but that he would \'strive to maintain a solid relationship between our two countries\'.\r\nHe also briefly mentioned the challenges of rebuilding Notre Dame Cathedral, devastated by fire in April last year, the environmental crisis and national unity.\r\nEric Coquerel, also of France Insoumise, said the address was a call to arms.\r\n\'There are two worlds; the world of Macron and the world in which almost all the rest of French people inhabit … between these two worlds there is an ever-widening gap. Tonight, there was a lunar side to Emmanuel Macron’s (new year) wishes.\'\r\nEcologists were also disappointed. Julien Bayou, national sectretary of Europe Écologie-Les Verts, said: \'We had to wait 10 minutes for him to finally mention ecology, for barely a minute,\' he said.\r\nChanging France’s complex pension system – currently 42 individual systems – was a plank of Macron’s 2017 election platform. His government has proposed to create a \'universal points system\'. Unions, particularly those in the public sector, say this will remove hard-won rights and privileges, including early retirement on full pensions for those in particularly stressful jobs.\r\nAurore Bergé, an MP for Macron’s La République en Marche (LREM) party, said the president had been \'extremely determined and extremely calm in the face of the challenges that face us\'.\r\n\'This is what we expect from a president of the republic. We’re not here to listen only to the people on the streets, we are here to hear the voters and the mandate the French have given us, which was based on a clear pledge to carry out the necessary reforms,\' Bergé added.\r\nChristophe Castaner, the interior minister, also hailed the president’s \'determination to act\' and his \'wish to unite the French\'.\r\n\'Tonight, the president has renewed our ambition: to transform our country, to build a society together and united, as always, the republic,\' he tweeted.\r\n','2020-01-01',''),(131,'France is set to end the use of the 75-year-old controversial CFA franc in West Africa','CNN','Economy',28,'\" https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/23/africa/france-stops-use-of-cfa/index.html \"','Aisha Salaudeen','Lagos, Nigeria (CNN)A revamped common currency in West Africa known as the ECO will be launched in 2020, according to French President Emmanuel Macron.\r\nThe ECO is supposed to replace the CFA franc which is currently being used in eight west African countries and six countries in central Africa.\r\nDuring a trip to Ivory Coast on Saturday, in cooperation with eight West African countries — Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo — Macron announced at a joint news conference with the Ivorian president that France is working towards loosening up the supervision of the currency.\r\nMacron, speaking in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, described colonialism as a \'grave mistake and a fault of the republic\' according to a DW News report.\r\nThe move to drop the CFA franc is part of France\'s plan to rebuild relations with its former African colonies.\r\n\'I wanted to engage France in a historic and ambitious reform of cooperation between the West African economic and monetary union and our country. We do it for African youth,\' Macron wrote on his official Twitter page on Saturday.\r\nControversial currency\r\nKnown as \'Colonies Francaises d\'Afrique\' (French colonies in Africa), the CFA franc was established in 1945 and has been tagged as a controversial currency for its control by France.\r\nThe currency was initially pegged to the French franc but has been linked to the euro since 1999. A French representative has been on the board of the currency\'s union.\r\nFrench colonies have had to store 50% of their foreign currency reserves with France in return for France guaranteeing the currency.\r\nBut the new currency revamp announced by Macron will not require African countries in the ECOs economic bloc to keep half their reserves with France or have a representative sit on their currency\'s board.\r\nIt will, however, remained pegged to euro and guaranteed by France.\r\nOn his official Twitter page, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara described the adoption of the ECO as a step in building more business-oriented relations free from\r\n\'The reform of the CFA takes into account our desire to build our future in a responsible manner, in order to attract private investment, create jobs and pursue the economic development of our countries,\' he said on Twitter.\r\nThe ECO will be used initially only in the eight West African nations. The CFA will remain in use for now by the six Central Africa nations, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.\r\nFrance-Africa relations\r\nRevamping the west African currency is not France\'s first move in rebuilding its relationship with African countries on the continent.\r\nOver the past years, the country has taken many steps to smooth its association with Africa and Africans.\r\nIn November 2018, for example, a report commissioned by the French president recommended that art plundered from sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial era be returned by the French through permanent restitution.\r\nAs a result, stolen art from countries like Nigeria and Senegal were returned from French museums to their home countries.\r\n','2019-12-23',''),(132,'French company rebrands desalinated seawater as \'health drink\'','The Telegraph','Economy',28,'https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/04/french','David Chazan','Seawater from the depths of the Mediterranean is going to be desalinated for drinking – a process generally used when sources of water for drinking or irrigation are scarce – and marketed as a healthy drink in Europe, Japan and China.\r\nOcean Fresh Water, based in the Riviera resort of Hyères, plans to produce some 750,000 bottles of \'Ôdeep\' per week, starting in February. It is said to contain 78 \'marine minerals,\' including magnesium, and could be the next big health craze.