Myrteza Hilaj and Kreshnik Kadena convicted after NCA operation into Albanian crime group involved in illegal migration
Two men who used a plane to smuggle people from northern France to an aerodrome in Essex have been jailed.
Myrteza Hilaj and Kreshnik Kadena, both from Leyton in east London, were found guilty at Southwark crown court in March of facilitating the commission of a breach of immigration law.
The frustration that erupted into deadly violence in the French territory last week has been building for years
In the middle of the main road in Rivière-Salée, north of Nouméa, sits a burnt-out car. After days of rioting, young men with masked faces wave a Kanak flag as vehicles pass. All around is desolation. Shops with gutted fronts, burnt buildings, debris on the pavements and roads. Gangs of young people roam the area.
The violence that erupted last week is the worst in New Caledonia since unrest involving independence activists gripped the French Pacific territory in the 1980s.
‘Bakery scent’ added via microcapsules to postage stamp celebrating ‘jewel of French culture’
The French Post Office has released a scratch-and-sniff postage stamp to celebrate the baguette, once described by President Emmanuel Macron as “250 grams of magic and perfection”.
The stamp, which costs €1.96, depicts a baguette decorated with a red, white and blue ribbon. It has a print run of 594,000 copies.
The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade.
“What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”
French police shot dead a man armed with a knife and an iron bar who set fire to a synagogue in the Normandy city of Rouen on Friday.
The interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, travelling to visit the fire-damaged synagogue, said France was “deeply affected” by what he called an antisemitic act. He said the government was “extremely determined to continue to fully protect Jewish people in France, wherever they are, and Jews should practice their religion without fear”.
Azerbaijani flags have sprung up at demonstrations in Pacific territory, while separatists from French territories have been invited to Baku
France’s government says it has no doubt that Azerbaijan is stirring tensions in New Caledonia, despite the vast geographical and cultural distance between the Caspian country and the French Pacific territory.
Days of unrest in the French Pacific territory – sparked by a plan to change voting rules – have left five dead
Tensions remained high in Nouméa, the capital of New Caledonia, on Friday after days of riots as the French government’s representative said areas of the Pacific territory have “escaped” state control.
Louis Le Franc, high commissioner of the Republic in New Caledonia, announced new security deployments. The number of police and gendarmes on the island will rise to 2,700 from 1,700 by Friday evening.
Sisters of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges started enterprise to cover soaring electricity costs
The sisters of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in south-east France are prepared to move more than heaven and earth to save their mountain abbey and pay soaring electricity bills.
A dozen Cistercian order nuns are making ends meet by selling cleaning products made from their own spring water and essential oils on the internet and in local shops.
Some locals say they have been too scared to leave their homes as protests over changes to the voting law grew into deadly riots
Lizzie Carboni knew that life in New Caledonia had changed forever when the school she had attended as a child went up in flames on Wednesday night.
“I could hear people yelling, screaming and grenades being fired,” she says, adding that it was “the worst night of my life” and likening the scenes unfolding in the capital, Nouméa, to “civil war”.
Opposition has seized upon killings that shine spotlight on two big issues: prisons crisis and violent drug trade
As police continued to hunt the gunmen who killed two prison guards at a Normandy toll booth and freed a convict linked to gangland drug killings, the debate on law and order in France has intensified before next month’s European elections.
Both Gérald Darmanin, the hardline interior minister, and Jordan Bardella, the far-right president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, used the same dramatic vocabulary to warn of “savagery” in French society.
Cannes film festival First-time actor Agathe Riedinger is a wannabe influencer from the wrong side of the tracks in this forthright and fluent film
Feature first-timer Agathe Riedinger is bringing the TikTok energy for this story of a wannabe Insta influencer-princess from the wrong side of the tracks – but the director is also bringing some pretty old school social realism, exerting its downward gravitational pull. The result is forthright and fluent and fiercely acted by a newcomer lead who, in the time-honoured style of movies like this, is defiant, vulnerable and front and centre of almost every shot. But it also sometimes treads water in terms of narrative, running out of ideas before the end, and its final ambiguity about an ultimate success that is there to be hallucinated rather than achieved feels anticlimactic.
Liane, played by Malou Khebizi, is a 19-year-old with a French and Italian background living in Fréjus in the south of France. She was once given up for foster care by her troubled mother but now taken back home and is now in charge of babysitting her kid sister, whom she is busily turning into a mini-me version of her own brassy, sexualised image. Liane shoplifts and sells the stolen goods – which has paid for her breast-implant surgery and she has also had her lips done. She hangs out with her friends, getting drunk, but is fastidious about how and with whom she’s having sex; she has thousands of followers on her Only-Fans-type insta (although oddly, it doesn’t occur to her to have an actual Only Fans account). Liane also has a poignantly religious sense of her own heroic martyrdom, her ill-treatment at the hands of online haters, men and her appalling mother.
Deadly clashes have erupted over move to increase number of French nationals eligible to vote in Pacific territory
Deadly violence has erupted in New Caledonia, a French overseas territory in the South Pacific, after lawmakers in Paris approved a constitutional amendment to allow recent arrivals to the territory to vote in provincial elections.
The amendment, which some local leaders fear will dilute the vote of the Indigenous Kanak people, is the latest flashpoint in a decades-long tussle over France’s role in the island.
Two French prison officers who were shot dead in an ambush that freed a convict linked to gangland drug killings have been named, as police continued a massive manhunt for the missing fugitive.
Fabrice Moello, 52, and Arnaud Garcia, 34, were killed, and three others seriously wounded, in the brazen attack on a prison convoy on Tuesday during which the inmate escaped. They were the first French prison officers to be killed in the line of duty since 1992.
Macron holds crisis meeting amid unrest over plan to increase number of French nationals eligible to vote in Pacific territory
France has said it will impose a state of emergency in New Caledonia for at least 12 days, after a second night of unrest over changes to voting rights in the overseas territory that has resulted in the deaths of at least four people.
More than 130 people have been arrested and more than 300 injured, according to the french high commission.
Elite French police are searching for gunmen who attacked a prison van in Normandy, killing at least two prison officers and freeing the high-security inmate they were transporting. A police source said several individuals, who arrived in two vehicles, rammed the police van and fled. Footage circulating on social media shows heavily armed men dressed in black wearing balaclavas
Mistral, a French start-up considered a promising challenger to OpenAI and Google, is getting support from European leaders who want to protect the region’s culture and politics.
Experts said it was the first time an international court determined that governments were legally obligated to meet their climate targets under human rights law.
Supporters for the group of older women bringing a climate-related lawsuit against Switzerland at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, on Tuesday.
The cafeteria at the Pasteur Institute in Paris became more like a club during a March event that featured three musical groups formed at the institute.
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