French farmers blockaded sites in Paris on Thursday in protest against a sweeping trade deal the European Union is poised to sign with South American nations and other local grievances.

The farmers overran police checkpoints to enter the city, driving along the Champs-Élysées avenue and blocking the road around the Arc de Triomphemonument before dawn, before gathering in front of the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament.

National Assembly President Yael Braun-Pivet was booed and jostled when she stepped outside of the assembly’s gates to talk with protesters.

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Source: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20260108-french-farmers-take-tractor-protest-to-paris-amid-anger-over-mercosur-deal-cow-cull?fbclid=IwY2xjawPONkVleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEedrGJDV7ujQaeCiu5qzKW5dEqxjXNUQsAGRNPzcSrWxyfBp7L0sbAezVXDgM_aem_Xo4lMPh0Pa3XLxv9xdPK5g

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“Pig heads have been left in front of certain mosques… four in Paris and five in the inner suburbs,” Police Chief Laurent Nunez told a press conference, adding that police were not “ruling out the possibility that others may be found”.

French police have launched an investigation into the incidents.

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Source: https://www.france24.com/en/france/20250909-at-least-nine-pig-heads-found-outside-several-paris-mosques

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Rioters smashed storefront windows, vandalized monuments and set massive bonfires in public squares after the election results revealed the party, headed by nationalist Marine Le Pen, took 33% of the vote in the decisive first round of France’s legislative elections.

Stunning video spread widely online showed mass groups of demonstrators clashing with cops, launching fireworks that at times bathed city streets in an eerie blood-red glow.

Plumes of tear gas smoke wafted throughout the crowds as they battled it out in the streets with riot-gear clad police officers, the wild melee punctuated by the sounds of coughing and shattering glass.

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Source: https://nypost.com/2024/07/01/world-news/leftists-riot-in-france-after-national-rally-party-victory/

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French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin reportedly told TF1 television on Sunday that the country was “durably under threat from Islamist terrorism” after a prosecutor identified the French 26-year-old born to Iranian parents accused of fatally stabbing a German tourist and injuring two others steps away from the Eiffel Tower in Paris over the weekend.

At a news conference on Sunday, France’s top anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard said suspect Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, a French national, recorded a video speaking in Arabic before the attack in which he swore allegiance to the Islamic State group, used a name to introduce himself that referred to the Islamic State in Afghanistan and expressed support for Islamic extremists and jihadists operating in various areas around the world, including in Africa, Iraq, Syria, Egypt’s Sinai, Yemen, Iran and Pakistan.

Ricard said Rajabpour-Miyandoab and three others, including family members and associates, were taken into police custody for questions after the attack.

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Source: https://www.foxnews.com/world/french-minister-warns-country-durably-under-threat-islamist-terrorism-paris-stabbing-suspect-idd

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The world’s wealthiest nations are demonstrating a “surge of solidarity” with those most vulnerable to climate change, said Cécile Duflot, president of the NGO Oxfam. Some 50 heads of state and government, representatives from international financial institutions, members of the private sector, climate experts and members of civil society will be attending the summit in Paris hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron on June 22 and 23. The objective of this ambitious conference is to “build a new contract between [the global] North and South”, according to the Élysée Palace.

Macron announced his intention to host this summit at the end of COP27 back in November, 2022. Environmentalists were not satisfied with how the climate negotiations had concluded. But in the final hours, a historic agreement was reached providing for the establishment of a fund to compensate for the effects of climate change suffered by developing countries. The initial aim of this week’s Summit for a New Global Financial Pact was to establish concrete measures to finance this fund. “From now on, the battle against poverty, the decarbonisation of our economy and the fight for biodiversity will be very closely linked,” Macron said at the time.

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Source: https://www.france24.com/en/environment/20230621-paris-summit-aims-to-overhaul-global-financial-system-for-more-climate-solidarity-with-south

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Three people were killed and three others wounded, one critically, in a shooting in Paris on Friday, according to the city’s prosecutor, Laure Beccuau.

