The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) on Saturday reported that about 745 civilians were killed in “massacres” targeting Alawites on Friday and Saturday.

About 125 members of the Islamist-led government security forces and 148 fighters supporting toppled Syrian leader Bachar al-Assad have also been killed, according to the British-based war monitor, bringing the total number killed in the latest clashes to more than 1,000.

“We have to preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible and God willing, we will be able to live together,” Sharaa said from a mosque in Damascus on Sunday.

“What is currently happening in Syria is within the expected challenges,” following the fall of the Assad regime, he said in a video message.

EU to ease some sanctions against Syria following Assad’s fall

Call for independent investigations

France has expressed its deep concern over the “serious violence” which broke out on Thursday in the coastal provinces of Tartous, Lattaquié and Homs – a heartland of Assad, who belongs to the Alawite minority.

“France condemns in the strongest possible terms the atrocities committed against civilians on a sectarian basis and against prisoners,” the French foreign ministry said in a statement on Saturday. 

It called on Syria’s new authorities “to ensure that independent investigations can shed light on these crimes, and that the perpetrators are sentenced”.

France had pledged to support the new authorities led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), but as part of a more “inclusive” Syria that respected minority rights.

Macron calls Syrian leader to discuss transition, terrorism, sanctions

Alawites are an offshoot of Shia Islam, and make up around 10 percent of Syria‘s population, which is majority Sunni Muslim.

The authorities have blamed summary executions of dozens of youths and deadly raids on homes in villages and towns inhabited by Syria’s once-ruling minority on unruly armed militias who came to help the security forces and have long blamed Assad’s supporters for past crimes.

A security source told Reuters news agency that clashes continued overnight in several towns where armed groups fired on security forces and ambushed cars on highways leading to main towns in the coastal area.

Reuters also reported crowds were seeking refuge at a Russian military base at Hmeimim in Latakia, chanting “people want Russian protection”.

Ousted president Bashar Assad found asylum in Russia, the regime’s historic ally, after Islamist-led rebels took control of the capital Damascus on 8 December, ending nearly six decades of dynastic rule by the Ba’aath party and a 13-year civil war. 

(with newswires)

“It’s finally taking root in reality, after a lot of theories, a lot of things written on paper, back and forth, but nothing concrete,” the centre’s director Liz Gomis told French news agency AFP earlier this week.

MansA’s new home, at least for the first two years, will be in a former fashion workshop in the 10^th arrondissement of Paris, with the exact address yet to be revealed. 

Its first guests are due to visit in June, with the official opening set for September.

Gomis is convinced that MansA “will change things” by giving more visibility to African creativity.

“It is essential to have a place in Paris to talk about African worlds in the broad sense, particularly via the diasporas, and to counter the blind spot that currently exists in France on contemporary African [creativity], which abounds everywhere else in the world,” she said.

Giving France ‘another chance’

President Macron announced the centre’s creation in October 2021, during the France-Africa summit held in Montpellier.

This “House of African Worlds” was one of 13 recommendations made by Cameroonian academic Achille Mbembe, in a report commissioned by Macron entitled “New relations between Africa and France: Meeting tomorrow’s challenges together”.

He told AFP that the idea behind MansA was to give France “another chance, at a time when it is being tossed around in Africa and paying for the mistakes of successive governments”.

In 2022, Macron set up an online public consultation to explore what the public wanted from MansA.

African youth speak their truth directly to France’s Macron at the France summit

But the project stalled due to battles over its budget, which was ultimately revised downwards, and its location.

The Ministry of Culture, which is overseeing the project with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, originally advocated for MansA to be hosted at the Paris Mint (Monnaie de Paris), an institution created in the 9th century which now includes a museum and exhibition halls.

However, this proposal sparked a storm of protest from the employees of the Mint, who were concerned about the future of their museum – which had reopened in 2017 after €80 million of self-financed restoration work.

Staff said that the venue could be deprived of the use of rooms that it rents out, the income from which allows it to operate without state aid.

Rodolphe Krempp, a union representative at the Mint, told AFP: “There is no synergy between the two institutions”. He said that the proposal was launched without consultation, adding: “We wonder who had this idea and why.”

History of Olympic gold, silver and bronze glitters in Paris museum

Political debate

The proposal to use the Mint also made waves in political circles. Communist MPs said such a fusion of projects would “profoundly call into question the coherence of the cultural, industrial and commercial activities” of the historic site.

Meanwhile far-right National Rally MPs accused the government of giving in to “the sirens of repentance” with regard to the legacy of France’s colonial past on the African continent.

Post-colonial artists reimagine the future in new Pompidou exhibition in Metz

The Ministry of Culture had planned to allocate €2.1 million to MansA in 2025, according to the draft finance law, with €5 million to come from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

However, this has been thrown into doubt with the adoption of a disputed budget in February which saw the French government impose €32 billion of savings across different sectors.

In the face of uncertainty, Gomis remains cautiously optimistic. While the current 800m² space is a temporary installation, she says it is a “first step to begin rolling out our programming” and “a milestone while we wait for a definitive location”.

“I have to continue my little battle. Because deep down, it’s still a battle,” she said. “It’s great to be able to anchor ourselves in reality and start to come together, but there are now a lot of things to come into play.”

Sylviane Boyer founded Pot en Ciel Kreol in 2023, in Cambaie in the north of Réunion, a French department in the Indian Ocean. She had taken over her family farm, which grew numerous vegetables native to the island.

“On Réunion Island, we have exotic vegetables, which have lots of antioxidants. We’re protected here on this little volcanic island, in terms of all the produce we have,” Boyer told RFI. “There are vegetables that can’t be found in mainland France… papaya, chayote, watercress that grow in our mountains. And chillies.”

Over the years, Boyer began to notice a rise in cases of diabetes, Crohn’s disease and high cholesterol. It was at this point that she became interested in micronutrition – the practice of optimising the diet to include vitamins and minerals the body needs – and discovered lacto-fermentation.

“We have lots of health problems because we eat too much fat and sugar. This led me to study lacto-fermentation a bit and I found that, scientifically speaking, a lot has been proven about it, which brought me back to it.”

Why do France’s overseas territories have a diabetes problem?

This technique is very common in several Africa countries, where access to electricity can be limited, making food preservation a challenge.

“In Africa, babies’ first meals are made using lacto-fermentation. It’s a natural process to follow,” says Boyer.

This ancient food preservation technique involves immersing food in salted water to encourage the growth of lactic acid bacteria.

“We use large vats where we put local fruits and vegetables from Réunion, along with water and natural, unrefined salt from Saint Leu. This process helps us pre-digest the food and release its full bioavailability,” explains Mégane Mardemoutou, sales manager at Pot en Ciel Kreol.

“This process develops probiotics and prebiotics, multiplies vitamin C, vitamin K – which is very important for the heart – and various B vitamins like B2 and B6.”

One local vegetable the company works with is bitter melon. “It’s a fruit that grows on vines, somewhat like cucumbers. It’s an old local vegetable with a thousand benefits because it aids detoxification, improves heart circulation and provides all the essential vitamins we need,” says Mardemoutou.

Over half of all adults will be overweight or obese by 2050, study shows

The company is now working with hospitals, the Regional Health Agency and local organisations to spread awareness of the health benefits of lacto-fermentation.

The 68-year-old Briton, who has headed World Athletics since 2015, is campaigning to replace Thomas Bach as chief of the 130-year-old body that has organised 30 summer and 24 winter Games since 1896 and 1924 resepctively.

“You couldn’t do my job without recognising the importance of Africa,” said Coe who is vying with six other candidates to become the most powerful sports administrator on the planet.

“Track and field is a religion in many parts of Africa,” Coe added during an interview with France 24 and RFI.

“We need to build on that. And I see the Olympic movement and the potential of growth in the Olympic movement being critical on getting our policies in Africa correct.”

In 2019, four years after taking over from Lamine Diack as president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, the organisation was renamed World Athletics as Coe was reappointed for a second term.

Election

On 17 August 2023, in Budapest, he was re-elected unopposed for a third and final term.

Though Coe pledged to place a world championships in Africa during his time as World Athletics boss, the events have been held in England, Qatar, the United States and Hungary. The 2025 edition will be staged in Japan and China has been lined up for 2027.

Coe, though, has ushered into Africa the Diamond League, which features the world´s best athletes competing across 32 individual track and field disciplines.

Since 2016, Rabat in Morocco has been one of the stops on the Diamond League whirl. This year’s meeting will take place on 25 May.

“It’s not just about sitting there saying: ‘We hope one day to stage a world championships or an Olympic Games in Africa,'” Coe said. 

“You need a proper glide path. You need a proper programme. You need proper planning and you need steering groups to do this. And that will be one of the first objectives if I become president. Africa is critical to the growth of Olympic sport.”

After taking up athletics during his secondary school days in Yorkshire, northern England, Coe developed into one of the finest middle distance of his generation.

A sleek, unhurried gait masked devastating pace. His endurance and excellence brought him gold in the 1500m at the Moscow Games in 1980 and he retained his title four years later in Los Angeles, a feat that remains unmatched. There were also two silvers in the 800m from both Games.

Track record

Since stepping away from the white heat of competition, he has been a British government minister, led the organising team for the 2012 Games in London and the British Olympic Association. 

In July 2020, he became a member of the IOC.

“I’ve been a full member for only five years, but I’ve been involved with the Olympic movement since the age of 11,” Coe said.

“This is not a job. This is a passion. I was a competitive athlete. I went to two Olympic Games. I chaired a National Olympic Committee. I won and then successfully delivered the Games. 

“I have a sports marketing agency that I was in large part the creator of, which is now the second or third largest in the world. And I have also been a government minister. So I think that not only is it a passion, but I’ve actually had a life of delivery. This is more than about committees or commissions.”

Coe said in a bid to win the job as president he would promote his record as a facilitator.

“I will draw inspiration from every job of delivery that I’ve done,” he added. “Because I know you do not deliver as a lone wolf, you deliver with teams.

Zeitgeist

“I’m very good at creating and building teams. I inherited World Athletics when the sport was really at a critical moment, and in the space of 10 years, we’ve turned it around to be one of the best governed sports. 

“We’ve just increased our revenues by 25 percent in the last year. And as the president of the organising committee in London, you can’t bring 11,000 people together in an organising committee without really fundamentally understanding the need to build teams.

“And that, of course, is the way the athletes operate. And I lean very, very heavily on my athletic and my sporting experience.

“Working collaboratively with coaches for the best part of 15 or 16 years gives you real insights into how you work collaboratively in any environment.”

Whoever emerges triumphant from the vote on 20 March in Greece will require consummate charm to navigate the prelude to the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 2028.

Coe says he is prepared for the geopolitical buffeting.

“Los Angeles 1984 was my second Olympic Games so it’s a landscape I’m very familiar with,” he said. “I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, so I know many of the local politicians. And don’t forget my life in the last 10, 20, 30 years has been about meeting world leaders.

“I’ve done it politically. I’ve done it commercially. And just in the last few weeks I’ve met two or three very senior world leaders. So this is not alien territory to me.

“And you have to present the best case you can. But actually, it’s critical that those relationships are not just about high days and holidays. 

“The sole purpose of those relationships is to make sure that sport is higher up on government agendas.

“Sport is the best social worker in all our communities and used properly, it’s the smartest and deftest diplomat.” 

This article has been adpated from the France 24 interview with Selina Sykes and RFI’s Christophe Diremszian

In eastern Ukraine, scores of demonstrators held a minute’s silence to honour women killed defending the country from Russia’s invasion. Many carried banners bearing the faces of the deceased.

“Women are half of our society and we need to talk about what they do, what they are like, how they protect and what they do to make our country free and independent,” activist Iryna Lysykova told AFP in Kharkiv.

Many of the women marching in European capitals including Paris, Berlin and Madrid said they feared the growing strength of reactionary political forces, including a resurgent far right.

“It is coming now and we’re taking backwards steps,” said Dori Martinez Monroy, 63, in the Spanish capital. “We have to reclaim what has already been won, because women are the first to be targeted.”

In Jakarta, one activist, Ajeng, accused the Indonesian government of budget cuts that were “making women lose their rights.

“Women are killed, impoverished, criminalised,” she said, as nearby protesters held up placards reading “This body belongs to me” and “Glory to the women of the working class”.

“Indonesian woman are fighting against the state for these reasons,” she said.

‘Not over’

Some demonstrators directed their ire at US President Donald Trump.

In Paris, women from the Femen activist group marched topless with either the US or the Russian flag, marked with a swastika, painted on their chests.

The Republican has been accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, and his administration has been blamed for pushing through policies hostile to women.

“This is a battle, it’s not over,” said 49-year-old Sabine, who was marching with her seven-year-old son in Paris, where organisers put turnout at around 250,000. Police gave a figure of 47,000.

“We’re going in the right direction: Trump, the masculinists, they make lots of noise but they’re not as strong as we are,” she told AFP.

In Argentina, thousands joined demonstrations across the country, with many criticising President Javier Milei for policies including shuttering the ministry responsible for addressing gender violence and inequality.

Why do women in France still earn less than men?

‘Frightening’ developments

At the Berlin protest, some demonstrators held placards bearing messages including “Burn the patriarchy not the planet”.

One marcher, Steff Voigt, expressed her fears for the future.

“I find it quite frightening how certain developments are reversing, how women’s rights could simply be moving backward again, so to speak, because of the right. Especially in the USA,” she said.

At the rally in Istanbul, Cigdem Ozdemir took aim at male violence against women and the Turkish authorities’ declaration of 2025 as “The Year of the Family”.

“Since 2025 was declared ‘The Year of The Family’, we as women have been confined to our homes,” the psychologist lamented, adding that LGBTQ+ people like her were “criminalised”.

“Today, we are here to make our struggle visible, to defend our lives against male violence, to defend our place in society and our rights.”

Turkey exits treaty combatting violence against women

Iran’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi said women would overthrow the Islamic republic established after the 1979 revolution.

“Women have risen up against the Islamic republic in such a way that the regime no longer has the power to suppress them,” Mohammadi said in a video message where she was, as usual, not wearing the headscarf obligatory for all women in Iran.

Hundreds rally in Paris for Iranian women’s rights

Mohammadi, 52, who won the 2023 Nobel prize in recognition of her years-long fight for human rights in Iran, is on temporary release from prison for health reasons.

In Mexico, where the UN says an average of 10 women are murdered every day, thousands marched in the capital, Mexico City.

The collective organising the rallies, Greve feministe (Feminist Strike), said 250,000 people had taken to the streets across France at some 150 demonstrations, with 120,000 people in Paris alone.

Police put turnout in the capital at 47,000 people.

Some demonstrators took aim at US President Donald Trump including women from the Femen activist group. They marched topless with either the US or the Russian national flag, marked with a swastika, painted on their chests.

Why do women in France still earn less than men?

Dozens of women have alleged the Republican sexually abused them, and his administration has been accused of pushing through anti-women policies.

“This is a battle, it’s not over,” said 49-year-old Sabine, who was marching with her seven-year-old son.

“We’re going in the right direction: Trump, the masculinists, they make lots of noise but they’re not as strong as we are,” she told AFP.

