Air travel "getting back to normal" in Paris

After the previous day's chaos at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle, the French capital's major international airport, it's almost "service as usual" on Tuesday.

Snow and ice led Air France to cancel more than 150 flights on Monday leaving more than 3,000 passengers stranded overnight.

Many of them were forced to sleep in the airport terminals as nearby hotels were full.

You can tell it's winter here in France because it's cold - very cold. In fact "unusually cold" with daytime temperatures in the Paris region barely climbing above zero degrees centigrade at the moment.

Another sign that it's winter is that there's snow. Yes, shock horror, the two can sometimes go together even here in France.

And when the snow struck on Monday, the airport at Roissy seemed suitably unprepared.

Now that might come as something of a surprise to anyone who knows the country or has spent any time living here.

After all, the French seem almost as weather-obssessed as the British are reputed to be, and it wouldn't have taken a PhD perhaps for the airlines and the airport authorities to have anticipated what was likely to happen.

Don't believe me? Then flick on the television any evening at eight o'clock on either of the country's two main national channels and you'll be just in time to catch the weather forecast.

But that it seems isn't enough. Once the news is finished, up pops the presenter once again to repeat what he or she told viewers 35 minutes earlier.

Just to push the point a little further both TF1 - the privately owned channel - and France 2, public television - have just "upped the ante" by extending their forecasts from the following three days to five. So in theory we should all be fully informed knowing well ahead of time what's likely to happen.

Of course that also depends on the premise that viewers can have absolute faith in what they're being told.

Indeed on Sunday evening we were all informed that there was a danger of black ice on the roads as the country returned to work after the long holiday break, and there was also the likelihood of snow during the day on Monday.

Not just a light covering of the lovely fluffy, white stuff, but several centimetres falling across a huge chunk of northern France.

More than 20 of the country's 95 metropolitan departments were put on "weather alert" and sure enough the snow, freezing rain and ice arrived - as predicted.

But somehow, somewhere along the line, all that escaped The Powers That Be at Roissy, who failed to take into account what the rest of us knew was coming.

And as Monday's evening news showed, there were plenty of disgruntled passengers barely disguising their disgust at the confusion, lack of information and shortfall of emergency overnight accommodation provided.

Interestingly enough Orly airport, just south of the capital and therefore also subject to exactly the same weather conditions, reported very few cancellations and no accommodation problems for passengers.

There again it is smaller and serves mainly domestic routes, and perhaps its directors had tuned in to the weather forecast the evening before.

The cold snap or French equivalent perhaps of the "Big Chill' is expected to last for the best part of the week.

A woman's Facebook appeal to honour her father

Widely reported in the French media over the New Year comes a tale that is both seasonal and very telling of the times in which we live, when many are having difficulties making ends meet.

It is at the same time sad and uplifting, starting as it does with the death of a man just before the holiday period and resulting in the efforts of his daughter to pay homage to the father she lost, while also trying to help out others.

Joël Gamelin was the owner of a company which constructed and repaired boats in the western French town of La Rochelle. He had built the company up from scratch in 1983 and employed 120 people.

But at the beginning of last month it went into receivership, and on December 23 after the bank refused a credit extension to see the company into the New Year, Gamelin committed suicide.

The 55-year-old father of three left behind a note which read "please forgive me for not having been able to save the company."

Shortly before he took his life, Gamelin had expressed his frustration to the rest of his family, and as his oldest daughter, Fanny, told national radio, he had been particularly distressed by the fact that he wouldn't be able to pay his employees for the Christmas period.

"He told us he had never asked anything of anyone," she said.

"And the day he went to the bank to ask for help, he said was simply ignored," she continued.

That could well have been the end of the story - another casualty of the credit crunch, a small company faced with closure and a man, refused help and unable to deal with the consequences.

Except his daughter decided not to let the case rest there.

She set about not only paying homage to her father, but at the same time trying to ensure that the 120 employees at least had a salary coming in for Christmas.

Fanny turned to the Internet to launch an appeal for donations. She is using Facebook, and has set up a group inviting members to contribute just €1 each to raise the €200,000 necessary to pay the December salaries.

"If 200 000 people give just €1 each, that'll be enough to ensure the 120 families concerned will have an income for another month," she told prime time television news on Friday.

And already the campaign seems to be yielding results. As of Friday evening Fanny had received cheques totalling more than €1,500 and promised donations of another €500.

She has also been in touch with the local authorities to put the necessary wheels in motion to allow her to collect funds and is in the process of setting up a means by which contributions can be made online.

"Together we can act and people can survive," she writes on her Facebook message.

"And this will also permit my father who committed suicide to rest in peace."

French justice minister gives birth

Rachida Dati, the French justice minister has given birth.

The 43-year-old gave birth by caesarean early on Friday afternoon to a girl - named Zohra, after the minister's mother, Fatima-Zohra, at a hospital in the west of the French capital.

So what? You might well ask. Well, "so a lot" perhaps, because the circumstances surrounding the birth and the role of Dati in politics says a fair bit about France.

Dati, you might remember, made history here by becoming not only the first woman to hold the office of justice minister, but also by being the first person of North African descent to make it into the government.

She has created plenty of controversy during her time at the ministry "haemorrhaging" staff at an alarming rate and facing accusations of incompetence from the opposition Socialist party and certain sectors of the French media.

But one thing surrounding which there was no real controversy was her announcement at the end of last summer that she was expecting a baby.

Dati, who is unmarried, consistently refused to reveal the name of the father, saying the "situation was complicated", and much of the French media has been willing to leave it at that.

Of course the "mystery" surrounding the identity of the father has also led to some speculation - particularly among the weekly glossy magazines - with the name of a former Spanish prime minister and that of a popular French television and radio presenter being among "potential paters".

On the whole though, throughout her pregnancy, Dati's right to privacy has pretty much been respected.

It's not that often that a serving minister has given birth in office. Another notable politician was - wait for it - none other than Ségolène Royal, the defeated Socialist party candidate in the 2007 presidential election and the narrow loser of the battle to lead the party in November last year.

Back in 1992, while a minister in the government of prime minister, Pierre Bérégovoy, Royal gave birth to a daughter. Although in a long-term relationship at the time with François Hollande, Royal wasn't married either.

Back to Dati though, and her future role in government is far from being certain. She has dropped out of Sarkozy's "inner circle" of which she was so long a member, has come under constant attack from the media, and is rumoured to be the governing UMP party's preferred choice to head its push for the European parliamentary elections in June this year (in place of the junior minister for human rights, Rama Yade, who has refused to run.

Should Dati, who is also currently the mayor of the VII arrondissement in Paris, accept that challenge, she would most likely be asked to step down form the government.

But that as they say, is for the moment, just speculation.

Right now though, Dati is a reportedly "proud" first-time mother, who just a few weeks before giving birth was quoted as saying "there's more to life than just politics."