\r\nHowever, mineral waters are currently derived mainly from underground sources or springs, and fossil fuel use, greenhouse gas emissions and briny wastewater generated by desalination plants can pose environmental problems.  \r\nYet seas are expected to become increasingly important sources of freshwater in the future.\r\nThere are already about 18,000 desalination plants producing potable water in operation globally, with around half of all desalted water being produced in the Middle East and North Africa. The United States is also a major producer, with most plants in Florida, Texas and California.\r\nIn the case of Ocean Fresh Water, the water will be pumped from 300 metres below the surface on to a huge ship, the Odeep One, once used as a ferry transporting trains across the icy waters between Saint-Petersburg and Kaliningrad in the former Soviet Union. It will be desalinated and bottled on board the 160-metre-long vessel, using technology which the company claims will preserve its nutrients. The company says investors are pumping some 50 million euros into the project.\r\n\'Drinking seawater is not a habit,\' the company acknowledges, but claims it has health-enhancing properties.\r\nThe best-known ingredient is magnesium, a mineral that the NHS says helps the body convert food into energy and aids the functioning of the parathyroid glands, which produce hormones important for bone health.\r\nAccording to the NHS, however, most people should be able to get all the magnesium they need from their daily diet.  \r\nRégis Revilliod, the head of the company and a former captain in the French merchant marine, claims the water \'tones the body\'.  \r\nThe Odeep One will spend six months in the Mediterranean and will then sail to Asia where it will start pumping up water off the coast of the Philippines for the Asian market.  \r\nThe production system has already been piloted off the south of France on a small laboratory boat. Some bottles of Ôdeep are already on sale in France in luxury stores and available online for €2.25 (£1.92) a bottle.\r\nOcean Fresh Water says seawater offers \"a sustainable and eco-rational alternative, a global relay against the degradation and depletion of terrestrial waters… [which are] becoming increasingly scarce and polluted\r\n','2020-01-04',''),(133,'Paris Transport Strike Is Officially Over, Yet Trickles On, Wednesday January 29 ','Forbes','Economy',29,'https://www.forbes.com/sites/tamarathiessen/2020/01/27/for-ratp-paris-transport-strike-is-officially-over-wednesday-january-29/#1a7c78643888','Tamara Thiessen','Paris travelers rejoice: The non-stop transport strike in the French capital is officially over. Or will be on Wednesday January 29.\r\nThat’s the word from the President and CEO of the RATP Paris public transport authority, Catherine Guillouard. The non-ending strike is \'behind us\', she assures.\r\nIn an interview with Le Parisien, Guillouard, says traffic will be \'almost normal\' on the network Wednesday despite a new day of strike action.\r\nThat sounds like a contradiction ... Yet Guillouard says any ongoing transport disruptions due to the strikes over pension reform \'are not long-term\'.\r\nA positive sign: The RATP has not announced any traffic forecasts for the Metro and RER suburban train network for Tuesday January 28, as it has done over past weeks on its website and via twitter. Though if you dig deep, it does warn of public protests to be held between the Place de l’Italie and Invalides stations Wednesday.\r\n\r\nStrike Action At A Trickle Wednesday\r\nThe current strike action is now at a trickle, with all Metro lines operating and no stations closed. 12 out of 16 Metro lines are operating 100%. On the other 4, the disruptions are minimal.\r\nOn Wednesday, for the suburban RER Line B, this will mean 4 in 5 trains in peak hours, and 3 in 4 in non-peak. For Metro Lines 5, 6 and 8 there will be about 3 in 4 or 4 in 5 trains. And for Metro Line 13, 2 in 3.\r\nParisians and overseas travelers can now collectively breathe a massive sigh of relief after two months of commuter chaos in the French capital.\r\nThough the strike had shown signs of slowing to a complete halt over the past week, the rail unions threatened to resume their industrial action from January 24.\r\nUnions broke the strike on Monday January 19 to allow workers to \'recharge their batteries\' as they plotted the next course of action.\r\nSince then, most Metro lines have returned to normal, after six weeks of the walk-out which paralyzed French rail and Paris public transport.\r\nGuillouard does not believe the current strike will amount to much. \'For Wednesday, at this stage, the level of strikes signalled (by the union) is very low compared to previous episodes. Traffic should therefore be almost normal\'.\r\nSo What’s The Outcome For Pension Reform?\r\nGuillouard says the RATP unions have obtained \'concrete concessions\' over the pension reform, even though the planned streamlining of the pension system will go ahead. \'Yes, the special regimes will be abolished, but the transition phase will be long, suitable, and respectful of the RATP social contract.\'\r\nFrench Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has reportedly made \'a major concession\' in his government’s showdown with unions, retracting the bill’s most controversial measure – the so-called pivot age.\r\nThis raised the age at which retirees could collect a full pension to 64, from 62, though the latter remains the legal retirement age. This meant penalties for those who retired earlier, bonuses for retiring later.\r\nThe aim according to France 24, was \'to encourage workers to stay on the job, and pay into the system, for longer.\' It alarmed unions, \'with even the traditionally reform-minded CFDT saying it ‘crossed a red line’.\'\r\nStrike Ends Officially On Day 56?\r\nSo what is the official last day of the mega-strike? If there is completely normal traffic across the Paris transport network Wednesday, that will be Day 56 of the strikes.