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A French official has sparked controversy by suggesting that two Christian public holidays should be removed and replaced by ones marking the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur and the Muslim festival of Eid. A proposal by a French official to replace Christian national holidays with those based on Jewish and Muslim festivals has sparked controversy in the country.

In Paris last month, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian announced that France plans to spend $251 billion on its military. This amount was not just for 2014; it was for the next five years, meaning that Paris only plans to spend about $50 billion on its armed forces each year, or about 1.3 percent of GDP, down from 1.9 percent this year. As part of the reductions, France is cutting 34,000 troops from its ranks. Germany has also cut $10.7 billion out of its 2014 military budget, and recently announced that it would reduce the size of its military...

A treasure of precious jewels has been found by a young alpinist on the ice caps of Mont Blanc, where it likely was lost decades ago amid the wreckage of a crashed airliner. The chief commandant of the national police of Albertville, France, confirmed to NBC News that about a hundred small, precious stones were found in a metallic box in the ice caps known as Bossons. Commandant Sylvain Merly said the precious stones were separated in plastic bags that were stamped "Made in India." A local jeweler estimates the treasure to be worth between $175,000 and $325,000. The diamonds,...

Russia, France Develop New Infantry Fighting Vehicle MOSCOW, September 25 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s Uralvagonzavod and France’s Renault are jointly developing a new infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) with an increased firing range of up to 16 kilometers, the Russian company said Wednesday. “We [Uralvagonzavod and Renault Trucks Defense] unveiled today a prototype of a future IFV,” Uralvagonzavod general director Oleg Sienko said at Russian Arms Expo-2013, which opened Wednesday in the Urals city of Nizhny Tagil. “The French side provided us with the transmission, the engine, the concept and the fire control system,” he said. According to Sienko, the new...

Navis Pictures Producer Jim Morlino was looking for a story for his next film when a friend gave him a book with a story about a little known war in an area of Western France known as the Vendee - a story that he believed would be especially compelling to modern day Catholics. "More than just compelling, the magnitude of the story of the French Revolutionary Government's war against the Catholic Church, and the fact that these events were virtually unknown to most of the world, I found shocking," said Morlino. "How could a war which lasted for years,...

Despite its almost 11 percent unemployment rate and only freshly barely-there economic growth rate, Socialist President Francois Hollande insists that “growth is starting to take off again” and that “we are almost there” on efforts to tackle the problem of unemployment. …Er, if he says so, but besides perhaps taking it down a notch on the historically high tax burden, hem hem, French business leaders and economists consistently recommend one very important thing on which France needs to crack down if they’re ever going to really spur the economy forward: The country’s convoluted, rigid, anti-growth, and generally bass-ackwards labor laws.For...

Tensions between Israel and the European Union over the EU boycott of Israelis living in Judea and Samaria (Shomron) may be exacerbated by a new incident in which a French diplomat struck an IDF soldier. The incident occurred as IDF soldiers stopped a “humanitarian aid” shipment of tents and other supplies that were headed for an illegal Bedouin encampment. The equipment was to be sent to Bedouin and foreign activists in the Jordan Valley whose illegal encampment was destroyed last week after the High Court of Justice, Israel’s Supreme Court, ruled that the structures were built without proper permits. The...

Tensions between Israel and the European Union over the EU boycott of Israelis living in Judea and Samaria (Shomron) may be exacerbated by a new incident in which a French diplomat struck an IDF soldier. The incident occurred as IDF soldiers stopped a “humanitarian aid” shipment of tents and other supplies that were headed for an illegal Bedouin encampment. The equipment was to be sent to Bedouin and foreign activists in the Jordan Valley whose illegal encampment was destroyed last week after the High Court of Justice, Israel’s Supreme Court, ruled that the structures were built without proper permits. The...

France’s consumer affairs minister Benoît Hamon has slammed Germany’s policy of keeping pay artificially low for being “unfair” on France. Speaking to the BBC on a visit to an Optic 2000 factory, which creates eyewear in France, Hamon said “some countries in Europe are getting around employment directives and underpaying their workers.” Hamon lamented Germany’s wage policy, which has helped keep the cost of German products down compared to “Made in France” goods. “I want Germany to have a social policy where competitiveness doesn’t rely on jobs paying €400 [£336; $534] a month,” he said. …

France has proposed the European Union study taxing companies for transferring personal data outside of the bloc, for example in call centers abroad. The proposal is part of a series France has made ahead of an EU summit next month that also includes a call to put in place new tax rules that would require non-European Internet companies to pay taxes in Europe on profits earned there. …

