Author: Jourdain David

The French parliament has backed a proposal to ban single-use electronic cigarettes, which the government has said encourage “bad habits” in teenagers and are harmful to the environment. The national assembly voted unanimously for the move late on Monday, which still needs backing from France’s upper house senate as well as clearance from the EU Commission. Cheap pre-filled disposable e-cigarettes, known in France as puffs, are popular with young people. They come in many flavours and can have a high nicotine content. “They open a pathway to serious addiction,” the French health minister, Aurélien Rousseau, said. The MP Francesca Pasquini, who…

Aswarm of sunny Technicolor and balletic sublimity, Jacques Demy’s 1967 musical The Young Girls of Rochefort must be the chicest of all comedies of errors. Here, a port town in south-western France becomes a cosmic diorama of dreamers, who crisscross one another in pursuit of love, destiny and freedom. At the film’s centre are the headfast twins, composer Solange and dance teacher Delphine, played by real-life sisters Françoise Dorléac and Catherine Deneuve. Complete with matching silk nightgowns in complementary hues, they rhapsodise about a future of boundless success in Paris. Desires come to a head with the libidinous influence of a travelling fete…

The ex-wife of the French serial killer Michel Fourniret has described how he flew into a fury and beat a British student, Joanna Parrish, after discovering she had a boyfriend. Monique Olivier, 75, said Fourniret then raped and strangled the 20-year-old and dumped her body in a river. She admitted that her role in helping him lure Parrish to her death was “monstrous … unforgivable”. Shown a photograph of Parrish’s battered face, Olivier bowed her head. After a long silence, she said: “It’s not possible. I regret it. It’s monstrous what we did, me and him, it’s unforgivable and if…

A French restaurant boss has been charged over the death of a woman after an outbreak of botulism at the establishment, linked to improperly preserved sardines. A 32-year-old Greek woman died in September after eating at the Tchin Tchin Wine Bar in central Bordeaux. She was one of 16 mostly foreign diners who fell ill in the space of a week while the southwestern city was hosting Rugby World Cup matches. “Various infringements of the hygiene regulations by the establishment’s manager” were identified, “especially relating to homemade preserves,” senior prosecutor Frederique Porterie said in a statement. The restaurant chief was…

Much like its ideological counterparts at HispanTV (Iranian-owned) and Actualidad RT (Russian-owned), Telesur wraps its incitement into a sophisticated and slick twenty-four-hour news platform through its website, broadcasts, and social media presence. Though it is difficult to gauge its influence, numbers suggest that Telesur’s message is impactful. Telesur has two million followers on its Spanish X account, 117,500 on its English X account, and more than half a million on Instagram. Its YouTube account has over 1.7 million subscribers, with 100,000 new subscribers and almost 7.4 million video views since October 7 (It also posts its videos on the Daily Motion). The network traditionally pushes out conspiracy theories, fake news, “whataboutism,”…

French police have arrested two men on suspicion of fraud after they allegedly sold bedbug pest control services for large sums to elderly people who did not need them. The two men, operating in eastern France, phoned their victims, usually women over 90, telling them there had been a bedbug infestation in their neighbourhood, authorities said. Preying on widespread fears of bedbugs that gripped France this autumn, they allegedly gained access to their targets’ homes by passing themselves off as health officials and then pretended to inoculate the space against bedbugs with an aerosol. They are also said to have provided…

She has been hailed as the literary queen of the Paris techno scene, whose cult novel Superstars immortalised the hedonism and rivalry of the sweat-drenched dancefloors and rave parties of 1990s France. But if the novelist Ann Scott, the winner of last month’s prestigious Renaudot prize, so poetically chronicled Paris’s generation X, from queer clubs to hard house, it was also because her own backstory gave a unique insight on what it was to be part of the underground. Sent by her well-meaning Paris parents to England’s Shoreham-by-Sea in 1977 aged 12 “to speak English and play tennis” for the summer, she ran…

Figures in the French film and TV industry have said they would not work again with the actor Gérard Depardieu, after a documentary showed footage of sexism and inappropriate behaviour by the star, who is under formal investigation for rape. The documentary, Depardieu: The Fall of an Ogre, ran on the public service channel France 2 on Thursday night, after more than a dozen women had previously made allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour against Depardieu in an investigation by Mediapart last year. The documentary showed footage of Depardieu on a trip to North Korea in 2018 to mark the secretive state’s 70th anniversary. The…

Flush from this year’s victory over banning rental electric scooters, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has a new on-street target in her sights: SUVs. Bidding for a place in history as the woman who made Paris green, she has promised another city referendum. The vote next February will be on whether to increase parking fees for so-called sports utility vehicles. If last April’s e-scooter referendum is anything to go by, the mayor should be confident of another easy victory. On that occasion only a fraction of the electorate turned out, and they were in their vast majority people who actively hated…

A scheme allowing French nationals to make day-trips to Guernsey using their national identity cards has been extended. The Committee of Home Affairs said the pilot scheme introduced this summer led to thousands of extra visitors to the island on direct commercial ferries. Changes to the UK’s immigration rules mean the scheme will not continue past the September 2024. The UK plans to implement an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) scheme that will stop French people visiting the Common Travel Area without a passport. ‘Clear benefits’ Deputy Rob Prow, President of the Committee of Home Affairs, said: “The pilot scheme this…