Growing ‘masculinist’ culture in France slows down fight against sexism

The French capital’s Eiffel Tower is due to be lit up with a message of solidarity with Afghan women, whose freedoms have been curtailed since the Taliban returned to power. The message will be displayed in French, English, Farsi and Arabic.

The $53 billion plan, put forward by the Arab League, was formally adopted on Saturday by the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) at an emergency meeting in Saudi Arabia.

The Egyptian-crafted proposal is an alternative to US President Donald Trump’s plan to turn the Gaza Strip into a “Middle East Riviera”, displacing its 2.4 million inhabitants.

On Saturday, the foreign mnisters of France, Germany, Italy and Britain welcomed the five-year Egyptian plan, saying it promised “swift and sustainable improvement of the catastrophic living conditions” for the people of Gaza, they said in a joint statement.

French Foreign ministry says forced displacement of Gazans would be ‘unacceptable’

A “realistic” path

The plan would rebuild the Gaza Strip under the future administration of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and does not outline a role for Hamas, which controls Gaza.

Hamas and the PA welcomed the plan after it was presented by Egypt on Tuesday. 

OIC, which represents the Muslim world, has urged “the international community and international and regional funding institutions to swiftly provide the necessary support for the plan”.

Both the US and Israel have rejected it, claiming it fails to address the realities in Gaza.

“Residents cannot humanely live in a territory covered in debris and unexploded ordnance,” Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for Trump’s National Security Council, said Tuesday.

However, European foreign ministers said it showed “a realistic path to the reconstruction of Gaza”.

“We are clear that Hamas must neither govern Gaza nor be a threat to Israel any more,” they said in their statement.

“We commend the serious efforts of all involved stakeholders and appreciate the important signal the Arab states have sent by jointly developing this recovery and reconstruction plan.”

The four countries said they were committed to working with the Arab initiative, the Palestinians and Israel to “address those issues together”.

The majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced to leave their homes since Israel began bombarding Gaza following the 17 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel which killed some 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage.

More than 48,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict according to the Hamas-run health ministry. 

(with newswires)

France co-founded the United Nations International Labour Organisation in 1919, championing “equal pay for equal work”, and in 1972, the agency wrote the principle of pay equality into its labour code.

In 1983, France’s Roudy law mandated equal opportunities in the workplace, requiring companies to publish annual reports comparing the situation of its male and female employees and introducing a tool to help human resources managers identify and measure pay differences.

In 2018, the country launched an index to monitor the performance of large companies in the field of gender equality.

But this battery of legal measures has still not enabled France to close its gender pay gap.

Data published this week by the French National Statistics Institute (Insee) showed that in 2023 women’s average annual salary was €21,340 net compared to €27,430 for men – a difference of more than 22 percent.

While there has been progress, the pace is slow, with the gap narrowing at a rate of 1 percent per year over the last five years.

The primary reasons behind the gender pay gap are hours worked and type of jobs held. Women work on average 9 percent less than men and they’re also more likely to work part-time. But even when working hours are identical, their average salary is 14.2 percent lower than men’s, Insee found.

What’s more, working part-time is not necessarily a life choice says Anne Eydoux, an economist specialising in employment and gender issues.

“It’s a choice made under constraint, and some of the constraints refer to the gender divide of family roles where women take [more] parental responsibility,” she tells RFI. “But it’s also the result of occupational segregation.” Women are over-represented in for example supermarket and cleaning jobs, where split shifts are common.

Sexism and workplace inequality is rife in most areas of French life, research shows

Gendered occupations

Women are also far more likely to work in low-paying sectors such as health, care and education.

According to Insee, more than 95 percent of secretaries are women, with an average full-time net salary of €2,044 per month.

Meanwhile, only a quarter of engineers and IT executives – professions in which average monthly net salaries are close to €4,000 – are women.

“Women are over-represented in the care sector, where their skills are under-recognised,” Eydoux said. “And this is a fact for many female-dominated occupations, as the Covid crisis showed.”

Women also have less access to the highest-paying jobs. In 2023, they accounted for 42 percent of full-time equivalent positions in the private sector, and yet just 24 percent of the top 1 percent of high-paying jobs. The glass ceiling is still there, as Eydoux noted.

France works towards gender equality in top jobs while UK women are still struggling

Cultural attitudes

Working less and in lower-paid sectors does not, however, fully explain the 22 percent wage gap. Women doing the same job as men in the same company are still paid 3.8 percent less.

There are historical and cultural reasons for this according to Marie Donzel, an expert in social innovation and author of  “Justified inequalities: how to pay women less with a clear conscience”.

Until 1945, France had a “female wage”. Based on the assumption that a woman’s pay was intended merely to supplement her husband’s income, “women could be paid 10 to 15 percent less just because of their gender,” Donzel told RFI. 

This has helped foster gendered attitudes towards salaries. “Women tend to see [their pay] in terms of how much they need to live, and men see it in terms of ‘how much my job is worth’,” she said.

Donzel also points to a cultural prevailing negative image of women who take an interest in money. “We have a gendered socialisation in France that teaches us to be modest. When we talk about money, there’s still the spectre of venality.”

Gender pay gap means French women are ‘working for free’ until end of year

‘I thought negotiating was vulgar’

Women themselves are not always aware that they’re being discriminated against. It took Nathalie, a regional director for a multinational company, 15 years to find out.

“While chatting with my male counterparts, I realised that I was earning about €1,000 less per month than they were,” she told Franceinfo. “I’d lost €150,000 over 15 years.”

After comparing pay slips with colleagues, she realised that “every time, the women had significantly more experience in the role, more qualifications, we checked all the boxes. And yet, we were paid less. And the higher you climb in the hierarchy, the bigger the gap becomes”.

Nathalie took her case to court and won, securing a raise for herself and her colleagues. She questions whether women “negotiate their salaries enough”.

The question of negotiating pay “is as taboo as sex,” says lawyer Insaff El Hassini.

She set up a training and coaching company called Ma Juste Valeur – meaning “My True Worth” – to help women overcome that barrier and negotiate their pay, after facing gender discrimination in the workplace herself.

“I found out my male colleague earned €5,000 a year more than me,” she told RFI.  “When I voiced my concerns I was told, ‘Well you’re already well paid, you should have negotiated your starting salary when you joined’. No one had told me you had to negotiate. I thought it was vulgar.”

Gender gap at work far wider than expected, women’s pay remains static, UN says

Closing the gap

This year France will implement the EU’s 2023 Pay Transparency Directive, obliging companies to provide employees with pay scales for equivalent posts. Both Eydoux and Donzel welcome this transparency measure.

Eydoux also points to economic measures such as increasing both the minimum wage and income tax on very high wages, which together would narrow the pay gap. But the French government, which is trying to reduce the country’s huge deficit and keep high-earners and businesses on board, is not currently in favour of either.

Donzel insists that salaries in the female-dominated education and care sectors must be raised, given the contribution they make to society. “Whether it’s taking care of children, the elderly or in caring professions, this is obviously what’s most valuable, yet the economy has reversed the value system and that’s what we pay the least for.”

Eydoux would also like to see France’s gender quota policy, which has proven “very efficient” in breaking the glass ceiling by imposing gender-balance on executive boards, extended to other sectors.

Growing ‘masculinist’ culture in France slows down fight against sexism

For the moment, however, she says there aren’t many signs of improvement: “I don’t see much political will to focus on the gender pay gap and reduce it.”

Resistance to gender equality is nothing new, she added, and while younger women in particular are “more conscious of the gender pay gap and more willing to improve the situation”, they are now facing new forms of resistance.  

“More and more young men are defending masculinist positions and ideologies,” she said, with some claiming the 22 percent gender pay gap is “fake news”.

RFI: In the newspaper Der Spiegel, you compare today’s events to both the 1938 Munich meeting and the 1945 Yalta Conference, where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin shaped Europe’s future. How do these historical parallels apply now?

Ralf Fücks: It’s always a little bit dangerous to slip into this kind of historical comparison. There is no fatalism to repeat history, but I think we have to be aware that we are now again in an extremely critical and dangerous situation in Europe.

Munich, after Hitler took power, is the reference for appeasement policy. But Donald Trump is even going further than Chamberlain went in Munich in 1938 with Hitler’s Germany. He is not only trying to appease Putin with concessions, but taking sides with neo-imperial and authoritarian Russia against Ukraine and against former European allies of the US.

The situation is more like Yalta, because Trump is sharing the idea of Putin and of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, about a new world order where the world is dominated by the big powers which can do what they want without being restricted by rules.

Smaller nations submit to the big powers which divide the world into spheres of influence, like big boys who are at the same time collaborating and competing with each other.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in his June 2020 essay on the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, very clearly said that his vision was the one that came out of Yalta: the return to an agreement with the US about the division of the spheres of influence.

He does not believe in the idea of equality and shared sovereignty between all the nations. NOTE: Putin’s essay reads, “The major historic achievement of Yalta and other decisions of that time is the agreement to create a mechanism that would allow the leading powers to remain within the framework of diplomacy in resolving their differences.”

Trump also shares this view, notably that nations like Ukraine are to have only limited sovereignty and that they have to accept that Russia has a veto power over Ukraine’s future.

And this is a total contradiction of the European post-Cold War order. If we accept that, Europe will become a playground for China, the US and Russia.

RFI: What should Europe do?

Ralf Fücks: It is very hard to believe that the West as a political entity of liberal democracies is over and that we are entering a new political era, no longer relying on the US security guarantees, but one where the United States, at least under the presidency of Donald Trump, will turn on Europe and treat us not as friends, but as adversaries.

This moment is extremely critical, not only for Ukraine, but also for Europe. It is a litmus test as to whether Europe will stay relevant globally or if we will become a punching ball between China, Russia and the US.

As for Ukraine, the test is about our ability to defend the European security order, the principles on which this order was built, and if we can defend our values.

It is not just about solidarity with Ukraine, a country which is now suffering more than three years of war of destruction. It is also about defending Europe.

In the short term, the answer is weapons, weapons, weapons. We have to replace American military supply to Ukraine. Possibly for an interim period, the Europeans [could]  buy weapons in the US and send them to Ukraine. But then we have to build up our own military industries.

We must enable Ukraine to resist and to come into a better negotiation position with Russia, not from the defensive, but from a position of strength.

And we must build a common European Defence Union with Ukraine. Ukraine could be an asset for European security.

Europe scrambles to boost defence as US wavers on Ukraine support

RFI: You have mentioned the failures of the Minsk agreements. What lessons can we pull from those negotiations and what comes after in possible future negotiations with Russia?

Ralf Fücks: Ukraine should never again negotiate from a position of weakness. In Minsk 2014-2015, Ukraine was on the brink of military collapse. And this may never happen again. So if we want to have negotiations with Russia, we have to bring Ukraine into a position of military strength. The outcome of negotiations will depend on the military balance of force.

The second consequence from Minsk is that we cannot bring Russia into a position of brokering a deal. We have to treat Russia as an adversary. And the Europeans cannot be neutral in this conflict. We have to take sides with Ukraine. And we should not lift sanctions on Russia prematurely.

Sanctions go further than military support for Ukraine, our most effective tool to change Russia’s policy. Lifting sanctions wouldn’t only be about ending the war. We must raise other issues: the retreat of Russian nuclear arms from Belarus, from Kaliningrad, to reduce the nuclear threat to Europe. The release of political prisoners from Russian prison camps.

So we must build a package of political demands to Russia as a precondition for restoring economic relations.

RFI: Given all the changes in the US foreign policy, how do you feel that in the current situation the relationship can be saved?

Ralf Fücks: As long as Trump and his fellows are ruling in Washington, it only can be about damage control. We have to be strong economically, military, politically, in order not to be blackmailed by the US. 

We have to accept that with Trump you can only do transactional policies. So we have to define our interests and then negotiate with the US where we can strike deals in our interest.

One point of interest could be future policy towards China. If the US wants us to become tougher against China, especially in economic terms, reducing our economic dependency on China, not delivering critical technology to China, then we should ask the US in return to keep engaged in Europe.

The critical point is the nuclear guarantee. At the moment, even the combined French and British nuclear capacities will not be sufficient to deter Russia and to create a nuclear balance with Russia. So we have to increase our nuclear capacities. This is an issue we cannot avoid.

Ukraine to lead agenda during Washington talks between top EU and US diplomats

RFI: France and Germany together are the motor of the European Union. But the relationship has not been great, with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, differing in style and approach. Will the relationship get better under Friedrich Merz, who is likely to become Germany’s new Chancellor after the elections on 23 February?

Ralf Fücks: Let’s be realistic. I think there is no way back to this former exclusive French-German leadership in Europe. This is over. We have to recognise that the central eastern European nations, especially Poland, but also [the Czech Republic] the Baltic states, the Scandinavians, will play a much more self-assertive and important role.

So, we have to broaden the leadership board of the European Union.

But of course, a restart of Franco-German relations is absolutely crucial. We are almost in an all-time low. The same with Poland. And the designated new German Chancellor, Merz has already, before the elections, announced that his first visit will lead him to Warsaw and Paris.

And I think this is the right signal.

As the war in Ukraine rages on and air raid alerts in Kyiv remain a daily occurrence, a somewhat surprising new trend has flourished on TikTok – young people are posting about the race to get hold of theatre tickets. 

“Before, we used to announce new seasons a month in advance. Now we open ticket sales three months in advance and within two hours, everything’s gone,” said Victoria Bourkovska, the administrator of the Ivan Franko National Theatre – currently celebrating its 105th anniversary – who can hardly believe this turn of events.

In 2024, the hot ticket was for The Witch of Konotop, an adaptation of a 19th-century satirical novel about a Cossack chieftain battling witches. On TikTok, videos of the play have been viewed millions of times. 

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In front of the pastel blue facade of the theatre, Veronika and her group of friends are delighted to be among the lucky few who have seen the play. Yet Grehori, 32, confesses that before the war, he had never set foot in a theatre. One day he went along, and loved it. Tonight, the group don’t know what they’re going to see: “We just took whatever tickets they had.”

Evgeny Nuschuk, director of the Franko Theatre since April 2024, said: “There is a theatre craze at the moment. And it’s not just in Kyiv. With theatre, there’s this here and now aspect.” A living art form, a format that chimes with current events, it is also a source of inspiration for the future, as reflected in the theatre’s slogan for the new season: “Today’s theatre must reflect tomorrow’s society.”

There have been adjustments since the invasion. Big Russian names such as Pushkin and Chekhov have been eliminated from the repertoire – but a new generation of directors has seized upon Ukraine’s literary and theatrical heritage.

Fundraising for armed forces

In the event of an air raid alert, the play is stopped. And familiar faces have disappeared from audiences. “We have lost some regulars,” says Nuschuk. “They had bought tickets for the evening of 1 January, intending to start the year with us. Some other spectators brought flowers to lay on their seats.”

Before taking over the reins of the establishment, the director twice served as the country’s minister of culture. In the early days of the war he volunteered, and the theatre is engaged with the war effort. “In six months, we have collected more than 55 million hryvnias [almost €1.3 million] for our armed forces. Our troops perform in military hospitals and we lend our spaces to displaced troops from Sumy, Kherson or Mariupol every Monday,” said Nuschuk.

