Nicholas Sarkozy

Emmanuel Macron told striking factory workers that he can do nothing to save their jobs from cheap foreign labour when he paid them a last-minute visit on Wednesday.

Macron, who is pro-globalisation, had not been scheduled to speak with Whirlpool staff in his hometown of Amiens, but was forced to make a detour after Marine Le Pen went to see them earlier in the day.

Right before Paris was put on alert over yet another incident on the first anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo assault by al-Qaeda on Jan. 7, former French President Nicholas Sarkozy claimed that the Schengen visa agreement "was dead." The agreement has brought visa-free travel to a number of European Union and non-EU European countries since the mid-1990s.

Turkey has given the European Commission a revised position paper for European Union accession chapter 17, economic and monetary policies, and expects the bloc to open the chapter in eight weeks' time, EU Minister Volkan Bozkir has told Hürriyet Daily News.