Le Monde staff go on strike again

Staff at France's prestigious daily newspaper Le Monde have voted for a third 24-hour strike to protest plans for job cuts to save the debt-ridden broadsheet.

This will be the third one-day stoppage since management, under financial pressure, announced the cuts a month ago.

The strike, voted at a staff general assembly, means the afternoon paper - circulation some 320,000 - will not be published this Wednesday.

It was missing from newsstands twice in April in earlier protests at plans to cut 129 jobs - including up to 90 journalists - and sell several magazines in a bid to pull the Le Monde press group out of financial crisis.

Another 170 jobs would be affected by the sale of two publishing houses, a cultural weekly and the La Procure religious publications.

Le Monde and its affiliated publications have some 1,600 employees and the group has been struggling for years with heavy financial losses and mounting debt.

It ran up losses of €20 million last year.

The paper was founded in 1944 by journalist Hubert Beuve-Mery, who edited the daily for its first 25 years.

The staff are demanding that job cuts should be on a purely voluntary basis, without redundancies.