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“There has always been a renaissance of Ukrainian culture in difficult times,” Tetiana and Olha told RFI. These two students have also become regular theatre-goers since the start of the war.

“Remember the proliferation of poetry and theatre in the 1920s, for example [at the time of the occupation by the Soviet Union]. But I also think that one of the reasons for the craze we are experiencing is that today’s directors are reviving a certain authenticity in Ukrainian culture, breaking away from the rigid and overwhelming Russian culture embodied by the great authors and the great ballets.”

Language as resistance

In this cultural war, language is another battlefield. In a country where most people have historically mastered both Russian and Ukrainian, the former is being rejected while use of the latter has become a symbol of resistance.

On Khreshchatyk Avenue – Kyiv’s Champs-Élysées – where Vladimir Putin was planning a victory parade in 2022, the Sens bookshop opened its doors a year ago. On this Saturday afternoon, its two floors are bustling with people, particularly young people. With its café and stylish interior, it’s eminently Instagrammable. The store’s motto? “You can do what you like here, but not in Russian.” You won’t find any books in the language of Tolstoy for sale in this shop.

When the first Ukrainian language only bookshop opened, just before the full-scale invasion of February 2022, many people were sceptical, says Oleksii Erinchak, one of the owners and founders of Sens. “We would always hear that books in Ukrainian were more expensive, that there were few translations and therefore little choice… We wanted to promote books in Ukrainian. And we’ve shown that there is a demand for them.”

He added: “Of course, it’s an act of resistance. For centuries, Russia stifled our culture. This is like putting a protective dome over it.” He believes culture is a weapon, one Russia had tried to deploy in Ukraine long before the invasion: “Putin thought that the Ukrainians would welcome the Russians with open arms because culture had already prepared the ground.”

Before the war, around 75 percent of the book market in Ukraine was made up of books imported from Russia, illustrating Russian influence. Since 2022, these have been banned.

Today, eight of the shop’s top ten bestsellers are written in Ukrainian. They include a collection of love poetry, an anthology on Ukrainian nationalism, and a thrilling detective novel by Illarion Pavliuk, a Ukrainian writer and journalist turned soldier.

The bookshop also organises the collection of Russian-language books for recycling, with the money raised going to anti-aircraft defence.

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Maria Smirova, who is browsing for books to give as gifts with her husband Dimitrov, said: “Before the war I only bought books online, and most of them in Russian. Now everything has changed. We only speak to each other in Ukrainian and we’ve got rid of all our books in Russian.” For her, shopping here also means supporting Ukraine. 

Over the last two years, some 50 new bookshops have opened across the country. According to Rostyslav Semkiv, a professor of literature at the University of Kyivand a literary critic, this “cultural blossoming” can be explained by “a reformatting of our identity”.

“Before 2014, the cultural landscape was dominated by a post-Soviet identity. The large-scale invasion shattered this identity. This Ukrainian ethnic identity has become political. Many people are starting to take an interest in Ukrainian history, art and literature. What makes up Ukrainian culture? There is a search for ‘Ukrainianness’,” he explained.

Somoloskyp (meaning “torch”), the small Ukrainian-language publishing house run by Semkiv, is a testament to this movement. “Ten years ago, for us, printing 1,000 or 2,000 copies of a book was huge. Today, we have average print runs of 4,000 to 5,000 copies, and we can go up to 30,000. And every book that comes out goes very quickly,” he says. Production is in fact struggling to keep up with demand, with the printing works slowing down as a result of the war. 

Renaissance and resilience

In a basement in the centre of Kyiv, around 30 people have taken their seats. “Glory to Ukraine! Putin, you dickhead!” shouts stand-up comedian Arthur Petrov as he takes to the stage.

Nadiya and Stanislas, who discovered Petrov on YouTube, are here hoping to escape for an hour “from our difficult daily lives, and hear a few good jokes about Russkies, fighting and body bags,” says Stanislas, with a heavy does of irony.

“Laugh and keep your head up” is the name of the programme offered by this venue, the Underground Standup Club, which was founded in 2016 and sends 20 percent of its takings to the armed forces. 

When the hour is up, Petrov has another engagement – a charity show with two other comedians in the town of Irpin, near the capital, which has been hit hard by the war. The money raised will go to a charity that buys drones.

The show is taking place in the brand new community hall of a newly built neighbourhood, on a street formerly known as Dostoevsky Street and now renamed for Olha Kobylianska, a Ukrainian feminist writer. The atmosphere is warm among this young, hip audience. 

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Taxi drivers, the Montessori education method, talking in Ukrainian during sex, air raid alerts… war is not the only ground covered by the comedians, and laughter is clearly an outlet. Far from silencing it, the war has seen a huge increase in the number of comedians performing in Ukraine.

“Before the war started, most of the big stand-up shows in Ukraine were in Russian,” says Anton Zhytlov as he leaves the stage. “With the start of the war, we stopped using Russian and this has led to a sort of renaissance in Ukrainian humour.”

In the audience, Rima is happy to be able to relax a little. Her husband is at the front, but she doesn’t know where exactly. “It’s invaluable for our mental health,” she says.

For Zhytlov, the fact that Ukrainians still go to stand-up shows and comedians continue to perform, despite the war, is indicative of the national mentality: “We are courageous and we look fear in the eye. We’re not afraid of anything.”

This article has been adapted from the original in French, by our correspondent in Kyiv.

Nataliia greets us with a big smile and gifts: her favourite Ukrainian sweets, which helped her get through her exile in Paris. We first met in February 2023, when she was living in the French capital her two children, Hanna and Ivan. The family had fled Ukraine days after the Russian invasion, and the destruction of their home. Nataliia’s husband, Volodymyr, had stayed behind in Bucha, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital. Forbidden from leaving the country, he set about rebuilding a home for his family.

Today, we meet Nataliia in the centre of Kyiv. She wants to show us the old town. “It’s a bit like Montmartre,” she says as she takes us down Andrew’s Descent, a street renowned for its artists.

Last July, she packed the family’s bags, sold their furniture and left Paris to return home, despite the war that is still raging.

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In front of the sky blue St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery, destroyed tanks sit as a reminder of the Ukrainian resistance that prevented Russian forces from entering the capital. “This represents our success,” says Nataliia. “There are also civilian cars. I think these are vehicles that were bombed by the Russians in Bucha or Irpin, when people were trying to evacuate.”

‘I’m on home ground’

Since her return, Nataliia hasn’t had much time to herself. So, after more than two years away, this walk around her city means a lot. “I’m on home ground, I’m in my hometown,” she says, excited. “And it’s important for me to be able to bear witness to life in war, to remind us of our history, who we are and why we’re fighting: for this freedom, for our children’s future.”

It’s hard to know how many Ukrainian refugees, like Nataliia, have made their way home. According to the UN’s International Organization for Migration and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, of the 14 million Ukrainians who have fled their homes since 24 February, 2022, almost 4.3 million have already returned – around a quarter of them from abroad.

Nataliia says she will remember the moment she and her children crossed the border back into Ukraine, on the train from Warsaw, for the rest of her life. “The children were asleep and I started to cry with joy – at last, I’m home! It was crazy.”

At the station, her husband was waiting for her with a bouquet of flowers. “Before the war, he didn’t give me many flowers! And then my mother had prepared plenty of food, and the whole family was around the table, saying hurrah, you’re finally with us.”

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The first few weeks, however, were challenging. The family had to get used to the power cuts again, and the daily air raid alerts. “When we first came back, I couldn’t sleep. The children couldn’t even hear the alerts! I took medication, but after that I couldn’t wake up. So at one point, I said that’s enough. I turned everything off, the alerts and the news.”

Seven months on, the siren that wails as we warm ourselves up in a café no longer bothers her. The illusion of normality that Ukrainians have had to live with for almost three years has once again become her daily routine.

In the middle of the crowd on Independence Square, the nerve centre of Kyiv and the scene of the Maidan Revolution in 2013, she notes there is a “ballistic threat” and calls her children to check they are following “the two walls rule” – meaning there must be two walls between you and the street. On the other end of the line, Ivan and Hanna reply distractedly: “Yes, yes, Mum…”

“I was more stressed in France than here,” says Nataliia. “Here, I see the alert on my phone and life goes on. In France, I was always following the alerts on Telegram. When I saw that it was in Kyiv, I sent text messages, then when nobody answered I couldn’t sleep.”

A return to ‘normality’

Today, the family lives in a residential area of Kyiv. The work to rebuild a house on their land has been delayed, but they work on it every weekend, even if it bears little resemblance to the beautiful yellow house they lived in before the invasion. They are making do – with compensation from the city of Kyiv and help from the Ukrainian Fund for International Volunteers, a French humanitarian organisation.

On her return, Nataliia was lucky enough to be able to return to her job as a language teacher at the National Defence University of Ukraine, a military higher education institute. “I’m doing what I know how to do and what I like to do. That’s important to me,” she says, with relief.

In Paris, with the help of the Lesoult family, who took Nataliia and her children in on their arrival, and to whom she is “infinitely grateful”, she was taken on as a reception assistant for the Democratic Movement political party, where she also wrote articles on the situation in Ukraine for the party’s blog.

She has rediscovered the sense of purpose she had been missing 2,000 kilometres from home, even though she sent money to the army every month during her time away from Ukraine.

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Her pride in teaching English to officers in the Ukrainian army can be heard in her voice – she leads intensive four-month sessions, six hours a day, to enable soldiers to communicate or handle equipment sent from abroad. She also continues to give online French lessons to Ukrainian refugees, and refuses to “let them go before they’ve reached survival level!”.

At first glance, Nataliia looks like she’s picked up where she left off in March 2022. But as her story unfolds, it becomes clear things are not that simple. Inevitably, her two and a half years away were not without consequences.

“I don’t regret coming back at all, because I’m with my family, as are my children, I’m with my husband. For us, that’s the most important thing.” But, she confides, “the separation was a complicated period” for the couple, and when she got back they had to learn to live together again.

The most painful thing has been the lack of understanding she sometimes feels among those close to her who have stayed in Kyiv throughout. It’s a rift that’s hard to heal, and it’s also fed, she thinks, by a feeling of betrayal, even jealousy perhaps. For many Ukrainians, she says, even before the war Europe sounded like an El Dorado – a place that promised a better life.

“Everyone thought it was a thousand times better than Ukraine. We had fantasies, no doubt linked to the Soviet Union and when the borders were closed.” So for those who stayed at home, for her to come back to a country at war, with children, when she had a flat and a job in Paris and spoke the language… “They can’t understand. They think, is she crazy or what?”

‘Life is difficult for refugees’

The decision to return was not an easy one. “I wanted to come back from day one, but I always had doubts about whether I was doing the right thing for my children, because my husband was always telling me no, you have to stay, the children have to live in peace, you have to sleep well, that’s what’s important.”

Right up until her last day in Paris, he hoped that she would change her mind. But for Nataliia, life in France had become unbearable. 

“We are very grateful for what France has done for us and for all the Ukrainian refugees,” she insists. “But it’s too complicated to be away from your family. And life is very difficult, especially for refugees, both materially and morally. Because all our roots are here in Ukraine. Over there, I was alone, everything was on my shoulders. I had to deal with all the problems, paperwork, for the flat, at work, with the schools… Everything I earned went to the rent. It was my husband who paid for our food. I couldn’t live there on my own with two children.”

The children went to school in France for two years, but also continued to follow the Ukrainian curriculum via distance learning in the evenings and at weekends, in the hope of eventually returning. For Nataliia, on top of everything else, this timetable was too much. “I said stop, we can’t live like this!”

Especially since she could see, on her visits home to see her family, that “people were still living here, trying to enjoy themselves”. “I said to myself, why do my children and I have to suffer in France if we can be with our families, be together and enjoy every day? Why do I have to cry myself to sleep every night without my husband, without my children’s father, without my parents, without my loved ones? Of course,” she concedes, “if we lived in occupied territory, if we didn’t have a roof over our heads, things would be different.”

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It was in a Telegram messaging group set up by a Ukrainian psychologist that she found the support she needed to put her fears to bed and take the plunge and go home. In the group, women, often mothers like her, refugees all over Europe, shared their worries. Others, who had already returned, talked about their experiences. 

Nataliia does not want to seem ungrateful to France. Her favourite things there, she says, were the châteaux, Normandy, the ocean and Berthillon ice cream – “a great stress reliever!” She knows that having temporary protection status made her situation among refugees rather enviable. But her eyes mist over and her jaw clenches when she thinks back to those two and a half years, when she felt herself drowning in problems.

How are Hanna and Ivan, now 13 and 11? “They’re happy, they’ve got their own room and their friends back,” she says. “Everyone thinks there’s no future here. But if everyone leaves, what will become of this country? Nothing. So it’s up to us and our children to rebuild.”

We pass beneath the imposing Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People, a monument from the Soviet era, then named the Peoples’ Friendship Arch, Nataliia explains. Night has fallen, it’s cold, and yet there are lots of people around. “We live each day,” says Nataliia – day by day. “Before, I wouldn’t buy anything, I’d save for the children, for work [on the house]. But now, no… you have to live now, you have to enjoy it. You never know what tomorrow will bring.”

This article has been adapted from the original French version, by our correspondent in Kyiv.

“What is exciting and quite unique is to find various objects from as far as Ireland, England, the Netherlands and Germany buried with the corpses in this part of western France, in the late 8th century,” archaeologist Annie Bolle, of France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), told RFI.

Bolle is the scientific project manager for excavations taking place at La Flotte, a village on the Ile de Ré, off the French Atlantic coast.

INRAP was called in to look at a plot of land ahead of the construction of a house – because in 1985 a Gallo-Roman villa dating back to the 4th century was unearthed next door.

Between October and December 2024, the INRAP team uncovered around 50 graves in and outside a chapel. Having belonged to the priory of Saint Eulalie, according to texts from 1156, it was later destroyed during the French Wars of Religion, between Catholics and Protestants, in the 16th century.

“The findings provide rare tangible evidence of close ties between the Carolingian Empire [a Frankish empire in Western and Central Europe during the early Middle Ages] and a population from the North and Celtic Seas,” said Bolle.

Unusual burials

Five of these graves stood out. The position of the bodies and the artefacts they were buried with “are quite rare to find on Ile de Ré or even in western France,” explained Bolle.

Two of the bodies were not positioned in the customary Christian fashion, with the heads facing east towards Jerusalem, but were orientated towards the south.

The lower limbs of some were bent rather than extended, as would be expected. Furthermore, two others were laid on their sides and one female was found lying face down.

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“The bodies in the five graves were buried with various objects and ornaments. This practice, common during the 6th and 7th centuries, disappeared later in the 8th and 9th centuries, around the time we think the five were buried,” said Bolle.

The archaeologists found two combs and necklaces made of amber, glass, bone and copper beads.

The findings from the La Flotte excavations have been preserved and will undergo analysis to gather information about their composition and provenance.

“By finding out what technique was used to make the combs, we will be able to tell when and where they were made. DNA testing of the material used – bones or antlers – will help us to more accurately determine where they came from,” Bolle explained.

