The Paris leg of the Beijing Olympic flame relay was cut short on Monday after citywide protests against China’s crackdown in Tibet forced the torchbearers to take refuge on a bus. The torch’s journey by foot ended outside the French Parliament, where protesting deputies hung a Tibetan flag on a railing.
French authorities were working on Saturday to free a luxury cruise yacht and its 30-member crew taken hostage by pirates off the coast of Somalia. ”The defence and foreign affairs ministries are working to act as quickly as possible. I hope … to try to obtain the release of the hostages,” French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said.
French regulator AMF said on Tuesday it had found evidence of insider trading at Airbus parent EADS surrounding delays to its A380 superjumbo and that it would inform Paris prosecutors. It also alleged the company had misled financial markets by failing to meet standards on the publication of information.
France will not support bids by the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine to become members of Nato, putting it at odds with the United States, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Tuesday. ”France will not give its green light to the entry of Ukraine and Georgia,” Fillon told France Inter radio.
England manager Fabio Capello has brought David Beckham back into his team and it’s nothing to do with the star reaching 100 appearances. He believes that the Los Angeles Galaxy midfielder might well be wearing the same white shirt at the 2010 World Cup.
Tourism and commerce are conspiring to turn what for centuries has been a thriving Jewish district — a slice of downtown Tel Aviv in modern Paris — into just another identikit shopping strip, locals say. The ”To rent” sign hanging over a celebrated kosher restaurant is a symbol of the rapid decline of the Rue des Rosiers area.
A Paris court on Tuesday freed Jerome Kerviel, the trader accused of causing record losses at French bank Société Générale, pending investigation, his lawyers said. Société Générale unveiled €4,9-billion (,64-billion) of losses in January in the biggest trading scandal in recent history.
The world’s most expensive champagne, popping the records at €4 166 (about R53 500) for a personalised bottle of bubbly, goes on sale on Thursday targeting a ”super-rich” global elite. The limited-edition, 12-bottle box sets of Perrier-Jouet champagne will be priced at €50 000.
France’s last surviving veteran of World War I, an Italian immigrant who fought in the trenches with the Foreign Legion, has died at the age of 110, the president’s office said on Wednesday. Lazare Ponticelli, who joined his adopted country’s army at the outbreak of the war with Germany in 1914, had attended a memorial ceremony as recently as November 2007.
Police arrested an employee from the trading room of Société Générale on Wednesday as part of their investigation into an alleged rogue trading scandal at the French bank, Europe 1 radio reported. In January, Société Générale unveiled €4,9-billion of losses which the bank blamed on rogue deals carried out by Jerome Kerviel
Back in the wild Sixties and Seventies, a Formula One hotshot would arrive bleary-eyed at his hotel, check out the nearest club and order a large drink or three. In 2008, his corporate-conscious counterpart is more likely to check into the gym and order an early call. ”I have busy testing days, busy marketing days and I have training days,” said Lewis Hamilton.
France extended their perfect record against Italy with a 25-13 win on Sunday that kept alive their slim chances of retaining the Six Nations title. France, who bounced back from a defeat by England on the same Stade de France pitch two weeks ago, will now try to ruin Wales’s Grand Slam hopes next Saturday in Cardiff.
Calls to end forced marriage, domestic abuse and job discrimination marked International Women’s Day on Saturday as demonstrators took to the streets worldwide. The issues highlighted crossed a wide spectrum, including abortion rights in Italy, violence against women in Iraq and women hostages in Colombia.
African neighbours Chad and Sudan will sign an agreement to end their long-running conflict in Dakar next week, the Senegalese president said on Friday. "There will be the signing of a general agreement and an implementation agreement" on March 12, President Abdoulaye Wade said.
Fighting triggered by a rebel assault on Chad’s capital, Ndjamena, last month killed about 700 people, President Idriss Déby Itno said in comments broadcast on Thursday. Rebels opposed to Déby attacked Ndjamena on February 2 and besieged his presidential palace.
Europe’s European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) won its share of a huge contract to build aerial tankers for the United States thanks in part to improved French-American ties, French President Nicolas Sarkozy was quoted on Thursday as saying.
Arsenal produced one of their finest performances under Arsene Wenger on Tuesday to dethrone AC Milan, beating the Champions League holders 2-0 on the night and on aggregate in their last 16 second leg clash. Arsenal’s great Premiership rivals Manchester United also eased through with a 1-0 victory.
