PARIS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.