Other artefacts unearthed include a metal belt with an intricate design, and a knife similar to one previously found in the south-east of England.

Social status

“Stable isotopes analysis of the human bones will help us to reconstruct the diet of the individuals,” Bolle said, explaining that what they ate will give an indication of where they came from – as well as their social status, given usually only people with means could afford meat.

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“Paleogenetic analysis of the skeletons’ DNA should help us determine the sex of the individuals and whether they were related or not,” she added.

The findings have been sent to various laboratories around France, with some at the Arc’Antique Laboratory in Nantes, while some of the DNA testing – of the combs, for example – will be done at the Natural History Museum in Paris.

Trade links

Most of the artefacts unearthed from the graves appear to originate from northern Germany, the Netherlands, south-east England and the area around Dublin in Ireland. The beads are Irish, the knife or the belt could come from England and the combs may come from the Frisian region in north-western Europe – in modern times, parts of the north of the Netherlands and north-west Germany.

“What is fascinating is trying to uncover how the various objects from so many different places found their way in this small plot of land on Ile de Ré,” Bolle said.

“The La Flotte excavations [have uncovered] rare archaeological evidence of the active trade relations we’ve read about between the Carolingian Empire and the population around the North Sea.”

Danish and German archaeologists have already shown an interest in the La Flotte findings. Now follows at least two years of investigation to uncover the story behind them.

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“What we don’t know yet is whether the individuals were locals buried with their own objects or whether they were foreigners buried on this land,” said Bolle. “It says a lot if the foreigners were buried amongst the locals. It means that they were well accepted. And, resonates with what is happening nowadays in terms of tolerance towards migrants.”

A woman’s voice emanates from Michel-Marie Maudet’s laptop, sitting on a desk at the headquarters of his software development company Linagora, in Issy-Les-Moulineaux, south of Paris.

“Hello, I am Lucie, a large language model trained on a massive data set of text and code in French and other European languages.”

Speaking English with a French accent, she continues: “I am able to understand and respond to questions in a way that is sensitive to the nuances of European culture and language.”

This chatbot, which can communicate in French and several other European languages, uses the word “nuance” frequently when describing itself – which Maudet echoes. 

“It is a question of nuances. These large language models are statistics, and if the models are trained mainly on US content, you are more likely to get answers influenced by US culture.”

Listen to an interview with Michel-Marie Maudet (and “Lucie”) in the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 124:

The idea is that different content will be generated on a tool that has been trained on different languages.

“Languages are our culture, our civilisation, our values, and we developed Lucie, our large language model, to fix this under-representation of our culture,” said Maudet.

Lucie was released to the public in January with little testing beforehand, and ran into problems as users found it was generating nonsense – and worse. It was taken offline three days later.

Maudet said that while the release was premature, it generated interest – notably about the training data, which was made public at the same time as the chatbot, because Linagora is committed to developing open-source tools.

Behind the curtain of AI

“It’s a completely open-source model,” he said. “If you want to build transparency and trust in an AI system, you have to know where and how these models are built.”

The training data set was downloaded 10 times more than the actual model, revealing the level of interest in how these tools work.

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And while Lucie’s release was something of a public relations disaster, Maudet says it also demonstrated an interest in alternatives to tools developed by US tech giants.

This was borne out at the AI Action Summit held in Paris earlier this month, at which France and other European countries sought to stake their claim in terms of innovation and governance.

European identity

“People are asking for this kind of technology, as an alternative to Chinese or US companies,” Maudet added. “I think the debates around Lucie were very interesting, because they raised an expectation that we want to have our own technology, our own strategy, our own mastery of our digital future.”

Linagora is not the only company developing these alternatives, and far from the most powerful. But the company is dedicated to transparency and open sourcing, in its aim to create a tool that can generate text not derived from American content.

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“We want to incorporate these systems into our daily life, and I am not sure we have the same approach in the US as our social system here in France or Europe,” Maudet explained.

However, the company’s mission presupposes a European identity that is not always clear, or unanimous.

“A big challenge for Europe is to act as one continent,” said Maudet. “AI models could ease a common vision of what we call Europe. We will be stronger and better if we play collectively and act as a single continent and one entity.”

Listen to an interview with Michel Maudet in the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 124, listen here.

The victory – France’s biggest in Dublin – was all the more impressive as it was achieved without skipper Antoine Dupont who left the field late in the first-half with his side leading 5-0.

After absorbing early home pressure, the visitors opened the scoring after 20 minutes. Louis Bielle-Biarrey scored his sixth try of the competition going over the line in the corner on the left wing. Thomas Ramos failed to add the two points for the conversion.

Following Dupont’s departure, both teams swapped penalties before Sam Prendergast added another for Ireland. The visitors went in at half-time 8-6 up.

To the delight of the partisans in the Aviva Stadium, the hosts took the lead in the early stages of the second-half. Dan Sheehan scored on the right wing and Prendergast added the conversion for a 13-8 advantage.

Indiscipline

But a second Irish player was shown a yellow card five minutes into the second period and France took full advantage of Calvin Nash’s 10-minute absence with tries from Paul Boudenhent, Bielle-Biarrey, and a penalty from Ramos to lead 25-13.

Just before the hour mark, it was effectively all over, Oscar Jégou scored a try and Ramos added the conversion for 32-13.

Another Ramos penalty on 66 minutes took the score to 35-13 and when Damien Penaud went over for a record-equalling 38th try for his country, the Test entered humiliation territory at 42-13.

Ireland salvaged some pride late on with tries from Cian Healy and Jack Conan but the spoils and leadership of the table were with Fabien Galthié’s men.

“The secret was to play 80 minutes with all the intensity we can have,” Bielle-Biarrey told British broadcaster ITV. “I got good ball to play and I know it’s my job to finish off. I tried to do my best.” 

Ireland skipper Caelan Doris lamented his side’s indiscipline just after the pause. “That middle 20 minutes of the second-half was what killed us,” he said.

“There was some discipline issues with some back-to-back penalties. They got a bit of momentum and when we got tight defensively, they can spread it wide to score. That hurt us, big time. It’s disappointing.”

Next Saturday at the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, France can claim the Six Nations title for the first time since 2022 with victory over Scotland who beat Wales 35-29 on Saturday night.

France co-founded the United Nations International Labour Organisation in 1919, championing “equal pay for equal work”, and in 1972, the agency wrote the principle of pay equality into its labour code.

In 1983, France’s Roudy law mandated equal opportunities in the workplace, requiring companies to publish annual reports comparing the situation of its male and female employees and introducing a tool to help human resources managers identify and measure pay differences.

In 2018, the country launched an index to monitor the performance of large companies in the field of gender equality.

But this battery of legal measures has still not enabled France to close its gender pay gap.

Data published this week by the French National Statistics Institute (Insee) showed that in 2023 women’s average annual salary was €21,340 net compared to €27,430 for men – a difference of more than 22 percent.

While there has been progress, the pace is slow, with the gap narrowing at a rate of 1 percent per year over the last five years.

The primary reasons behind the gender pay gap are hours worked and type of jobs held. Women work on average 9 percent less than men and they’re also more likely to work part-time. But even when working hours are identical, their average salary is 14.2 percent lower than men’s, Insee found.

What’s more, working part-time is not necessarily a life choice says Anne Eydoux, an economist specialising in employment and gender issues.

“It’s a choice made under constraint, and some of the constraints refer to the gender divide of family roles where women take [more] parental responsibility,” she tells RFI. “But it’s also the result of occupational segregation.” Women are over-represented in for example supermarket and cleaning jobs, where split shifts are common.

Sexism and workplace inequality is rife in most areas of French life, research shows

Gendered occupations

Women are also far more likely to work in low-paying sectors such as health, care and education.

According to Insee, more than 95 percent of secretaries are women, with an average full-time net salary of €2,044 per month.

Meanwhile, only a quarter of engineers and IT executives – professions in which average monthly net salaries are close to €4,000 – are women.

“Women are over-represented in the care sector, where their skills are under-recognised,” Eydoux said. “And this is a fact for many female-dominated occupations, as the Covid crisis showed.”

Women also have less access to the highest-paying jobs. In 2023, they accounted for 42 percent of full-time equivalent positions in the private sector, and yet just 24 percent of the top 1 percent of high-paying jobs. The glass ceiling is still there, as Eydoux noted.

France works towards gender equality in top jobs while UK women are still struggling

Cultural attitudes

Working less and in lower-paid sectors does not, however, fully explain the 22 percent wage gap. Women doing the same job as men in the same company are still paid 3.8 percent less.

There are historical and cultural reasons for this according to Marie Donzel, an expert in social innovation and author of  “Justified inequalities: how to pay women less with a clear conscience”.

Until 1945, France had a “female wage”. Based on the assumption that a woman’s pay was intended merely to supplement her husband’s income, “women could be paid 10 to 15 percent less just because of their gender,” Donzel told RFI. 

This has helped foster gendered attitudes towards salaries. “Women tend to see [their pay] in terms of how much they need to live, and men see it in terms of ‘how much my job is worth’,” she said.

Donzel also points to a cultural prevailing negative image of women who take an interest in money. “We have a gendered socialisation in France that teaches us to be modest. When we talk about money, there’s still the spectre of venality.”

Gender pay gap means French women are ‘working for free’ until end of year

‘I thought negotiating was vulgar’

Women themselves are not always aware that they’re being discriminated against. It took Nathalie, a regional director for a multinational company, 15 years to find out.

“While chatting with my male counterparts, I realised that I was earning about €1,000 less per month than they were,” she told Franceinfo. “I’d lost €150,000 over 15 years.”

After comparing pay slips with colleagues, she realised that “every time, the women had significantly more experience in the role, more qualifications, we checked all the boxes. And yet, we were paid less. And the higher you climb in the hierarchy, the bigger the gap becomes”.

Nathalie took her case to court and won, securing a raise for herself and her colleagues. She questions whether women “negotiate their salaries enough”.

The question of negotiating pay “is as taboo as sex,” says lawyer Insaff El Hassini.

She set up a training and coaching company called Ma Juste Valeur – meaning “My True Worth” – to help women overcome that barrier and negotiate their pay, after facing gender discrimination in the workplace herself.

“I found out my male colleague earned €5,000 a year more than me,” she told RFI.  “When I voiced my concerns I was told, ‘Well you’re already well paid, you should have negotiated your starting salary when you joined’. No one had told me you had to negotiate. I thought it was vulgar.”

Gender gap at work far wider than expected, women’s pay remains static, UN says

Closing the gap

This year France will implement the EU’s 2023 Pay Transparency Directive, obliging companies to provide employees with pay scales for equivalent posts. Both Eydoux and Donzel welcome this transparency measure.

Eydoux also points to economic measures such as increasing both the minimum wage and income tax on very high wages, which together would narrow the pay gap. But the French government, which is trying to reduce the country’s huge deficit and keep high-earners and businesses on board, is not currently in favour of either.

Donzel insists that salaries in the female-dominated education and care sectors must be raised, given the contribution they make to society. “Whether it’s taking care of children, the elderly or in caring professions, this is obviously what’s most valuable, yet the economy has reversed the value system and that’s what we pay the least for.”

Eydoux would also like to see France’s gender quota policy, which has proven “very efficient” in breaking the glass ceiling by imposing gender-balance on executive boards, extended to other sectors.

Growing ‘masculinist’ culture in France slows down fight against sexism

For the moment, however, she says there aren’t many signs of improvement: “I don’t see much political will to focus on the gender pay gap and reduce it.”

Resistance to gender equality is nothing new, she added, and while younger women in particular are “more conscious of the gender pay gap and more willing to improve the situation”, they are now facing new forms of resistance.  

“More and more young men are defending masculinist positions and ideologies,” she said, with some claiming the 22 percent gender pay gap is “fake news”.

The outskirts of the French capital’s 13^th arrondissement have been undergoing a radical transformation in recent years, with new residential buildings popping up among office blocks and older architecture.

Where the southern Paris city limit meets the suburb of Ivry, three busy overpass bridges provide a vast web of concrete canvases for street artists hailing from Europe and further afield, as well as local talents.

“Even though we’re under the ring road, it feels like we’re in the countryside and we have a sense of freedom,” says Spot 13 founder Joko – who is also a graffiti artist and a keen skateboarder.

While graffiti artists have been using the site since 2017, Joko set up his non-profit organisation in 2021 and got permission from the local council to “beautify” what would otherwise be a no-man’s land – part of a wider initiative by the co-operative Plateau Urbain, which repurposes unused urban spaces.

Spot 13 also prides itself on promoting female graffiti artists. “In general, there isn’t much room for women in urban art. There tends to be a lot of testosterone,” Joko says, adding that he created Spot 13 in homage to his mother.

‘Everyone is welcome’

Joko points to an artist known as MIU, who is working on a large wall in the bright sunlight – this is her first time working on such a large surface since she started doing graffiti just over two years ago.

She loves interacting with the people who come to ask questions and observe the artists at work. It’s a laidback, family-style atmosphere, she says. “While the question of gender still exists elsewhere, I don’t think it’s an issue at Spot 13. Everyone is welcome here, regardless of social background, identity or gender.”

MIU’s latest work is a portrait of a child from the Toraja ethnic group in Sulawesi, Indonesia, wearing traditional colourful dress.

Describing herself as a modern art historian whose job it is to “preserve memory,” she likes to use art as a means to represent minorities around the world whose cultures and way of life “we don’t know much about, and which are becoming extinct”.

MIU is one of 15 female artists invited to take part in a live graffiti “jam session” on the theme of freedom, to celebrate International Women’s Day, on the weekend of 8-9 March.

Organised by Spot 13 and the collective Bombasphères, part of the profits from artists’ prints will be donated to the Maison des Femmes charity in Paris, whose work includes supporting women experiencing gender-based violence. 

Poor funding and weak measures ‘bury’ gender equality in France warns Oxfam

Building bridges

Jacques, a longtime volunteer with Spot 13, emphasises that giving back to the community is part of the project’s DNA. More than just a place for people to legally practise street art, the space has a role to play in social cohesion, in an area that used to have a “pretty bad reputation,” he says.

“We try to have good communication with our neighbours. It’s very important to be accepted, to be understood…it’s not just about painting,” he explains, adding that making art provides a focus that can diffuse tensions between groups.

Joko – whose personal tag includes the slogan “taking art towards infinity and beyond” – agrees that art can be a powerful way to promote mutual respect, as well as a valuable tool for maintaining mental health.

“Art is a good way to stay calm. When you’re making art, you’re calm, and it brings a sense of peace to viewers. It’s great to have a designated place where art and nature meet.”

Spotlight on Africa: celebrating female empowerment for Women’s History Month

He hopes to make the current initiative in this part of Paris a permanent one. “We’re trying to bring some life into the suburbs and public spaces. It really comes from the heart.”

Squarcini, 69, headed France’s domestic security services from 2008 to 2012 and was later hired by luxury giant LVMH as a security consultant.

The court on Friday handed him a four-year prison sentence, two of them suspended, on charges of using his security contacts for personal gain, including by obtaining confidential information for LVMH.

Squarcini, whose professional nickname was “le Squale” (the shark), can serve his sentence at home with an electronic bracelet. He was also fined €200,000 and given a ban on professional activities relating to intelligence or advisory services for five years.

