Free Republic

PARIS (AP) — France’s navy, working with intelligence provided by the United Kingdom, on Thursday intercepted an oil tanker in the Mediterranean Sea that traveled from Russia, in a mission targeting the sanctioned Russian shadow fleet, officials said. French maritime authorities for the Mediterranean said the ship, the Grinch, is suspected of operating with a false flag. The French navy is escorting the ship to anchorage for more checks, the statement said. The tanker departed from the city of Murmansk in northwestern Russia, it said.

If U.S. President Donald Trump really wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize, he needs to stop the war in Gaza, French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday. Speaking to France's BFM TV from New York, Macron said that only Trump has the power to put pressure on Israel to end the war. "There is one person who can do something about it, and that is the U.S. president. And the reason he can do more than us, is because we do not supply weapons that allow the war in Gaza to be waged. We do not supply equipment that...

French President Emmanuel Macron said it was out of line for Charles Kushner, the U.S. ambassador to France and the father of President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, to publicly accuse him of taking insufficient action to combat antisemitism, and for him to link France's foreign policy positions to domestic incidents of violence against Jews in France. In a letter he published in the Wall Street Journal to Macron in August, Kushner wrote that he had "deep concern over the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France and the lack of sufficient action by your government to confront it." "Public statements haranguing...

French President Emmanuel Macron is due to meet Donald Trump in Washington later, the first one-on-one meeting between the pair since the US president re-entered the White House. Macron said in a social media Q&A that he would warn Trump against appearing weak to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Bernard Arnault, the billionaire boss of the world's biggest luxury conglomerate LVMH, has picked a fight with the French government by suggesting that companies could flee France for the United States to escape a planned tax hike. As the government of Prime Minister Francois Bayrou is struggling to fine-tune a budget designed to tackle the country's deficits and debt mountain, Arnault took issue with an expected key ingredient, a special tax on large companies. "I have just returned from the US, and I have witnessed the wind of optimism in that country. Coming back to France is a bit like...

Emmanuel Macron has added his voice to a growing chorus of European criticism of Elon Musk, accusing the world’s richest man of intervening directly in the continent’s democratic processes, including Germany’s snap federal elections next month. The French president joined the Norwegian and British prime ministers and a German government spokesperson on Monday in responding to a barrage of hostile posts by Musk backing far-right political parties and attacking leftwing politicians in Europe. The owner of the social media platform X is a close ally of Donald Trump and, after spending more than $250m (£210m) to help get him re-elected,...

The EU faces difficult questions that need to be debated now rather than later. Europe needs a strong deterrent against Moscow, and that will only be possible if France and Germany team up to advance the debate. In the end, the meeting at the United States airbase in Ramstein, Germany, resembled a ribbon ceremony with praise awarded to the most diligent. Germany is a great friend that is doing everything it can to support Ukraine, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said. It was not only thanks for the Germans’ proposal to send tanks to Ukraine, but also the polite...

For the second time since the first two presumptive positive cases of the coronavirus appeared in Pennsylvania on March 6, Gov. Tom Wolf on Monday renewed the state’s disaster declaration for the pandemic for another 90 days. “As we approach the six-month mark of this crisis, I continue to be amazed at the resiliency and strength shown by Pennsylvanians during this pandemic,” Wolf said in a statement. “We are going to continue to combat the health and economic effects of COVID-19, and the renewal of my disaster declaration will provide us with resources and support needed for this effort.” This...