French President Emmanuel Macron led the traditional ceremony on Paris’ Champs-Elysees Monday commemorating the day that marked the end of World War II in Europe in 1945.

Flanked by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, Macron laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe monument. A brass band played the Marseillaise.

To limit disruptions amid ongoing opposition to Macron and his contested pension reforms, police banned gatherings around the area of the ceremony in the French capital, and in Lyon where the president will travel later in the day.

Authorities are being vigilant that a “casserolade ” or the loud banging of pots and pans in protest will not distract from the memorial ceremonies.

May Day march against pension reform: Paris protesters determined to ‘give it our all’

In Lyon, Macron is paying tribute to the French Resistance movement and one of its leaders, Jean Moulin. Macron is visiting Montluc prison, where Moulin was detained and tortured by the Gestapo.

Source: AP

The Coronation was nothing if not international.

About half of all the world’s leaders were there – 90 heads of state in all, as well as 14 prime ministers from countries where the King is still their monarch.

Servicemen and women from 33 Commonwealth countries took part in the procession. Kings and queens from Europe and beyond were in the congregation. Many in the crowds were visiting from overseas.

And it all made headlines abroad, especially in the US.

But interest was not universal. In some of the King’s realms, such as Belize and Jamaica, the coronation has prompted fresh debate about them becoming republics.

Australia’s Prime Minister Antony Albanese may have attended the Coronation but he is a lifelong republican and some people in Sydney today appeared underwhelmed by the day’s events.

On the Pacific island of Tanna, in Vanuatu, however, thousands gathered to dance and feast in celebration of the King’s big day. But then they still believe his late father was a god.

The Palestinian connection to the Coronation comes through the Chrism oil used to anoint King Charles. It was created with Palestinian olive oil and consecrated at Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre Church.

At Bethlehem University, a Catholic institution, staff watched events unfold on TV together.

“My interest is just that it’s unusual, it doesn’t happen every day,” explains Brother Jean Manuel from Jerusalem. “I like the ceremony and the pomp,” adds Brother Alejandro Cerna, a Mexican. “I’ve always liked history and anything related to royalty, kings and castles.”

Paola Handal, who has Canadian nationality, confesses to “an utter fascination with anything royal,” even planning her own coronation cocktail using orange blossom – a local flavour used to perfume the Chrism oil.

By contrast, Australian, Brother Mark McKeon, felt detached. “The monarchy in the UK has no impact on my life,” he says. “I think in Australia, we should have our own head of state.”

Source: BBC

King Charles III greeted the crowds outside Buckingham Palace on Friday on the eve of his coronation, with royal revellers cranking up the party atmosphere with fancy dress and inflatable crowns.

Hundreds of tents have been pitched along The Mall, the tree-lined avenue leading to the palace, with hardcore royalists camping out to secure a prime viewing spot for the glittering processions to and from London’s Westminster Abbey on Saturday.

The scene looks like a costume party, with many extravagantly dressed up in all manner of costumes and accoutrements and wearing blow-up crowns on their heads.

The buzz cranked up even further when Charles, his son Prince William and William’s wife Kate went out to shake hands and chat with the multitudes behind the bunting-lined barricades.

People cheered, took selfies next to the royals and some sang “God Save the King” as the sun broke through rain clouds that had drenched the gathered masses.

One woman told the sovereign: “Love you, Charlie!”, while others passed on their congratulations.

Kate, 41, was heard saying that the coronation was “a great moment for celebration”.

One man, wearing a golden crown and the red, white and blue flag around his shoulders, stood next to a life-size poster of the sovereign.

Five women from the English Midlands, all in their sixties and wearing Union Jack suits, were preparing for a third and final night sleeping in a tent.

Carry on camping

But they know the drill, having done it before for the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in June 2022, celebrating her 70 years on the throne, and then again for her funeral in September.

“We’ll really have good views,” one of them said.

“Being here, together, for the coronation, it’s what makes us British.”

Karen Chamberlain, 57, from Birmingham, arrived at The Mall with a big backpack and a tent. She was preparing to camp out for the night with her sister, husband and their eight-year-old son.

“It’s so exciting,” she told AFP. “Being here is a way to say we are proud of the monarchy.”

