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/ 7 September 2005
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin took the place of the hospitalised Jacques Chirac in the chair at the government’s weekly Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, confirming his strengthening position as the 72-year-old president’s heir apparent. Detail of the president’s condition remained obscure.
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/ 7 September 2005
Hurricane Katrina has had an unforeseen effect on the French fashion industry, which says it fears it will be hit by a shortage of Louisiana alligator hides in coming months. While there is no shortage of the saurians in the flood waters of New Orleans, the hurricane may have seriously damaged alligator farming.
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/ 7 September 2005
First came singles bars, dating services, and click-and-date websites. Then young urban professional searching for a little tenderness turned to speed dating. Now a pair of French cooking schools are blazing another, somewhat less frenetic, trail in the quest for modern romance: ”cook-dating”.
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/ 5 September 2005
A fire early on Sunday which killed 15 people, including two children, was almost certainly the result of arson, according to police investigating the third major blaze in the Paris region in little over a week. A police spokesperson said three local teenage girls had been remanded in custody, suspected of deliberately setting letterboxes alight
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/ 4 September 2005
Paris police arrested four suspects after the latest fire in an apartment building in a Paris suburb left 12 people dead, local authorities said on Sunday. Mayor Patrick Seve of L’Hay-les-Roses in the Department Val-de-Marnes said witnesses had seen four young people setting fire to the 18-storey apartment block.
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/ 2 September 2005
The French defence minister warned on Friday of ”worrying signs” in Côte d’Ivoire, saying rebel militias there are rebuilding and re-arming in violation of ceasefire accords. Michele Alliot-Marie, speaking on French radio, expressed concern that some Ivorians ”dream only of one thing: to take up arms again”.
Seven people were killed and three seriously injured in a fire that swept through a building housing African immigrants in central Paris, fire services and police said on Tuesday. The blaze comes four days after 17 Africans were killed in similar circumstances in the French capital.
Homeopathic treatment is no more effective than a placebo, the dummy substance used in medical trials, according to a study appearing in Saturday’s issue of The Lancet, the British medical weekly. That is the conclusion of a team of doctors in Britain and Switzerland, who reviewed a mountain of published evidence.
Seventeen people including many children died and about 30 were injured early on Friday when a blaze ripped through a dilapidated apartment building in Paris occupied by African families. The origin of one of the worst blazes in post-war Paris was not known, but a criminal investigation is under way. The fire was a reminder of a blaze on April 15 this year in the central Opera district in which 24 people, also immigrants, perished in a hotel.
Hundreds of millions of people the world over use the internet every day to shop, chat, work, read the news and plan their next seaside holiday. But many also go online in search of a little extra-marital cybersex, making the internet a new vehicle for adultery, suggests a book recently published in France.
Defending champions Liverpool survived a Champions League scare on Tuesday before booking their place in the multimillion-dollar group stages where they will be joined by a little-known Swiss team who were playing amateur football nine years ago.
Seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong denied ever taking performance-enhancing drugs, in response to a report published on Tuesday by the French daily L’Equipe that he was proven to have taken an endurance-boosting hormone during his first Tour de France triumph in 1999.
Parisian book-lovers desirous of a dose of Dumas in the dead of night or some Stendhal on a Sunday can turn to a new development in automated distribution — the book vending machine. Five bright yellow Livre à toute heure machines, stocking 25 contemporary and classic titles, have been installed around the city over the past six weeks.
England’s belief that they are serious World Cup contenders suffered a shattering reality check on Wednesday when Denmark sent them crashing to their worst defeat for 25 years. Fortunately for coach Sven-Goran Eriksson and his bunch of highly-paid but under-performing players, the shambolic 4-1 defeat in Copenhagen was a friendly international.
In a feat that will have statisticians shaking their heads, a French family have twice won a national lottery — using the same numbers each time. The lucky clan, who were not identified, picked up €1,5-million (R11,9-million) in an August 3 lottery using the same selection of numbers they mark down every week.
Youth representatives from across Africa will meet next week in Morocco to discuss the continent’s most pressing problems, including HIV/Aids, poverty, the environment and the technology gap. ”We bring the young together and we let them loose, let them work together to solve these problems,” said Djibril Diallo, chairperson of the Pan-African Youth Leadership Summit.
