Increasing development aid, rebooting European climate policy, partnering with green technologies in emerging economies: the French president has made his diplomatic priorities clear. [...] In front of a distinguished audience, he listed France’s new ambitions “in the current state of affairs”: security, independence, and influence. This motto, he stressed, does not mean to “make France a small and reluctant country, jealously guarding its security”.

Facebook will become the suggester of perspective to avoid being the “arbiter of truth”. It’s rolling out “Related Articles” that appear below news links to stories lots of people are posting about on Facebook, or that are suspected to be false news and have been externally fact checked by Facebook’s partners. [...] Pre-click Related Articles are rolling out in the US, Germany, France, and Netherlands today.

The French leader said that migrants were destabilizing Libya and Europe by fueling people-smuggling, which in turn funded terrorism. "The idea is to create hotspots to avoid people taking crazy risks when they are not all eligible for asylum. We'll go to them," he said on Thursday at a naturalization ceremony in the central city of Orléans.

In postwar France, two men had a bold, even utopian idea: a peace-loving network of ‘world cities’. [...] The symbol of the global city remains an effective one. As the idea of globalisation falters and tensions between nations ratchet up once more, is the world ready to revisit the older idea of global cities?

France is this year’s top soft power, according to a report published Tuesday. The Soft Power 30, published by PR firm Portland Communications, ranks countries on their exercise of soft power — the ability to influence others through attraction and likability rather than coercion.