PARIS

Scientists meeting in Paris on Monday for a council of war on the Aids pandemic were lauded for the strides they had made during a two-decade-old campaign, but were also told they faced a foe unique in its stealth and tenacity.

Western countries should kickstart deadlocked global trade talks to heal the international diplomatic rifts left by the war in Iraq, Supachai Panitchpakdi, the director of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), urged this week.

One of the greatest prizes in modern physics — the confirmation or otherwise of a theoretical sub-atomic particle called the Higgs boson — is back up for grabs.

Things are getting a little worrying: junk email is getting intelligent. True, those pitches for Viagra, penis enlargement, gambling, baldness cures, cheap credit or phoney diets are just as crass as they ever were.

Economic development and social benefits are boosted when governments strengthen people’s land rights and dismantle barriers to land transactions, a World Bank report said on Thursday.

Mark Raboo speaks of the moment when he wished the floor had opened and swallowed him, and all because of some misheard lyrics.

Women who wolf down steak and chips, pasta, salad, chocolate and other favourite foods while they are pregnant may be expecting a boy rather than a girl, a study says.

Thousands of private-sector workers worried by rising unemployment joined protests in 100 French towns and cities this week as discontent with the centre-right government spilled over from the long-running public-sector dispute.

France will provide half of a 1 400-man international force to be deployed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) once the United Nations has given the green light, according to Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.

Psychopathic serial killers may one day be unmasked by a simple 10-minute test, British psychologists propose in Thursday’s issue of Nature.

The era of ”heroic” fish — rod-busting marlin, great white sharks and mighty tuna, which inspired legends and novels — is well and truly over, according to the most complete study ever compiled of these species.

Astronomers say they have detected nearly two dozen more satellites orbiting Jupiter, bringing the number of moons encircling the Solar System’s greatest planet to an astonishing 112.

An Iraqi-born British billionaire, reputedly Britain’s seventh-richest man, is one of 37 company administrators and business partners accused of involvement in France’s biggest post-war financial scandal in which the oil firm, now TotalFinaElf, allegedly paid out huge bribes and backhanders to expand its empire.

Researchers have found two species of beetle to be a potent weapon in Africa’s fight against water hyacinths, an aquatic plant indigenous to Brazil that has become a devastating superweed.

A month into one of France’s biggest ever corruption trials, an avid public has gorged on a rich diet of African bribes, political skullduggery and sensational divorce — all paid for from the illicit millions of the formerly state-owned oil company Elf.

The ever-optimistic front-man for the Iraqi regime during the war to topple Saddam Hussein — Information Minister Mohammad Said al-Sahhaf –may have vanished but he has resurfaced on the Internet with a website containing his finest pearls of wisdom.

Leading French politicians, apparently seeking to rebuild bridges with Washington, warned in the first week of April against mounting anti-Americanism in France and stressed that the United States remained one of the country’s most valued allies.

Fears of a potential bio-terror attack in continental Europe were heightened last night after the discovery of two flasks containing a lethal ricin compound in a railway station in Paris.

Central African Republic coup leader Francois Bozize on Monday called for more African peacekeepers to be deployed alongside French forces in the country.

The world will face a water crisis a few decades from now as population growth, pollution and climate change deprive billions of the most precious natural resource of all, a UN report warned on Wednesday.

Ivory Coast rebel leader Guillaume Soro on Wednesday denied accusations by Amnesty International that his armed group carried out summary executions after a rebellion broke out last September.

France’s top chefs railed yesterday against the pressures of their job and the power of the critics after one of this food-obsessed country’s culinary giants committed suicide, apparently because of a bad review.

Director of the prestigious French GaultMillau restaurant guide Patrick Mayenobe denied on Tuesday that star chef Bernard Loiseau, had killed himself because his flagship restaurant received a low mark.

The chief executive of British information group Reuters, Tom Glocer, has ruled out separating the news division from the rest of the company despite a steady decline in its core financial business.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe was due to arrive in Paris on Wednesday ahead of a Franco-African summit likely to be dominated by his controversial presence and the absence of embattled Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo.

The commercial banana has such a narrow genetic base that within a decade the plant could be wiped out by two fungal diseases that are rampaging through Central America, Africa and Asia, the New Scientist says.

French police defended themselves on Tuesday over an incident in which they detained a television news crew from the west African state of Mali and erased part of their camera tape after being filmed manhandling two Malian illegal immigrants.

Shirley Bassey’s ”Goldfinger” booms out of a ghetto blaster as five men attempt to sashay on tiptoe the length of a dance studio in the heart of Paris. ”Be relaxed and virile,” shouts coach Veronique J. ”Think of James Bond. Tight bottoms and hold those stomachs in.”

French troop reinforcements due in Ivory Coast at the weekend will come equipped with a stronger mandate aimed at quelling unrest in the former colony, a representative said.

In the red-light Rue Saint-Denis, a seedy Paris street lined with neon peep-shows and bulging women in bustiers and fishnet stockings, Angelique, a middle-aged prostitute from French Guyana, was fuming.