Christiane Taubira

French lawmakers approved a bill on Thursday to completely remove the word "race" from the country's law books, but the initiative has been blasted as naïve and useless by right-wing opponents.

France swiftly rejected on July 3 a request for asylum by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The founder of the transparency website had appealed directly to President Francois Hollande, days after Wikileaks published documents showing the United States had spied on successive French leaders, including Hollande himself. 

Deputy Prime Minister Meglena Kuneva called for dissociating Bulgaria's accession to the Schengen Area and the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) of the European Commission.

According to Kuneva, the accession of Bulgaria should not be made dependent on the CVM, which monitors the progress of Bulgaria in the areas of judicial reform and the fight against corruption.

The European Parliament announced March 9 that it had alerted anti-fraud investigators to possible financial irregularities committed by France's far-right National Front (FN) party over salaries paid to EU parliamentary assistants.
      

A former French local election candidate for the far-right National Front (FN) has been sentenced to nine months in prison for comparing the country's black justice minister to a monkey.