Frederic Michalak is an anomaly in the migration patterns, the maverick flyhalf the sole French player moving to South Africa to play while many Boks head the other way. It now seems almost voguish that every French rugby team have at least a couple of South Africans on their books.
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/ 27 February 2008
French President Nicolas Sarkozy travelled to Chad on Wednesday as rights groups urged France not to ”cover up” for President Idriss Déby Itno, accused of having a hand in the disappearance of opposition members. The president will make a brief stopover in Ndjamena en route to South Africa.
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/ 26 February 2008
French President Nicolas Sarkozy sharply criticised the chairperson of scandal-hit bank Société Générale in an interview published on Tuesday, saying his response to billion-euro losses was "not normal". "When the president of a company sees losses of that magnitude and does not draw conclusions from it, that’s not normal," Sarkozy said.
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/ 24 February 2008
A 26-year-old engineer has been sentenced to three years in prison for creating a fake profile of the younger brother of Moroccan King Mohammed VI on the popular internet networking site Facebook. A court in Casablanca on Friday convicted Fouad Mourtada of ”usurping the identity of HRH Prince Moulay Rachid”.
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/ 24 February 2008
French vineyard owners are returning to a slower pace of life by starting to export their wine by sailing boat — a method last used in the 1800s — to reduce their carbon footprint. Later this month, 60 000 bottles from Languedoc will be shipped to Ireland in a 19th-century barque, saving about 8 300kg of carbon.
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/ 24 February 2008
England, fired by the boot of Jonny Wilkinson, dashed French hopes of a Six Nations grand slam with a 24-13 win over France at the Stade de France in Paris on Saturday. It was England’s first away win over France in the Six Nations since 2000, and left unbeaten Wales as the only side now capable of claiming the grand slam.
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/ 20 February 2008
Writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet, an ”enfant terrible” of France’s literary establishment who helped found the New Novel school in the 1950s, died on February 18 aged 85. Robbe-Grillet became a cult figure among France’s postwar intelligentsia with a genre of novel-writing that rejected conventions such as plot and characterisation.
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/ 18 February 2008
Liverpool tackle Italian giants Inter Milan in their Champions League second round clash on Tuesday desperately needing a victory to prevent their season falling apart. Liverpool will be one of two English clubs who entertain Milan’s finest this week as Arsenal attempt to recover from their 4-0 FA Cup mauling by Manchester United.
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/ 18 February 2008
France and England meet next Saturday in the Six Nations at the same venue where French World Cup hopes were extinguished by their bitter rivals. New French coach Marc Lievremont has swept out a lot of the old guard and replaced them with fresh faces with a view to rebuilding for the 2011 World Cup.
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/ 13 February 2008
Lawyers for Jerome Kerviel, the rogue trader blamed by French bank Société Générale for huge losses, lodged an appeal against his detention, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday. Kerviel placed a secret wrong-way bet on the share market that Société Générale blames for a -billion trading loss in the world’s biggest rogue trading scandal.
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/ 13 February 2008
French crooner Henri Salvador, who first went on stage in the cabarets of pre-war Paris and played guitar with Django Reinhardt, died in Paris on February 13 aged 90, his record company announced. Salvador helped introduce France to rock’n’roll, inspired the invention of bossa nova in Brazil and was a pioneer of the music video.
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/ 13 February 2008
The world oil market could be set for a lengthy slowdown, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Wednesday, signalling a sharp shift in the climate that pushed the oil price to $100 last month. "Just as the demand shock of 2004 shaped the oil market for the next three years, so too could the pending slowdown," the IEA said in its monthly review of oil trends.
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/ 12 February 2008
Société Générale launched a discounted â,¬5,5-billion capital increase on Monday to prop up its finances and heal scars from the world’s biggest rogue trading scandal. The one-for-four rights issue at â,¬47,50 per share gives its existing shareholders a bigger-than-expected discount of 38,9% to Friday’s price.
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/ 12 February 2008
By mid-century, getting it on with an electronic femme fatale or a superstud sexbot will become an accepted part of the human landscape, predicts David Levy, a PhD in gender studies and artificial intelligence and author of <i>Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relations</i>.
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/ 11 February 2008
Argentina and Chile will host the 2009 Dakar Rally between January 3 and 18 with Buenos Aires as the start and finish city, organisers said on Monday. The move comes after the 2008 edition of the event was cancelled for the first time since its inception in 1979 due to security concerns after four French tourists were murdered in Mauritania on December 24.