His lawyers said he would appeal the verdict.

Links to Europe’s richest man

Part of the verdict was related to the use of public funds to locate blackmailers targeting LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault in 2008, while Squarcini was still head of DCRI French security services (since renamed the DGSI).

That year, security agents staked out a cyber cafe in Aix-en-Provence to identify a suspect sending emails seeking to extort Arnault as part of a mission Squarcini defended as protecting French economic interests.

Arnault, Europe’s richest man, testified during the trial in November as a witness but was never charged and denied all knowledge of a scheme to protect the luxury group. 

French luxury mogul Arnault defiant at ex-spy chief trial

‘A call to order’

Squarcini was also found to be complicit in spying on François Ruffin, a former journalist and founder of leftist magazine Fakir who is now a leading lawmaker with hard-left France Unbowed.

Ruffin filed a lawsuit in 2019 accusing LVMH of contracting Squarcini to spy on him for nearly three years while filming a satirical documentary “Merci Patron” (Thanks boss) for which the Fakir team planned to disrupt an LVMH shareholder meeting in 2013.

The film won a Cesar – France’s equivalent of the Oscars – for best documentary in 2017.

Ruffin’s lawyer, Benjamin Sarfati, welcomed Friday’s verdict. “We are satisfied with this decision that serves as a call to order, though we regret the absence of Mr Bernard Arnault among the defendants,” he said.

Proceedings against LVMH were dropped in 2021 after the company paid a €10 million settlement to close the criminal probe.

Squarcini, a close ally of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, was sacked as head of intelligence in 2012 after Sarkozy lost his re-election bid to François Hollande. Hollande, a Socialist, considered Squarcini was too close to the former right-wing president.

(with Reuters)

Commenting on the report’s findings, Nathalie Gahunga, manager of the Gender and Women Empowerment Division at the African Development Bank (AfDB) said they are “a call to action for African governments to invest in Africa’s women and girls for sustainable and inclusive socio-economic development that works for all, across the continent”.

She emphasised that this could be achieved through evidence-based, gender-responsive policies and programmes, adding: “At the African Development Bank, we will continue collaborating with governments to address this important gap.”

‘A more prosperous Africa for all’

The Africa Gender Index 2023 Analytical Report measures gender equality in 54 African countries, scoring them between 0 and 100 – representing full equality.

Entitled “African Women in Times of Crisis”, this second edition of the Africa Gender Index (AGI) is the latest conducted by the AfDB and the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), and was released in November 2024.

It shows that between 2019 and 2023, Africa’s overall gender index score improved from 48.6 to 50.3 percent. While this marks progress, it also highlights a sobering reality: women on the continent still experience half the economic, social and representation opportunities available to men.

Keiso Matashane-Marite, head of UNECA’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Section, said: “None of the targets for United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality are on track. For instance, equal representation in parliaments won’t be reached until 2063. This is unacceptable.”

She believes Africa cannot achieve sustainable prosperity if half its potential – that represented by the women of the continent – remains underused.

DR Congo names Judith Suminwa Tuluka as first woman PM

Matashane-Marite is urging policymakers to act decisively, using the AGI findings to implement practical solutions and close gender gaps.

“The need for accelerated action is clear,” she said. “By addressing these gaps, we can build a more inclusive and prosperous Africa for all.”

The AfDB’s Gahunga echoed this, saying: “This effort requires strong support in investing gender data and statistics for more evidence-based decision-making, that leads to transformative public policy reforms.”

Key findings

The report found that women in Africa score just 50.3 percent in equality across economic, social and public representation areas – a slight improvement from the 48 percent score in 2019.

Women in Africa are closer to equality in social areas, with a score of 98.3 – a parameter that includes access to education and healthcare. Girls on the continent now outnumber boys in graduation rates across primary, lower secondary and upper secondary education.

The report also found a 1.5 percent increase in women’s representation, which rose to 24.4 percent. However, women continue to be underrepresented in Africa’s parliaments, ministerial positions and private leadership roles.

Economically, there has been a decline in gender equality. Women’s economic parity dropped from 61 percent in 2019 to 58.2 in 2023. While both men and women experienced economic setbacks during the reported period, women were disproportionately adversely affected.

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Women in war zones

Women are also often the first victims of the conflicts raging on the continent.

“When conflict and crisis strike, displacement, hunger, and poverty follow,” according to the charity Oxfam. “But, all too often, it is women’s rights that become the early casualties of war.”

The charity reports that one in five refugee or displaced women suffers sexual violence, and that in countries affected by conflict girls are 2.5 times more likely not to be in school. 

“As they flee conflict, travel, and settle in refugee camps they are highly vulnerable to all forms of violence. They face exploitation, sexual harassment, and rape; they risk being sold into early or unwanted marriages or resorting to survival sex just to get their basic needs for food, shelter, and transport met.”

Burkina Faso’s army massacred over 200 civilians in village raid: NGO

Recommendations

Building on its findings, the AGI recommends targeted actions to close the gender gap across three key areas.

In the social sphere, the report urges countries to invest in overcoming barriers that prevent women from thriving in education, such as the burden of unpaid domestic work, early marriage and inadequate sanitary facilities in schools.

On representation, the report recommends strict enforcement of gender quotas in order to increase the number of women in leadership roles, in both government and the private sector.

Recognising that women often attain higher education levels than men, the report also calls for African countries to tackle harmful gender norms and practices, and address occupational segregation, to boost women’s economic participation.

“Women artists have long been marginalised in art history courses and by museums and galleries,” Manon Lecaplainn, director of the Sainte-Croix Museum, told RFI. “For decades, art history has been written without women. Why should our exclusively female exhibition be shocking?”

“Our aim is not to exclude men from art history,” she explains. “The goal is to make people think.”

The Sainte-Croix Museum has been known in France for its proactive policy of promoting women artists since the 1980s.

In this new exhibition, Lecaplain and her co-curator Camille Belvèze are showcasing nearly 300 works from the 18th century to the present day, divided into three sections: the collection of Eugénie Dubreuil, the hierarchy of genres in art history, and the social role of the museum.

Spotlight on Africa: celebrating female empowerment for Women’s History Month

This exhibition is the first step in a five-year project to promote Dubreuil’s collection – entitled La Musée – and relies on a financial grant of €150,000.

“Why not an initiative like this on a larger scale in France, Europe, the world?” asks Dubreuil.

► La Musée runs until 18 May, 2025 at the Sainte-Croix Museum in Poitiers.

Under the “Rearm Europe” plan announced by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on 6 March, EU member states can boost defence spending even if it means breaking the bloc’s budget deficit rule of 3 percent of GDP.

Von der Leyen suggests the EU could raise “close to” €650 billion over four years, which would be added to a €150 billion loan to member states for defence investment, totalling €800 billion.

European arms manufacturers view this as a golden opportunity to compete against their US rivals.

• EU leaders vow to boost defence as US announces new talks with Kyiv

Some deals are already in motion. During a meeting in London on 2 March, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a €1.9 billion agreement to supply 5,000 Lightweight Multi-role Missiles (LMMs) for use against drones and helicopters.

Thales Belfast, a UK-based subsidiary of French defence giant Thales Group, which produces NLAW (Next-generation Light Anti-tank Weapon) missiles for Swedish defence manufacturer Saab, is expected to benefit from the surge in demand. Saab specialises in aerospace, missile systems and military technology.

This is likely just one of many contracts that will be offered to European arms contractors, shifting the burden of providing Ukraine with weapons from the US to Europe’s “coalition of the willing” – EU countries together with the UK and Norway.

• Europe’s defence vulnerabilities exposed as US shifts on Ukraine

Arms manufacturers have profited substantially from the Ukraine conflict.

The share value of French company Thales increased by about 50 percent between the beginning of the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022 and the end of 2024.

Until now, according to the Ukraine support tracker of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IFW), EU countries plus the UK and Norway provided €61.94 billion in military aid to Ukraine, compared to €64.1 billion from the US between the start of Russia’s invasion and the end of 2024.

Weapons supplied to Ukraine since the invasion began include US F-16 and French Mirage-5000 fighter jets, US Abrams tanks, French Caesar howitzers, various missile systems, Patriot air defence systems, armoured vehicles, light weapons, millions of rounds of ammunition and US-made Javelin anti-tank systems that became a symbol of Ukraine’s resistance.

Following Trump’s apparent reluctance to continue military aid to Ukraine and Europe’s reaction, the effect on local weapons producers was immediate.

Market statistics show that performance of US defence companies had already fallen behind European arms companies before Trump’s election as US president on 5 November 2024. After his victory, the gap widened.

After Trump’s inauguration on 20 January and particularly following his announcement of plans to suspend military aid to Ukraine after a difficult meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on 28 February, Thales shares soared – as did those of other European arms manufacturers.

Starlink dependency

US policy changes could also impact Ukraine’s battlefield communications. The Ukrainian military has relied on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network since Russian strikes wiped out other communications systems.

But SpaceX, the company behind Starlink, has raised concerns about the network being used for military purposes.

Last month, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Starlink was “never, never meant to be weaponized,” adding that the company never intended for it to be used offensively.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has reportedly floated the idea of cutting Ukraine’s access to Starlink unless Kyiv agrees to grant the US access to critical materials such as rare earth elements, lithium, and other essential resources.

Eutelsat

Now, Europe is looking at alternatives. Paris-based Eutelsat, the world’s third-largest satellite operator by revenue, is in talks to replace Starlink in Ukraine.

CEO Eva Berneke told Bloomberg that after “discussions about the Starlink potential pull-out of Ukraine,” Eutelsat shares more than tripled in value over two days, adding over €1 billion to its market capitalisation.

“It is a key element of modern warfare to have strong communications capabilities,” Berneke said. She added that discussions to replace Starlink with Eutelsat’s OneWeb satellite network “have intensified”.

Currently, Ukraine has around 40,000 Starlink terminals, nearly 10 times the number provided by Eutelsat. Berneke said the company could supply “a couple of thousand” terminals immediately but would need “a couple of months” to replace all 40,000.

Eutelsat’s system would eventually be part of the EU’s “Secure Satellite System” IRIS², a flagship project launched on 17 December. The hardware is supplied by Italian aerospace company Telespazio, a joint venture between Italy’s Leonardo (67 percent) and France’s Thales Group (33 percent).

• EU launches flagship satellite project to rival US networks by 2030

Drones

On 6 March, Italian company Leonardo signed a deal with Turkey’s Baykar for a joint venture to produce drones as defence companies rush to respond to the surge in European military spending.

Increased demand may revive the EU’s Eurodrone project, a four-nation development programme involving Germany, France, Italy and Spain.

Meanwhile, the Czech Republic announced it will extend its Czech ammunitions initiative with Denmark, Canada, Portugal and Latvia, which already supplied Kyiv with 1.6 million rounds of large-calibre ammunition last year.

Overall, the biggest winners from the increase in EU defence spending are likely to be Germany’s Rheinmetall, France’s Thales and Saab of Sweden, while BAE systems of the UK is well-positioned to benefit from increased military budgets across EU nations.

“Never has the risk of war on the European continent, in the European Union, been so high, because for almost 15 years the threat has been getting closer and closer to us,” declared French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot on Monday.

Caught off guard by an American president seemingly ready to review his historic alliances, Europe is being forced into revising its defence model and counting its troops.

France is the only country in the European Union with nuclear weapons, but now the French president says he is ready to open discussions on a potential European nuclear deterrent.

However, this does not imply any sharing of nuclear weapons, explained Elie Tenenbaum, research director at the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) think tank.

“The deployment of French nuclear weapons abroad is not currently an option. And in the French concept of [nuclear] doctrine, the weapons are not shared and deterrence is not shared – indeed in any concept of doctrine, since the Americans do not share theirs either. Emmanuel Macron has said ‘it doesn’t change our doctrine’,” Tenenbaum told RFI.

What is changing, however, is how France views its strategic interests in relation to Europe.

“For the moment, we are not talking about a change of doctrine, we are talking about strengthening this European dimension that [Macron] mentioned in his February 2020 speech at the École Militaire,” said Tenenbaum.

This European dimension involves France’s vital interests – interests that could trigger the nuclear deterrent if threatened by an aggressor state.

A German change of heart?

Germany, which until now has relied exclusively on NATO and Washington for its security guarantees, has never asked for the cover of the French nuclear umbrella.

The country’s entire political class has formally ruled out having to contribute to the funding of its neighbour’s nuclear deterrent. But, according to Tenebaum, things are changing and the future German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, seems to be taking a different view.

“Ever since Donald Trump’s ranting during his campaign, including about the fact that he might refuse to defend or honour his security commitments to NATO allies, there has been discussion in Germany about possible alternatives to a US nuclear security guarantee that could be undermined,” Tenenbaum said.

This debate has been ongoing in German media for about a year, according to the expert.

With growing concerns about American reliability, Germany is looking at alternative security guarantees. The European options – France and the UK – have different capabilities than the US.

“But it’s an arsenal dedicated to defending more limited interests than the American model. We have systems that were not designed from the outset to deter a wide range of interests,” Tenenbaum said.

A French-UK nuclear umbrella for Europe? Not likely, say analysts

These converging interests could lead to new forms of cooperation.

“Berlin is looking for alternatives and there is a French desire – including for political reasons – to emphasise the European dimension of its own deterrent. So these two interests are finally coming together and will hopefully lead to discussions.

But he cautioned that any collaboration would be modest in scope.

“We are talking about the participation of Europeans in French nuclear exercises. This has already happened with Italian participation in the French Air Force’s Poker [nuclear air raid simulation] exercise.

European industrial projects

A joint industrial project for nuclear deterrence remains a distant prospect, according to Tenenbaum. The immediate focus is on strategic cooperation.

“We are talking about a strategic nuclear culture, about better integration of the nuclear factor into defence planning. When we draw up defence plans, at what point do we consider the link with the dialogue on deterrence?

This discussion is especially timely as NATO is currently developing its defence plans. On the technological front, there are opportunities for European collaboration.

“France’s nuclear deterrent is based on its mastery of a number of technologies… So there are a number of technological building blocks on which we can work together,” Tenenbaum said.

He cites the Ariane Group as an example – a European aerospace company working on both space access and ballistic technology, which are closely linked.

Nuclear monitor defends Ukraine plant visit via Russia-controlled territory

“We need to make Europeans understand that there are a number of industrial and technological projects that help to strengthen the credibility of our nuclear deterrent,” Tenenbaum said. 

“This may enable Europeans to change their minds about what they have long considered to be a kind of French luxury, when the Americans were already offering an extended deterrent.”

What is France’s nuclear deterrent?

What is meant exactly when we refer to France’s nuclear deterrent? 

Thirty years ago, the country gave up tactical nuclear weapons and retained only two types: ballistic missiles on board its four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, and airborne bombs – the nuclear missiles carried by its Rafale B fighter aircraft, the visible part of the French deterrent.

While the role of the air force is complementary to the ballistic missile submarines, in the eyes of General Jean-Patrice Le Saint, who stepped down as chief of staff of the Strategic Air Forces in the summer of 2024, airborne deterrence has specific strengths.

