PARIS

King Louis XVI’s own handwritten copy of the speech that triggered the French revolution in 1789 will go on public sale in England next month.

US financier George Soros is one of four men who will go on trial in Paris on Thursday on insider-trading charges relating to a failed take-over bid at the French bank Societe Generale 14 years ago.

Building a nuclear weapon is a long, complex and dangerous task that requires lots of fissile material, advanced knowledge, specialised laboratories and a deep treasure chest.

French officials credited spectators and police for thwarting an assassination attempt on President Jacques Chirac by a neo-Nazi.

Flora Lewis, an American journalist and columnist whose probing analysis of international affairs appeared in newspapers for nearly six decades, died on Sunday.

Eating more fruit and vegetables helped a group of volunteers to make a big reduction in blood pressure

Imre Kertesz, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor who has been awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature, has drawn heavily on his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald to hold up a mirror to history.

The rivalry between Britain and France sometimes touches legendary peaks. The British can find the ”Frogs” unbearably smug or lazy, while the French like to stereotype ”les Rosbifs” as irredeemably cold or treacherous.

Angola has denied any involvement in Ivory Coast, where army rebels pulled out of ceasefire talks over the reported presence of Angolan troops and tanks in support of the government.

ASTRONOMERS are relishing a once-in-a-lifetime lineup of five planets whose last conjunction sparked terrified warnings that all civilisation on Earth would be wiped out.

Devout Roman Catholics appear to be vulnerable to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a maniacal drive for hygiene.

Edible Wonderbras, the Mona Lisa wearing a kimono and box after box of mouth-watering sweet morsels — the Paris Chocolate Show, set to run from Thursday to Sunday, has something for just about everyone.

Vivendi Universal’s battered stock soared on Thursday after a team of French business veterans took charge of the media group.

Girls who start smoking in their early teens are two-thirds likelier to develop breast cancer later in life compared with non-smokers, a study says.

Gene researchers have ripped the mask off a strain of hospital superbug that is becoming resistant to all but the toughest antibiotics.

Japanese seismologists believe they have confirmed a controversial technique, measuring electromagnetic signals from rocks, that hopes to predict when and where earthquakes will occur and how destructive they will be.

It would be like abolishing Oxbridge, except that the establishment clout of the alumni of Britain’s two oldest universities pales into insignificance besides the power wielded in France by the select band of men and women known as enarques.

The biggest attempt to tackle the Earth’s worsening environment problems and help the planet’s poorest gets underway in less than two weeks, but already the prospect of failure hangs over the Johannesburg summit.

After virtual travel and virtual games, how about becoming a virtual art collector with a share in a multi-million-euro Vincent Van Gogh you can peruse at leisure on the Internet.

Scientists at Europe’s atom-smashing lab say they can produce a steady stream of hydrogen antimatter, a breakthrough that opens the way to testing one of the conceptual cornerstones of physics.

Media giant Vivendi Universal saw a third wiped off the value of its shares on Tuesday as persistent worries over its finances panicked investors despite the imminent ouster of its unpopular chief.

French Family Minister Christian Jacob was beside himself with outrage. ”The book actually glorifies paedophilia, and no crime is more ignoble, more shameful.”

Thirty years ago this week, Apollo 17 headed out across space, bringing the curtain down on the United States’ extraordinary conquest of the Moon.

MILLIONS rallied worldwide to mark May Day on Wednesday, while in France the labour holiday turned into a massive but peaceful street protest against the extreme right.

The largest single-crystal diamond ever offered on the world market failed to find a buyer, with its French auctioneers blaming volatile global markets.

World opinion was sharply divided on a new agreement with Iraq to resume weapons inspections, mirroring the fierce debate in the UN Security Council.

Little by little, but probably too slowly to save millions of people, the world seems to be getting its act together for confronting the Aids peril.