\r\nTravelers no doubt will want to first see it to believe it.\r\n','2020-01-27',''),(134,'France prepares evacuation of its citizens from coronavirus-hit Wuhan, China','France 24','Health',29,'https://www.france24.com/en/20200125-france-china-wuhan-coronavirus-french-evacuation-chinese-city-citizens-virus-lockdown-flight-cancel','N/A','France is planning to evacuate its citizens from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the deadly coronavirus epidemic, the French Foreign Ministry said on Saturday.\r\nA statement on the official webpage of the French consulate in Wuhan said that France was \'considering … setting up a bus service allowing French citizens, their spouses and children to leave Wuhan\'.\r\nThe French Foreign ministry has set up an emergency phone line. On Saturday, an official answering the line told FRANCE 24 that the bus transport details were still being worked out, but that the plan was to take French citizens trapped in Wuhan to another Chinese city, where they would undergo a 14-day quarantine before being allowed to move on.\r\nFrench automotive group PSA, maker of the Peugeot and Citroen brands, said on Sunday that it will also planning expat staff and their families from the Wuhan area. The PSA statement said that 38 people would be evacuated and that the initiative will be executed in full collaboration with the Chinese authorities and the French general consulate.\r\n\r\nPSA said the evacuees will remain in quarantine in Changsha before traveling back to their home countries.\r\nLockdown\r\nWuhan, a city of 11 million people, has been on virtual lockdown since Thursday, with nearly all flights cancelled and checkpoints blocking the main roads leading out of town. Some foreigners report that they have been able to leave town after having their temperatures checked.\r\nAmong them, Sébastien Spaeth, a manager at the Wuhan French International School, told FRANCE 24 that he managed to leave on Thursday. \'Despite the lockdown, it seems that foreigners can still leave … The locals have been very well briefed. They are a very disciplined people, much easier to manage than the French. Here in Sichuan (another province west of Wuhan), Chinese people are telling us that we are not reasonable, that we may be propagating the virus. We are going to undergo a medical test\', Spaeth told FRANCE 24 on Saturday.\r\nThe US is also planning to evacuate its diplomats and citizens from Wuhan. US officials are arranging a charter flight on Sunday to bring about 230 people outside the epidemic-stricken city, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday, citing a person familiar with the operation.\r\nThe source said that other governments were currently negotiating with Chinese authorities to arrange similar evacuation.\r\n','2020-01-25',''),(135,'Deadly storm Gloria batters Spain, then shifts to France','BBC','Society',29,'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51189589','N/A','Powerful storm Gloria has battered much of eastern Spain, with officials linking at least four deaths to it.\r\nThe Balearic Islands and the region around Valencia were the worst-hit on Monday, with heavy flooding and strong winds causing havoc.\r\nMore than 30 provinces in Spain were put on high alert. The storm later moved into southern France.\r\nOne French forecaster was quoted by local media as saying the storm was the worst in the region since 1982.\r\nA man died in his home in the Spanish province of Ávila after being hit by flying roof tiles, local officials said on Monday.\r\nA homeless woman froze to death near Valencia, a municipal official told Reuters news agency.\r\nOne man was killed in a car accident on a snowbound road in the Asturias region, while another man was found dead outside his home in the town of Moixent with signs of hypothermia.\r\nSocial media users in Spain have been publishing footage of flooded streets in Valencia and other cities and towns in Spain.\r\n\r\nSpanish forecasters on Monday reported winds of up to 115km/h (71mph), and huge waves on the Mediterranean coast.\r\nAlicante airport was forced to close, resulting in the cancellations of many flights.\r\nWhat about France?\r\nStorm Gloria has arrived in Pyrénées-Orientales, France\'s southernmost Mediterranean department, which has been placed on high alert.\r\nDozens of extra police and firefighters have been deployed in the region.\r\nThe A9 motorway on the French side of the border was closed as a precautionary measure.\r\nGloria was the worst storm to have hit the region in the winter period since January 1982, Météo France forecaster Olivier Proust told Franceinfo.\r\nSpain and France were also hit by heavy flooding in October last year.\r\n','2020-01-21',''),(136,'Brexit: French petition launched for Briton denied citizenship','BBC','Politics',29,'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51280617','N/A','Carpenter Mark Lawrence has lived in France for 27 years and his children are French, but the authorities have rejected his application for citizenship.\r\n\r\nAs the UK\'s departure from the EU approaches at 23:00 GMT on Friday, Mr Lawrence has said he is \'gutted\' by the decision.\r\nFrench authorities argue he does not have \'sufficient and stable resources\'.\r\nNow 32,000 people have signed a petition calling for a change of heart.\r\nMr Lawrence will still be able to stay as a resident and does not risk being deported.\r\nWhat is changing after Brexit?\r\nCitizens\' rights have been among the most emotive issues to have arisen from Brexit but for the immediate future the question has now been agreed.\r\nFreedom of movement will continue for EU nationals in the UK and UK nationals across the EU under the Withdrawal Agreement until 31 December. But what happens after that will affect millions of people.\r\nIn the UK, EU nationals have to apply for settled or pre-settled status by 30 June 2021, or by the end of 2020 if a final Brexit deal is not reached.