New video of baby goats slaughter in France reveals the horrors behind organic meat. A scary look inside a certified organic abattoir.

French president makes new appeal for force in run-up to First World War Armistice centenary

The sea imbues the town of St-Malo with what locals describe as ‘a salty side’ that’s not only present in its culture and regional dishes, but also its wine.

Police officer also advertised a system to track the location of buyers' gang rivals or spouses based on the telephone numbers.

France's health watchdog says the risk of cancer from sunlamps and sunbeds is proven and authorities should act to stop people being exposed to artificial ultraviolet rays. Brazil and Australia have already banned sunbeds commercially, and France is one of a number of countries that have already limited their use. But now the Anses watchdog says France should go further and impose a ban.

Despite centuries of efforts to make standardised French the language of all of France, Occitan, which is intrinsically tied to the local culture, could not be suppressed.

Two and a half million tickets at €15 a piece were sold for the heritage lottery drawn on Friday, September 14. The €15-20 million collected will subsidise the restoration of 269 endangered French heritage sites. Eighteen sites designated as “iconic” by the minister of culture will receive priority funding. They will receive immediate funding from the Fondation du patrimoine – enough to begin the first stages of construction and restoration. Here are some of the top sites.

After heroically delivering a message in World War I, French pigeon Le Vaillant died of gas poisoning. A century later, it looks as though he and the thousands of other animals killed in the conflict will now be remembered with a monument in Paris. An estimated 11 million horses, donkeys and mules were requisitioned during World War I, as well as 100,000 dogs and 200,000 pigeons (including Le Vaillant).

French president Emmanuel Macron has urged citizens to moan less, telling pensioners: “We don’t realise how lucky we are.” The country would be better off if people emulated wartime leader Charles de Gaulle, he said after being harangued by voters worried about cuts to pensions. The French government has forced pensioners to make higher social security contributions amid budget cutbacks, prompting protests.

A Polish man long suspected of ordering a mafia-style hit on his partner’s wealthy mother has broken down in a French court and confessed to being behind her killing after years of denying the accusations. Wojciech Janowski was Poland’s honorary consul to Monaco at the time of the murder of the billionaire heiress Hélène Pastor, 77, and her driver. They were gunned down in her car by two hitmen in Nice on 6 May 2014.

Brutalist architecture has an unavoidable presence in every major metropolis, even Paris. In fact, the French capital is something of a haven for futurist concrete architecture. Brutalist boomed here during the 60s and 70s in response to Modernism’s utopian vision. (All photos courtesy of Anthony Saroufim).

For the tourists thronging the streets and pavement cafes of Chamonix, the neck-craning view of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in the Alps, is as dazzling as ever. But the mountaineers who climb among the snowy peaks know that it is far from business as usual – due to a warming climate, the familiar landscape is rapidly changing. “Global climate change has serious and directly observable consequences in high mountains,” says Vincent Neirinck from Mountain Wilderness, a campaign group that works to preserve mountain environments around the world.

A ban on five neonicotinoid pesticides enters into force in France on Saturday, placing the country at the forefront of a campaign against chemicals blamed for decimating critical populations of crop-pollinating bees. The move has been hailed by beekeepers and environmental activists, but lamented by cereal and sugar beet farmers who claim there are no effective alternatives for protecting their valuable crops against insects.

Monday is the first day that French schoolchildren under 15 cannot use their cellphones at any point during the school day, thanks to a new nationwide law. The ban, passed in July following a campaign pledge made by French President Emmanuel Macron, will affect elementary and junior high schools across the country as they return from the summer break.

More than 18,000 people marched Saturday in Paris as part of an international mobilisation to show popular support for urgent measures to combat climate change ahead of a San Francisco summit.

A new report reveals today how the French State and several French companies have participated in the bloody Egyptian repression of the past five (...)

Emmanuel Macron also recognises role of state in 1957 death of dissident Maurice Audin

A French court ordered Marine Le Pen to submit to a psychiatric evaluation as part of its investigation into her decision to post images of Islamic State executions on Twitter, the far right leader said on Thursday and denounced the order. The investigation is one of a series that have distracted Le Pen's National Rally, formerly known as the National Front, as it seeks to rebuild after her loss to President Emmanuel Macron in the second round of an election last year.

A group of French Catholics has called for a parliamentary inquiry into child sex abuse in the Church. In an online petition they cite the examples of Australia, Ireland and the US state of Pennsylvania and accuse the Church's leaders of "ignoring or even concealing" the suffering of victims. Pope Francis's appeals to "fight this scourge" have fallen on deaf ears, particularly in France, an appeal in Témoignage Chrétien, a paper founded by Catholic resistance fighters during World War II, declares.

