Did you miss the news this morning? We have put together a summary to help you see things more clearly.
After the concessions obtained from Michel Barnier, Marine Le Pen adopted a firmer stance and launched an ultimatum. The leader of the National Rally (RN) in the Assembly warned, in an interview with Monde this Thursday, that the Prime Minister must respond by “Monday” to the “red lines” drawn by her party on the budgetary texts for 2025. Failing this, she threatens to vote on the motion of censure to bring down the government.
Although Michel Barnier has reversed course on several measures, notably taxes on electricity and State Medical Aid (AME) for migrants, Marine Le Pen believes that “significant differences remain”. Among the priority demands of the RN are a general increase in pensions for retirees from January 1 and the abandonment of reimbursements for certain medications. She warned that if these conditions are not met, her party will not hesitate to use all parliamentary levers to block the budget.
On Thursday, Vladimir Putin threatened to order a strike against the Ukrainian capital kyiv with his experimental hypersonic intermediate-range missile Orechnik. “We do not exclude the use of Orechnik against military targets, military-industrial installations or decision-making centers, including in kyiv,” he said. The Russian president is convinced of the power of his missile. “If we use several of these systems in one strike then, from the point of view of its power, it is comparable to the use of a nuclear weapon”, he claims, comparing the missile to “a meteorite”.
This new threat from Putin does not seem to impress Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister: “The fact that he so often uses very harsh threats in his rhetoric testifies to his weakness rather than his strength,” he put into perspective . “We will not let ourselves be frightened by threats of this kind, we will support Ukraine as long as it needs it,” he added.
Will a sixty-year-old arrested in Burgundy on Monday have to answer for two murders, apparently very different and which have been waiting to be resolved for decades? Investigators have been questioning him for four days about the death of Nathalie Boyer, a 15-year-old girl found with her throat slit in 1988 in Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, in Isère, but also about that of Laïla Afif, a 40-year-old mother killed with a bullet in the neck, still in Isère, in 2000.
It was family DNA, found in the seals of the Afif file, which allowed the Nanterre “cold case” center to trace the suspect. The man was already convicted in 2002 for raping his daughters. We should know this Friday if he is indicted in these two cases. Nathalie Boyer is on the list of “disappeared from Isère”, several young girls who inexplicably disappeared in the region.
