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End of FCAS 'flagship project' marks setback for Franco-German cooperation and European defence

François Picard is pleased to welcome Ulrike Franke, Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. According to Franke, the project's demise was "not a surprise to anybody." While acknowledging that Dassault was often perceived as "quite difficult to deal with," she argues that the deeper problem lay in a structural design flaw that brought together industrial rivals who "never really had the incentive to properly work together."

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Unbreakable Kim? China's Xi visits Russia-backed North Korean leader

It takes convincing these days to get China's leader to go abroad. Xi Jinping has just wrapped up what was only his first foreign visit of 2026. Why Pyongyang? It's hard to deduce from official readouts of that two-day state visit to neighbouring North Korea. Was it politeness after a pair of visits by Kim Jong Un to Beijing? Celebrations of the 65th anniversary of their mutual defence pact?

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'Entire system is broken': Lyhanna's death reveals 'systemic failures' in France's judicial system

François Picard is pleased to welcome Solène Podevin-Favre, president of the "Face à l'inceste" advocacy and support group and former co-director of the Ciivise, an independent commission set up in 2021 to come up with proposals to fight sexual abuse of children in France. According to Podevin-Favre, the murder of 11-year-old Lyhanna is not an isolated tragedy. It is a "systemic failure" that has been repeatedly identified, documented and reported for years.

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Holocaust remembrance: Newly discovered photos illustrate previously-unknown roundup of French Jews

François Picard is pleased to welcome Dr. Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Historian, Professor of Modern History at the University of Manchester, Chief Editor of 'La Revue d'Histoire de la Shoah' and one of the curators of the Shoah Memorial in Paris photography exhibit highlighting the discovery of 98 previously unknown photographs documenting the May 14, 1941 roundup of foreign Jews in Paris. It represents one of the most significant visual revelations in Holocaust historiography in recent years, the images capturing what Dr. Dreyfus calls "a real discovery for history, for our memory," offering an almost minute-by-minute account of a largely forgotten precursor to the infamous Vel' d'Hiv roundup of July 1942.

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Cancer breakthroughs: Does a string of advances signal turning point?

It’s not every day that a standing ovation at a medical conference goes viral. Dateline: Chicago, at the annual conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Doctors from around the world rose to their feet to applaud the announcement of a new pill that doubles survival time for pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest forms of the disease.

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