Marguerite and Andre Debry, 100 and 107 years old respectively, may well be the oldest married couple in the world, the daily Le Parisien reported on Friday. The pair from the central French town of Argenton-sur-Creuse met shortly after World War I and celebrated their 81st wedding anniversary on Friday.
Zinedine Zidane wants to make something clear: He’s not hearing voices. The French soccer star said on his website that an interview he gave to France Football magazine was misinterpreted. In those comments, published this week, Zidane told of a mysterious conversation in the dead of night.
This year is set to be one of the worst on record for hurricanes, scientists say, amid spectacular new evidence about the power of these storms and fears that global warming is intensifying them. Experts are warning that the brooding western Atlantic may serve up as many as 21 severe storms and hurricanes this year.
After the success of Mecca Cola, a soft drink marketed to French Muslims, perhaps it was only a matter of time before a Muslim-themed fast-food restaurant opened in the country with Europe’s largest Islamic population. The bright and colourful ”Beurger King Muslim” was launched in July in a Paris suburb crowded with immigrants.
The collapse of a huge ice shelf in Antarctica in 2002 has no precedent in the past 11 000 years, according to a study to be published on Thursday that points the finger at global warming. Measuring about 3 250 square kilometres in area, the Larsen B iceshelf broke away from the eastern Antarctic Peninsula in 2002, eventually disintegrating into giant icebergs.
Who would have thought it? France’s new Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, dismissed two months ago as an aloof, unelected and often incomprehensible aristocrat, began his brief summer holiday on Tuesday with his popularity soaring and newspaper editorials singing his praises.
Paris made a bold move in 1977 by building a modern art museum wrapped in large multicoloured pipes in the heart of the city. Now, French art authorities are planning another audacious act: a satellite of the Pompidou Centre that looks like a Chinese peasant’s hat.
Wim Duisenberg, the former European Central Bank chief who helped create the euro currency, was found dead on Sunday in his swimming pool in southeastern France, officials said. He was 70. Police did not give a cause for Duisenberg’s death but rescue teams and police said Duisenberg was found unconscious in the swimming pool at his home in the town of Faucon, and could not be resuscitated.
Key figures in the largest child abuse trial to date in France were sentenced to up to 28 years in jail on Wednesday after a jury convicted them of raping, molesting and prostituting children, including their own. The court found that between January 1999 and February 2002, the 65 defendants had sexually abused 45 children, then aged from six months to 14 years.
American Lance Armstrong waved goodbye to what has been a remarkable cycling career after securing his seventh consecutive yellow jersey following the 21st and final stage of the Tour de France on Sunday. The 33-year-old finished the race with a 4min 40sec lead on Italian Ivan Basso with Germany’s Jan Ullrich, the 1997 winner, finishing third on the podium at 6:21.
Germany’s Jan Ullrich is facing the prospect of emerging from the Tour de France finale on Sunday without a victory from this year’s race, which has once again been dominated by Lance Armstrong. Ullrich has once again had to bow to the reality that Armstrong is simply too strong.
Three pensioners were in intensive care in a Grenoble hospital on Thursday after ordering a glass each of a popular local liqueur, génépi, and being mistakenly served caustic soda. The three, a man of 69, his wife, 68, and her 94-year-old mother, were still in a critical condition after drinking the highly corrosive and toxic cleaning fluid.
Lance Armstrong’s teammates are doing a better job of beating him than his rivals are. Armstrong’s Discovery Channel teammate Paolo Savoldelli won Wednesday’s 17th stage of the Tour de France, three days after George Hincapie earned a stage victory of his own. Meanwhile, Armstrong has yet to win an individual stage so far.
As Lance Armstrong closes in on a seventh straight Tour de France title, the high mountains safely behind him and the finish almost in sight, just one thing is missing: a daily stage win of his own. In all of his previous record six Tour wins, Armstrong always managed to win at least one individual stage.
Lance Armstrong isn’t just trying to win a seventh straight Tour de France title, he’s also trying to win over the French fans. Armstrong’s sometimes brash dominance of the 102-year-old race is one reason why he has encountered hostility. In recent years, politics also have played a part.
As Lance Armstrong prepared for what may be hardest stage of the Tour de France, the widow of a friend and teammate killed in a crash a decade ago told him to go for the win. That was the only thing that didn’t work out for Armstrong on Sunday, which he called ”a perfect day”.