\r\nThere were a number of cases last year of EU nationals who had lived in the UK for decades being initially rejected.\r\nMore than 2.7 million EU nationals have now applied and Downing Street has promised no-one who fails to apply by the deadline will be deported. The UK is now considering a \'points-based system\' that will include a minimum salary for applicants. Government advisors have recommended a minimum of £25,600 (€30,000; $33,000) annual salary.\r\nIn France, initially the only change this year will be that UK nationals will not be able to take part in local elections.\r\nWhat will happen to Mark?\r\nMark Lawrence, 48, lives with his girlfriend and children in the village of Plazac in France\'s picturesque Dordogne region. They have a son of two and Mr Lawrence has three children aged 10, 12 and 14 from his earlier marriage while his French partner, Camille, has another daughter.\r\nThe children were all born in France and are French, he says.\r\n\'It\'s really not clear what\'s going to happen,\' he told the BBC. \'It\'ll be a year before they decide and I\'ll get a citizen\'s permit so I can stay. Quite frankly, with my citizenship I thought there was no problem in that I\'ve been here so long.\'\r\nHe applied to the local prefecture in Bordeaux in April 2019 and passed language and culture tests as part of the process.\r\nBut the authorities decided, having looked at his finances over recent years that \'we cannot assume you are completely integrated professionally even though the most recent period is fine\'.\r\n\r\nHe was rejected first in April and then on appeal in October. He can try again in two years\' time.\r\nThierry Suquet, head of the Bordeaux prefecture, told French TV: \'We checked at the time of the request that the applicant for French nationality meets economic criteria, in other words makes a salary or has the resources to be economically independent and not in need of welfare benefits.\'\r\nMr Lawrence is a self-employed carpenter who speaks fluent French and has never had French welfare benefits, even though he did stop working when his children were younger.\r\nHe is also on the 15-member town council and is actively involved in several social projects in Plazac.\r\nMayor Florence Gauthier told France 3 TV that she was very surprised that someone so integrated in society was rejected.','2020-01-29',''),(137,'French reforms: Why France is resisting Macron\'s push on pensions','BBC','Politics',30,'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51502427','Hugh Schofield','The rolling transport strikes that crippled Paris through much of December and January have stopped, as empty pay packets post-Christmas took their toll. Instead there has been a change of tactic, with the more radical unions now planning sporadic days of action. \r\nPresident Emmanuel Macron\'s bid to radically overhaul the post-war pension system reaches the National Assembly on Monday, ahead of a long period of debate. \r\nThe moment is being marked by a strike on the Paris metro and further protests on Thursday. \r\nFor the government, the pressure from the street has clearly diminished, even though the protests still draw tens of thousands. \r\nBut the bigger difficulty is with the broader public - polls continue to show a majority in favour of the strikes, and rejecting the government\'s handling of the reform. \r\nThe pensions issue has also served as a rallying-cry for all those with other grievances against President Macron. \r\nHow Macron changed his plans\r\nThe proposed law would radically overhaul the country\'s post-war pension system, merging the 42 existing private and public sector regimes into one, universal points-based system. Early retirement privileges enjoyed by some workers would come to an end. \r\nPresident Macron started off with one kind of reform, then as the protests grew he tried to convert it into another.\r\nThe initial proposal, as sold to the public, was to create a fairer system by making everyone put into - and get out of - the same pension pot under the same rules. It was a \'systemic\' reform, to use the parlance.\r\nBut somewhere en route it also became a \'parametric\' reform. In other words the government decided that now was also the moment to shuffle the numbers around in order to ensure the system\'s long-term financial survival. \r\nSomewhere in the change, the government decided it had to be written in that people were going to have to work for longer, retiring later in life\r\nThis may have been eminently sensible, but it was not what the government had advertised. And the unions - even the \'moderate\' ones - got cross.\r\nThe number of French people who actually understand the pensions reform can probably be counted in fingers and toes.\r\nWhat on earth, for example, is the difference between an age de pivot (age of pivot) and an age d\'équilibre (age of balance)? \r\nThey both have something to do with the year you first claim your pension, and whether or not you get penalised or rewarded. \r\nThe government says it backed down in response to the protests, abandoning the pivot age in favour of the latter. \r\nAnd yet no-one in France can figure out what that implies. \r\nMeanwhile, the government has set up a working group to report on ways of balancing out the current €14bn (£11.5bn; $15bn) pensions deficit. \r\nPension spending\r\nCost per country as a percentage of GDP\r\nSo what does any of it mean for France\'s workforce?\r\nWho are the winners and losers?\r\nMost public sector employees receive a lot of their pay in the form of bonuses. \r\nBut teachers just get it straight. In the new universal pension system that\'s not good, because for the first time bonuses will be used in the calculation of who gets what. \r\nSo teachers fear they will lose out. The government says it will boost teachers\' salaries to compensate. \r\nBut will it? And by how much? \r\nFarmers, mothers and the low-paid are all said to be future beneficiaries of the new system.