“Our mother came to London in 1953,” said the charity worker, referring to Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation.

News crews from around the world, some broadcasting live, zig-zagged between the tents. Smiling police officers guided the growing crowd, while groups of passing tourists gazed at the bustling spectacle.

Bill Powell, 52, from Toronto, came to The Mall as soon as his plane landed on Wednesday. He is camping out with a fellow Canadian who now lives in England.

They have installed a Canadian flag on the barricades.

“Making eye contact with royal family is something amazing, something you don’t understand when you just watch on TV,” he insisted.

Unifying force

Charles is Canada’s head of state and Powell does not believe that his country will ditch its constitutional monarchy.

He said some people wanted to replace the king of Canada with a president “because they don’t know Charles” yet.

“The priority for the king is his country, the tradition. It’s country first. Whereas politicians, it’s ‘my interests first’.”

His friend Mary Foster added: “I can’t imagine how it is to start the biggest job of your life at 74.”

Ilana Trevisan, a 41-year-old Frenchwoman, came from the southern city of Marseille with her mother and daughter especially for the coronation.

“Being here is brilliant,” she said. “We are fans of the monarchy,” she proclaimed, without regretting France’s republic status.

“My mother wanted me to marry William when I was little!” she said.

“The atmosphere here is absolutely fantastic. There are so many people from different countries,” she said.

“I hope it stays like this. I mean the monarchy. It brings people together.”

Source: AFP

Russia shelled a block of flats in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk on Friday, killing six people including a toddler who was pulled out of the rubble but died in an ambulance on the way to hospital, police said.

Sloviansk lies in a part of the Donetsk region that is under Ukrainian control. It is close to territory controlled by Russia.

AFP journalists saw rescue workers digging for survivors on the top floor of a residential building and black smoke billowing from homes on fire across the street.

Authorities earlier said five people were killed but that there was possibly a child under the rubble of the building, a typical Soviet-era housing estate.

“The death toll in Sloviansk has risen to six,” Ukrainian police said on Twitter.

“A child died in an ambulance after being pulled out from the rubble.”

Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska said the child was a two-year-old boy and sent her condolences to the family during this “indescribable grief.”

The street below — including a playground — was covered in a layer of concrete dust and debris, including torn pages from school books and children’s drawings.

Shocked residents

“I live on the opposite side of the street and I was sleeping a little when I heard this huge boom and I ran out from my flat,” 59-year-old resident Larisa told AFP.

“I was really scared and in a state of shock,” she said, adding the impact of the shelling had broken her windows and sent shards of glass flying throughout her home.

“I heard a woman screaming, ‘there’s a child here, there’s a child here.’ She was screaming so much.”

At another impact site in a residential neighbourhood, an elderly woman in a purple cardigan — dazed from the blasts — was gathering blown-off shards of metal from the ground outside a shop.

A resident nearby, who declined to give her name, told AFP journalists the strikes had blown out her windows and dislodged her front door from its frame.

“Usually when this happens we immediately take cover in the bathroom,” she said.

“No one from our side of the building was injured but maybe someone here was,” she added, pointing to a pool of blood next to another entrance of her building.

Sloviansk is 45 kilometres (27 miles) north-west of Bakhmut — the current epicentre of fighting.

Source: AFP

Moscow announced Tuesday it had for the first time downed a long-range rocket supplied to Ukraine by the United States, weapons Kyiv said were key to an anticipated counter-attack against Russian forces.

The statement from Russia’s defence ministry came a day after Ukraine said it received modern Leopard and Challenger battle tanks from Germany and the United Kingdom to push back Moscow’s army in east and southern Ukraine.

Fighting in recent months between Russian and Ukrainian forces has concentrated on the eastern city Bakhmut, and Kyiv says it is holding out in the Donetsk region urban hub to exhaust Russian forces and then more easily push them back.

“Air defence (forces) downed… a GLSDB guided rocket,” Russia’s defence ministry said in a statement, referring to ground-launched small diameter bombs produced by Boeing and the Saab Group.

These devices have a range of up to 150 kilometres (93 miles), which would threaten Russian positions and supply depots far behind the front lines.

The Pentagon announced last month it was providing Ukraine with the artillery as part of a $2.2 billion arms package.

