high school teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded

The ministry said the reaction distorted the President’s remarks for political aims, and that “the positions defended by France [were] in favor of freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of religion and the refusal of any call to hatred.”
The statement added that Macron’s policies were aimed at “fighting against radical Islamism, and to do so with the Muslims of France, who are an integral part of French society, history and the Republic.”
“We will not give in, ever,” Macron tweeted on Sunday. “We respect all differences in a spirit of peace. We do not accept hate speech and defend reasonable debate. We will always be on the side of human dignity and universal values.”
Paty’s death has sparked a security crackdown in France, where officials are targeting hate speech on social media and organizations and non-profits with possible links to Islamism.
The Mohammed caricatures that Paty used in his class originally appeared in Charlie Hebdo, and were cited as the motivation for a terror attack on the satirical magazine in 2015 that left 12 people dead. Macron fiercely defended the right to display such cartoons in France at the memorial event for Paty..

French Prime Minister Jean Castex has said his government would keep “fighting relentlessly” against “radical Islam” as he paid tribute to the three victims of a knife attack in the southern city of Nice last month.

“We know the enemy. Not only has it been identified, but it has a name, it is radical Islam, a political ideology that disfigures the Muslim religion,” Castex said in a speech during a ceremony for the victims on Saturday.

“(It is) an enemy that the government is fighting relentlessly by providing the necessary resources and mobilising all of its forces every day,” he added.
Concerns over security and immigration have increased in France after the knife attack at a church in Nice on October 29 saw three people killed.

The man suspected of carrying out the Nice attack — still in a critical condition after being shot by police — was a 21-year-old Tunisian born who had arrived in Europe on September 20, landing in Lampedusa, the Italian island off Tunisia. He has been identified as Brahim Issaoui.

The attack came after the beheading of Samuel Paty, a school teacher in a Paris suburb who showed his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a discussion on free speech.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s subsequent defence of the right to draw the prophet drew the ire of Muslim communities across the world, with trade associations in several Muslim countries announcing a boycott of French products.

Joe Biden, the US president-elect, has cast himself as a moderate with the experience and empathy required to offset Donald Trump’s disruptive presidency. Having battled adversity throughout a career scarred by personal tragedy, he says he feels the pain of a nation unnerved by economic crisis, civil unrest and a deadly pandemic.

Slovak officials said the team included two Downing Street advisers and two people responsible for arranging the UK’s large-scale testing programme in Liverpool.

“They are interested in our lessons and in the details and results,” said Slovakia’s deputy defence minister, Marian Majer, who added that Slovakia has offered to send a planning team to London to help with UK preparations if required.
A No 10 spokesperson declined to comment on the visit except to say that “we are constantly seeking to evolve our testing system in order to control the spread of the virus and bring the R rate down”.

Among 302 such adults, 16 (5.3%) had antibodies, likely generated during infections with “common cold” coronaviruses, that reacted to a specific region of the spike protein on the new virus called the S2 subunit. Among 48 children and adolescents, 21 (43.8%) had these antibodies. In test tube experiments, blood serum from both older and younger uninfected individuals with cross-reactive antibodies could neutralise the new coronavirus. That was not the case with serum from study participants who lacked these antibodies.