Every year huge crowds gather in Paris at the Champs-Élysées to ring in the new year with fireworks and concerts. Much like the New Year’s Eve parties in Times Square in New York City, the joyous festivities are a key link in the chain of worldwide celebrations of the year to come.
The New Year’s Eve concert on the Champs Élysées has been cancelled for security reasons. Paris was supposed to host its usual spectacle. A free open-air concert at the Arc de Triomphe, video projections on the monument and the midnight festivities that once drew close to a million people. Instead, the concert has been scrapped. It will be replaced on national television with a prerecorded concert filmed weeks ago with a handpicked crowd to mimic a celebration Paris no longer believes it can safely host. A capital once famed for its public life now performs it under studio conditions.
It marks the collapse of what used to be one of the simplest pleasures of Parisian life. For decades families and friends would spill out onto the streets on New Year’s Eve. Families, couples carrying a bottle of champagne, tourists wrapped in scarves, all drifting towards the Champs Élysées to count down the final seconds of the year. It was spontaneous and cheerful and open to everyone. That Paris no longer exists.
French schools are failing badly. A report from the Observatory of Immigration and Demography (OID), published this week, lays bare the extent of the education system’s struggle with immigration. The report’s author, teacher and writer Joachim Le Floch-Imad, delivers the verdict that “immigration is not the primary cause of our schools’ problems, but it exacerbates all of their difficulties.”
After all, France’s demographics have changed at a rapid pace, placing unprecedented pressure on classrooms, teachers and the basic mission of the school system. In 2024, 31% of newborns had at least one parent born outside the EU. Births to two non-EU-born parents are up 74% since 2000. Today, 40% of children under four in France are either migrants or have a migrant background. And more than one in five fourth-grade (aged nine and 10) speaks a language other than French at home.
A majority of young French Muslims rank sharia above the laws of the Republic, according to a study.
The poll, for Ecran de veille magazine, also found that more than a third sympathise with Islamist ideology.
Some 57 per cent of Muslims aged 15 to 24 believe Islamic law should outrank French legislation in areas such as ritual slaughter of animals, marriage and inheritance.
Civil war is coming.
The voices are quiet at first and then loud all at once. On the vast empty beach of Gravelines in northern France, as an orange morning sun rips through grey clouds, two men prowl the dunes. In a few minutes they cross the beach, filming everything on a GoPro, iPhones in hand, stopping occasionally to pick at coats, trainers, sweatshirts, and empty teargas canisters that litter the sand.
Danny Thomas from Portsmouth and Ryan Bridge from Birmingham are filming content for their Instagram pages, one of which is “Raise the Colours”, the account behind this summer’s surge in Union Jacks, of which Bridge is a co-founder.
They haven’t won in a war, but they’ve changed the battlefield: no longer the streets, but our minds.
From the court records.
Stade de France:
“Against the stadium gate we find a bone. Pieces of human flesh, a hand. Then what could be an arm and shreds of meat. On Rue de l’Olympisme, a finger.”
Then the photo of Manuel Colaço Dias, the first victim of the attacks. His body had “eleven metal nuts, including one in the lung that caused death.”
Next stop: Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge, two restaurants in the city center.
No words.
Please tell me this isn’t real. @fancypants_s https://t.co/VT2UBCZVJw
— Patti Jo (@TheSupeHero) November 14, 2025
Three young Islamist women have been arrested in France on suspicion of plotting terror attacks in Paris to pay “homage to Bin Laden” and to mark the 2015 Bataclan theatre attack.
France’s National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office (PNAT) has charged three women, aged 18, 19, and 21, with a “criminal terrorist conspiracy” following a months-long investigation involving wiretaps and other surveillance, which uncovered plans for a potential suicide attack in Paris.
Every day murder cult Muslimas.
The arrest of influencer Jean-Eudes Gannat, who is being prosecuted for posting a video showing Afghan migrants camped outside a supermarket in his town, continues to cause controversy. The widespread outrage over the attacks against him, even beyond France’s borders, has given rise to a movement on X called “Let’s show reality,” which aims to show, with supporting images, the prevalence of immigration and population change in society.
Tweet Translation (Sorta)
SUMMONED AT THE PROSECUTOR’S REQUEST as early as this afternoon for this innocuous video posted last night on TikTok. Possibly for a custody hearing according to my contact.
