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/ 29 October 2005
Andy Roddick will be the top seed at the Paris Masters, tournament organisers said on Friday. The American was selected after top-ranked Roger Federer and defending champion Marat Safin both withdrew due to injury. Federer has a torn ligament in his right ankle while Safin has tendinitis in his left knee.
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/ 28 October 2005
Gerard Houllier’s Lyon will be looking to get back to winning ways at Sochaux on Saturday after suffering their first defeat of the season as they exited the French League Cup. The loss to Nantes 4-3 on penalties after the match finished 1-1 after extra time ended Houllier’s dream of the four-time French champions ”winning everything” this season.
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/ 27 October 2005
Tour de France organisers unveiled the 20-stage 2006 edition in Paris on Thursday which will be held next July 1-23 and totalling around 3 600km. It will be the first not to feature seven-time winner Lance Armstrong, who is now retired, but the American was a hot topic despite the presence of several of his potential successors.
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/ 21 October 2005
For nearly five months, he led his pursuers a merry dance, swimming nearly half a kilometre across open sea to a new home, laughing at the traps and the poisoned baits and the baying hounds bent on killing him. When the annals of rodentology are written — as they surely must — this rat deserves an honoured place.
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/ 20 October 2005
Paris, mid-October: a morning of bountiful autumn sunshine that makes one happy to be alive. But we are among the dead, searching in a sector of the Père Lachaise cemetery for the grave of Poulenc. Though we aren’t going to find him here: the names, and the stars where elsewhere there are crosses, denote that this quiet corner, ”amants légendaires”, is the seventh division, the Jewish quarter, and we need to push on up the Chemin Serré.
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/ 19 October 2005
TV around the world is starting to ditch humiliation and confrontation in favour of the feel-good factor and good old-fashioned fun. That’s the big message from this year’s influential five-day Mipcom audiovisual trade show which opened its doors on Monday in the ritzy French Riviera resort of Cannes.
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/ 17 October 2005
A 48-year-old Frenchman who is accused of rape collected other men’s sperm from used condoms and left traces at the crime scene in order to confuse police, justice officials said on Thursday. Jean-Luc Cayez worked as doorman of an apartment block at Soisy-sur-Seine south of Paris.
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/ 13 October 2005
The Nobel Prize for Literature is considered the highest accolade to which a writer can aspire, but there is a long list of justly-deserving authors who have died without winning the award. Everyone has their own favourite who never made it on to the laureates list, but there are a good many about whom no-one with an interest in fiction would disagree.
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/ 11 October 2005
A 39 year-old South African man was detained in France after walking through the channel tunnel from Britain, police said on Tuesday. The unnamed man, who had only a pair of flip-flop sandals on his feet, was spotted by security cameras at the French end of the 50km tunnel early on Sunday morning.
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/ 10 October 2005
Former French health minister Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Médécins sans Frontières, said on Monday that hundreds of Africans are dying of thirst and starving in the Moroccan desert after failing in their bid to reach Europe.
A film festival for movies shot on cellphones opened on Friday in Paris, aiming to take cinema a technological and creative step forward in the country that gave birth to the seventh art. The Pocket Film Festival, which was to screen pictures ranging from 30-second shorts to a full-length feature set in Rome, seeks both to showcase an emerging art form and to ask what effect it might have on mainstream cinema.
Improved methods of blood doping being used on the Tour de France are almost impossible to detect, claims former United States Postal doctor Prentice Steffen. Steffen, who has hit out at under-fire Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, claims riders and their team doctors have got using the banned blood booster EPO (erythropoietin) and blood doping down to a fine art.
European governments have agreed to withhold funding commitments for a new Airbus plane set to be launched on Thursday while negotiations continue to resolve their aircraft subsidies dispute with the United States. ”The deployment of possible aid will not be immediate,” French Minister of Transport Dominique Perben said.
The French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, faces his first big wave of unrest as an expected 1,5-million public- and private-sector workers take to the streets on Tuesday to protest at worsening social conditions and unpopular economic reforms.
A former snowboard champion turned sports cameraman and a friend were convicted by a French court on Monday for making a video in which pornographic images were flash-cut into a DVD production about snowboarding. "I did it as a laugh, but it was a bad joke," Julien Joud told the court in the eastern French city of Grenoble.
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/ 30 September 2005
In what must rank as a world record, animal-welfare officers in France have discovered a total of 340 dogs living in a single house near the north-eastern city of Nancy. The dogs were confined to the first floor of the house in the village of Marbache and had been interbreeding for years, officials said.
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/ 29 September 2005
London are banking on a cash bonanza from the 2012 Olympics after gaining the support from the man who helped write the International Olympic Committee (IOC) marketing handbook. Michael Payne, who helped mastermind the IOC’s rise to a billion dollar business has agreed in principle to join London 2012 as a special consultant.