“The first asset is the weapon. And today’s weapon is a cruise missile, the ASMP-AR. This missile is extremely fast and highly manoeuvrable. It is an extremely accurate missile,” General Le Saint said.

“The second advantage of the airborne component is that it is deployed from airbases that are visible infrastructures, which makes it possible, in the context of the nuclear discussion that the president would engage in, to make his intentions clear.”

France ‘massively upgrading’ its nuclear weapons: report

From bases at Istres, north of Marseille, Avord, in the centre of the country, and Saint-Dizier, in the east, more than 2,000 air personnel are responsible for implementing France’s deterrence.

While it is impossible to recall a ballistic missile, the reversibility of an air raid is always an option – up to a point.

“From the moment the Strategic Air Forces raid is committed, the crews will continue the mission to the end,” continued General Le Saint.

“But up to the point of engagement, the raid can be recalled. And so, when we look at the length of our transmission resources and the capabilities of our vectors, the Rafales combined with the A330 MRTT tankers, it is possible to fly the raid several thousand kilometres before committing to it.

“And the fact that the raid is in transit is a pretty strong signal, which, as you can imagine, gives pause for thought.”

Credibility crucial

A strong signal based on credibility is at the very heart of the concept of deterrence, according to General Le Saint.

“This credibility has three dimensions. The first is political, embodied by the president of the Republic, the holder of the nuclear licence. The second is technological credibility, which is what enables us to guarantee that we are capable of designing, manufacturing and deploying weapons that are reliable and safe.

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“The third aspect is operational credibility. And there’s an important point here, because credibility cannot be decreed. On the other hand, there are certain parameters that make credibility objective.

“We are credible because the crews of the Strategic Air Forces are highly trained and extremely experienced, because they conduct manoeuvres – such as the Poker exercises which, four times a year, are carried out with around 50 aircraft in an extremely realistic scenario simulating a nuclear raid.”

What’s more, at each Poker exercise, the spy satellites of the major powers point their antennae towards France to observe the exercise and measure the credibility of France’s deterrent – a scenario that has been repeated since 1964.

This article was adapted from the original version in French. Some answers have been condensed for clarity.

Under the banner “Stand up for Science France“, a collective scientists held several demonstrations and conferences in cities across the country on Friday in support of similar events organised in the United States.

The “Stand Up For Science” movement is calling for an end to censorship, the protection of funding and the rehabilitation of researchers who have been brutally removed from their work since Donald Trump came to power.

Mass firings and sweeping cuts overseen by Trump’s senior advisor Elon Musk in recent weeks have targeted research in a range of areas including climate and health.

“Science has become a target,” prominent French climate science researcher Valérie Masson-Delmotte told French news agency AFP.

“Today I am talking about obscurantism: making scientific knowledge inaccessible and spreading disinformation. All of these attacks are of an unprecedented gravity in a democracy”.

Freedom of speech curbed

In an interview with Franceinfo on Friday, Delmotte said that academics’ freedom to communicate had been severly curbed, which was a form of “sabotage to the detriment of American society … and scientific progress in the world.”

“Researchers from federal agencies – the equivalent of the CNRS in France for example – are banned from exchanging with colleagues from other countries,” she said.

She gave the example of NASA’s chief scientist, Kate Calvin, co-chair of Group 1 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who was banned from participating in the last plenary session of the IPCC last week. “She was also banned from speaking to the press and her support team has been dismantled,” Delmotte says.

Delmotte was one of many French scientists who published an editorial in Le Monde on Tuesday with the title “Defend science against new obscurantisms”.

The signatories insist that the US brutal budget cuts were already directly affecting society and would affect international cooperation and data sharing.

Trump vows to act with ‘historic speed and strength’ via executive orders

For example, hundreds of scientists and experts have been fired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a leading US agency responsible for weather forecasting and climate analysis, Democratic Congressman Jared Huffman said last week.

In response, France’s Aix-Marseille University announced a new programme this week to welcome scientists who “may feel threatened or hindered” in the United States and want “to continue their work in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence and academic freedom”.

University president Eric Berton told AFPTV that he would have preferred to not to have had to issue this “recruitment call”.

“The risk these researchers face is that their projects will lose funding and that they themselves – if they are foreigners – will have to return to their home countries,” he said.

Scientists afraid to speak out

“It is a real danger,” he emphasised, particularly for academics who work on “sensitive subjects such as the climate, social sciences and the humanities in general”.

Berton said his university could not take in everyone, adding: “I hope we can launch a national movement”.

The university’s “Safe Place for Science” programme will provide upto €15 million that can accommodate around 15 researchers over three years.

UN rights chief deeply worried about ‘fundamental shift’ in direction in US

French astrophysicist Olivier Berné, a researcher at the CNRS, says he has received anguished testimonies from some of his American scientific colleagues.

“Already, for a certain number of them, they are afraid to speak out,” he told Franceinfo.

“They are afraid of losing their jobs. We do not realise at all in France what is happening in these circles. In the United States, there is an extremely strong attack on the scientific world. Donald Trump has announced that people who go to demonstrations on campus could be thrown in prison or expelled from American territory”.

“There is also an attack on data with a pure and simple suppression of access to data concerning climate studies,” the scientist underlines.

Asked about welcoming US scientists, France’s higher education and research minister Philippe Baptiste said it was necessary to “strengthen” existing systems for international scientists.

“But this discussion must also take place at the European level,” he told the French parliament, lamenting budget cuts by the Trump administration that were “contrary to scientific consensus”.

Hello everyone! Welcome to The Sound Kitchen weekly podcast, published every Saturday – here on our website, or wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll hear the winner’s names announced and the week’s quiz question, along with all the other ingredients you’ve grown accustomed to: your letters and essays, “On This Day”, quirky facts and news, interviews, and great music … so be sure and listen every week.

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Remember, podcasts are radio, too! As you see, sound is still quite present in the RFI English service. Please keep checking our website for updates on the latest from our journalists. You never know what we’ll surprise you with!

To listen to our podcasts from your PC, go to our website; you’ll see “Podcasts” at the top of the page. You can either listen directly or subscribe and receive them directly on your mobile phone.

To listen to our podcasts from your mobile phone, slide through the tabs just under the lead article (the first tab is “Headline News”) until you see “Podcasts”, and choose your show. 

Teachers take note! I save postcards and stamps from all over the world to send to you for your students. If you would like stamps and postcards for your students, just write and let me know. The address is english.service@rfi.fr  If you would like to donate stamps and postcards, feel free! Our address is listed below. 

Another idea for your students: Br. Gerald Muller, my beloved music teacher from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, has been writing books for young adults in his retirement – and they are free! There is a volume of biographies of painters and musicians called Gentle Giants, and an excellent biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., too. They are also a good way to help you improve your English – that’s how I worked on my French, reading books that were meant for young readers – and I guarantee you, it’s a good method for improving your language skills. To get Br. Gerald’s free books, click here.

Independent RFI English Clubs: Be sure to always include Audrey Iattoni (audrey.iattoni@rfi.fr) from our Listener Relations department in your RFI Club correspondence. Remember to copy me (thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr) when you write to her so that I know what is going on, too. N.B.: You do not need to send her your quiz answers! Email overload!

This week’s quiz: On 8 February, I asked you a question about our article “French PM pushes through budget, faces second no-confidence vote”. That’s because French Prime Minister François Bayrou used Article 49.3 – a special executive power – to push the budget through. The Parliament does not take kindly to Article 49.3, because the executive branch can use it to bypass their votes.

After it went through, a no-confidence motion was immediately brought forward by the hard-left France Unbowed party. At that time, it was not thought the no-confidence motion would pass, because the Socialists said they would vote against it. My question to you was: Why did France’s Socialist party say they would vote against the no-confidence motion brought by the France Unbowed party? 

The answer is, to quote our article: “The Socialist Party said in a press release that it did not want to see France in an extended period of financial limbo and would therefore, ‘in a spirit of responsibility’, not back the no-confidence vote.”

They held to their word: The Socialist party did not back the no-confidence vote – France has a budget now, and the same prime minister, François Bayrou. 

In addition to the quiz question, there was the bonus question: “Is the favorite child the worst child?”

Do you have a bonus question idea? Send it to us!

The winners are: RFI English Listeners Club member Nasyr Muhammad from Katsina State, Nigeria. Nasyr is also this week’s bonus question winner. Congratulations, Nasyr, on your double win !

Also on the winner’s list this week are: Reepa Bain, the secretary of the RFI Pariwer Bandhu SWL Club in Chhattisgarh, India; Mukta Banu, a member of the Shetu RFI Listeners Club in Naogaon, Bangladesh; RFI English Listeners Club member Dipita Chakrabarty from New Delhi, India, and last but not least, RFI English listener Murshida Parvin Lata, the vice – president of the Sonali Badhan Female Listeners Club in Bogura, Bangladesh.

Congratulations, winners!

Here’s the music you heard on this week’s programme: “One Woman” by Beth Blatt, Graham Lyle, and Fahan Hassan, performed by the United Nation Women Singers; “Toy Symphony” by Leopold Mozart; “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov; “The Cakewalk” from Children’s Corner by Claude Debussy, performed by the composer, and “Nubian Lady” by Kenny Barron, performed by Bobbi Humphrey and her orchestra.  

Do you have a music request? Send it to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr

This week’s question … you must listen to the show to participate. After you’ve listened to the show, take another listen to the first story on Alison Hird and Sarah Elzas’ Spotlight on France podcast number 124, which will help you with the answer.

You have until 31 March to enter this week’s quiz; the winners will be announced on the 5 April podcast. When you enter, be sure to send your postal address with your answer, and if you have one, your RFI Listeners Club membership number.

Send your answers to:

english.service@rfi.fr

or

Susan Owensby

RFI – The Sound Kitchen

80, rue Camille Desmoulins

92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux

France

Click here to learn how to win a special Sound Kitchen prize.

Click here to find out how you can become a member of the RFI Listeners Club, or form your own official RFI Club.   

The unexploded bomb was found “in the middle of the tracks” overnight during maintenance work carried out in the area of the northern Paris suburb of Saint Denis, the national SNCF rail company said.

It was detected at about 4am by an earth-moving machine in an area prone to the discovery of World War II relics.

Minesweepers were sent to disarm the metre-long device.

The bomb “dated to the Second World War”, the RER B suburban train wrote in a post on social media platform X.

French lake still riddled with bombs 80 years after World War II

National rail operator SNCF said in a statement that traffic would be stopped at the train station, which hosts Eurostar trains as well as high-speed and local services, at the request of police. 

The other Eurostar routes – between London and Brussels or Amsterdam – were still mostly running as normal.

The Gare du Nord train station lies in the north of Paris and is the country’s busiest rail terminal, serving an estimated 700,000 people each day.

Bombs left over from World War I or World War II are regularly discovered around France but it is very rare to find them in such a people-packed location.

(with AFP)

Following Trump’s treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House last week and his subsequent withdrawal of US aid to Ukraine, thousands of French consumers have joined online communities calling for a boycott of American products and suggesting French or European alternatives.

“Tired of financing American imperialism? Take action. Here, we are organising to support the French and European economy by boycotting US products,” reads the description of the Boycott USA: Buy French! Facebook group created last week.

The group had garnered nearly 14,000 members by Thursday afternoon.

Its administrator Edouard Roussez is a 33-year-old farmer who grows hops in the north of France. He told France Inter radio that the goal is to boycott as many American companies as possible, with a focus on those whose owners are supporters of the Trump administration, such as Elon Musk.

Sales of Musk’s Tesla cars in Europe have fallen since the beginning of the year. In France, sales were down 26 percent in February compared to the previous year, according to French auto industry trade group PFA.

Tesla sales plummet in France amid Musk’s support for European far-right parties

Boycotts elsewhere

While it is difficult to determine if the drop is due to a boycott or other market forces, consumers looking for ways to limit their consumption of American products are finding inspiration in boycott movements elsewhere in the world.

After Trump repeated his threat to take over Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, the Danish supermarket distributor Salling began adding asterisks to the labels of European-made products in its Danish stores.

Managing director Anders Hagh posted on LinkedIn that the decision came after the company received request “from customers who want to buy groceries from European brands”.

Similarly, in response to tariffs imposed by the US and threats by Trump to annex Canada as “the 51st state”, Canadians have started boycotts of US products and some have cancelled planned trips south of the border to the US.

Trump unveils sweeping US tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China – EU next?

As soon as the US tariffs were announced on Tuesday, the premier of Ontario province, Doug Ford, announced that all American alcohol products would be removed from store shelves and cancelled the province’s $100 million satellite internet deal with Musk’s Starlink satellite internet company. 

This move came in addition to retaliatory tariffs imposed by Canada on US imports.

Manufacturing ties

However, for consumers in France seeking to wage their own boycotts identifying exactly which goods are American can be difficult – as can finding alternatives, given the ubiquity of US products on the shelves.

The US was France’s fifth largest supplier in 2023, according to the French Treasury, with €51.8 billion in US imports.

Many American brands have manufacturing facilities in Europe, and European brands have connections with the US. For example, one alternative to buying a Tesla car could be to buy one from Peugeot, a French brand – owned by the Italian-American multinational Stelantis.

Boycotting American brands could also hit European companies, such as the factory in eastern France which produces M&Ms for the American confectionery maker Mars.

Both Pepsi and Coca-Cola have bottling plants all over France, and American fast food companies buy from French and European suppliers.

Undeterred, Roussez posted in his Facebook group: “We are aiming for an efficient and rational boycott,” adding that this may not “overthrow the world order, but at least we will have resisted with the arms we have”.

The military sites of Maréchal and Saint-Exupéry, not far from the port of Dakar, were officially returned to Senegalese authorities.

The French military said these two sites had been empty for a year and had already been earmarked to be handed back to Senegal.

According to RFI’s correspondent, there was no ceremony, just the signing of a document to mark the transfer.

Since his election last April, Senegal’s President, Bassirou Diomaye Faye has made it clear that he wants to reshape his country’s relationships with the outside world.

He told several French media last November that “There will soon be no more French soldiers in Senegal”. 

Transform the nation

This was echoed in the first major policy speech to parliament made by Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko in December.

He promised sweeping changes to transform the nation, including the closure of foreign military bases.

The three remaining French military bases are set to be closed and handed back with a timetable yet to be drawn up.

A little over 200 soldiers and their families reside at Camp Geille, the largest of the five military bases, located in the city centre of Ouakam. 20 others are at the Rufisque base in the suburbs of Dakar.

Senegalese PM promises bold reforms in first major policy speech

In January, France’s head of the Africa command General Pascal Ianni paid a visit to Senegalese Chief of Staff, General Mbaye Cissé to discuss arrangements.

Military sources at the time told RFI that September appears to be a logical deadline for the closure for the remaining bases.

“The transfer movements within the army usually take place in the summer, for family and logistical reasons,” a French military source said.

A decision will also need to be taken concerning the future of the Falcon 50, a French army plane parked at Dakar airport.

France has signalled that it would like to see it stay in Senegal for surveillance missions on fishing and drug trafficking, among other things.

Fears for local employment

In the meantime, the announcement of the closure of the remaining military bases has created concern with regards to local employment.

