Eleanor Beardsley

A little over three months after Paris' Notre Dame caught fire, French officials say the cathedral is still in a precarious state and needs to be stabilized. Ultimately, they aim to restore the monument, a process that will take years.

When that work begins, there will be a new demand for experts who have the same skills required to build Notre Dame 900 years ago. In the workshops of the Hector Guimard high school, less than three miles from the cathedral, young stone carvers are training for that task.

For much of his life, Ray Lambert wouldn't talk about World War II. But then the 98-year-old veteran army medic began returning to Normandy, where, on June 6, 1944, he led a unit of medics as a 24-year-old staff sergeant in the allied invasion of western Europe.

"I realized that if I didn't tell these stories about my men, that they couldn't do it," he says. "I felt it my responsibility and obligation to them to talk to people and tell people about the war and what they did."

As a budding young soprano in the 1990s, Anne-Sophie Schmidt was selected to sing the lead role in an opera conducted by the renowned Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit and the National Orchestra of France. It was a great honor to work with Dutoit, she says.

But then the harassment started.

After one concert, Schmidt says, Dutoit pushed her up against a wall and forcibly kissed and groped her.

Why would a wildlife conservation organization be involved in a campaign to push people to diversify their diets? As it turns out, the way we humans eat is very much linked to preserving wildlife — and many other issues.

France has been shocked by incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism in the last couple weeks, including 80 tombstones in a Jewish cemetery painted with graffiti and swastikas earlier this month.

French President Emmanuel Macron has said France and other Western democracies are experiencing a "resurgence of anti-Semitism unseen since World War II."

Stung by criticism, and with his government rocked by ongoing protests from yellow vest demonstrators, French President Emmanuel Macron last month launched a nationwide series of community conversations — what his government calls a grand debat national or "great national debate." Since mid-January, groups of mayors, local leaders and ordinary citizens have been meeting to hear and respond to complaints, grievances and suggestions.

Hanni Weissenberg, now Hanni Lévy, survived as a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Today, the petite and lively 94-year-old lives in Paris. Earlier this month, she returned to Berlin, her home during the war years, to attend the screening of a film about her and other Jews who survived while hiding under the noses of the Nazis.

The Invisibles, a German documentary-drama based on the accounts of four survivors, opened Friday in the U.S.

In the film, Lévy is depicted first at age 17, sitting in her Berlin apartment in 1943, with the Gestapo pounding on the door.

At a traffic circle outside the northern French town of Rouen, a couple of dozen protesters gather every day, building a bonfire and occasionally blocking traffic. The threat of arrest doesn't keep them away. Au contraire, says protester Frederic Bard; the nationwide movement called the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, feels pretty powerful.

"The media are all talking about us, and we actually made the government back down," he says. "We're not about to accept the crumbs Macron has thrown us."

The French government is hoping Saturday's "yellow vest" protests were the last. The movement, named for the fluorescent safety vests worn by demonstrators, is not only the country's biggest social and political crisis in 50 years, but, according to many analysts, a very threat to French democracy. Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has called for national unity and said, "It's time to stop the fighting and begin the dialogue."