French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has admitted in an interview that he made errors and was misunderstood in his management of a hotly contested youth labour law that has sent students and unions into the streets in violent protests. He denied, however, that he has been disavowed by President Jacques Chirac.
A stone’s throw from the Eiffel Tower on the banks of the Seine, the final touches are being put to Europe’s newest museum, a huge project celebrating and bringing to life non-Western art and heritage. Named the Musee du Quai Branly after its location, the museum will house about 300Â 000 works of tribal art.
It has been called the Sun-eating Dragon. The Spirit of the Dead. The Eye of God. A harbinger of great events, good and evil — terrible famines, bumper harvests, wars, the birth and death of kings. On Wednesday, tens of millions of people will be treated to this spine-tingling celestial sight: a total eclipse of the Sun.
Cars were torched and shops burnt in central Paris on Thursday night after the seventh big protest in eight days against the government’s controversial employment law ended in clashes between hooded youths and riot police. The youths grouped on the pavements on the Esplanade des Invalides and armed themselves with baseball bats and metal bars.
Martine Urvoy will never forget July 3, 1995, the night she was told her husband, Francois, a Breton seaweed fisherman, had been lost at sea. For five terrible hours she had no news of his fate. Finally at daybreak, Francois was found clinging to a rock in the treacherous waters off Brittany’s northern coast.
When student demonstrators in France wore trash bags to protests, their message was: ”We’re not disposable.” Officially, they are angry about a new government job plan that makes it easier for employers to hire and fire them. But that was just the tipping point.
One of Paris’s most famous chefs, Rene Lasserre, who founded the legendary restaurant that bears his name, has died at the age of 93, the current owner said on Thursday. Lasserre, who stepped down from the helm five years ago, died late on Wednesday, said Gerard Louis-Canfailla.
Paris police have arrested 187 people in connection with violent clashes that followed Thursday’s demonstrations against new labour laws, the city’s police chief Pierre Mutz said on Friday. Mutz described those behind the violence, in which 46 police officers were injured, as ”louts” and said he hoped to identify them by the end of the day.
Riot police on Thursday night fired rubber pellets and tear gas at students who pelted them with petrol bombs and stones as protests at new labour laws boiled over in the heart of Paris. Police fought running battles with the rioters, who set cars alight and smashed shop windows near the Sorbonne on the Left Bank.
French cosmetics giant L’Oreal said on Friday it would buy Body Shop International, renowned for its ethical hair and skin products, for $1,143-billion (£652 million). L’Oreal will pay 300 pence a share for Body Shop, which will be maintained as a separate entity and continue to be led by its current management team.
"There are only two kinds of people in the world: the Irish and those who wish they were." So goes one Irish adage. And on Friday millions will get a wish come true, with parades and parties marking St Patrick’s Day which, just like Irish immigrant communities, have spread to become a global excuse for a bit of <i>craic</i>, or fun.
Paper planes have soared way beyond the classroom. Now every bored schoolboy’s elicit past-time has become a worldwide sport with thousands of fans battling to carry off the championships. ”The secret of a good plane is patience, symmetry and a good eye to feel where you need to fold,” said Nicolas Deschamps,
Fifa has agreed not to restrict the media from online publication of World Cup photographs during the soccer tournament in Germany later this year. The governing body of world soccer and the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) said on Monday they have reached an accord to allow media photos to be used.
France outclassed world champions England in Paris on Sunday to win their Six Nations clash 31-6 on the 100th anniversary of their first meeting in the tournament and inflict the worst defeat on the visitors between the sides in 34 years.
The death of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in a United Nations cell on Saturday prompted widespread dismay that the ”Butcher of the Balkans” had escaped justice. But his allies accused the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague of being fully responsible for his death.
French riot police stormed the marble-halled Sorbonne University early on Saturday, pushing out about 200 students occupying the historic institution, some for three days, to protest a government jobs plan. At least 80 helmeted police officers rushed the landmark institution to dislodge students.
MPs from France’s ruling conservative party have blocked a move to legalise internet downloading of movie and music files, after several days of sharp debate in Parliament. MPs from the Socialist, Communist, Green and UDF parties walked out in protest ahead of the vote, allowing it to be adopted nearly unanimously.
An unemployed teacher took 18 students, a teacher and another man hostage at gunpoint at a high school in western France on Thursday, officials said. At the time of going to press the drama was unfolding in a state high school in the town of Sable-sur-Sarthe, southwest of Le Mans.
