Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

Macron and von der Leyen expected to announce protections for researchers seeking to relocate amid Trump’s crackdown

France and the EU are to step up their efforts to attract US-based scientists hit by Donald Trump’s crackdown on academia, as they prepare announcements on incentives for researchers to settle in Europe.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, alongside the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will make speeches on Monday morning at Sorbonne University in Paris, flanked by European university leaders and researchers, in which they are expected to announce potential incentives and protections for researchers seeking to relocate to Europe.

Writer, actor and director Lawrence Valin says that in Little Jaffna he wanted to ‘show new role models’

It has been hailed as one of the most innovative and surprising French gangster films this year: a suspense movie that tears through Paris’s Tamil neighbourhood.

The police thriller Little Jaffna, which opened in France this week, is set in the French capital’s Tamil community, which has rarely been represented on screen – and never in an action film by a French actor, writer and director of Tamil heritage giving his inside take on the legacy of Sri Lanka’s bloody ethnic conflict for younger generations living far away in Europe.

Victims have had fingers chopped off by attackers in crimewave targeting entrepreneurs and their families

French police are investigating a series of kidnappings of investors linked to cryptocurrency after a 60-year-old man had a finger chopped off by attackers who demanded his crypto-millionaire son pay a ransom.

In the latest of several kidnappings of cryptocurrency figures in France and western Europe, the man, who owned a cryptocurrency marketing company with his son, was freed from a house south of Paris on Saturday night. He had been held for more than two days.

Aomar Aït Khedache, 68, has admitted involvement in armed robbery of reality TV star but denies being ringleader

A retired restaurant owner alleged to have been the ringleader of an armed robbery of American reality TV star Kim Kardashian in Paris, has told a court he was in part driven by a taste for easy money.

Aomar Aït Khedache, 68, known as “Old Omar”, has admitted to police that he took part in the robbery in which Kardashian was tied up and held hostage at gunpoint in her Paris hotel bedroom during Paris fashion week in 2016. But he has denied the prosecution’s accusation that he was the organiser or ringleader of the jewel heist in the early hours of 3 October 2016, which was the biggest robbery of an individual in France in 20 years.