\r\nMetro and train drivers will suffer, because they see the end of their special status. \r\nBut some other special statuses will survive, like for the army and police. Lawyers will be allowed to keep their special caisse (fund) with its massive surplus - for a while. \r\nWhat happens now?\r\nThe National Assembly will now prepare to take up the baton on this mother of all reforms. \r\nThere are technically two laws going before parliament. \r\nOne is an ordinary law, and one is an \'organic\' law. The far-left opposition have tabled 20,000 amendments in committee; the State Council has ruled that in several aspects the government\'s intention to resort to decrees to implement the reform needs clarification. \r\nIs it any wonder that the pension reforms have triggered the longest opposition movement since President Macron came to power?\r\nThe key point is not that people necessarily dislike the idea of a universal points-based system. \r\nAfter all, as the president says, its much-vaunted prime characteristic - and what distinguishes it from the dreaded Anglo-Saxon systems - remains intact.\r\nIt is and will be a single \"share-out\" system in which workers pay in and pensioners take out. There are no scary pension funds. \r\nNo, the key point about the reform is that most people simply find it impossible to make head or tail of. \r\n','2020-02-17',''),(138,'Teacher confirmed as first French coronavirus victim','The Jakarta Post','Health',30,'https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/02/26/teacher-confirmed-as-first-french-coronavirus-victim.html','N/A','A 60-year-old teacher has become the first French casualty of the coronavirus, the health ministry announced on Wednesday.\r\nThe man died overnight in a Paris hospital, bringing the coronavirus death toll in the country to two, said the ministry\'s deputy head Jerome Salomon.\r\n\r\nThe first victim was an 80-year-old Chinese tourist who died in hospital in mid-February.\r\nThe latest victim, who worked at a junior-high school in the town of Crepy-en-Valois, about 80 kilometres (50 miles) northeast of Paris, is not believed to have travelled to an area affected by the global coronavirus outbreak, the education ministry said.\r\nLe Parisien newspaper quoted the mayor of the teacher\'s hometown of Vaumoise as saying he had \'begun to feel ill at the start of the (mid-term) holidays and had been quickly hospitalised.\'\r\nClasses are due to resume in northern France on Monday.\r\n\r\nFrance has reported four other new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours -- two in people returning from hard-hit Italy -- bringing the total number of infections to 17.\r\nEleven other people have recovered in France from the disease which has killed more than 2,600 people worldwide and infected almost 80,000 others, mainly in China.\r\nOne of the four people still being treated in hospital, a 55-year-old man, is in a critical condition in the northern city of Amiens.\r\n\r\nTwo of the four had recently returned from the Lombardy region of Italy, which is at the centre of Europe\'s biggest outbreak of the disease, the health ministry said.\r\nThe French government has asked citizens returning from Lombardy and the neighbouring Veneto region to avoid \"all non-essential outings\" and keep their children home from school.\r\nThe same recommendations have been issued for people returning from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and South Korea.\r\n\r\nDeath of Hong Kong tourist probed \r\nMeanwhile, 30 tourists have been confined to their hotel in the Burgundy town of Beaune after the as-yet unexplained death of a tourist from Hong Kong, the regional health department said.\r\nThe department said a tour group, which had been due to travel to Paris Wednesday, was being kept at the Ibis hotel while tests are carried out \'to banish all suspicion of a case of coronavirus\'.\r\nThe agency did not say where the other members of the group were from. \r\nThe Beaune town hall said the dead man had a heart condition.\r\nOther guests who had not been in contact with the group were allowed to leave.\r\n','2020-02-26',''),(139,'Victims thought they were paying millions to free hostages. But the \'minister\' who asked them was a fraudster in a mask','CNN','Society',30,'https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/16/europe/france-fraud-case-intl/index.html','Saskya Vandoorne','Paris, France (CNN)There was a sense of urgency in the voice of the man claiming to be France\'s defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian.\r\n\"We\'re talking about the lives of French citizens and we would like to free them. If we don\'t, we expect the worst,\" the man said in an audio recording of a telephone solicitation obtained by CNN. \r\n\"I need to know if you can join us in this mission so we can carry it out and if the answer is \'yes\' then I will alert the presidency to say we have someone who can act as a mediator for us.\" \r\nOn the receiving end of the telephone line was Olivier de Boisset, a Frenchman who heads an IT company in Niger.\r\nDe Boisset was being asked to wire over 2 million dollars to allegedly help free French hostages being held by terrorists in Mali.\r\nThe voice said France needed de Boisset\'s help transferring funds because officially the country does not pay ransoms and gave assurances that France\'s central bank would reimburse him.\r\n\r\nDe Boisset was suspicious, but he could never have imagined the extent of the scam that was being played on him.\r\nNot only were there no French hostages in Mali, but he had just become the latest victim in a multi-million dollar con that would span two years and target more than 150 people including the spiritual leader Aga Khan, the President of Niger, the Prime Minister of Norway, the Archbishop of Lyon, the owner of Chateau Margaux wines, the King of Belgium, the director general of UNESCO and numerous CEOs.\r\nAttempts to extort money from embassies and governments were made in more than 50 countries, according to French court documents.