Horrors such as the Rwandan genocide, in which 800Â 000 people were killed in 100 days, are an appalling indictment of man’s inhumanity and must be told, said British actor John Hurt. He was talking ahead of the release of his latest film, Shooting Dogs, which opens in France on Wednesday.
A publicity stunt in which a golf ball will be whacked into orbit from the International Space Station has met a chilly reception from scientists, who say the scheme is risky and adds to the growing problem of space junk. Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov is to take on the role of a celestial Tiger Woods under a deal between a Canadian golf club manufacturer and the cash-strapped Russian Space Agency.
The Pentagon is funding research into neural implants, with the ultimate hope of turning sharks into "stealth spies" capable of gliding undetected through the ocean, the British weekly <i>New Scientist</i> says. "The Pentagon hopes to exploit sharks’ natural ability to glide quietly through the water," says the report.
To lovers of fine wine there is no more satisfying sound then the pop of a cork as a favourite vintage is opened. The twist of a screw cap just doesn’t carry the same hint of promise. But the metal top is moving up market. "We are convinced about screw caps. They are better, certainly for white wine," said Veronique Bouffard, communications manager at Andre Lurton.
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/ 28 February 2006
The recent violence surrounding the publication in the West of caricatures of the prophet Muhammad illustrate the danger of Islamic ”totalitarianism”, Salman Rushdie and a group of other writers said in a statement obtained on Tuesday. ”After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global threat: Islamism,” they wrote.
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/ 28 February 2006
United Nations chief Kofi Annan hailed France’s idea to tax airline tickets to fund development aid on Tuesday, in an address at the opening of an international conference in Paris. He urged other countries to follow suit, noting that Chile was also implementing the tax.
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/ 27 February 2006
International veterinary experts gathered in Paris on Monday to discuss the fight against bird flu as the lethal H5N1 strain made further advances in Africa and French authorities started a mass vaccination programme of ducks and geese. The potentially deadly virus made new strides in Africa, with reports of the first cases in Niger.
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/ 22 February 2006
French investigators headed to Côte d’Ivoire on Tuesday to hunt the leader of a gang that tortured and murdered a young Jewish man near Paris, a crime thought to have been motivated in part by anti-Semitism. Two officers were expected in Abidjan late in the day to track down the gang’s alleged leader, a 25-year-old convicted petty criminal of Ivorian origin.
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/ 16 February 2006
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy branded Iran’s nuclear programme for the first time on Thursday as a ”clandestine, military” project. In response to sharp protests from Iran, however, France’s foreign ministry reiterated Paris’s official position, which is that Tehran’s nuclear activities ”raise doubts about their peaceful nature”.
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/ 13 February 2006
Inspired by the absent Lleyton Hewitt, Australia booked their Davis Cup quarterfinal berth on Sunday with a 3-2 victory over Switzerland that came down to the final rubber. Heavy-hitting debutant Chris Guccione heroically wrapped up the weekend on the back of 39 aces, crushing George Bastl 7-5, 6-3, 7-6 (9/7) to send the visitors into an April quarterfinal against Belarus.
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/ 11 February 2006
Ireland were the only side to turn up for the Six Nations match with France, coach Eddie O’Sullivan claimed after his men in green had gone down 43-31 to France at the Stade de France on Saturday. The Irish gifted France three of their six tries and at one point trailed their opponents 43-3 before staging an extraordinary comeback which at one stage threatened to see them overhaul the French.
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/ 9 February 2006
This year’s Belgian formula-one grand prix has been called off because of track-improvement works, the sport’s governing body, the FIA, announced on Wednesday. One of the favourite races for drivers, the Spa Francorchamps circuit will be back on the formula-one calendar in 2007.
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/ 8 February 2006
A ”highly pathogenic” strain of the H5N1 bird-flu virus has been found in poultry stocks in Nigeria — the first reported case of the disease in Africa, the Paris-based World Organisation for Animal Health said on Wednesday. Nigeria reported the outbreak among commercial, battery-cage poultry in a village in Kaduna state.
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/ 8 February 2006
Fossil hunters in China say they have found the earliest known forerunner of the Tyrannosaurus rex, the mighty flesh-ripping dinosaur beloved of children and Hollywood. Uncovered in Wucaiwan in the western province of Xinjiang, the species has been dubbed Guanlong wucaii — which means ”crowned dragon of the five-coloured rocks”.