Category: France

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Issued on: 25/03/2026 – 09:20

2 min Reading time

Insee expects growth of 0.2 percent in both the first and second quarters, down from 0.3 percent previously. At the same time, inflation is forecast to climb above 2 percent in the spring after running at less than 1 percent in February.

The Middle East conflict, which began on 28 February, pushed oil prices to around $100 a barrel, compared with an average of 63 dollars at the end of 2025. The impact has been quickly felt at petrol stations.

“The surge in hydrocarbon prices would translate in France, as elsewhere in the world, into a marked rebound in inflation, which would go above 2 percent during the spring,” Insee said in its updated outlook.

With oil once again a weapon in the Middle East, is clean energy the key to peace?

Holding for now

Despite the shock, growth remains stable in the short term.

“At the very short term, growth is holding up thanks to the recovery momentum in the euro zone,” said Dorian Roucher, head of Insee’s economic outlook department, told business daily Les Echos.

Insee has only slightly lowered its forecasts despite the shock. Les Echos reported that growth carry-over could reach 0.9 percent by mid-year, matching the country’s total growth in 2025.

“At this stage, Insee’s forecasts do not lead us to revise our own forecasts in either direction,” Roland Lescure, the economy minister, told lawmakers on the finance committee.

But the pressure on households is expected to come sooner. Insee expects inflation to move above 2 percent by May. The agency now sees it reaching 2.2 percent by June.

Kharg Island, the fragile oil lifeline behind Iran’s war economy

Household squeeze

The rise in prices is set to hit household finances. Purchasing power is expected to fall by 0.5 percent by mid-year, as wages have not yet adjusted to higher inflation.

“While they were gradually recovering the losses suffered during the inflationary wave of 2022 and 2023, real wages would decline again in the second quarter,” Insee said.

The increase is mainly driven by petrol and gas prices and has not yet spread to other sectors such as food. One exception is air travel, where higher kerosene costs are expected to push up ticket prices.

Households are expected to soften the impact in the short term by drawing on their savings, allowing consumption to hold up despite higher energy costs, Insee said.

“The main negative effects are more likely to be felt towards the end of the year,” Roucher said. “An oil price shock will have a much stronger effect on growth in 2027 than on growth in 2026.”

Insee estimates that a $40 rise in oil prices would cut growth by about 0.4 percentage points over a year. Meanwhile unemployment is expected to edge up to 8.1 percent by mid-2026.

(with newswires)

The court found Jean-Pierre Dagos, 58, guilty of having twice raped the woman in 2023 in the town of Pontault-Combault, east of Paris, once after she came to file the complaint, and then a few days later after summoning her back to his office.

The defendant, in custody since 2023, admitted during his trial to having imposed oral sex act on her, but claimed he had no idea she had not consented.

The woman is from Angola and did not have residency papers. She told the court she had been terrified, believing the officer was armed and had the power to deport her and force her to leave behind her three French-born children.

An internal police investigator told the court on Monday that women had filed 176 complaints against law enforcement officers in 2023, of which 19 had amounted to at least inappropriate behaviour.

Under French law, rape is “any act of sexual penetration, of whatever nature, or any oral-genital act committed on another person through violence, coercion, threat or surprise”.

A revision to the law, passed in the wake of the Dominique Pelicot case, will amend the law to define rape as any non-consensual sexual act. Dominique Pelicot was jailed in 2025 after admitting to drugging his wife Gisèle and inviting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was unconscious.

When President Donald Trump announced in a social media video on February 28 that the United States and Israel had launched strikes on Iran, he kickstarted a war that has engulfed the Middle East. 

But he also sparked an online information war that analysts say has been dominated by the use of AI-generated content to spread fake news about the conflict

One study from Clemson University in South Carolina found that, within 24 hours of the US and Israel launching attacks on Iran, dozens of social media accounts affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had begun posting Iranian propaganda about the war, some of which reached an audience of millions.

Among the most widely viewed content are AI-generated videos mocking Trump – styled to reference Western media including the LEGO movies and the Teletubbies – and AI videos and photographs claiming to show the devastation Iranian strikes have wrought on Israel and the Gulf states.

“The propaganda includes memes and cartoons that aren’t meant to be perceived as real but are very good at spreading political messaging,” said Darren Linvill, author of the study and co-director of Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub. 

“The deepfakes portray a version of reality that [seems] genuine and often paint Iran as more successful in the conflict. Both are being shared widely among communities that are critical of the war and hungry for this messaging.”

‘Politically divisive’

The accounts analysed in the Clemson study had been used previously for Iranian influence operations “designed to exploit regional fault lines to advance Iranian regime interests” in the West by posting “politically divisive” content such as critiques of the recent US immigration crackdown.

The switch to posting war propaganda on platforms including X, Instagram and Bluesky suggests that Iran quickly overhauled its social media strategy when the war with the US and Israel began.

As the conflict has spiralled over the past month, Iran has relied on both state media outlets and proxies to push its online message as a form of asymmetrical warfare with a view to targeting a US audience.

Read moreMiddle East war live: Iran rejects US ceasefire plan and offers counterproposal, state TV says

“The Iranian regime wants to make the conflict as painful as possible for the US and Israel, and if they can target what support Trump and [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu have, it may ultimately shorten the war,” Linvill said.

