France

PARIS (AP) — The Palace of Versailles was evacuated for security reasons on Wednesday for the third time since the weekend, the former royal chateau said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. It was among a spate of evacuations in the past five days around France, including three airports that were also forced to close for security checks.

The Chateau of Versailles apologized to visitors on X for being forced to clear out visitors from the sumptuous 17th-century palace “for security reasons.”

PARIS, Oct 17 (Reuters) - France's Palace of Versailles re-opened to visitors on Tuesday afternoon after closing for a few hours for security reasons, the Chateau de Versailles said on social media network X.

BFM TV, citing police sources, had said earlier that a bomb squad had been dispatched to the site.

The local police body for Versailles said later that the police operation had finished and an earlier security cordon that had been put in place had now been lifted.

16 October 2023; MEMO: France’s broadcasting watchdog, the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), has asked Eutelsat, Europe’s leading satellite operator to take down the Al-Aqsa Satellite Channel, which is affiliated with the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas,  after pressure from the French government, Eutelsat said.

PARIS, Oct. 14 (Xinhua) -- The Louvre Museum in Paris was closed on Saturday for security reasons.

"For security reasons, the Louvre Museum is closing its doors today," announced the museum's account on X, formerly Twitter.

According to French news channel BFMTV, the museum received messages about bomb threats. The closure of the museum was due to verification measures in the framework of France's national security alert system Vigipirate.

ARRAS, France (AP) — France will mobilize up to 7,000 soldiers to increase security around the country after a teacher was fatally stabbed and three other people wounded in a school attack by a former student suspected of Islamic radicalization, the president’s office said Saturday.

Some schoolchildren, parents and personnel returned to the Gambetta-Carnot school in the northern city of Arras as it reopened Saturday morning to reconnect and seek support, after the attack Friday that rattled France in a context of global tensions over the Israel-Hamas war.

PARIS, Oct 12 (Reuters) - French police used teargas and water cannon to break up a banned rally in support of the Palestinian people in Paris on Thursday, as President Emmanuel Macron urged the French to remain united and refrain from bringing the Israel-Hamas conflict home.

Macron's interior minister had earlier banned pro-Palestinian protests, saying they were "likely to generate disturbances to public order".

France is home to Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish communities. The Middle East conflict has often stoked domestic tensions in the past.

ARRAS, France (AP) — A man of Chechen origin who was under surveillance by the French security services stabbed a teacher to death at his former high school and critically wounded two other people in northern France on Friday, authorities said.

The attack was being investigated as potential terrorism amid soaring global tensions over the war between Israel and Hamas. But it also happened almost three years after another teacher, Samuel Paty. was beheaded by a radicalized Chechen near a Paris area school.

PARIS, Oct 12 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Consumers discard or possess disused electronic goods containing raw materials critical for the green energy transition and worth almost $10 billion every year, the United Nations said.

Toys, cables, electronic cigarettes, tools, electric toothbrushes, shavers, headphones and other domestic gadgets contain metals like lithium, gold, silver and copper.

Demand is expected to soar for these materials due to their crucial role in rapidly growing green industries such as electric vehicle battery production.

PARIS, Oct 12 (Reuters) - President Emmanuel Macron will meet political party leaders on Thursday and address the nation on TV to call for unity and try to prevent any spillover of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in France, where there has been a rise in antisemitic acts.

France has Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish populations and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has in the past contributed to tensions between the two.

PARIS, Oct 6 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Global sugar prices soared to their highest level in almost 13 years in September as the El Nino weather phenomenon hit production in India and Thailand, the Food and Agriculture Organization said Friday.

While world food prices steadied as a whole last month, the FAO’s Sugar Price Index jumped by 9.8 percent compared to August, the highest point since November 2010, the UN agency said.