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French strike threat over Cannes film festival

STRIKING showbusiness workers in France have threatened to disrupt next month’s Cannes film festival.

The film industry website Screen Daily has said that a group representing the workers has planned an “occupation committee” for the 57th festival.

Picasso sought French citizenship

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso applied for French citizenship just before German troops invaded France in 1940, but was turned down because police saw him as a Communist sympathiser, a new exhibition shows.

Picasso’s brief letter of application, featuring his instantly recognisable signature, is the highlight of an exhibition of 40 years of police surveillance of the celebrated artist, which opened at the Paris Police Museum on Tuesday.

The records, among hundreds of files stolen by the Nazis during World War Two and seized by the Russians in 1945, lay in KGB vaults in Moscow for decades before being returned to France in 2000.

Appellation boss calls for overhaul to French system

The head of France’s appellation authority, René Renou, has called for a new quality standard in French wine, to stand above the current AOC system.

The President of INAO (Institut National des Appellations d’Origines), speaking at a seminar at Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire, said he was proposing a wholesale revision of the laws which categorise French wine; the most sweeping changes since the system was introduced.

France to close last coal mine — and two centuries of sooty history

France on Friday is to close the last of its coal mines, ending an industry that, after more than two centuries of toil and occasional tragedy, became doomed because of reliance on nuclear energy and cheaper competition abroad.

The excavation of a symbolic final block of the compressed black carbon from the La Houve mine near the eastern town of Creutzwald is to be a highly symbolic moment for the country and Europe on many levels, underlining personal, historic, social and economic and political transformations.

“We are worn out by years spent underground, without ever seeing the daylight, and for that we are happy to stop,” said one miner, Yves Cerati, who spent 24 of his 43 years in the depths of La Houve.

Opinion: Good News & Bad News from France

In early March, while meeting with French officials in Libya, I suggested that if President Chirac wanted to repair the damage done to U.S.-French relations by French behavior last year, he might start by “putting a new face on French diplomacy.”

Just three weeks later, Chirac announced that he was replacing foreign minister Dominique de Villepin with the relatively unknown, but pro-American, Michel Barnier.

Known for his arrogance and love for grandstanding, Villepin was reviled in America for having sandbagged U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell at the United Nations last year, a disgraceful episode I have detailed in my new book, The French Betrayal of America.