A group of 10 French imams will meet Pope Francis on Wednesday in the latest sign of rapprochement between the Vatican and the Muslim world. The meeting has been organized by Marek Halter, a French Jewish author known for promoting religious tolerance who has organized similar initiatives in the past. … Relations between the Vatican and the Muslim world were strained in recent years and Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam’s Cairo-based highest seat of learning, broke off ties with Francis’s predecessor Benedict XVI for what it regarded as controversial statements. …

A mother who sent her three-year-old son Jihad to school wearing a sweater with the words "I am a bomb" on the front, along with his name and 'Born on September 11th' on the back, was handed a suspended jail sentence on Friday for "glorifying a crime". A court of appeal in the city of Nimes, southern France, convicted Jihad’s mother Bouchra Bagour and his uncle Zeyad for “glorifying a crime” in relation to the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11th 2001. “We have to rule that they (the mother and uncle) knew of the provocative nature...

French President François Hollande hailed “a new industrial revolution” in inaugurating Friday a new lithium battery plant built by the Bolloré group, which manufactures the Bluecar made popular by France’s electric-car sharing scheme. … Earlier in the day, as he attended an environmental conference in Paris, Hollande vowed to halve energy consumption in France by 2050 and cut fossil fuels by 30% by 2030. The French president has also made electric cars “a priority.” …

SNIPPET: "A webmaster from Normandy, northern France was arrested and charged on Thursday for "provoking" and condoning terrorism. He is accused of translating articles from the jihadist magazine Inspire into French." SNIPPET: "The 26-year-old, identified as Romain, was detained Tuesday for his role as administrator of the Ansar al Haqq website, a "reference" for the radical Islamist movement, and as a translator of magazines put out by militant group Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Paris prosecutors said. Detained by intelligence officers in his native Calvados region of northern France, Romain said he converted to Islam when he was 20, prosecutors said. The Ansar...

PARIS (Reuters) - France is pushing for the European Union to regulate global internet companies like Google Inc (GOOG.O), Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Facebook Inc (FB.O) more aggressively, to counter their growing dominance over online commerce and services. In an interview published by Liberation newspaper on Thursday, France's minister for the digital economy, Fleur Pellerin, said Europe needed new regulatory powers to intervene much earlier, to level the playing field in the internet economy and allow the emergence of alternatives in Europe to U.S. Web giants. She said Europe needed to be able to act quickly, as soon as problems...

France's interior minister revealed Thursday that hundreds of homegrown Islamist militants were signing up to fight in Syria and warned they could pose a security threat when they come back. More than 300 French nationals or residents are either currently fighting in Syria's civil war, planning to go and fight or have recently returned from there, the minister, Manuel Valls, told France Inter radio. Most of them were young men, often with a delinquent past, who had become radicalised, he said.

Dr. Xavier Dor An octogenarian and veteran pro-life activist in France was fined 10,000 euro ($13,360 US) on Monday for having twice visited a Paris abortion clinic where he met with staff and attempted to counsel abortion-bound women. The conviction is one of the first cases pleaded under a French law that prohibits putting “moral and psychological pressure” designed to obstruct abortion. The hefty fine is 2,000 euro more than had been demanded by the public prosecution. Since 2001, when the offense of “obstruction to abortion” was given a wider definition in law, the maximum fine for violating the statute...

We have an amazing man-bites-dog story today. Let’s begin with some background information. A member of the European Commission recently warned that: “Tax increases imposed by the Socialist-led government in France have reached a “fatal level”…[and] that a series of tax hikes since the Socialists took power 14 months ago – including €33bn in new taxes this year – threatens to “destroy growth and handicap the creation of jobs”. Given the pervasive statism of the European Commission, that was a remarkable admission. But the Commissioner who issued that warning, Olli Rehn, is Finnish, so French politicians presumably don’t listen to...

A French national has died in police custody in Cairo and two Canadians have begun a hunger strike to protest at their month-long detention amid a rising tide of xenophobia and nationalist fervour in Egypt. Elsewhere, two Syrian refugees were killed by Egyptian coastguards while trying to flee the country by boat, while a Swiss national has been arrested on suspicion of espionage after being caught in possession of a toy plane. Frenchman Eric Lang, 49, a teacher, was beaten to death by fellow inmates in a Cairo police station last Friday. A longterm Cairo resident, Lang had been held...

Proposed legislation may outlaw paying for sex in France while giving prostitutes who are victims of sexual violence easier access to legal support. The preliminary text does not enjoy universal support. … “We are going to turn the law on its head,” said Socialist Member of Parliament Maud Olivier, who authored a report that will be the basis of the bill. “Prostitutes are victims and should not be treated like criminals.” “The law is intended to reduce violence towards prostitutes and to get it into the general mindset that paying for sexual services is not acceptable. We need to destroy...