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President Emmanuel Macron said on Wednesday he was open to adding a specific mention of Corsica in the French Constitution but rejected several other demands for autonomy made by the island's nationalist leaders. Corsica's relationship with mainland France has long troubled French presidents. For 40 years, separatists waged a militant campaign, blowing up police stations and mansions owned by mainlanders and carrying out assassinations, before laying down their arms in 2014. The head of the regional govement, Gilles Simeoni, said that Macron had "missed an opportunity" to forge a new relationship with the island. During his first visit to Corsica since his election last year, Ma...

A Belgian court must acquit Paris attacks suspect Salah Abdeslam over a shootout with police because of a legal language mix-up between Dutch and French, his defence lawyer said Thursday. Abdeslam, 28, refused to come to court in Brussels on Thursday, after accusing judges on the first day of the trial on Monday of being anti-Muslim and proclaiming he would only put his "trust in Allah". In Abdeslam's absence, lawyer Sven Mary sought the case's dismissal over a technicality in how the judges were named to investigate the gunbattle in Brussels in March 2016, in which three police offers were wounded. "It's a very Belgian story," said Mary, explaining that the top counter-terror ju...

French judicial investigators have opened a full-scale inquiry into allegations of complicity in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an official at the public prosecutor's office said on Monday. BNP Paribas bank, accused by non-govemental organisations of complicity over a transfer of $1.3 million to an arms dealer, said the move was expected and not a surprise. "This in no way constitutes a ...

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Monday, March 20 is Jouée Inteationale de la Francophonie (Inteational French Language Day) and a French high school in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with a 100 percent graduation success rate is a showcase for promoting the language abroad.The Lycée Pasteur is a Francophone island in the heart of primar...

Rwandan President Paul Kagame criticised France on Monday after French investigators reopened a investigation into the 1994 assassination of the Rwandan president, a killing that triggered the country’s genocide. “The judicial system of Rwanda is not subordinate to France or France’s interests,” Kagame told a cheering audience of judges, senior military officers and govement officials at an official judicial function. “It should be France in the dock being tried, not anybody in Rwanda and not Rwandans.” Rwanda’s former chief of army staff Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa, now in exile, has accused Kagame of being linked to the shooting down of the plane carrying president Habyarimana Juvenal, the pr...