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On the front page of the French press, next week's examination of the immigration bill in the National Assembly. This is an opportunity for La Croix to return to the phenomenon of migrant children.
What do these children's dreams look like? What reality do they face? On the front page of the newspaper this morning, 16-year-old Bashir, wearing a "Paris" t-shirt on his back. A photo by Leïla Hammami. Originally from Cameroon, Bachir is now in Tunisia, from where he hopes to reach Europe. It's a dream shared by 11-year-old Saliou, who is passionate about football, like all kids his age, and whom he met by La Croix in the suburbs of Dakar, Senegal. From the time he crossed to his mother's Canary Islands, Saliou had only one idea in mind: to join her. His own clandestine trip is scheduled for next summer. According to La Croix, 42,000 asylum applications were lodged in Europe last year by unaccompanied minors – children like Bachir and Saliou, ready to leave without their parents, despite the risks. The newspaper indicates that the number of foreign minors trying their luck in France "has been steadily increasing in recent years", but that "the child protection system, already saturated, struggles to accommodate them in good conditions".
Also as part of this immigration bill, the Republicans want to propose today a resolution to denounce the Franco-Algerian agreement on the stay of Algerians in France. L'Opinion has already announced that this agreement is "on borrowed time", as a part of the right wants to call into question this bilateral agreement signed in 1968 and creating a single status for Algerians in terms of movement, residence and employment. This text allows these nationals to have not residence permits, but "residence certificates for Algerians", of which 600,000 were issued last year in France. His denunciation is notably defended by the leader of the Republicans, Eric Ciotti, but also by that of the RN, Marine Le Pen - accused by the cartoonist Kak of wanting to "return to the Evian Accords of 1962" marking the end of French Algeria, while the far-right polemicist Eric Zemmour is said to be asking to return to the collaborationist Vichy regime...
In an interview with Le Figaro, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said that "discussions with a view to a fourth amendment to this agreement" were opened with the Algerian government last October and that it would indeed be "on the agenda". But all this is not very clear and L'Opinion may have been a little hasty in its work. Still according to Le Figaro, Emmanuel Macron himself warned parliamentarians by declaring that "it is not up to the National Assembly to decide on the foreign policy of France".
The issue of immigration is also tearing the British government apart, whose minister in charge of the file resigned yesterday. The Guardian reports that Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick says he "strongly disagrees" with the emergency bill introduced yesterday - a bill that seeks to make it possible to return illegal immigrants to Rwanda. But the plan also does not sit well with the right wing of the Conservative Party, which is calling on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to be even tougher. Decidedly, nothing is going well with the Tories. The performance of their former boss Boris Johnson, who was questioned yesterday as part of a public inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic, has turned into a fiasco. His explanations and regrets did not convince the press across the Channel. The National, the Scottish pro-independence newspaper, lashed out this morning: "We don't accept your apology."
And will he ever apologize?... Luis Rubiales, the former head of Spanish football, who forcibly kissed striker Jenni Hermoso on the mouth, is the subject of damning new testimony. The Spanish sports daily Marca reports on a summary of testimonies collected by Fifa, which suspended him for three years after the Hermoso affair - "a disproportionate campaign", according to Rubiales. He also allegedly "kissed other players effusively and forcibly kissed other players on the cheeks, holding their heads and inappropriately patting parts of their bodies," according to Debbie Hewitt, the president of the English FA.
He also says he is the victim of a cabal: the French actor Gérard Depardieu, who is targeted by a second complaint for sexual assault, according to Le Monde, which takes up here information from our colleagues of France 2. This time, the complaint was filed by actress Hélène Darras who accuses the actor of sexual assault during a film shoot in 2007. These facts are presumed to be time-barred.
We don't leave each other on that. If this news makes you want to turn off your television set (or your phone), I recommend you to wait a bit, because I have found for you, precisely, an article in Le Monde devoted to this dilemma. To the question "should we continue to follow the news, despite its violence, or turn off the TV, at the risk of ignoring the fate of a part of humanity?", the newspaper replies that it is always possible to limit oneself, to sort out what is important and what is less important, the war in Gaza not having quite the same importance as bed bugs. Le Monde reminds us that in the current information war, "it is we who are at stake: our attention, our indignation, our anger, our empathy", this ability to look beyond one's navel - which can have its virtues, as evidenced by this story reported by The Guardian. The British newspaper tells the story of a mishap that happened to tourists in Venice, who capsized their gondola by refusing to sit down, because they wanted to take selfies. The good news is that no one was injured, just a nice big dip in cold and dirty waters. This mishap is reminiscent of another, that of an American tourist who fell into the crater of Mount Vesuvius while trying to retrieve his phone that had slipped out of his hands while taking... a selfie.
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