Author: Jourdain David

The situation in and around Ocheretyne is desperate for Ukraine This weekend, Russian drones and scouts surveilling the front line just west of the ruins of Avdiivka, in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast, observed something strange. Ukrainian trenches just east of the village of Ocheretyne, previously manned by soldiers from the Ukrainian army’s elite 47th Mechanized Brigade, were empty. The village was undefended Seizing the opportunity, the Russian army’s 30th Motor Rifle Brigade raced several miles along the railroad threading west from Avdiivka and captured most of Ocheretyne—and potentially also Novobakhmutivka, the village south of Ocheretyne. It’s the fastest penetration into…

French MEP Valérie Hayer will become the new president of Renew Europe with “overwhelming consensus” after current interim President Malik Azmani failed to gather enough support following widespread worries about his party’s involvement with coalition talks with the far-right in the Netherlands. Though the formal election will be on Thursday (25 January) at 8 am, hers is the only official candidacy. As such, she will be elected by acclamation, just like her predecessor Stéphane Séjourné, who left the group’s presidency to become France’s new foreign affairs minister. The formal announcement of Hayer’s candidacy was confirmed to Euractiv by a Renew…

French Jews were only partly reassured when more than 100,000 people, including the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, and two former presidents, turned out to demonstrate in Paris last month against antisemitism and in defence of the secular republic. Why did the president, Emmanuel Macron, not attend, many asked? Where were the leaders of France’s Muslim community? And where were the cultural, intellectual and sports celebrities so often eager to take a public stance on a worthy cause? Since Hamas fighters poured into Israel from the Gaza Strip on 7 October, slaughtering around 1,200 Israeli men, women and children, a wave of antisemitic attacks and hate…

The world’s biggest operational experimental nuclear fusion reactor – a technology in its infancy but billed by some as the answer to humanity’s future energy needs – has been inaugurated in Naka, Japan. Fusion differs from fission, the technique used in nuclear power plants, by fusing two atomic nuclei instead of splitting one. The goal of the JT-60SA reactor is to investigate the feasibility of fusion as a safe, large-scale and carbon-free source of net energy – with more energy generated than is put into producing it. The six-storey-high machine, in a hangar in Naka, north of Tokyo, comprises a doughnut-shaped…

Thieves have stolen parts of a lead sculpture by the German contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer from a warehouse in France, representing a loss of more than $1m (£785,000), a prosecutor said on Friday. Kiefer, 78, is renowned for his bleak sculptures and installations confronting his country’s Nazi past, which sell for millions. Several of his works have featured oversized lead books. The burglars broke into the grounds of the artist’s warehouse in the town of Croissy-Beaubourg, east of Paris, on Thursday before dawn, according to the prosecutor in the nearby town of Meaux, Jean-Baptiste Bladier. “CCTV footage showed four individuals breaching the car…

Reading the obituary of the distinguished French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (24 November) made me think about his sister, Marie Fauroux, who died in 2021. Educated at the École Nationale des Chartes soon after the second world war, her edition of all of the pre-1066 charters of the dukes of Normandy, published in France in 1961, is of fundamental importance to our understanding of the consequences of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and everything that followed. There are those who would argue that it is even more important than Le Roy Ladurie’s book Montaillou for our understanding of the past.…

Two days before reading Zing Tsjeng’s article (What made me love theatre even more? Leaving a bad show at the interval, 28 November), I walked out of a performance for the first time in my life. Having seen Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach at the Barbican in London many years ago, I was excited to take my seat at La Villette in Paris for what I hoped would be a thrilling performance of a much-loved work. It was not to be. On a slowly rotating stage that reminded me of a nightmare Christmas grotto, performers made a series of “significant” gestures…

A 26-year-old man suspected of killing a German-Filipino tourist and wounding two others near the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Saturday night had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in a video released online. The French anti-terrorism prosecutor, Jean-François Ricard, said the French suspect, named as Armand Rajabpour-Miyandoab, “had recorded a video before committing the act”, in which he spoke in Arabic, swore allegiance to Islamic State and supported its jihadists in different areas from Africa to Iraq, Syria and Pakistan. The video was posted online on his account on the social network X, which also showed numerous posts on Hamas, Gaza…

On a drizzly November evening, ecologists in Brest, Brittany, are rooting through the damp undergrowth flanking an unmarked and unlit track going nowhere. They are searching for Quimper snails. It’s a slow and meticulous job: the snails are small, come out only at night and prefer the dank, dark cover of soggy leaves and twigs. Soon, their natural habitat here will be destroyed by a €200m (£170m) public transport project, which includes a new tramway. As environmental damage cannot be avoided, it has to be reduced and compensated for. So the Quimper snails, only known to exist in northern Brittany and…

Australia and France have promised to grant “enhanced” access to each other’s military bases and training facilities in a clear break from their post-Aukus blues. Under a “roadmap” signed on Monday, France will gain increased access to Australian defence facilities, while the two sides will also carry out more complex joint military training activities and increase the sharing of intelligence. In return, Australia will gain more access to French defence facilities across the Indo-Pacific region. The document says this allow “a more sustained Australian presence in priority areas of operation”. At this stage, the increased “reciprocal access” to each country’s military facilities is…