Free Republic

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...