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/ 29 September 2005
Raul became the first player to rack up 50 goals in the Champions League as the Real Madrid star helped his side to a hard-fought 2-1 victory over Greek side Olympiakos in their match on Wednesday. Liverpool were held 0-0 at home to Chelsea, whom they controversially beat in the semifinal last term.
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/ 28 September 2005
Japanese zoologists have made the first recording of a live giant squid, one of the strangest and most elusive creatures in the world. The size of a bus, with vast eyes and a querulous beak, <i>Architeuthis dux</i> has long nourished myth and literature, and until now, the only evidence of giant squids was extraordinarily rare.
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/ 23 September 2005
British electronic music whizz Matthew Herbert is hoping to become the first musician ever to use the sound of cancer in a dance track. The London-based musician is working on the follow-up album to <i>Plat du Jour</i>, released worldwide this year, which was made using sampled recordings of food to raise awareness about the industrialisation of modern farming methods.
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/ 22 September 2005
Middle-class mothers in France could be paid up to â,¬1Â 000 (R7Â 700) a month — almost the minimum wage — to stop work for a year and have a third child under a government scheme to boost the birth rate, already among the highest in Europe.
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/ 20 September 2005
Fans of a certain diminutive Gallic warrior and his corpulent sidekick are counting down to Thursday morning, when a glimpse of the latest Asterix and Obelix album will be permitted amid a public relations blitz in the Belgian capital Brussels. Albert Uderzo, the 78 year-old illustrator who launched the comic-strip character in 1959 with author Rene Goscinny, is scheduled to appear at a press conference to reveal the title of the new book.
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/ 19 September 2005
A 60-year-old man shared a two-room apartment with his mother’s corpse for five years, concealing her death so he could receive her pension, French police said on Saturday. Intrigued that the woman born in 1904 still received social-security payments, social services in the port city of Marseilles asked police to investigate.
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/ 19 September 2005
Elena Dementieva and Dinara Safina teamed up to help the Russian Federation retain the Fed Cup title on Sunday, beating Amelie Mauresmo and Mary Pierce of France 6-4, 1-6, 6-3 in doubles to give the Russians a 3-2 win. Dementieva, who also won both of her singles matches, sank to her knees in celebration after Mauresmo hit a forehand long on match point at Roland Garros.
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/ 17 September 2005
One lucky lottery player won a French record €75-million (R585-million) in the Euro Millions lottery roll-over jackpot on Friday, the organisers announced. The winner bought the ticket in a railway café in the town of Franconville, in the suburbs north of Paris, the Francaise des Jeux company said.
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/ 15 September 2005
One of the architectural jewels of late 19th century Paris — the enormous steel and glass exhibition hall known as the Grand Palais — opens to the public on Saturday for the first time in 12 years following a monumental face-lift. Closed for safety reasons in 1993 after a metal bolt fell from the ceiling, the fin-de-siêcle masterpiece has been renovated at a cost to the state of more than €70-million.
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/ 14 September 2005
Vladimir Volkoff, a Franco-Russian author of espionage novels and non-fiction books famed in France, died overnight at home, his publisher, Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, said on Wednesday. He was 72. Volkoff began his literary career in 1962 after serving as a French secret-service officer.
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/ 12 September 2005
Hundreds of people stripped off in Lyon, France, on Sunday to pose naked for United States photographer Spencer Tunick, who has made a name for himself by organising mass nude photo shoots around the world. Men and women of all ages turned up in the early hours to obey Tunick’s orders.
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/ 9 September 2005
A resourceful Breton dairy farmer has come up with a new invention: milk beer. ”Everyone thought I was crazy to try to make a milk-based alcohol,” Marcel Besnard said on Friday in Rennes, adding that low prices and strict quotas had led him to consider other ways of marketing milk.
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/ 9 September 2005
International Cycling Union (UCI) chief Hein Verbruggen said on Friday no action would be taken against Lance Armstrong following the recent allegations of doping against the American cyclist. Armstrong, who retired after his seventh consecutive Tour de France victory in July, had been accused of using banned blood booster EPO (erythropoietin) by French sports daily L’Equipe.
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/ 9 September 2005
Hurricane Katrina delivered a "severe" shock to Gulf of Mexico oil supplies, wrecking pipelines and damaging scores of platforms, but 90% of production can be back on stream within a few months, the International Energy Agency said on Friday.
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/ 8 September 2005
Health ministers, development agencies and experts on anti-malarial drugs opened a two-day World Bank conference on Thursday aimed at improving fund-raising to fight malaria, a disease that kills over a million people worldwide each year, mainly in Africa.