The motive for the shooting was not immediately clear, but a 69-year-old suspect from France was taken into custody, according to the prosecutor. The suspect was also wounded.

One man and two women were killed, according to authorities. All three who suffered injuries are men.

An investigation has been opened into murder and aggravated violence charges.

Beccuau confirmed the attacker was already known to the police, and had recently been released from prison. He was also banned from possessing a weapon, the prosecutor said.

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Source: https://abcnews.go.com/International/2-dead-4-hurt-paris-shooting-prosecutor/story?id=95744394

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The post 3 dead, 3 hurt in shooting at Kurdish cultural center in Paris first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Cold, hungry, forgotten: 250 migrants have turned a disused Paris office into their temporary home. In recent months, this type of abandoned building has become one of the only solutions for those left on the streets.

Source:  https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/29952/we-do-what-the-state-doesn-t-do-surviving-a-paris-squat-filled-with-tents

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The measures announced by President Emmanuel Macron of France on Wednesday included tightening access to health services for new asylum seekers.Credit…Pool photo by Jason Lee

PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron of France tried to seize control of the issue of immigration on Wednesday, as his government announced steps to make the country less attractive to migrants while cracking open the door to skilled foreign workers.

The combined moves were a bid by Mr. Macron to wrest the issue from his main political challengers, the far-right National Rally of Marine Le Pen, which for years has skillfully used immigration in its political ascent.

With critical municipal elections just months away, Mr. Macron has shifted right and begun talking tough on immigration, especially on the perceived abuses of France’s generous social welfare system, hoping to keep Ms. Le Pen’s party, formerly known as the National Front, at bay.

Among Mr. Macron’s new get-tough measures is a provision that asylum seekers would have to wait three months before qualifying for non-urgent health care.

A makeshift migrant camp on the outskirts of Paris early this year.Credit…Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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But the government also announced that starting next year, it would for the first time establish a system of annual quotas to grant visas to skilled immigrants looking to enter France.

“We want to regain control over our immigration policy,” Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said.

While that may have been the intention, the announcement did as much to underline the political peril the issue presents for Mr. Macron, a centrist whose shape-shifting has often dissatisfied French voters across the political spectrum.

The measures drew immediate criticism from both the right, who said they didn’t go far enough and the left, who said Mr. Macron was unnecessarily endangering the already vulnerable population of asylum seekers for political ends.

In recent weeks, Mr. Macron — who as a presidential candidate lauded Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for saving Europe’s “collective dignity” through her pro-migrant policies during the height of the crisis in 2015 — had been setting the stage for Wednesday’s announcement.

In a long interview on the presidential plane with a right-wing magazine, “Valeurs Actuelles,” Mr. Macron recently said the authorities had been lax in expelling those who had entered France illegally.

“My goal is to throw out everybody who has no reason to be here,” he said.

In an interview on Radio France, Ms. Le Pen said that the government was addressing the issue of immigration simply because of the municipal elections, scheduled for March. She said the measures would be ineffective in reining in illegal immigration.

“They’re talking about immigration because they think it’s enough to talk about immigration to the French to make them believe that solutions are being brought,” Ms. Le Pen said.

Nearly 124,000 people requested asylum in France last year, a record number and an increase of 23 percent from the previous year. The requests came mainly from Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan and France’s former African colonies, but also from Albania and Georgia, two countries that France says respect human rights.

The increase in asylum seekers has exacerbated housing problems, overwhelming shelters established by the government.

In Paris and other cities, groups of migrants, often numbering in the hundreds, have set up tent cities or are squatting in unused buildings. Nearly 3,000 are estimated to be living on the streets in northern Paris and an adjoining suburb.

The evacuation of a migrant camp in northern France in September.Credit…Francois Lo Presti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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The authorities have regularly expelled migrants from specific sites, leading them to move elsewhere, in a continuing cat-and-mouse game.