There is fertile ground in the United States for messages critiquing military involvement in the Middle East. 

Ipsos polling from mid-March found that US public opinion was “overwhelmingly” against the war in Iran, with 58 percent opposing US military strikes and 78 percent against the idea of US boots on the ground.

In some cases, the Iranian regime does not need to create original or fake content to spread its message. 

Clips of the former head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, being interviewed about his resignation in opposition to the war were widely shared online by Iranian state media.

‘A ton of lies in a grain of truth’

AI videos in particular “travel fast and plug into emotions that people already have”, said Tine Munk, senior lecturer in criminology at Nottingham Trent University and a specialist in digital warfare.

“They create a lot of noise, even when they are so obviously fake because it is easy to communicate complex ideas through visual storytelling using these shared cultural references,” he said. 

But many of the photos and videos gaining traction online purport to show events on the ground that are harder to identify as fake.

Information warfare analyst Tal Hagin has been tracking these on X – a platform where disinformation about the war is rife.

Among them are hundreds of examples of videos and images showing Iranian attacks on Israel that are either years old, of attacks on different countries or are AI-generated.

“There was a strike in Tel Aviv on February 28th, and the videos and photos of those strikes have been used every single day to allegedly depict new strikes,” Hagin said. 

The strategy is effective, he added, because the initial attack really did happen. “Then they put a ton of lies into that grain of truth, so people don’t know what the truth is anymore.”

In addition, “social media platforms are not fulfilling their commitments on labelling content and removing it if it is provably false”, said Melanie Smith, expert in information operations at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. 

“We’re seeing content get millions of views before it’s proven to be AI and labelled as such.”

‘Information battlefield’

The current conflict in the Middle East is not the first time viral videos and memes have been used as a weapon of war – they are an established form of Ukrainian resistance against Russian misinformation.

But the use of AI to generate wartime propaganda is a new development. 

“This conflict is the first time we’ve really seen AI-generated content be used very intentionally to sow chaos and confusion around what’s actually happening on the ground,” Smith said.

Adding to the confusion are censorship rules restricting the flow of information out of both Israel and Iran. 

In Israel, wartime censors have prohibited the sharing of information deemed sensitive, such as the location of interceptor missiles.

Meanwhile, Iran has imposed a full internet blackout, now in its fourth week, making it extremely difficult for outsiders to know what is happening on the ground.

The result is “a big information void that can be filled very quickly with synthetic content, propaganda narratives and generally chaotic information”, Smith said. 

Iran is surging forward on this “information battlefield”, said Munk. “It’s a broader war strategy where Iran cannot always dominate militarily, so it’s focused on shaping perceptions to create doubt and uncertainty.”

Trump has accused Iran of using AI-generated “fake news” as a “disinformation weapon” –although the White House shared its own heavily critiqued AI video combining real footage of strikes in Iran with clips from action movies and video games.

“Iran has been fairly successful, certainly more successful than the US and Israel, in reaching a broad audience and gaining more support than they might otherwise have,” Linvill said.

Issued on: 25/03/2026 – 15:23Modified: 25/03/2026 – 15:26

2 min Reading time

Anses, France’s food safety agency, said on Wednesday that the population was experiencing “strong and increasing” exposure to cadmium, mainly through food.

It described the situation as “concerning” and said it required action that was “rapid and determined” to limit harmful effects on human health.

“Nearly half of the adult population [47.6 percent] exceeds the toxicological reference values,” Géraldine Carne, a toxicologist and coordinator of the report, told a press conference.

The findings come from a two-year study that, for the first time, sets out the scale and nature of cadmium exposure in France. The metal is present in soils, builds up in the body and is not easily removed.

Cadmium is classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic and toxic for reproduction. It can affect several parts of the body, including the bones, kidneys and cardiovascular system.

“This toxic element is widely distributed in the organs,” Carne said, warning of effects on the pancreas, bladder, prostate and breasts.

Cities can improve air quality ‘quite rapidly’ with political will

France above neighbours

Studies over several decades show exposure levels are rising, with France standing out from neighbouring countries. “Levels in France are up to three or four times higher than in countries such as Belgium, England or Italy,” Carne said.

Food is by far the main source of contamination, accounting for up to 98 percent of exposure in non-smokers, the agency said. Staple foods such as cereal products, potatoes and vegetables are the biggest contributors because they are widely consumed.

The report links this exposure in part to agricultural practices, particularly the use of phosphate-based fertilisers that contain cadmium.

Anses called for urgent reductions in the amount of cadmium allowed in fertilisers and urged action across the whole sector, “and not only farmers”.

The agency also said current regulatory limits for cadmium in food were “not sufficiently protective” and should be lowered.

Why France’s agriculture law may not help the farmers it claims to defend

What consumers can do

For consumers, the room for action is limited. The report said it was “not relevant to formulate recommendations in terms of individual choices”, given how widespread contamination is in food from the soil.

Still, Anses suggested reducing consumption of wheat-based products with low nutritional value, such as breakfast cereals, cakes and biscuits.

It also encouraged a shift towards legumes such as lentils and chickpeas, which are “10 times less contaminated than cereals”.

Chocolate, often singled out for cadmium content, was described as only a minor contributor because it is consumed in smaller amounts and is not subject to specific advice.

(with newswires)