\r\nCNN has obtained exclusive recordings made by often-skeptical victims showing how a group of fraudsters tried to pull off what some in France are calling the scam of the century by impersonating France\'s then defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, and conning wealthy individuals out of 80 million euros purportedly to help pay ransoms to free French hostages being held by Islamist terrorists.\r\nSome of the money has not been recovered.\r\nSix of the alleged fraudsters are currently on trial in Paris in connection with the Le Drian hoax and a plot to impersonate Prince Albert II of Monaco while a seventh defendant is on trial only for the Albert of Monaco plot. \r\n\r\nThe con was elaborate\r\nAccording to many of the victims, to earn their trust an initial phone call was followed up by a Skype video call. During this exchange, the con artist wore a custom-made silicone mask of Le Drian\'s face and sat in a replica of the minister\'s office complete with both the tricolor flag of France and a flag of Europe, pictures in the court documents show.\r\nAnother one of those targeted in June 2016 by the bogus Le Drian was Bruno Paillard, who heads a champagne house in Reims, northern France.\r\nPaillard told CNN the hustle was impressive because of its elaborate nature. \"The image was not very precise and the voice was a little bit strange. The excuse was that they were in a bunker in the ministry,\" Paillard said.\r\nIn addition to the Skype calls, Paillard said they communicated with him on official-looking letterheads from the ministry, but despite all their efforts Paillard said he wasn\'t convinced and went straight to the police. \r\n\"As a champagne producer we make people happy, but we\'re not necessarily good at saving the lives of people who are being held in strange countries,\" Paillard told CNN.\r\nPaillard said the fake Le Drian had done his homework, he even knew how many children he had.\r\nWine maker Guy-Petrus Lignac was equally astonished at how much the fraudsters knew about him. He said they drew on his background to appeal to his sense of patriotism. \r\n\"They knew so many things about me! That I had been a police officer in the past. That\'s not common knowledge, it\'s not on the internet. I was surprised,\" Lignac told CNN. \r\nMany of the victims were skeptical and went to the defense ministry to report the calls. The ministry alerted investigators in the summer of 2015 and an investigation was opened in April 2016, according to court documents.\r\nLawyers for Le Drian said French embassies all over the world were warned of the scam in 2016. However, the ministry didn\'t see the need for a press conference. \r\n\r\nAuthorities opened an investigation but the con continued\r\nTurkish businessman Inan Kirac, was duped in November 2016 and over the course of one month handed over $47 million in nine transfers to bank accounts in China -- the largest sum to be wired to the fraudsters by one individual.\r\nKirac eventually realized he was being scammed and began taping the conversations.\r\nIn an audio recording obtained by CNN Kirac is heard speaking with a man impersonating an aide to Le Drian.\r\n\"Mr. Kirac, first of all, I wanted to express my condolences concerning the attack in Istanbul and I learned that two of your very close friends were injured in this attack,\" the voice on the crackly line is heard saying.\r\n\"I hope that 2016 will be a good year to defeat crime and the terrorists who deserve to go to hell,\" the man said.\r\nKirac believed his money was being used to free two French journalists who were allegedly being held hostage in Syria.\r\nDelphine Meillet, the lawyer representing the actual Le Drian, who is now France\'s foreign minister, told CNN the fraudsters used the war in Syria to their advantage. \r\n\"There were real hostages at the time, in 2015, and the technique to convince them was to play on fears of terrorism,\" Meillet said.\r\n\"When the state asks you to do it a favor, to help fight terrorism, how can you say no? How can you say no to a minister?\" she added.\r\nThe voice of the fake Le Drian is allegedly that of Gilbert Chikli, according to prosecutors, a Franco-Israeli accused of being the mastermind behind the sting. He is charged with organized fraud and usurping a person\'s identity. Chikli denies the charges.\r\nMeillet describes the 54-year-old as being a modern-day Victor Lustig, the notorious con man who sold the Eiffel Tower to a scrap-metal dealer in 1925, not once but twice.\r\nChikli has a checkered past. In 2015, he was sentenced in absentia to seven years in prison for a brazen scam where he posed as prominent French CEOs in order to extort millions of euros from companies. The hoax was later the subject of a movie \"Thank You for Calling\" that paid Chikli as a consultant, according to court documents. \r\nIn 2017 the Parisian was arrested in Ukraine and according to court documents evidence was found on Chikli\'s cell phone showing that Google searches for \"silicone mask Kiev\" and \"Prince of Monaco\" had been made.\"\r\n\r\nAnother defendant in the trial, Anthony Lasarevitsch, was arrested in Kiev alongside Chikli. Investigators found pictures of a silicone mask of Prince Albert II of Monaco on his cell phone.\r\nLasarevitsch faces the same charges as Chikli, and denies any wrongdoing. His lawyer said in court that Lasarevitsch had been \"dragged into the case by the media\" after his arrest alongside Chikli \"was broadcast to the masses.\"\r\nA clip of Chikli, while incarcerated in Kiev, surfaced on social media in 2017 showing him having a fridge delivered to the prison. In the video Chikli says \"this is what I\'ve bought, a fridge, so I can eat some entrecote. We are the bosses!\"\r\nChikli was eventually extradited to France. He is currently in prison serving time for the CEO hoax. He\'s admitted taking part in the CEO scam but says he\'s not the mastermind.\r\nOn Monday experts testified that the voice of the fake Le Drian bore a striking resemblance to that of Chikli.