Describing reality is forbidden!
Since the truth is disturbing, I ask you to spread it as widely as possible and commend me to your prayers in the face of this umpteenth political-judicial harassment.
CONVOQUÉ À LA DEMANDE DU PARQUET dès cet après-midi pour cette vidéo anodine postée hier soir sur Tiktok. Possiblement pour une garde à vue d’après mon interlocuteur.
Décrire le réel est interdit !
Puisque la vérité dérange, je vous demande de la faire tourner au maximum et me… pic.twitter.com/1UTXx135zV
— Jean Eudes Gannat (@gannat_JEG) November 5, 2025
Every year, young women in southwestern France put on white dresses and prepare for an important vote: to be titled the most virtuous woman of their village.
The tradition of crowning an 18-year-old woman with white roses in recognition of her irreproachable conduct and moral character originated in the 19th century but is still practised in 45 French villages.
It is now at the centre of a row over alleged government “wokeism”. Mayors are furious that the culture ministry is refusing to back their demand for the tradition to be given Unesco world heritage status on the grounds that it contravenes the principle of gender equality.
Screw the ‘Cultureless Ministry’.
Following several attacks on women in public transport in recent days, a petition is circulating on the internet in France calling for specific carriages reserved for women—and possibly children—on suburban trains and metros. It has already gathered several thousand signatures. The initiative may seem commendable: isn’t it a matter of protecting the most vulnerable, as in the days when society looked after widows and orphans? But those promoting this new initiative, convinced that they have found the ultimate remedy for rape and sexual assault and quick to stigmatise the evil male, are determined to ignore the root causes of female passengers’ unease.
Twenty years ago, in October 2005, two young boys, Zyed and Bouna, sought refuge in an electrical transformer while trying to escape a police check and died there. In response, violent riots broke out in Clichy, in the Paris suburbs, before spreading throughout France and causing chaos for three long weeks. Since then, these events, which were unprecedented at the time, have been repeated and will continue to be repeated: the lessons of this episode have not been learned, condemning France to relive an increasingly intense and violent scenario of urban warfare.
The events took place in Clichy-sous-Bois on October 27th, 2005: two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, were electrocuted in an electrical substation while trying to escape a police check.
On the eve of the Jewish New Year, when families across the world were preparing to celebrate renewal and resilience, French President Emmanuel Macron chose a different symbol.
He formally recognized, at the United Nations on September 23, a so-called Palestinian state — an act that emboldened Hamas, even as the 20 Israeli hostages still believed to be alive remained starved, tortured, and trapped in its tunnels in Gaza. Macron did not even have the decency to make his recognition of a non-existent Palestinian state contingent on Hamas releasing the hostages.
You have probably heard that something extraordinary is happening in the Catholic Church in France. The French bishops’ conference announced in April that more than 10,000 adults were due to be baptised in 2025 – a 45 per cent increase on the year before.
It’s not just adult baptisms that are booming. A record 19,000 people, many young, attended this year’s Paris to Chartres pilgrimage. An unprecedented 13,500 high school students took part in the 2025 Lourdes FRAT pilgrimage, a major annual youth event.
The woman accused of murdering Lola Daviet had been served a deportation order. So why was she still in France?
It is just over three years since a 12-year-old Parisian girl called Lola was raped and murdered in a crime that shocked France. The woman accused of the murder, 27-year-old Dahbia Benkired, is now on trial and on Monday the court heard chilling evidence from a man who encountered the defendant shortly after the death of Lola.
Karim Bellazoug told the court that Benkired was carrying a large trunk and told him she had items to sell. When he glanced inside he saw what looked like a body. “I thought she was crazy, that she was a psychopath,” Bellazoug declared.
I have a friend who has a foolproof trick for when he wants to do something forbidden: “act completely normal.” Using this system, he’s crashed other people’s weddings to eat the appetizers, sneaked into concerts without tickets, and gotten me into a few troubles, because I, unlike him, am incapable of acting normal while doing something abnormal.
France: The Seine in Paris, a vacation paradise, a seaside resort, homeless people? It’s hard to define. pic.twitter.com/PE0Vpx1MEC
— Shoshana Yisrael Aras (@aras_shoshana) September 7, 2025
