Back-to-school season in France sees tighter rules on mobile phones

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 the French papers, one of President Emmanuel Macron's last marks on the national education system will be to extend an existing ban on mobile phones in schools to the oldest secondary school pupils. Le Figaro hails the development, even if Macron is yet to successfully pass what he hoped would be his landmark ban on social media for the under-15s. Libération also praises the effectiveness of the existing mobile phone bans for younger children, but reminds us that overall screen time still matters, and that schools are still the ones handling incidents of cyberbullying taking place outside of school hours. Elsewhere, even though the global rollout of data centres is occasioning controversy pretty much everywhere, US President Donald Trump says their critics "want to end up backwards and poor". As the Fin...