Mobile phone ban greets French teenagers going back to high school

PRESS REVIEW – Tuesday, September 1: It's back-to-school season in France, this time with tighter rules on mobile phones. In other news, local opposition to data centres across the US and Europe could be a spanner in the works of the AI revolution. Finally, in footballing news, Lionel Messi retires from the Argentinian national team, and some English men play football in a river.

In Tunisia, UNESCO recognised the town of Sidi Bou Said as a world heritage site this July. The designation marks a new period in the cultural preservation of this historic tourist site. The special status may help as it battles erosion, like in the floods this last January, but it will also help boost its lesser known Sufi mystical traditions. FRANCE 24's Lilia Blaise and Hamdi Tlili were there to report on the Kharja ceremonies, which run in the town from mid-august til the end of September.

He was Queen’s flamboyant frontman. She was his shy girlfriend, dreaming of marriage until they both realised he preferred men. Thirty-five years after his death, in the week he would have turned 80, Mary Austin talks about their unbreakable bond There were four silver trunks in Mary Austin’s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn’t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by Freddie Mercury – Don’t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are the Champions and, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. She shut the case. It was still too painful. “To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.” Eventually she asked her two sons to sift through the treasures on her behalf...