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/ 1 December 2004
French peacekeepers who shot and killed around 20 people during anti-French violence in Ivory Coast early last month were acting in self-defence, the Defence ministry in Paris said on Wednesday. The soldiers ”reacted within the rules, that is to say with warning shots, shots of dissuasion, and in any case they acted in totally legitimate defence”, Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie told journalists.
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/ 24 November 2004
French employees of a General Electric branch that makes medical equipment, tired of struggling with company e-mails, manuals and meetings in English, took their fight to court on Tuesday — the latest flare-up in the French language’s struggle to maintain linguistic pre-eminence, at least at home. The employees have invoked the 1994 Toubon Law. that secifies French be used in business and on the airwaves.
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/ 16 November 2004
Europe’s first mission to the moon, the unmanned exploratory probe <i>Smart-1</i>, has been safely placed in lunar orbit after a voyage of more than 13 months, the European Space Agency announced on Tuesday. <i>Smart-1</i>, a tiny test-bed of revolutionary technology, was successfully captured by the moon’s gravity on Monday.
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/ 10 November 2004
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is still alive but ”in the hands of God”, the Palestinian representative in France, Leila Shahid, said on Wednesday. Also on Wednesday, Israel gave the go-ahead for Arafat’s eventual burial to take place at his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah, officials said.
Arafat close to death, say officials
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/ 5 November 2004
Thales said on Friday it had won a contract from the British defence ministry for the maritime unmanned air vehicle (UAV), or drone, portion of the ministry’s joint UAV experimentation programme. The French defence electronics group will lead the consortium that won the contract, which also includes Boeing of the United States and QinetiQ of Britain.
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/ 3 November 2004
The single life and how to make the most of going it alone — a way of life increasingly chosen by many, sociologists say — is celebrated at a three-day fair in Paris, France, this week. Holidays, hobbies, sports, outings, even how to get the best deals for your finances and phone bills as a ”singleton” are lined up for the show.
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/ 2 November 2004
Authorities in Paris’s historic Pere Lachaise cemetery have sealed off one of its most-visited tombs to prevent the perpetration of lewd acts on the prostrate bronze form of a murdered 19th-century journalist. The funerary relic of Victor Noir has long been held as an aid to love or fertility by women.
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/ 2 November 2004
American porn mogul Larry Flynt says he may decide to go into exile if United States President George Bush is re-elected. ”If Bush is re-elected — but I don’t want to even consider the thought for one second — I really have to think about living somewhere else,” Flynt said early on Monday in a strip club on the Champs Elysees in Paris.
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/ 1 November 2004
An ailing Yasser Arafat entered a fourth day of emergency treatment on Monday at a French military hospital specialising in blood disorders, but the cause of his precipitous decline in health remained unexplained. Palestinian officials say their leader’s condition has improved markedly since he was rushed to Paris on Friday.
<li><a class=’standardtextsmall’ href="http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?cg=BreakingNews-InternationalNews&ao=124695">Potential successors take control</a>
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/ 29 October 2004
Frail Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was admitted on Friday to a French military hospital near Paris for urgent treatment for what is said to be a potentially fatal blood disorder. It is the first time in three years that Arafat, symbol of the Palestinian struggle for statehood, has left his West Bank base, a sign of the gravity of his condition.
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/ 29 October 2004
Chocolate makers from as far away as Japan and New York have converged on Paris, seeking to carve out a niche in the French market at a five-day industry binge that runs until Monday. Tokyo’s Madame Setsuko, Kyoto’s Ponto and the assorted ”chocolatiers New Yorkais” are rubbing shoulders with European industry giants.
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/ 25 October 2004
The launch of France’s first gay television channel, Pink TV, on Monday has been touted as a big step for television and a new era for homosexuality in this largely Roman Catholic country. The channel is ”a giant leap for television, a small step in high heels”, presenter Eric Gueho says in a promotional clip.
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/ 21 October 2004
More than 700 women have volunteered to lie in bed for 60 days to simulate some of the effects of weightlessness, the European Space Agency announced on Thursday. The female test subjects will lie in bed, with their heads slightly tilted downwards at six degrees below the horizontal, for 60 days.
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/ 14 October 2004
Campaigners against alcohol abuse were up in arms on Thursday after the French Parliament voted in favour of a law which will ease the tight restrictions on advertising wine and possibly other drinks. Critics accused the centre-right government of President Jacques Chirac of abandoning a pledge to clamp down on alcohol abuse.
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/ 13 October 2004
The blind cavefish, a curiosity of nature, has a clever genetic trick that destroys its sight, thus giving itself an advantage in a pitch-dark watery world, scientists believe. Astyanax mexicanus lives in deep, lightless caves off the Mexican coast. Soon after the cavefish starts developing in the egg, its eyes begin to degenerate and the fish is born blind.