\r\nChikli defended himself vehemently in court Monday.\r\n\"What can I tell you? They\'ve got it wrong!\" he shouted. \r\n\"There are 20 billion cases like this per year, I\'ve got nothing to do with this! I have no answers to your questions,\" Chikli growled.\r\nHis lawyer, Stephane Sebag, told CNN that the whole of the prosecution was based on weak analysis of the voice samples from Chikli\'s interviews and that the recordings of the scam \"are very poor.\"\r\n\"This is not enough to convince anyone of his guilt,\" Sebag said.\r\nIf convicted Chikli faces up to 14 years in prison and a 2 million euro fine. A verdict is expected on March 11.\r\nThe real Le Drian reacted to the scam last year. \"You can\'t impersonate me, if you do then you go to prison,\" he said.\r\n\"They were pretty convincing and sadly there were victims. They did a good job of imitating my voice,\" Le Drian added. \r\n\r\n','2020-03-02',''),(140,'We need to give the French public a good France team – Shaun Edwards','Yahoo','Sport',30,'https://sports.yahoo.com/french-public-good-france-team-130006828.html','Andrew Baldock','Shaun Edwards wants France to give the nation a team they can be proud of after taking another step towards possible Grand Slam glory.\r\nA first Six Nations title and clean sweep since 2010 is in sight for Les Bleus following their thrilling 27-23 victory over Wales.\r\nWins against Scotland at Murrayfield and Ireland in Paris next month would see France crowned Six Nations champions.\r\nIt would also secure another significant entry in Edwards packed career portfolio – back-to-back Grand Slams – after Wales\' triumph last season\r\nEdwards made one of the few wrong turns on a memorable day for French rugby, admitting that he briefly headed towards the Wales dressing room on his arrival at the Principality Stadium.\r\nIt was understandable, given his 12-year stint with Wales that produced four Six Nations titles, three Grand Slams and two World Cup semi-final appearances.\r\nBut France are now prospering from his masterful defence coaching that again came to the fore as Les Bleus ended a 10-year wait for a win on Welsh soil.\r\n\"Everyone was telling me \'remember to go in the right dressing room\'! and, honestly, I took one step towards the Welsh one and then I remembered and returned,\"Edwards said.\r\n\"It was a fantastic advert for the game and the Six Nations. It was quite an epic encounter.\r\n\"The impression I\'ve had is the French public – and I think, actually – that the whole rugby public are crying out for a good French team.\r\n\"Definitely the French people want a team to be proud of, and hopefully over the next couple of years maybe we can provide that.\r\n\"The attitude has been first class. They (French players) are really buying into how I want them to defend.\r\n\"And it\'s not just that – it\'s the style of play as well. French teams in the past maybe overplayed in their own half, and it is mixing that French flair with some structured rugby.\r\n\"We are slowly getting there. There are still some strides to take, but we are going in the right direction.\"\r\nEdwards\' trademark surfaced just before half-time when France repelled wave after wave of Welsh attacks close to their own line, meaning they took an eight-point lead into the interval.\r\n\"I honestly believe if they had scored there, Wales would have won the game,\"Edwards added. \"It was tough defence, but they did well.\r\n\"All the credit goes to the players because they dug really deep, and they had to. They were playing the (Six Nations) champions.\r\n\"You\'ve got to remember this team we played, they have lost two (Six Nations) games in two years. We were playing a high-quality opponent on their own ground, so we had to do something special.\r\n\"What I did do was show them the defence from the World Cup they (French players) were doing.\r\n\"They were incorporating Wales-style defence at the tournament, and I said ‘this is how good you can be\', instead of telling them how bad they can be. I showed them some really positive things, and thankfully they have continued in that vein.\"\r\nScotland are next up for France on March 8 – Les Blues have lost on their last three trips to Edinburgh – and Edwards has underlined the game\'s degree of difficulty.\r\n\"Scotland last year was the toughest game of the whole Six Nations for Wales,\"he said. \"I\'ve been very impressed with Scotland so far.\r\n\"We have to prepare for that and then we have a six-day turnaround for Ireland, which is difficult.\"\r\n','2020-03-02',''),(141,'Coronavirus: Has America ever been this humbled?','BBC','Health',31,'https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51981627','Katty Kay','In one short week, the United States has gone from being the world\'s superpower, to asking nurses to sew their own protective gowns and masks.\r\nIn the early phases of this war, the country has failed miserably. Miserably.\r\nYes, every country has been stretched. This is clearly not easy. Italy, Iran, France, Spain, the UK have all been hit hard and struggled to rise to the challenge of this pandemic.\r\nBut America is meant to be different. How often do we hear people say this is the strongest country in the world? It\'s a feeling that produced a sense of invulnerability. Is that why it took so long for the US to accept this wasn\'t a foreign problem?\r\nAnd there\'s been a reluctance over the years to learn from other countries\' healthcare systems because the greatest country in the world believed it had the greatest healthcare in the world. In this fight that\'s a sham.\r\nCompared to South Korea, Germany or Singapore, the US today takes no prizes for a great response to Covid-19.\r\n\r\nDoctors are terrified. They know America\'s hospitals are about to be hit by a tsunami of infected patients and they don\'t have enough beds or ventilators to treat them. They don\'t even have basic protective gear to keep their staff healthy. The Governor of New York today asked factories and businesses to switch gears to produce what\'s needed to keep the hospitals running.