France could also scrap commercials on state radio
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy on  Thursday proposed to eliminate commercials from state-owned  radios, having already proposed to scrap advertising on public  television.
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Less fat, less sugar, less salt: Even the mostly svelte French are cracking down. Beginning Thursday, the government ordered food ads to carry cautions telling the French to stop snacking, exercise and eat more fruits and vegetables.
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French PM Jean-Pierre Raffarin has called for a Lebanon-based satellite TV channel backed by Hezbollah to be taken off air for its "anti-Semitic" content.
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France is pressing on with plans for a French-language rival to 24-hour global news stations such as CNN, a minister says, adding that such a station would help France explain its foreign policy.
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Media & professional: Ofcom to amend TV and radio stations' licences to make them directly responsible for lapses.
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On the anniversary of motorist Rodney King's beating by Los Angeles police being caught on amateur video, France approves a law that bars non-professional journalists from filming violent attacks and distributing them on the internet.  By the Associated Press.
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France will eliminate all energy waste by households and ban incandescent light bulbs and polluting cars, under proposals announced Thursday by President Nicolas Sarkozy, who also met with former Vice President Al Gore.
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(InfoWorld) - In a surprise move, the European Commission said Wednesday it is shelving plans to overhaul Europeâs rules on copyright fees, after intense lobbying from France and from groups representing artists and authors. The Commission, the executive body of the European Union, was planning to replace the patchwork of national rules with a Europe-wide code designed to better suit the digital age. Presently most countries impose copyright levies on a wide range of products, from photocopiers to mobile phones, and including recordable formats such as CD-Rs, blank cassettes and even paper. The size of levies varies widely from country to country. Only the U.K., Ireland, and Luxembourg do not impose any such levies. Copyright levies are supposed to compensate artists and authors who donât receive any payment when their copyrighted music, documents, or pictures are duplicated by consumers. The Commission wanted to harmonize the rules and scrap levies on most hardware. Its aim was to reduce the fees, which in some cases increase the price of goods dramatically. For example, in Spain consumers have to pay almost â¬300 ($398) in levies when they buy an 80GB MP3 player; in Austria the equivalent charge is just â¬8, according to the Copyright Levies Reform Alliance (CLRA), a coalition of businesses dedicated to harmonizing and lowering copyright fees in Europe. The Commission said it was abandoning the rule change for now. It had planned to publish a proposal before the end of this year. âMore reflection is needed on this complex issue,â spokeswoman Pia AhrenKilde Hansen told journalists. She wouldnât give a new timetable for the legal proposal. She acknowledged that the French prime minister Dominique de Villepin had written to the Commission earlier this month, urging it to drop the plan but she insisted that the Commission will decide for itself when the proposal will be launched. The Commission has been planning to harmonize copyright levies across the E.U. since 2000. Since then the case for scrapping most levies has grown stronger. Digital rights management software, which allows copyright owners to track the copying of their works, has become commonplace. The Commissionâs climb down sparked an angry reaction from the companies and industry groups pushing for a change to the system. âEuropean industry is deeply disturbed by the European Commissionâs apparent about-face on the planned reform of copyright levies,â said Mark McGann, spokesman for the CLRA in a statement issued Wednesday. âWith this decision, it is clear to industry that the Commission has abandoned any serious efforts to establish transparency, efficiency and fairness in the way these levies are set, collected and distributed,â he added, warning that without the revamp of copyright levies, several large European companies now intend to file official complaints with the Commission that will likely result in a wave of infringement procedures against certain member states. âThe reform of copyright levies would then move from the European executive to the European Court of Justice,â CLRA said in its statement.
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A French court is to decide on Monday whether to ban television broadcasts to Europe by Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group, after the satellite station claimed Zionists were trying to export AIDS to Arab countries.
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The French Parliament is likely to pass a law that rescinds the country s 35 hour-workweek rule, annulling a key piece of legislation put in place by the previous Socialist government that failed to cut ...
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The French government has banned broadcasts by a satellite TV channel run by the militant Hizbullah organisation on the grounds of anti-semitism.
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(InfoWorld) - The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned on Tuesday. The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed by amateur videographer George Holliday in the night of March 3, 1991. The officers' acquittal at the end on April 29, 1992 sparked riots in Los Angeles. If Holliday were to film a similar scene of violence in France today, he could end up in prison as a result of the new law, said Pascal Cohet, a spokesman for French online civil liberties group Odebi. And anyone publishing such images could face up to five years in prison and a fine of â¬75,000 ($98,537), potentially a harsher sentence than that for committing the violent act. Senators and members of the National Assembly had asked the council to rule on the constitutionality of six articles of the Law relating to the prevention of delinquency. The articles dealt with information sharing by social workers, and reduced sentences for minors. The council recommended one minor change, to reconcile conflicting amendments voted in parliament. The law, proposed by Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy, is intended to clamp down on a wide range of public order offenses. During parliamentary debate of the law, government representatives said the offense of filming or distributing films of acts of violence targets the practice of "happy slapping," in which a violent attack is filmed by an accomplice, typically with a camera phone, for the amusement of the attacker's friends. The broad drafting of the law so as to criminalize the activities of citizen journalists unrelated to the perpetrators of violent acts is no accident, but rather a deliberate decision by the authorities, said Cohet. He is concerned that the law, and others still being debated, will lead to the creation of a parallel judicial system controlling the publication of information on the Internet. The government has also proposed a certification system for Web sites, blog hosters, mobile-phone operators and Internet service providers, identifying them as government-approved sources of information if they adhere to certain rules. The journalists' organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for a free press, has warned that such a system could lead to excessive self censorship as organizations worried about losing their certification suppress certain stories.
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Europe is rapidly becoming a dirty word in French politics as fears grow that France&#39;s influence in the European Union is waning.
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French President Jacques Chirac will make  a television declaration at 1900 GMT on Sunday, his office said  on Thursday, when he is expected to say he will not stand for  re-election.
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Mobile phone signals will be jammed in French cinemas and theatres to prevent audience disturbance.
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German TV networks ARD and ZDF stop Tour de France coverage amid a doping furore.
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Watch a movie or make a mobile phone call. Soon, in France, you might not be able to do both at once...