Author: Looys Martel

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has announced she is quitting X, formerly Twitter, calling it a “gigantic global sewer” that is “destroying our democracies” by spreading abuse and misinformation. After buying Twitter in 2022, the billionaire Elon Musk laid off thousands of employees, including many who moderated content on the platform. Rebranded as X, it has lost several major advertisers and has been criticised, including by the White House, for not doing enough to curtail antisemitism. “I have made the decision to leave Twitter,” Hidalgo wrote in lengthy posts in English and French on Monday, citing manipulation, disinformation, antisemitism…

The French interior minister has called for the dissolution of three extreme-right groups after a series of marches were organised in response to the killing of a 16-year-old in the south-east of the country. Gérald Darmanin told France Inter broadcaster he was seeking to shut down Division Martel and two other groups he did not name, warning there was a risk of militias targeting people of different skin-colour. Thomas, a 16-year-old rugby player, died from stab wounds after a dance party at a village hall in Crépol in the Drôme, in south-eastern France, on 19 November. Nine people believed to…

France is to ban smoking on all beaches, as well as in public parks, forests and near schools, after Emmanuel Macron promised to create “the first tobacco-free generation” by 2032. “From now on, no-smoking areas will be the norm,” said the health minister, Aurélien Rousseau. There are already 7,200 tobacco-free areas in France – including in Nice, on the French Riviera, which was the first to establish a cigarette-free beach in 2012 with the approval of France’s League Against Cancer. The government said that instead of smoke-free areas being decided by individual local authorities, central government would introduce a nationwide…

French authorities have arrested the leader of a multinational tantric yoga organisation on suspicion of indoctrinating women for sexual exploitation. The Romanian guru was detained on Tuesday morning during a major police operation across the Paris region, according to a French judicial official, who was not authorised to speak publicly about an ongoing investigation. The French official identified the man as Gregorian B, whom French media identified as Gregorian Bivolaru, 71, an internationally known yoga teacher and author. The investigation into Bivolaru and his yoga federation, the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (Misa), began after reports of psychological…

For more than 30 years, the parents of British student Joanna Parrish have battled for justice for their daughter, murdered by the French serial killer Michel Fourniret in 1990. Often, when the killer was still unidentified and at large, Roger Parrish and his ex-wife Pauline would travel to northern Burgundy looking for clues, appealing for witnesses, badgering seemingly insouciant investigators to do their job, seeking answers they never found. Fourinet, known as the “Ogre of the Ardennes”, was eventually caught and jailed for life in 2008 for the murder of seven other girls and young women. It was another decade…

French far-right politician Marine Le Pen will stand trial alongside 27 others over alleged misuse of EU funds, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Friday, charges that Le Pen’s party said it contested. Twenty-eight defendants will be brought to court, including Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie, the office said, confirming French media reports. An initial pre-trial hearing scheduled for 27 March next year will be followed by a more in-depth hearing during October and November. The investigation, opened in 2016, aimed to ascertain whether the then National Front had used money destined for EU parliamentary assistants to pay staff who were working…

France, the country that gave the world the word “patisserie”, a nation famous for its macarons, meringues and millefeuilles, whose restaurants strive for gastronomic perfection and whose baguette is on the UN heritage list, has fallen for another foreign interloper: the American doughnut, or more precisely the Krispy Kreme. On a freezing morning last week, 400 people, some having camped out all night, formed an uncharacteristically orderly queue for the opening of the US chain’s first outlet in a central Paris shopping centre. As a mechanical production line imported from North Carolina produced a steady stream of white-glazed doughnuts inside,…

In Paris in 1965, the artist Myriam Bat-Yosef, who has died aged 92, presented, with the Uruguyan dancer Teresa Trujillo, and the lettrist poet François Dufrêne, the performance Éryximaque. Trujillo, her body painted by Bat-Yosef in psychedelic patterns, rolled and threw similarly decorated diabolo-shaped stools across a triangular, white-walled space, as Dufrêne chanted a syncopated, alliterative text. The performance, which melded surrealist ideas with the psychedelic, pop art sensibilities of the time, was in particular a repudiation of Yves Klein’s femmes-pinceaux (women paintbrushes), who in 1960, their nude bodies painted blue, obediently followed their master’s directions to press themselves against canvas. For Bat-Yosef,…

The questions began swirling soon after police were notified that a €750,000 (£644,000) ring had gone missing from the Ritz hotel in Paris. Was it a meticulously planned and targeted robbery? An act of carelessness? Or simply a quick swipe, carried out when the opportunity presented itself? Two days after a Malaysian guest at the hotel reported the missing diamond ring to police, the hotel proffered an answer, albeit less exciting than many of the theories that had circulated online: the hotel said security had found the ring in the bag of a vacuum cleaner. The newspaper Le Parisien hinted…

Opposition MPs have succeeded in scuppering the French government’s highly controversial immigration bill by having it thrown out before any debate began. In a humiliating defeat for Emmanuel Macron, a motion to reject the law – known as the Darmanin law after the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin – was passed on Monday by five votes. The motion, which was put forward by the Europe Écologie Les Verts party, was backed by an unlikely alliance of opposition MPs from parties including the Nupes (Nouvelle Union populaire écologique et sociale), a leftwing alliance; Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National; and the conservative…