Those expulsions have increased with the government’s tougher line on immigration, according to advocates for the rights of immigrants.

“Since last summer, the government has been really pushing to close down these camps without offering any solution for those who find themselves on the street, said Yann Manzi, the president of Utopia 56, a group that assists migrants in Paris.

The number of asylum seekers in France has risen, migrant support groups say, as part of the continuing effects of the migrant crisis that reached a peak in 2015.

According to the European Union law governing the process, known as the Dublin Regulation, applicants must request asylum in the first country they set foot in, and remain there. But many end up moving to a second country. Those who have gravitated to France are called “Dublinés,” in reference to the law.

Nations like Italy and Greece argue that the system presents an unfair burden on them. But France, Germany, and others have stepped up efforts to send migrants back where they landed.

With countries unable or unwilling to rapidly process applications, migrants have been stuck in limbo for years, or ended up wandering inside Europe, said Pierre Henry, the director of France Terre d’Asile, a migrants rights group.

“You have 200,000 to 250,000 people who are being sent back and forth in Europe like Ping-Pong balls,’’ Mr. Henry said.

Mr. Macron’s government has increasingly adopted arguments that some migrants are exploiting France’s welcome of asylum seekers, who can quickly qualify for health care and other benefits.

A beach near Calais, a northern French port city that has been a flashpoint over immigration.Credit…Benoit Tessier/Reuters

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His government has accused some asylum seekers of engaging in what it describes as “medical tourism” by seeking treatment for serious medical conditions in French hospitals.

Mr. Macron said that reforms were necessary so that France “shouldn’t be too attractive a country” for asylum seekers.

Last year, nearly 320,000 people without legal status benefited from a government health care program reserved for them — a situation that has long angered France’s right.

Migrant rights groups said that tightening access to health care would harm most legitimate asylum seekers.

“Many of them suffer from real mental and physical problems, given the very difficult journeys they’ve had,” said Bruno Morel, the director of Emmaus Solidarité, a migrant rights group. “The government says if we welcome migrants too well, more will come. That’s totally false. That just feeds populism.”

Mr. Macron has been criticized for representing the interests of France’s economic elite, especially during the Yellow Vest protests that roiled the country for months starting in October of last year.

In explaining his focus on immigration, Mr. Macron told members of his party, La République en Marche, that they must avoid becoming a party of the “bourgeois.” The bourgeois, he said, lived in areas with few immigrants and did not encounter immigration in their daily lives.

It is France’s working classes that live with the difficulties of immigration, he said, and “have thus migrated to the far right.”

Migrants in France

Hundreds of Undocumented Migrants Occupy Panthéon Monument in Paris – July 12, 2019

Macron Aims to Keep Migrants, and Far Right, at Bay in France – Feb. 22, 2018

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Norimitsu Onishi is a foreign correspondent on the International Desk, covering France out of the Paris bureau. He previously served as bureau chief for The Times in Johannesburg, Jakarta, Tokyo and Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/06/world/europe/france-macron-immigration.html

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A knife-wielding employee has killed three officers and one administrative worker at police headquarters in the centre of the French capital, Paris.

The attacker, who has not been named, was shot dead by police.

Witnesses described scenes of panic, with many people fleeing the building in tears. The area in the île de la Cité was sealed off.

The attack came a day after police went on strike across France over increasing violence towards officers.

The Paris prosecutor said a murder investigation had been launched.

• Paris knife attack: Latest pictures from the scene

A motive for the attack remains unclear. However, police union officials have suggested the attacker may have been involved in a workplace dispute.

What happened?

At about 13:00 local time (11:00 GMT; 12:00 BST), the attacker is said to have gone into the building and straight to his office where he began attacking colleagues with a knife.

He stabbed three people inside two offices and two women on a stairway before he was shot dead by an officer inside the building’s courtyard, according to French media.

Three men and one woman were killed, Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz told reporters.

