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    The French people casts their ballot at a polling station in France, on May 7, 2017, during the second round of the French presidential election. French voters went to the polls on Sunday to pick a new president, choosing between young centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen in a watershed election for the country and Europe. Polling day follows an unprecedented campaign marked by scandal, repeated surprises and a last-minute hacking attack on Macron, a 39-year-old who has never held elected office. The run-off vote pits the pro-Europe, pro-business Macron against anti-immigration and anti-EU Le Pen, two radically different visions that underline a split in Western democracies. Le Pen, 48, has portrayed the ballot as a contest between the ‘globalists’ r...

    The campaign team of French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron said on Friday night it had been the victim of a massive hacking attack after a trove of documents was released online. The apparent hack came on the final day of campaigning in the French presidential election, with Mr Macron, the centrist, facing Marine Le Pen, the far-Right candidate in tomorrow's run-off. Immediate suspicion fell on Russia, which has been accused of meddling in the US election to help get Donald Trump elected in November. Campaign officials stated authentic documents had been mixed on social media with fake ones to sow doubt and misinformation and that it was a clear attempt to undermine Mr Macron. Democracy at risk The En Marche! Movement has been the victim of a massive and co-ordinat...

    A law in France banning the use of unhealthily thin fashion models has come into effect, reports BBC. Models will need to provide a doctor’s certificate attesting to their overall physical health, with special regard to their body mass index (BMI)— a measure of weight in relation to height. The health ministry says the aim is to fight eating disorders and inaccessible ideals of beauty. Digitally altered photos will also have to be labelled from 1 October. Images where a model’s appearance has been manipulated will need to be marked photographie retouchée (English: retouched photograph). A previous version of the bill had suggested a minimum BMI for models, prompting protests from modelling agencies in France. But the final version, backed by MPs 2015, allows doctors to dec...

    A Danish brewery is drawing on 50,000 liters of urine collected from the largest music festival in Northern Europe in producing a novelty beer aimed at the more adventurous drinker. The beer named Pisner a word-play combining pilsner with local slang for urine contains no human waste, but is produced from fields of malting barley fertilized with human urine rather than traditional animal manure or factory-made plant nutrients. When the news that we had started brewing the Pisner came out, a lot of people thought we were filtering the urine to put it directly in the beer and we had a good laugh about that, said Henrik Vang, Chief Executive of brewer Norrebro Bryghus. Using human waste as fertilizer on such a scale is a novelty, said Denmark’s Agriculture and Food Council, w...

    Centrist French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron extended his lead in the polls over his far-right rival Marine Le Pen on Friday, the final day of a tumultuous election campaign that has turned the country’s politics upside down. The election is seen as the most important in France for decades with two diametrically opposed views of Europe and France’s place in the world at stake. The National Front’s Le Pen would close borders and quit the euro currency, while independent Macron, who has never held elected office, wants closer European cooperation and an open economy. The candidates of France’s two mainstream parties were both eliminated in the first round on April 23. According to an Elabe poll for BFM TV and L’Express, Macron will get 62 percent of the votes in th...