Lunchtime News - Tuesday July 21st 2020

Fatal shooting- A 35 year old man who’d just been released from prison has been shot dead in a car in the Sainte-Musse area of Toulon.

Police say that the shooting happened in the early hours of this morning and the victim was a passenger in a car being driven by his partner. His three children were in the back of the car.

The dead man had been serving a jail sentence for drug trafficking before his release. His partner was injured in the thigh during the incident but the three children were unhurt.

Noxious fumes-Guests at a hotel in central Nice have been evacuated following reports of noxious fumes in the building.

The incident happened at the Days Inn on the rue Miron and is thought to have been caused by an electrical fault in the kitchen.

There are no reports of any injuries and the hotel residents were allowed to return to their rooms after firefighters had carried out an inspection of the building and repaired a short circuit.

Dead woman-Reports say that a 79 year old woman who died in a fire at a launderette in Nice on Monday was a popular local figure.

The fire which killed Jeanette Rous on the rue Bonaparte was caused by a faulty washing machine. Local residents have been paying their respects.

In National News.

EU agreement-President Macron has hailed as “historic” the EU deal on a 750 billion euro Covid-19 recovery plan as well as the bloc’s budget for the next 7 years.

The agreement came after four days of sometimes fraught negotiations in Brussels with Mr Macron judging the recovery fund to be a “huge historic change and a historic step for Europe”.

At one point during the negotiations ,the French President is reported to have “thumped the table” and likened those thwarting spending plans to the British in previous budget negotiations.

The latest Brussels summit was just a few minutes shorter than the record-breaking meeting in Nice 20 years ago when leaders were haggling over EU enlargement.

Temperature checks-The SNCF is to experiment with offering passengers using TGV services voluntary temperature checks during the summer in an effort to restrict the spread of coronavirus.

The first checks have been carried out at the Gare de Lyon in Paris today with machines set up on platforms shortly before passengers board high speed services.

Any passenger showing a reading of more than 38.5 is being offered a face mask ,alcohol hand gel and will be reminded about social distancing.

Passengers with abnormally high temperatures will be able to cancel or rebook their journey at no cost but there nobody will be prevented from boarding a train.

The SNCF says that its experimenting in case the government forces it to carry out temperature checks on all passengers in the event of a second wave of the virus hitting France.