Paris - When France is officially welcomed back to NATO's military command structure at the group's April 3-4 summit, it will restore what French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested was normalcy to the country's relationship with the transatlantic alliance.
The French president linked parliamentary approval of his decision to return Paris to full NATO membership to a vote of confidence in the government's entire foreign policy, a tactic that irritated even members of his own centre-right UMP party.
Paris - The European Union was one island richer Sunday after the mostly Muslim citizens of the Mayotte islands in the Indian Ocean voted for full integration into the French nation.
The 374-square-kilometre island group is geographically part of the Comoros islands, between Madagascar and northern Mozambique.
But it has been politically separate since the 1970s, when it voted against independence. It has belonged to France since 1841
London, March 28: French surgeons have carried out the world’s fifth face transplant, and given a 28-year-old man a new nose, mouth and chin after his original features were blown off in a shooting accident.
The surgery, which marked the third face transplant in France, took place at the Henri Mondor Hospital, near Paris.
Doctors at the hospital spent 15 hours giving the man a new face, after the accident had destroyed the muscles in the man''s mouth, which prevented him from moving his jaw.
Paris - After a tumultuous seven-week trial, a Paris appeals court late Friday sentenced a Corsican shepherd, Yvan Colonna, to life in prison for the 1998 murder of the prefect of that Mediterranean island.
The sentence therefore upheld the judgment delivered in the first trial, in 2007, that the 48-year-old Colonna was the man who fired three bullets into the head and neck of the prefect, Claude Erignac, in a street in the city of Ajaccio on February 6, 1998.
Nairobi/Niamey - French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Niger Friday to back a deal by French firm Areva to exploit uranium deposits in the north of the West African country.
Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive officer of Areva, is travelling with Sarkozy on the whistle-stop tour that saw him also visit the Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo.
Lauvergeon on Thursday signed an agreement with the Congolese Minister of Mines, Martin Kabwelulu, on the prospecting and mining of DR Congo's sizeable uranium reserves.
Paris - The bishop of the French city of Orleans, Monsignor Andre Fort, rekindled a row sparked by Pope Benedict XVI by telling a French radio station on Friday that condoms were ineffective in the prevention of AIDS.
"You know very well, and all the scientists know it: the AIDS virus is infinitely smaller than a sperm. This is proof that the condom is not a 100 per cent guarantie against AIDS," the bishop told Radio France.
Paris - When France is officially welcomed back to NATO's military command structure at the group's April 3-4 summit, it will restore what French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested was normalcy to the country's relationship with the transatlantic alliance.
Paris - The European Union was one island richer Sunday after the mostly Muslim citizens of the Mayotte islands in the Indian Ocean voted for full integration into the French nation.
London, March 28: French surgeons have carried out the world’s fifth face transplant, and given a 28-year-old man a new nose, mouth and chin after his original features were blown off in a shooting accident.
Paris - After a tumultuous seven-week trial, a Paris appeals court late Friday sentenced a Corsican shepherd, Yvan Colonna, to life in prison for the 1998 murder of the prefect of that Mediterranean island.
Nairobi/Niamey - French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Niger Friday to back a deal by French firm Areva to exploit uranium deposits in the north of the West African country.
Paris - The bishop of the French city of Orleans, Monsignor Andre Fort, rekindled a row sparked by Pope Benedict XVI by telling a French radio station on Friday that condoms were ineffective in the prevention of AIDS.