A fifth person was critically injured in the attack and was sent for surgery. The building is near major tourist sites including the Notre-Dame cathedral.

“Police were running around in a panic,” a witness who was inside the courtyard at the time of the attack told Le Parisien newspaper.

“I was surprised to hear shooting because this is not a place where you hear that kind of thing. I first thought it was a suicide because there are a lot of those at the moment,” he added.

President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and Interior Minister Christophe Castaner have all visited the site.

“You wait. One of these days there’s going to be a real tragedy in the police.”

Those words were said to the BBC by an officer attending Wednesday’s big demo in Paris, called to draw attention to the alarming rise in police suicides. He could have no idea that the next day four of his colleagues would be knifed to death by another colleague at the Paris Prefecture.

But the truth is we know nothing about the motives of the attacker.

On the face of it he was an administrative worker, facing none of the day-to-day pressures of police officers on the street. One police union member said the killings could have happened anywhere – a factory, a hospital, a farm. The police link was coincidental.

This evening reports are being carried by two reputable French news outlets that the man was a recent convert to Islam. Is that true? Is it relevant? We do need to wait.

Who was the attacker?

According to the interior minister, he was a 45-year-old IT specialist who had worked for the Paris police force for 16 years.

Officials said he had been working in the force’s intelligence division.

Mr. Castaner said there had been no warning signs about the attacker, adding: “On the face of it, he looked a model employee.”

Police have searched his home in the north of the city and taken his wife into custody, although the Paris prosecutor’s office said she has not been charged.

Paris police headquarters is located in the heart of Paris – Reuters

There were tensions between the knifeman and his supervisor, according to police union official Christophe Crepin.

“I do not think this is a terrorist act,” Mr. Crepin, who knew the attacker, told Franceinfo Radio.

Police union leader Jean-Marc Bailleul described it as a criminal act, telling BFMTV: “It was a moment of madness.”

The attack follows a rare nationwide police strike on Wednesday, which saw thousands of officers demonstrating in Paris over working hours, shortages in resources and controversial pension reforms.

Police unions say there have been more than 50 suicides by police officers since the start of the year.

They blame the rising numbers on difficult working conditions and increasing violence towards police.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/49921145

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PARIS — Hundreds of undocumented migrants stormed the Panthéon monument on Friday, demanding that the French government pay more attention to their plight and grant them legal status.

The protesters, many of whom were from West Africa, called themselves “Black Vests,” an allusion to the recent anti-government “Yellow Vests” protests. They surged the memorial in the early afternoon, where luminaries such as Victor Hugo, Voltaire and Simone Veil, champions of human rights, are buried.

Occupying the memorial for a couple of hours, they sat peacefully under the monument’s dome, waving papers and chanting, “Black Vests, Blacks Vests” and “Solidarity with migrants.”

“We are undocumented, the voiceless and faceless of the French Republic,” read a leaflet shared by La Chapelle Debout!, an advocacy organization for migrants and refugees. “We come to the graveyards of your great men to denounce your desecration.”

As France has grappled with an increasing number of asylum requests in recent years, it has closed its border with Italy, fought illegal immigration in cities like Calais and adopted tougher policies against migrants. Yet studies show that immigration issues remain a top concern among the French, just as they do in other Western European countries like Germany or Italy.

The situation has been tense in France’s largest cities. Since the immigration crisis of 2015, Paris has been struggling to house migrants, who live in appalling conditions in the northern and eastern parts of the city, where there are not enough shelters. “The situation is unacceptable,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo of Paris, said in April.

The protesters — many of whom live in the Paris region in migrant shelters, in precarious hotels or on the streets — have staged other protests during the past few months.

In May, hundreds of “Black Vests” protesters occupied a terminal at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport to denounce the “collaboration of Air France” in the repatriation of undocumented migrants to their countries of origin. In June, they stormed the entrance hall of a catering services group in the financial district of Paris, claiming that the company, Elior, exploited undocumented migrants.

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