Iran denies accusations, 'forcefully' calls for release of diplomat who headed cell allegedly planning to bomb exiled dissident group

About four million French women - 12% of the total - have been raped at least once in their lives, a survey suggests. The study for the Fondation Jean Jaurès, a Paris-based think tank, also says 43% have been subjected to sexual touching without their consent. Like many other countries, France has seen women take to social media to highlight abuse in recent months.

Hundreds of armed police are guarding the Brussels court where the trial of Salah Abdeslam, the prime suspect behind the November 2015 Paris attacks, opens today after his secret transfer from a prison outside the French capital. Mr Abdeslam, a French national of Moroccan descent, is being tried on charges of terrorism, possession of weapons and attempted murder during a shoot-out with police in Brussels three days before his arrest in March 2016.

Emmanuel Macron has said he will unveil measures against Russia in response to the poisoning of the former spy Sergei Skripal on British soil in the coming days. The French president spoke with Theresa May on the phone on Thursday morning about “progress of the investigation” in the nerve agent attack, which the British Government says was carried out by Russia.

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was placed in custody on Tuesday as part of an investigation that he received millions of euros in illegal financing from the regime of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. A judicial source with direct knowledge of the case told The Associated Press that Sarkozy was being held at the Nanterre police station, west of Paris. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, because insects they feed on have disappeared

Armed police have killed a suspect who shot dead three people dead in a shooting spree in southern France. The gunman hijacked a car and then took hostages at a supermarket in the town of Trèbes. The man, named by ministers as 26-year-old Redouane Lakdim, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group. He is believed to have killed and wounded his victims in three separate incidents which began in Carcassonne, 15 minutes' drive from Trèbes.

An 85-year-old woman who as a child narrowly escaped France’s most notorious wartime roundup of Jews has been murdered in Paris, and the authorities are calling it a hate crime. The body of the woman, Mireille Knoll, was found on Friday in her apartment in the city’s working-class 11th Arrondissement. She had been stabbed to death, and her body was partly burned after her attackers apparently tried to set fire to the apartment.

The reduction, from six, will give France one of the lowest school starting ages in Europe.

France is going to invest more than €1.5 billion ($1.85 billion) into artificial intelligence (AI) R&D from 2019 till 2022, as Élysée Palace presidency announced on Thursday. French President Emmanuel Macron announced his new AI development strategy at the Paris-based Collège de France research institute. Macron stressed that he does not want France to be behind other countries as he introduced the audience with new measures created to compete with the United States and China, the current global leaders in AI. He wants also to regulate the industry with additional measures.

The Italian foreign ministry summoned France’s ambassador on Saturday, after uniformed French customs officers crossed the border to confront a man suspected of carrying drugs. France insisted the presence of its personnel at an alpine railway station just inside Italy was acceptable. However, the French ambassador, Christian Masset, was summoned over what Rome called “a serious act considered outside the scope of cooperation between states sharing a border”.

The French Revolution and the invention of the guillotine allowed Charles-Henri Sanson, whose family had been executioners for generations, to become a hero—but the glory was brief.

Belgian cyclist Michael Goolaerts died in hospital on Sunday at the age of 23, hours after suffering heart failure during the gruelling Paris-Roubaix one-day classic race in France. "It is with unimaginable sadness that we have to communicate the passing of our rider and friend Michael Goolaerts," the rider's Veranda's Willems team said in a statement on Twitter.

Seven Italian charities have accused French border police of falsifying the birth dates of migrant children travelling alone in an attempt to pass them off as adults and send them back to Italy. In an appeal to the European commission and Italy’s interior ministry, the charities highlighted evidence of two cases in which birth dates appeared to have been modified on “refusal of entry” documents.

Conques was never supposed to be found. Or at least, not easily. The sleepy village had been presiding over the French Pyrénées mountains since the 7th century, when a monk named Dadon decided it would make the perfect place for sacred hermitage. Not only was the valley close to a legendary Roman spring, but it was nearly impossible to reach without a lot of grit and motivation, making it the perfect resting place for one of Europe’s grandest treasures…

It narrowly escaped being melted down after the French Revolution, but a 16th century gold case containing the heart of the only woman to have twice been crowned queen of France has now been stolen. The theft of the reliquary containing the heart of Anne of Brittany, who was briefly betrothed to the Prince of Wales, has provoked outrage over the loss of an object of enormous historical value. Robbers broke in through a window of the Thomas-Dobrée museum in the western French city of Nantes during the weekend. They got away with the 6-inch oval case despite setting off an alarm.