The French military bases in Dakar and its surrounding areas directly employ 162 personnel, and employ between 400 and 500 people in total through subcontractors.

Employees are mainly asking for severance pay in order to bounce back and are still negotiating with their French employer.

To allay fears, the French army organised a career advice day on Thursday to help workers find new jobs in sectors such as construction, logistics, cooking and accounting. 

Senegal unveils 25-year development plan aiming for economic sovereignty

“We are thinking especially of the young people,” electrician Souleymane Touré told RFI.

He says he doesn’t expect much from this day since 60 percent of the workforce is over 50 years old, “and that it is already difficult for young people to find a job in Senegal.”

Brigadier General Yves Aunis told French news agency AFP in January that as an employer, the French state was “very aware of the human stakes and the impacts on Senegalese families, that it would (comply) with Senegalese labor law, but that the starting conditions should be good”.

Senegal and France have historically maintained strong political and economic relations, despite France’s long colonial rule over Senegal, which lasted until 1960.

At the end of February, the Comoros government announced a series of measures to counter the surge in prices ahead of the month-long Muslim fasting period of Ramadan, which this year falls in March. The population is 98 percent Sunni Muslim.

These measures included tax breaks, a guarantee fund of 6 billion Comorian francs to secure the import of basic necessities, and reinforcing the electricity supply.

The authorities also assured residents that these adjustments would not be limited to the month of Ramadan.

Iftar for All: Ramadan handouts highlight food insecurity in Paris

However, the Consumer Federation of the Comoros says the measures have not been implemented quickly enough, and that the price of oil, sugar, flour and other basic necessities are not regulated enough for a population struggling to cope.

“The measures announced are all well and good, but they are not being implemented,” the president of the Federation, Nasra Mohamed Issa, told RFI’s correspondent in the capital Moroni.

“Yes, there has been a slight improvement with electricity, but food prices continue to rise. There is still a shortage of water and petrol is becoming a new problem. The population is at the end of its tether,” he said.

Tables turned as Comoros offers lifeline to Mayotte’s cyclone survivors

Rise in money transfers

RFI spoke to several residents who said they are relying on relatives in the diaspora to send them items from abroad – a trend reflected in the number of money transfers in the lead-up to the religious holiday.

One agency told RFI that transfers increased from 59 to 135 million Comorian francs (from €119,500 to €273,000) between January and February.

In Moroni and elsewhere, residents continue to face power cuts and water shortages despite the installation of new generators.

Mahamoud Salim Hafi, deputy secretary-general of the government, has said the public needs to be patient.

“Regarding water, there are improvements to be made. I am convinced that in some time this water issue will be resolved. We have adjusted certain taxes,” he told local media.

“The government has issued a decree fixing the prices agreed between the government and the private sector, on the wholesale side and the retail side.”

Added to these difficulties is the quality of fuel, the Consumer Federation said, which is causing cars to break down. It was due to hold a meeting with the Transporters’ Union on Thursday to discuss this situation.

Comoros president Assoumani announces plans to hand power to son

Hello everyone! Welcome to The Sound Kitchen weekly podcast, published every Saturday – here on our website, or wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll hear the winner’s names announced and the week’s quiz question, along with all the other ingredients you’ve grown accustomed to: your letters and essays, “On This Day”, quirky facts and news, interviews, and great music … so be sure and listen every week.

Erwan and I are busy cooking up special shows with your music requests, so get them in! Send your music requests to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr Tell us why you like the piece of music, too – it makes it more interesting for us all!

Facebook: Be sure to send your photos to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr for the RFI English Listeners Forum banner!

More tech news: Did you know we have a YouTube channel? Just go to YouTube and write “RFI English” in the search bar, and there we are! Be sure to subscribe to see all our videos.

Would you like to learn French? RFI is here to help you!

Our website “Le Français facile avec RFI” has news broadcasts in slow, simple French, as well as bilingual radio dramas (with real actors!) and exercises to practice what you have heard.

Go to our website and get started! At the top of the page, click on “Test level”. According to your score, you’ll be counselled to the best-suited activities for your level.

Do not give up! As Lidwien van Dixhoorn, the head of “Le Français facile” service told me: “Bathe your ears in the sound of the language, and eventually, you’ll get it.” She should know – Lidwien is Dutch and came to France hardly able to say “bonjour” and now she heads this key RFI department – so stick with it!

Be sure you check out our wonderful podcasts!

In addition to the news articles on our site, with in-depth analysis of current affairs in France and across the globe, we have several podcasts that will leave you hungry for more.

There’s Spotlight on France, Spotlight on Africa, The International Report, and of course, The Sound Kitchen. We also have an award-winning bilingual series – an old-time radio show, with actors (!) to help you learn French, called Les voisins du 12 bis. 

Remember, podcasts are radio, too! As you see, sound is still quite present in the RFI English service. Please keep checking our website for updates on the latest from our journalists. You never know what we’ll surprise you with!

To listen to our podcasts from your PC, go to our website; you’ll see “Podcasts” at the top of the page. You can either listen directly or subscribe and receive them directly on your mobile phone.

To listen to our podcasts from your mobile phone, slide through the tabs just under the lead article (the first tab is “Headline News”) until you see “Podcasts”, and choose your show. 

Teachers take note! I save postcards and stamps from all over the world to send to you for your students. If you would like stamps and postcards for your students, just write and let me know. The address is english.service@rfi.fr  If you would like to donate stamps and postcards, feel free! Our address is listed below. 

Another idea for your students: Br. Gerald Muller, my beloved music teacher from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, has been writing books for young adults in his retirement – and they are free! There is a volume of biographies of painters and musicians called Gentle Giants, and an excellent biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., too. They are also a good way to help you improve your English – that’s how I worked on my French, reading books that were meant for young readers – and I guarantee you, it’s a good method for improving your language skills. To get Br. Gerald’s free books, click here.

Independent RFI English Clubs: Be sure to always include Audrey Iattoni (audrey.iattoni@rfi.fr) from our Listener Relations department in your RFI Club correspondence. Remember to copy me (thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr) when you write to her so that I know what is going on, too. N.B.: You do not need to send her your quiz answers! Email overload!

This week’s quiz: On 8 February, I asked you a question about our article “French PM pushes through budget, faces second no-confidence vote”. That’s because French Prime Minister François Bayrou used Article 49.3 – a special executive power – to push the budget through. The Parliament does not take kindly to Article 49.3, because the executive branch can use it to bypass their votes.

After it went through, a no-confidence motion was immediately brought forward by the hard-left France Unbowed party. At that time, it was not thought the no-confidence motion would pass, because the Socialists said they would vote against it. My question to you was: Why did France’s Socialist party say they would vote against the no-confidence motion brought by the France Unbowed party? 

The answer is, to quote our article: “The Socialist Party said in a press release that it did not want to see France in an extended period of financial limbo and would therefore, ‘in a spirit of responsibility’, not back the no-confidence vote.”

They held to their word: The Socialist party did not back the no-confidence vote – France has a budget now, and the same prime minister, François Bayrou. 

In addition to the quiz question, there was the bonus question: “Is the favorite child the worst child?”

Do you have a bonus question idea? Send it to us!

The winners are: RFI English Listeners Club member Nasyr Muhammad from Katsina State, Nigeria. Nasyr is also this week’s bonus question winner. Congratulations, Nasyr, on your double win !

Also on the winner’s list this week are: Reepa Bain, the secretary of the RFI Pariwer Bandhu SWL Club in Chhattisgarh, India; Mukta Banu, a member of the Shetu RFI Listeners Club in Naogaon, Bangladesh; RFI English Listeners Club member Dipita Chakrabarty from New Delhi, India, and last but not least, RFI English listener Murshida Parvin Lata, the vice – president of the Sonali Badhan Female Listeners Club in Bogura, Bangladesh.

Congratulations, winners!

Here’s the music you heard on this week’s programme: “One Woman” by Beth Blatt, Graham Lyle, and Fahan Hassan, performed by the United Nation Women Singers; “Toy Symphony” by Leopold Mozart; “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov; “The Cakewalk” from Children’s Corner by Claude Debussy, performed by the composer, and “Nubian Lady” by Kenny Barron, performed by Bobbi Humphrey and her orchestra.  

Do you have a music request? Send it to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr

This week’s question … you must listen to the show to participate. After you’ve listened to the show, take another listen to the first story on Alison Hird and Sarah Elzas’ Spotlight on France podcast number 124, which will help you with the answer.

You have until 31 March to enter this week’s quiz; the winners will be announced on the 5 April podcast. When you enter, be sure to send your postal address with your answer, and if you have one, your RFI Listeners Club membership number.

Send your answers to:

english.service@rfi.fr

or

Susan Owensby

RFI – The Sound Kitchen

80, rue Camille Desmoulins

92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux

France

Click here to learn how to win a special Sound Kitchen prize.

Click here to find out how you can become a member of the RFI Listeners Club, or form your own official RFI Club.   

The sharp decline in US-Ukraine relations has raised doubts about American support for Europe, as the continent assesses its ability to defend itself against a threat from Russia.

Donald Trump’s decision to cut military aid to Ukraine this week signals a  shift in US foreign policy and raises questions about America’s commitment to Europe’s security.

From shortages in the number of tanks and the availablity of artillery, to the debate over a unified European army, leaders must decide whether to bolster national forces or embrace deeper military cooperation.

As France and the UK guard their nuclear arsenals and Russia tests Europe’s resolve, can the EU build a credible deterrent, or will it continue to rely on America?

The Director for Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa at the Institute for Economics and Peace, Serge Stroobants, explained to RFI that Europe lacks the capacity to react quickly to security threats, with defence procurement bogged down by fragmentation and slow production timelines.

As early as 2016, Germany’s defence industry acknowledged that no major projects would reach completion for at least six to eight years. Today the projections are even worse.

“If you want to invest quickly in the military – into defence, into new equipment and weapon systems – these need to be bought off the shelf outside of Europe,” with the US, Turkey, and South Korea as key suppliers, he says.

Defence neglected

Beyond military upgrades, Europe faces a broader challenge as its entire economic and state system must adapt to meet modern security demands.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s recent pledge to cut red tape for defence procurement is a step in the right direction, Stroobants says, but it comes too late and under pressure from events rather than forward planning.

“The problem is – as is so often with the EU – we are doing this under the pressure of the events. We’re not doing this in advance. We’re not planning. We don’t have a strategy.”

Despite being a continent of 500 million people – and the world’s third-largest economic and military power – Europe remains unable to ensure its own security due to a longstanding lack of strategic foresight and neglect of defence spending.

As it stands, a unified EU defence force remains a challenge due to Europe’s struggle to coordinate military policy alongside foreign diplomacy and development.

Stroobants explains that peace and security are based on three pillars – diplomacy, development and defence. “When you look at the EU, this has been done for almost 75 years, but if you are not able to integrate foreign policy and foreign development…and have common influence outside of European borders? Well, it doesn’t really help to only unify just one of those three pillars,” he said.

While the EU has made progress in development and soft power, true strategic influence for the bloc requires the full integration of defence and diplomacy to establish an undivided foreign policy and a stronger global presence.

‘Europe must do the heavy lifting’ in Ukraine, needs ‘US backing’: UK’s Starmer

Reshaping Europe

“For 30 to 35 years now, we have been divesting from defence, but it’s much more than defence. It’s the entire society that has lived with the idea that we would live eternally in peace,” Stroobants says.

He argues that to independently deter Russian aggression, European nations must go beyond bolstering their military capabilities – they need to rethink their entire strategic approach.

“If you want to be ready, you need to invest in defence…but you also need to reshape your society and your infrastructure,” he adds.

He also points out that with France and the UK as Europe’s only nuclear powers, their cooperation on a nuclear umbrella remains uncertain. France insists its deterrent will stay national but may engage allies without losing autonomy. Both nations favour a “coalition of the willing” over an EU or NATO-led approach, prioritising national security.

‘Deterrance and power’

While Moscow takes America’s military threat seriously and views European states as weak, Stroobants added,  Europe must take concrete steps to change this perception and restore credible deterrence.

European security hinges on two key concepts: deterrence and power. Deterrence relies not just on military capability but on the will to use it – because, as Stroobants puts it, “you can have 20,000 nuclear warheads, but if you have nobody who is strong enough to use them, they are not going to be a deterrent.

“And that’s exactly what’s happening with the EU at the moment”.

True power – accroding to Stroobants – is essentially a combination of military, economic, and diplomatic strength,comboined with a clear strategy and the political will to act.

Britain holds back as France pushes for truce between Russia and Ukraine

While Europe possesses significant resources, it lacks a unified vision on how to confront Putin’s Russia and define its role in an increasingly aggressive global order – leaving it strategically adrift and unable to deter adversaries effectively.

The absence of key nations – including the Baltic states – from a recent high-level security meeting in London only underscores the challenge of consolidating a unified European deterrent.

“After having lived in the military for 30 years, in Europe and under the NATO umbrella, not incorporating all the allies or member states [at high level meetings] is really strange,” he said.

For Stroobants, Europe now is facing the disintegration of alliances that have taken over seven decades to build.

Officially recognised by the United Nations in 1977, International Women’s Day (IWD) originated from the labour movements of the early twentieth century.

On 8 March, women around the world – and throughout the month in some countries – are celebrated and recognised for their social, cultural, economic and political achievements.

The day also serves as a call to action to accelerate progress towards gender parity.

In 2025, the United Nations will mark International Women’s Day under the theme: “For All Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.”

While the situation for women in parts of Africa is undeniably influenced by conflicts, disasters, and insecurity, this episode focuses on progress and empowerment.

Empowering

Spotlight on Africa’s first guest is Magalie Lebreton Traoré, an expert in digital transitions across the African continent at the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco).

As Unesco leads training for women in AI across Africa’s five regions, Magalie joins us to discuss how women are taking the lead in shaping high-tech industries, particularly artificial intelligence. This technological leap presents significant opportunities for women’s leadership and innovation.

Moreover, a study published in Nature revealed that 79 percent of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) could be improved or achieved through AI.

To tackle gender and geographical inequalities in AI, Unesco has made these issues a priority in its Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence – the first global standard-setting framework in this field, unanimously adopted by Unesco Member States in November 2021.

Celebrating

And to broaden the conversation, we also talk to a curator and two artists from Johannesburg in South Africa, who are organising a special exhibition to highlight the work of artist-mothers and women artists caring for families.

Lara Koseff is a curator at INCCA, the Independent Network for Contemporary Culture & Art in Johannesburg. She has established the second edition of ‘Art After Baby‘, with the support of the National Arts Council South Africa.

These female artists and mothers have been selected to receive support and mentorship in order to complete and exhibit a body of work in solo exhibitions at Victoria Yards in Johannesburg until the end of March.

Lara Koseff, Siviwe James and Phumelele Kunene join us on the line from South Africa.

Episode mixed by Erwan Rome.

Spotlight on Africa is produced by Radio France Internationale’s English language service.

In a packed conference hall in an Istanbul hotel, Ahmet Turk, a leading member of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Dem Party, read a statement by Ocalan calling for the organization, which he founded, to disarm and dissolve itself, declaring an end to the decades-long conflict.