“This gives them a longer-range capability… that will enable them to conduct operations in defence of their country and to take back their sovereign territory,” Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said at the time.

Ukraine had been asking the United States for munitions that can fly farther than the HIMARS rockets, which have an 80-kilometre range.

The West had been wary of supplying the weapons over concerns Kyiv could use them to target Russia.

HIMARS played an important role in Ukraine’s recapture of Kherson in the south last year but the GLSDB potentially gives Ukraine forces an ability to strike anywhere in the Russian-held parts of Ukraine.

‘Wear down’ Russian forces at Bakhmut

That could threaten key Russian supply lines, arms depots and air bases.

The Kremlin has consistently said the Western arms deliveries to Ukraine would ultimately not have any impact on the battlefield and only prolong the conflict and Ukrainians’ suffering.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky at the time tweeted his thanks to President Joe Biden for the new aid.

Source: AFP

French President Emmanuel Macron strongly condemned violence that erupted in Thursday’s demonstrations against raising the French retirement age and said he would not give in to it.

“We will yield nothing to violence, I condemn violence with the utmost strength,” Macron told a news conference, after an EU Summit in Brussels, on Friday.

Macron is under pressure to find a way out of a crisis that has seen some of France’s worst street violence in years over a pension bill he has pushed through parliament without a vote.

As protests are expected to continue next week, a planned state visit to France from Britain’s King Charles III has been postponed at Macron’s request.

“I think we would not be serious and lack common sense to propose to His Majesty the King and the Queen Consort to come do a state visit in the middle of the demonstrations,” Macron said Friday.

The French president said that the visit would be rearranged for early summer.

Source: AFP

Russia vowed Tuesday to capture the Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, the epicentre of fierce fighting for months, as a precursor for offensives deeper into eastern Ukraine.

The intense fighting in the east comes as Ukraine said it had identified a soldier filmed being shot dead in a video that sparked outrage on social media and as UN chief Antonio Guterres headed to Ukraine for talks in Kyiv.

The battle for the salt-mining town, which had a pre-war population of 80,000 people, has been the longest and bloodiest in Moscow’s more than year-long invasion that has devasted swathes of Ukraine and displaced millions.

Ukraine vowed Monday to bolster its defences in Bakhmut, but a Ukrainian soldier near the town also told AFP that forces were bracing for its fall to the Russians and that some units had begun to retreat.

“Capturing (Bakhmut) will allow for further offensive operations deep into the defence lines of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told military officials during a televised meeting on Tuesday.

In Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the army was intent on defending Bakhmut despite a rumoured retreat under pressure from Russian forces, who have sought to capture Bakhmut for months.

“I told the chief of staff to find the appropriate forces to help the guys in Bakhmut,” Zelensky said in his evening address to the nation late Monday.

‘Bakhmut will fall’

Ukrainian presidential aide Mykhaylo Podolyak told AFP there was “consensus” within the military on the need to “continue defending the city.”

Both sides have said the Bakhmut battle has cost a significant number of troops, but neither gave figures.

Source: AFP

King Charles III will make his first state visits as UK monarch when he travels to France and Germany later this month, Buckingham Palace announced Friday.

The choice of the two European nations and close allies is widely seen as an attempt to build post-Brexit bridges and an acknowledgement of the affection the late Queen Elizabeth II had for France.

The visits will take place from March 26 to March 31, ahead of the king’s coronation on May 6.

The tour “will celebrate Britain’s relationship with France and Germany, marking our shared histories, culture and values,” the palace said.

Charles and his wife Camilla will be in France from March 26 to March 29, and will join President Emmanuel Macron for a ceremony of remembrance and wreath laying at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The king will make an address at the French Senate, while Camilla and the French first lady Brigitte Macron will officially open the new Manet and Degas exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay.

The royal couple will then be guests of honour at a state banquet hosted by the Macrons at the Palace of Versailles, and will also pay a visit to Bordeaux in southwestern France.

While there, Charles will “witness first-hand the devastation caused by last summer’s wildfires” on the outskirts of Bordeaux and visit an organic vineyard, the palace said.

The visit will take place shortly after a first trip to France by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on March 10 for a bilateral summit.

