Christmas shopping to begin on Saturday as French PM details lockdown exit

The French prime minister has detailed the government's step-by-step approach to easing the second Covid-19 lockdown, starting with the reopening of non-essential businesses and services on 28 November. Jean Castex said the progressive easing of restrictions over the coming weeks depended entirely on citizens' responsibility.

Looking to limit the spread, the government last week created a three-tier system, with varying degrees of curbs in each area, initially placing four regions in a red zone, two in an orange zone and the rest in a moderate-risk yellow zone.

It tweaked the zoning at the start of this week and revised it again on Friday after reviewing the latest data, including local infection rates and hospital occupancy.

Tuscany and Campania will be added on Sunday to the red list, joining the wealthy northern regions of Lombardy, Piedmont and Valle D'Aosta, the province of Bolzano and Calabria in the toe of Italy.

People living in these areas are only allowed to leave their homes for work, health reasons or emergencies. Bars, restaurants and most shops must remain closed.

In silence and mourning, France marked five years since 130 people were killed by Islamist extremists who targeted the Bataclan concert hall, Paris cafés and the national stadium in a series of coordinated attacks.
The night of carnage on November 13, 2015, which saw 130 people killed and 350 wounded, was France’s deadliest peacetime attack, deeply shaking the nation.

It led to intensified French military action against extremists abroad and a security crackdown at home.

Five years on, Parisians remember how the November 13 terror attacks unfolded

Five years later, Prime Minister Jean Castex led silent ceremonies at the multiple sites targeted by coordinated attackers around the French capital: the Stade de France in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, the Bataclan, and five cafes in eastern Paris where gunfire shattered the balmy Friday night.

The public could not join this year’s commemorations because of France’s partial virus lockdown.

Victims of Paris 2015 attacks: How to live five years after ?
The sheer horror of the attacks, which were claimed by extremists from the Islamic State (IS) group, has left scars that have still not healed. Five years on, the country is again on its highest security alert following a spate of attacks blamed on Islamist radicals.

Friday's anniversary comes with France still reeling from three attacks in the last weeks: a knife attack outside the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly, the beheading of a teacher and a deadly stabbing spree at a Nice church.

In the last five years, 20 attacks have been carried out on French soil, 19 plots failed and 61 were foiled.

There has been an increasing trend of attacks being carried out by isolated individuals, previously unknown to the intelligence services, who are inspired by jihadist propaganda and carry out attacks with cold weapons needing little preparation.
But the threat of an attack planned from outside France – as was the case on November 13, 2015 – remains serious.

"Just because [the IS group] has suffered a military defeat does not mean its military capacities have been annihilated," said a French official involved in the fight against terror, who asked not to be named.

Between 100 and 200 French jihadists are still believed to be in former IS group strongholds in northern Iraq and Syria, and it would be an "illusion" to think they were not capable of clandestinely coming back to France, added the official.

Repeated attacks

In January 2015, Islamist gunmen massacred staff at the Charlie Hebdo satirical weekly, claiming they were avenging its publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.

True to its defiant reputation, the magazine republished the cartoons to mark the start in September of the trial of suspected accomplices in the killings.

In the wake of that move, a Pakistan-born man wounded two people with a meat cleaver on September 25 outside Charlie Hebdo's former offices.

Teacher Samuel Paty, who had shown his class the cartoons, was beheaded outside his school on October 16 by an Islamist radical from Chechnya. And on October 29 a man recently arrived from Tunisia killed three people with a knife in a Nice church.

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The attacks reopened painful debates in France about the integration of the country's Muslim population – the largest in Europe – and also prompted tougher rhetoric from President Emmanuel Macron against radical Islamism.

In turn, Macron's defiant stance triggered a wave of protests in some Muslim countries and calls for a boycott of French goods.

‘Islam is being hyper-politicised in France, but Muslims are not part of the debate’

On Thursday, the IS group claimed responsibility for a bomb attack on Western diplomats attending an Armistice Day ceremony in Saudi Arabia's Jeddah. That came weeks after a knife-wielding assailant injured a guard at the French consulate in Jeddah.

The 2021 trial into the Paris attacks will see just one of the suspecter perpetrators in the dock – French-Belgian Salah Abdeslam.

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Since 30 October, France has been under its second Covid-19 lockdown. Restrictions are about to be relaxed, on a gradual basis, according to a three-step timeline set out by President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday during a televised address and detailed by Prime Minister Jean Castex on Thursday.

"The first results are there," the prime minister confirmed, but he called on citizens to "not drop their guard" and said it was "too early" to announce a total easing of lockdown.

Sante Public France said the "encouraging" statistics "should not make us forget that, pending the availability of treatments and vaccines, the only way to slow the pandemic and lessen its impact on the health system is still to adopt individual prevention measures, combined with collective efforts."

The easing of lockdown measures will come into effect on three key dates.