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/ 13 October 2004
About 1% of adults have absolutely no interest in sex, a surprisingly high figure that is not far from the estimated 3% of the population who are gay, according to a study reported in next Saturday’s <i>New Scientist</i>. Plucky activists have already started campaigning to promote awareness and acceptance of asexuality.
One of France’s best-known philosophers, Jacques Derrida, revered as the founder of the deconstructionist school, has died at the age of 74, his entourage said on Saturday. Derrida, who had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, died in a Paris hospital on Friday night.
Scientists working in top-security labs say they have recreated pathogens from the 1918 flu pandemic, the greatest plague of the 20th century, in a bid to find out why this strain was so extraordinarily lethal. The United States team took two key genes from the 1918 virus and slotted them into human flu viruses to which lab mice were known to be immune.
An apparently mentally deranged man attacked and killed a passer-by on a French street with a knife then tried to suck the victim’s blood, police said on Monday. The 23 year-old attacker struck his victim, another man, on the head and was about to suck the blood from his wounds when a passer-by ripped a receiver from a nearby telephone booth and hit him.
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/ 29 September 2004
Seismologists believe they have pinpointed the source of a mysterious low-frequency ”hum” that emanates from the Earth, the British science journal Nature reports in Thursday’s issue. The persistent noise — at between two and seven milliHertz, way below the threshold of human hearing — is clearly caused by large emissions of energy near or at the Earth’s surface.
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/ 22 September 2004
Belching and farting sheep and cattle, blamed by doomsters for driving the planet towards climate catastrophe, may have met their match. Eructations from farm animals account for a fifth of all global emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas that is less plentiful but far more potent than the most notorious culprit, carbon dioxide.
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/ 22 September 2004
Rats fitted with radio backpacks may soon help rescue teams locate earthquake survivors who are buried under rubble, the British weekly New Scientist reports in next Saturday’s issue. Researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville and the State University of New York in Brooklyn have fitted rats with electrode implants in their brains, hooked up to a tiny radio transmitter that transmits a signal of their cerebral activity.
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/ 21 September 2004
The relatively low ranking of Paris on a survey of quality of life in cities around the world for expatriate workers triggered bemusement in a leading French financial newspaper on Tuesday. Les Echos expressed surprise that the French capital ranked 31 out of 215 cities graded in the annual survey.
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/ 15 September 2004
A Canadian inventor has devised the world’s first computer to be controlled by the nose and eyelids, New Scientist reports. The gadget could be a boon for people with disabilities who cannot use the conventional mouse, it says. The nose-steered mouse is called a ”nouse”.
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/ 8 September 2004
A controversy over lice that has had zoologists scratching their heads for almost 250 years has been resolved at last, a report in next Saturday’s New Scientist says. The squabble dates back to 1758, when Carl Linnaeus declared there was one species of human louse, which he boldly baptised Pediculus humanus.
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/ 8 September 2004
A British-built robot generates its own power by gobbling flies, but it has a stinky downside — it needs human sewage as bait to catch the insects and then digest them. EcoBot II, made by robotics experts at the University of the West of England in Bristol, tucks into the flies in eight microbial fuel cells which are loaded with human sewage.
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/ 7 September 2004
Paris police have discovered an underground cinema — complete with projector, screen, seating and bar — which was set up in a disused quarry beneath the Trocadero in the capital’s plush 16th arrondissement, officials said on Tuesday. The chamber, situated about 20m below ground level, was fed by electricity stolen from power lines.
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/ 3 September 2004
Apple unveiled the third generation of its iMac range of computers this week, showing off machines housed in all-in-one cases that incorporate the processors, disk drives and screen in a box that is only about 5cm thick. The range was unveiled by Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of worldwide product marketing, at the start of the five-day Apple expo in Paris.
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/ 3 September 2004
The children ensnared in the three-day hostage drama in North Ossetia will have probably suffered major psychological damage and some may never get over their ordeal completely, a French expert warned on Friday. "This case is of the gravest kind," he said. "The psychological problems will be major."
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/ 1 September 2004
Human pride, based on the notion that man is the planet’s alpha animal, was dealt a crushing blow seven years ago when the computer Deep Blue humiliated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Be afraid, be very afraid, for another towering bastion of human achievement — table football — is about to fall to machines.
Two French journalists being held hostage in Iraq on Monday night warned that they faced death if France refused to yield to their kidnappers’ demands to repeal legislation which will ban Islamic headscarves in schools. Their captors extended the deadline for the government to overturn the law by a further 24 hours.
A French air-force fighter jet collided with an ultralight aircraft over central on France Monday, killing its two occupants, the Defence Ministry said in a statement. The Mirage 200 N was on a training flight over the city of Clermont-Ferrand when it hit the ultralight, a small, low-flying recreational plane resembling a paraglider.