Historic relationship

The trip will mark the king’s 35th official visit to France, and 29th official visit to Germany.

His mother Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by her husband Prince Philip, last undertook state visits to France and Germany in 2014 and 2015 respectively.

Elizabeth, who was a fluent French speaker, made five state visits to France during her reign, in addition to numerous private visits.

Her first visit to France was in 1948 as the 22-year-old Princess Elizabeth.

In 1957, when she returned to France as queen, thousands lined the streets to cheer her as she travelled through the streets of the capital.

“Look at our Parisians, how much they love you,” president Rene Coty told her.

On her last state visit to France in 2014, she joined 1,800 World War II veterans and 18 heads of state and government, including the US and Russian presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Normandy landing.

A Macron aide has previously said the visit would illustrate the “age-old attachment of his country to ours, beyond Brexit.”

It would also be a sign of “family continuity, because Elizabeth II was a Francophile and a Francophone”, the aide told Le Parisien newspaper.

Macron himself paid tribute to Britain’s late monarch following her death in September 2022.

In a message to the British people, he recalled a “great head of state” and a “unique example of devotion to her people, and a very close ally”.

“With her, France and the United Kingdom shared not just an ‘entente cordiale’, but a warm, sincere and loyal partnership,” he added.

Charles will head to Berlin on March 29, and undertake engagements there and in Brandenburg before heading to Hamburg, the palace added.

The royal couple are due to receive a ceremonial welcome by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at the Brandenburg Gate and will be guests of honour at a state banquet, hosted by the President and his wife.

The king will also make a speech in the German federal parliament, the Bundestag, a first for a British monarch, and will also meet refugees recently arrived from Ukraine.

Source: AFP

At least 36 people were killed and another 66 injured after two trains collided head-on near the Greek city of Larissa, authorities said, as emergency services raced Wednesday to find survivors among the charred wreckage.

Several carriages were almost completely destroyed in the collision between a passenger train and a freight train just before midnight on Tuesday, with at least one car appearing to catch fire and trap passengers inside.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life,” said one rescue worker, emerging from the wreckage. “It’s tragic. Five hours later, we are finding bodies.”

Several cars had overturned or caught fire when they came off the tracks in the impact, leaving a tangled mess of metal and shattered glass.

The passenger train, carrying 350 people, had been travelling from the capital Athens to the northern city of Thessaloniki.

Health Minister Thanos Plevris said most passengers were “young people”, with the train carrying many students returning to Thessaloniki after a long holiday weekend.

“It was a nightmare… I’m still shaking,” 22-year-old passenger Angelos told AFP.

“Fortunately we were in the penultimate car and we got out alive. There was a fire in the first cars and complete panic.”

“The collision was like a huge earthquake.”

“I was stained with blood from other people who were injured near me,” a passenger named Lazos told the newspaper Protothema.

Source: AFP

The Russian mercenary Wagner Group said on Tuesday it was fighting “heavy, bloody battles” for control of the town of Soledar as part of Russia’s months-long offensive to capture Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region.

“On the western outskirts of Soledar there are heavy bloody battles. The Armed Forces of Ukraine are honourably defending the territory of Soledar,” Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin said on social media.

The Kremlin-linked businessman, who has been hit with Western sanctions, also dismissed allegations that Ukrainian forces were deserting front lines en masse in Soledar.

“Let’s be honest with ourselves. The Ukrainian army is bravely fighting for Bakhmut and Soledar. Reports of their mass desertion are not true,” Prigozhin said, cited by his press office on Telegram.

Soledar is around 15 kilometres (nine miles) from the war-battered city of Bakhmut, which has become the focus of fighting in recent months.

The capture of Bakhmut – a city with a pre-war population of 70,000 – is now one of Moscow’s main military objectives almost a year into its Ukraine mission.

A Russian proxy official in Donetsk, Denis Pushilin, said on Tuesday on Russian state television that Soledar was “very close to liberation” by Moscow’s forces.

He admitted that this came “at a very high price” and said Ukrainian forces were “still resisting”.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his late night address on Monday that his troops were withstanding “new and even tougher assaults” on Soledar.

He said the town had been flattened by the fighting. “Everything is completely destroyed,” he said.

Source: France 24