\r\nI lived here during 9/11. That was a huge shock to America\'s sense of security but the response was different. It was confident. Misguided, quite possibly, but confident. The country could respond with massive military force. Here a critical weakness at the heart of the American system has been exposed.\r\n\r\nSome of America\'s adversaries might revel in that failing. There\'s nothing to revel in here. We\'re all better off when the nation with the biggest economy and the biggest military in the world is healthy and strong and functioning well. It\'s scary to see the US like this.\r\n\r\nYet even now, there are glimmers of hope.\r\nThe country\'s government has been woefully underprepared but its famous entrepreneurial spirit is kicking in. We hear stories of distilleries retooling to produce alcohol cleansers. My son\'s university, which is closed to students, sends a daily email to parents - today it told us the medical department has already developed its own test for the virus.\r\nI have no doubt that American businesses will heed Governor Cuomo\'s call and start making surgical masks. I hope they do so soon, so that American nurses don\'t have to.\r\nAnd maybe a little humility is no bad thing.\r\n','2020-03-20',''),(142,'Confused, dangerous, flippant\': rest of world pans PM\'s handling of coronavirus ','The Guardian','Health',31,'https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/24/confused-dangerous-flippant-worlds-media-pans-pms-handling-of-coronavirus-boris-johnson','Rory Carroll','The international verdict on Boris Johnson and his zigzag handling of the pandemic has been damning, with responses ranging from bafflement and disbelief to anger.\r\nMany consider the prime minister’s initial laissez-faire approach to the crisis, followed by contradictory signals about his government’s strategy, as an inexplicable bout of British exceptionalism.\r\n\'Boris Johnson had gone out publicly and essentially asked Britons ... to accept death,\' said the Greek newspaper Ethnos. It declared him \'more dangerous than coronavirus\'.\r\nOn Sunday, Singapore’s national development minister, Lawrence Wong, said the UK and Switzerland had “abandoned any measure to contain or restrain the virus”.\r\nThe New York Times accused Johnson of sowing confusion. \'He has seemed like a leader acting under duress ... playing catch-up to a private sector that had already acted on its own.\'\r\nPoliticians, scientists and commentators greeted the prime minister’s U-turn on Monday night, when he ordered a UK-wide lockdown, as a belated but welcome decision to join the rest of Europe, and much of the world, in a necessary strategy.\r\nThe mystery is why it took so long.\r\nLast week Ireland, which shares a land border with the UK, struggled to understand Downing Street’s hesitation. “Boris Johnson is gambling with the health of his citizens,” said the Irish Times.\r\nOn Tuesday, after the prime minister’s sudden reversal, one official in Dublin expressed relief. \'The Brits were doing their own thing and it looked like we were going to have to live with it. They got there in the end.\'\r\nIt was a variation of an observation attributed to Winston Churchill about America doing the right thing after exhausting all other options.\r\nForeign observers had become accustomed to Johnson’s breezy pronouncements on Britain steering its own course during Brexit showdowns last year but they winced at hearing the same tone in the context of a global health emergency.\r\nHe appeared at press conferences alongside the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, and the chief scientific adviser, Patrick Vallance, but instead of reassurance Vallance caused consternation by appearing to endorse the idea of allowing much of the population to become infected to develop \'herd immunity\'.\r\n\r\nLast week the prime minister made an initial concession to physical distancing – a key tactic to slow contagion – by asking people to avoid pubs. But he did not close them and many people, including his own father, Stanley, cheerily said they still planned to go out for a drink. Nevertheless, Johnson expressed confidence such limited measures were working and could \'turn the tide\' within 12 weeks.\r\nMany outsiders were aghast. The pandemic was out of control in Italy and Spain, killing thousands, and surging across the globe, prompting a scramble to emulate Chinese-style lockdowns.\r\nAdvertisement\r\nThe French president, Emmanuel Macron, reportedly threatened to close France’s border with Britain last Friday if it did not intensify measures.\r\nOthers worried about the fate of friends and relatives in Britain. Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo, the city hardest hit by Italy’s coronavirus outbreak, flew his two daughters out of the UK, deeming them safer at home.\r\n\'When I saw what the English government was thinking about this problem, I decided to bring them back, because I think that even if we are at the centre of the epidemic, probably they are more secure here than in England, because I don’t understand why the government didn’t decide in time to protect their citizens,\' he told Sky News.\r\nGreece, an early adopter of draconian measures, also became alarmed. It has one of the largest overseas student communities in the UK, much of which has been repatriated and ordered into a 14-day quarantine. Athens suspended all flights to Britain on Monday until 15 April.\r\nNot everyone lamented the UK’s foot-dragging.\r\nOn Monday, before Johnson’s U-turn, a son of Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, defended his father’s much-criticised response to the pandemic by citing Johnson.\r\nEduardo Bolsonaro tweeted a 22 March video of Johnson encouraging British citizens to use local parks. \'Coronavirus is very serious but the country cannot stop,\' he said. \'The British prime minister advised his people to take exercise in public parks.\'\r\n','2020-03-24',''),