Salut!

Qatar's globetrotting shopping trip adds top French hotels to PSG

Image: Bex Walton

Qatar's energetic acquisition of all or part of numerous western commercial treasures is a subject I have addressed more than once in The National, Abu Dhabi. Still no sign of a takeover bid for the Salut! group of websites, so here is my latest report of the Gulf state's activities in other sectors ...

Abdallah Boumezaar, murder in Collobrières and the death penalty

From Var-Matin's exhaustive coverage

If I had awoken to news that two male gendarmes had been shot dead while investigating a commonplace theft in the small Varois town of Collobrières, I would have been shocked and saddened. I probably would not have written these words.

Lemon curd, Shredded Wheat, Newcastle Broon anyone? Oui mais ...

Moving gratefully on from the elections, I was taken by a discussion at the Survive France Facebook group on the things people miss on either side of the Channel ...

Hollande wins as a Le Pen - but not the one you thought - enters parliament

Image: Rémi Noyon

And this is all you're getting as a taster to my election night coverage for The National, Abu Dhabi - already online at http://thenational.ae ...

Valérie Trierweiler has made up her mind. Now France chooses

Jake's art

At last. The protracted French election season ends today. I have enjoyed covering its twists and turns for The National, Abu Dhabi - and sharing some of those reports with Salut! readers - but I am relieved that today's second round of the legislative vote, in effect the general election, brings down the curtain ...

La triangulaire so French: Ségolène, Valérie and Olivier

Image: Zugaldia

From the hint of historic power to the brink of parliamentary doom. That is the fate of Ségolène Royal, once favourite to win the 2007 presidential elections in France but later soundly beaten by Nicolas Sarkozy. And now, in bizarre circumstances, another crushing defeat looms for the woman who shared the life of François Hollande for 30 years and is the mother of his four children.

Unless there is a remarkable turnaround in voting intentions as declared in a poll* published last night, Ms Royal will lose her straight fight on Sunday with Olivier Falorni, a rebel socialist in her Charente-Maritime constituency.

This is not one of the 34 so-called triangulaires, three-way run-offs which occur when even the third-placed candidate wins a first-round vote of 12.5 per cent of the electorate. But the entry into the Royal-Falorni duel of Valérie Trierweiler, the Mr Hollande's strong-willed lover, amid suggestions - flatly denied - of jealousy at play - makes it a triangulaire of momentous and somehow very French proportions ...

Trick or treat? François Hollande on his way to a socialist majority

Image: Robin Hood Tax

François Hollande's political enemies need something akin to an electoral miracle to stop him winning an absolute majority in the Assemblée Nationale come Sunday night. Cause for instinctive celebration, or a case of last one out of the country remembering to switch off the lights,? Time will tell.

Charles Taylor. The UN Special Court for Sierra Leone answers Salut criticism

Image: stringer_bel

The Special Court for Sierra Leone took its time, but finally replied to my criticism of sentencing policy as applied in the case of Charles Taylor, jailed for 50 years for war crimes committed in that African country's civil war.

French election produces Le Pen v Mélenchon, a classic battle of extremes

Another Rémi Noyon image

First round of the French general election comes tomorrow. We won't know the composition of the Assemblée Nationale for another week, and it may get complicated in the meantime, but there are really only two serious questions at issue: will François Hollande's Parti Socialiste get a parliamentary majority to go with presidential power and who will voters elect in one Pas-de-Calais constituency where a clash far left and far right gives them an intriguing choice?

So British: over-the-top French coverage of the Queen's Jubilee

 

 

''Can I escape all this Jubilee nonsense and visit you in France?'' Almost up to the end of last week, I half-expected the call, text message or e-mail.