 The PKK, designated as a terrorist organization by the European Union and the United States, has been fighting for autonomy and Kurdish minority rights in Turkey since the 1980s.

Ocalan, imprisoned in a Turkish jail since 1999, made his disarmament call after the PKK suffered significant military setbacks in recent years.

 “The PKK is almost finished within the borders of Turkey,” explained Mesut Yegen, a political scientist at the Istanbul-based Reform Institute.

However, Yegen claims with the PKK now primarily based in northern Iraq on Turkey’s frontier, while its affiliate in Syria, the SDF, controls a large swathe of territory bordering Turkey all sides still have an interest in peace.

“We know that the Turkish state needs a peace process because it’s worried about the future development in the region in Syria and Iraq,” added Yegen.

Turkey looks for regional help in its battle against Kurdish rebels in Iraq

Cautious response

The Turkish government gave a cautious response to Ocalan’s statement, saying it’s waiting for the PKK to disarm. The PKK leadership based in Iraq, ahead of Ocalan’s statement, declared it is looking for gestures from the government before any disarmament.

“The peace process in Turkey will largely depend on what emerges, what kind of a deal emerges inside Syria,” Asli Aydintasbas, a visiting senior fellow with the Brookings Institution in Washington, said.

“So we’re also seeing Turkey be more cautious. That doesn’t mean, you know, Turkey won’t reverse course if it feels there’s no room to go with Syrian Kurds or inside the peace process in Turkey.”

Turkish armed forces are massed on the Syrian border with Ankara, demanding the SDF merge with the Syrian army under the control of Syria’s new rulers, with whom the Turkish government has close ties.

For now, the SDF leader Mazloum Abdi declared his force is not bound by Ocalan’s disarmament call while demanding Ankara end its ongoing attacks on its troops.

Turkey’s Saturday Mothers keep up vigil for lost relatives

Scepticism

Analyst Mesut Yegen adds that ending the PKK conflict will come at a price for Ankara.  “They’re (PKK) expecting that in return for that, the state promises that at least a kind of autonomy or status for Syrian Kurds is going to be recognised by the Syrian regime, the new regime, and that the Turkish state also supports this kind of solution.

“In addition to this, of course, the expectation is that some reforms will be implemented in Turkey with regards to the Kurdish question.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has distanced himself from the current efforts to end the conflict, other than saying a historic opportunity exists for Kurds and Turks to live in peace but offering no concessions.

For months, a crackdown on Turkey’s legal Kurdish movement continues, with the removal of elected mayors and arrests of journalists and human rights activists. 

Trial of alleged PKK figures accused of financing terror begins in France

Turkish commentator on Turkey’s Politikyol news portal, Sezin Oney, warns unless the causes of the conflict are addressed, there’s little hope of a permanent peace.

 “Probably, any disarmament or any disbanding of PKK would be a gimmick,” warns Oney.

“It wouldn’t be a real actual disbanding, and it might just appear in a year under a different name. Because they would still have the pretext to argue that armed struggle is necessary because the Kurds in Turkey don’t have their democratic rights.”

With previous peace efforts failing, opinion polls indicate that the public remains sceptical of this latest effort. But for 75-year-old Ocalan, analysts warn it may be his last chance of any hope of freedom.

Hello everyone! Welcome to The Sound Kitchen weekly podcast, published every Saturday – here on our website, or wherever you get your podcasts. You’ll hear the winner’s names announced and the week’s quiz question, along with all the other ingredients you’ve grown accustomed to: your letters and essays, “On This Day”, quirky facts and news, interviews, and great music … so be sure and listen every week.

The RFI English team is pleased to announce that Saleem Akhtar Chadhar, the president of the RFI Seven Stars Listening Club in District Chiniot, Pakistan, won the RFI / Planète Radio ePOP video contest, in the RFI Clubs category. Bravo Saleem! Mubarak ho!

Erwan and I are busy cooking up special shows with your music requests, so get them in! Send your music requests to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr Tell us why you like the piece of music, too – it makes it more interesting for us all!

Facebook: Be sure to send your photos to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr for the RFI English Listeners Forum banner!

More tech news: Did you know we have a YouTube channel? Just go to YouTube and write “RFI English” in the search bar, and there we are! Be sure to subscribe to see all our videos.

Would you like to learn French? RFI is here to help you!

Our website “Le Français facile avec RFI” has news broadcasts in slow, simple French, as well as bilingual radio dramas (with real actors!) and exercises to practice what you have heard.

Go to our website and get started! At the top of the page, click on “Test level”. According to your score, you’ll be counselled to the best-suited activities for your level.

Do not give up! As Lidwien van Dixhoorn, the head of “Le Français facile” service told me: “Bathe your ears in the sound of the language, and eventually, you’ll get it.” She should know – Lidwien is Dutch and came to France hardly able to say “bonjour” and now she heads this key RFI department – so stick with it!

Be sure you check out our wonderful podcasts!

In addition to the news articles on our site, with in-depth analysis of current affairs in France and across the globe, we have several podcasts that will leave you hungry for more.

There’s Spotlight on France, Spotlight on Africa, The International Report, and of course, The Sound Kitchen. We also have an award-winning bilingual series – an old-time radio show, with actors (!) to help you learn French, called Les voisins du 12 bis. 

Remember, podcasts are radio, too! As you see, sound is still quite present in the RFI English service. Please keep checking our website for updates on the latest from our journalists. You never know what we’ll surprise you with!

To listen to our podcasts from your PC, go to our website; you’ll see “Podcasts” at the top of the page. You can either listen directly or subscribe and receive them directly on your mobile phone.

To listen to our podcasts from your mobile phone, slide through the tabs just under the lead article (the first tab is “Headline News”) until you see “Podcasts”, and choose your show. 

Teachers take note! I save postcards and stamps from all over the world to send to you for your students. If you would like stamps and postcards for your students, just write and let me know. The address is english.service@rfi.fr  If you would like to donate stamps and postcards, feel free! Our address is listed below. 

Another idea for your students: Br. Gerald Muller, my beloved music teacher from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas, has been writing books for young adults in his retirement – and they are free! There is a volume of biographies of painters and musicians called Gentle Giants, and an excellent biography of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., too. They are also a good way to help you improve your English – that’s how I worked on my French, reading books that were meant for young readers – and I guarantee you, it’s a good method for improving your language skills. To get Br. Gerald’s free books, click here.

Independent RFI English Clubs: Be sure to always include Audrey Iattoni (audrey.iattoni@rfi.fr) from our Listener Relations department in your RFI Club correspondence. Remember to copy me (thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr) when you write to her so that I know what is going on, too. N.B.: You do not need to send her your quiz answers! Email overload!

This week’s quiz: On 1 February, I asked you a question about our article “African nations set to light up the homes of 300 million people by 2030”.

Nearly 600 million Africans live without access to electricity, which is higher than any other continent. The World Bank and the African Development Bank have a plan: Dubbed “Mission 300”, it’s meant to connect half of those homes to power by 2030.

You were to send in the names of four African countries that have committed to reform their electricity utility companies, push renewable energy integration, and raise targets to improve access to national electricity. The World Bank grant will only be available to countries once these reforms have been carried out.

The answer is, to quote our article: “In Nigeria, an estimated 90 million people, 40 percent of the population, don’t have access to electricity. The country, along with Senegal, Zambia and Tanzania is one of a dozen that committed as part of the Mission 300 Plan.”

The other countries are Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, DRC, Niger, Liberia, Madagascar, and Malawi. 

In addition to the quiz question, there was the bonus question: “What item have you held on to as a remembrance of something?”

Do you have a bonus question idea? Send it to us!

The winners are: RFI English listener Radhakrishna Pillai from Kerala State, India. Radhakrishna is also this week’s bonus question winner. Congratulations, Radhakrishna, on your double win !

Also on the list of lucky winners this week are Ahsan Ejaz, a member of the RFI Fans Club in Sheikhupura, Pakistan, and Sharmin Sultana, a member of the Shetu RFI Listeners Club in Naogaon, Bangladesh. Rounding out the list are two RFI English listeners: Subhas Paul, a member of the RFI Students Radio Club in West Bengal, India, and Christian Ghibaudo from Tende, France.

Congratulations, winners!

Here’s the music you heard on this week’s programme: The “Vivace” from Serenade for Small Orchestra by Jean Françaix, performed by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Louis Lane; “Djourou”, performed by Ballaké Sissoko and Sona Jobarteh; “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov; “The Cakewalk” from Children’s Corner by Claude Debussy, performed by the composer; “Happy” by Pharrell Williams, and “Baul Song” by Lalan, performed by Torap Ali Shah.

Do you have a music request? Send it to thesoundkitchen@rfi.fr

This week’s question … you must listen to the show to participate. After you’ve listened to the show, re-read our article “French president Macron set to brief EU leaders over details of Trump talks”, which will help you with the answer.

You have until 24 March to enter this week’s quiz; the winners will be announced on the 29 March podcast. When you enter be sure to send your postal address with your answer, and if you have one, your RFI Listeners Club membership number.

Send your answers to:

english.service@rfi.fr

or

Susan Owensby

RFI – The Sound Kitchen

80, rue Camille Desmoulins

92130 Issy-les-Moulineaux

France

Click here to learn how to win a special Sound Kitchen prize.

Click here to find out how you can become a member of the RFI Listeners Club, or form your own official RFI Club.   

The United States’ military presence in Syria has been called into question, as President Donald Trump faces conflicting pressure from Turkey and Israel over the 2000-strong US force supporting a Syrian Kurdish-led coalition.

The US force is supporting an Arab-Kurdish coalition of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in its war against the Islamic State (IS) group.

Thousands of IS militants are currently being held in SDF prisons, but the US military presence now hangs in the balance. 

Turkey analyst Sinan Ciddi, of the Washington-based research institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies says Trump is in a dilemma because he ran on this promise of putting America first. “Getting out of foreign entanglements, not committing US troops and US money to parts of the world in which the US doesn’t have any interest,” he tells RFI.

However, Ciddi warns a quick withdrawal would not be without risk: “The dilemma for Trump is that in a theatre such as Syria, if he were to pull back 2,000 troops, then you’ve got this major security threat.”

Turkey’s Erdogan sees new Trump presidency as opportunity

Turkey labels SDF ‘insurgents’

However, a US pullout would be welcomed by its NATO ally Turkey. Ankara strongly opposes Washington’s military support for the SDF, which it accuses of being linked to Kurdish insurgents fighting Turkey.

International relations expert Bilgehan Alagoz, of Istanbul’s Marmara University, maintains the US deployment has poisoned relations between the two allies, but says a withdrawal by Trump would offer a reset in ties.

“I believe that there is going to be a new ground between Turkey and the United States,” Alagoz said. “And Turkey will guarantee the safety of US soldiers and a successful withdrawal from Syria. So it is all going to be a kind of new negotiation between Turkey and the United States.”

Until now, US soldiers in Syria have prevented the Turkish military – massed on the Syrian border – from overwhelming the SDF, but time may be running out for the Kurdish-led forces.

“Assuming that the US withdraws at one point from Syria … this will mean the end of the diplomatic umbrella for the SDF that the US was able to put over them,” according to Aydin Selcen, a former Turkish diplomat and now foreign policy analyst for Turkey’s Medyascope independent news outlet.

Selcen warns that the SDF has only a small window to secure its future: “Time is of the essence for the SDF to get their act together and join forces with Damascus… to fold their forces into the Syrian armed forces, which would also satisfy Ankara’s security concerns.”

Turkey steps up military action against Kurds in Syria as power shifts

Israel sees SDF as key against IS

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has close ties with Syria’s new leaders, and is demanding that the SDF disband or face a Turkish assault.

However, the Israeli government is voicing support for American backing for the SDF, given the risk posed by the Islamic State.

“We know that the SDF controls prisons in which there are around 10,000 Islamic State fighters and families,” explains Gallia Lindenstrauss, a foreign policy specialist at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.

“Nobody wants to see the resurgence of the Islamic State. And I think in this respect, the US understands this is a small number of troops [and] they are effective. So why pull them out?”

Paris hosts global conference on shaping Syria’s future

Lindenstrauss told RFI: “Israel has voiced that it does want to see the West continue supporting the Kurdish presence in northeast Syria, so there will be Israeli diplomatic efforts to keep the [US] troops there.”

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, recently underlined the importance of the Syrian Kurds as an ally to Israel – a message that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is likely to have delivered to Trump during his visit to Washington this month, Ciddi believes.

“We’ve seen an increase in moves by the Israeli government to provide more formal and government support for non-state actors, such as the Syrian Kurds,” he said. “Because they understand that hitherto they’ve been entirely reliable in thwarting some of the major security concerns that the Israelis hold close to their heart.”

Madhya Pradesh is often referred to as the Heart of India. Located right in the middle of the country, the Indian region shows everything India has to offer through its abundant diversity. The IFTM trade show, which took place in Paris at the end of September, presented the perfect opportunity for travel enthusiasts to discover the region.

Sheo Shekhar Shukla, Managing Director of Madhya Pradesh’s tourism board, sat down to explain his approach to sustainable tourism.

“Post-covid the whole world has known a shift in their approach when it comes to tourism. And all those discerning travelers want to have different kinds of experiences: something offbeat, something new, something which has not been explored before.”

Through its UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Shukla wants to showcase the deep history Madhya Pradesh has to offer.

“UNESCO is very actively supporting us and three of our sites are already World Heritage Sites. Sanchi is a very famous buddhist spiritual destination, Bhimbetka is a place where prehistoric rock shelters are still preserved, and Khajuraho is home to thousand year old temples with magnificent architecture.”

All in all, Shukla believes that there’s only one way forward for the industry: “Travelers must take sustainable tourism as a paradigm in order to take tourism to the next level.”

In partnership with Madhya Pradesh’s tourism board.

Also known as the Land of the Beautiful Islands, Malaysia’s landscape and cultural diversity is almost unmatched on the planet. Those qualities were all put on display at the Malaysian stand during the IFTM trade show.

Libra Hanif, director of Tourism Malaysia, explained the appeal of the country as well as the importance of promoting sustainable tourism today: “Sustainable travel is a major trend now, with the changes that are happening post-covid. People want to get close to nature, to get close to people. So Malaysia being a multicultural and diverse [country] with a lot of natural environments, we felt that it’s a good thing for us to promote Malaysia.”

Malaysia has also gained fame in recent years, through its numerous UNESCO World Heritage Sites, which include Kinabalu Park and the Archaeological Heritage of the Lenggong Valley.

Green mobility has also become an integral part of tourism in Malaysia, with an increasing number of people using bikes to discover the country: “If you are a little more adventurous, we have the mountain back trails where you can cut across gazetted trails to see the natural attractions and the wildlife that we have in Malaysia,” says Hanif. “If you are not that adventurous, you’ll be looking for relaxing cycling. We also have countryside spots, where you can see all the scenery in a relaxing session.”

With more than 25,000 visitors at this IFTM trade show this year, Malaysia’s tourism board got to showcase the best the country and its people have to offer.

In partnership with Malaysia Tourism Promotion Board. For more information about Malaysia, click here.