Paris - Workers at a French factory producing industrial adhesives have taken hostage a number of executives to protest the planned closing of the site, the daily Le Progres reported Wednesday.

The standoff began on Tuesday, when the representatives of management of the Scapa group, which owns the factory, traveled to the site in the south-eastern town of Bellgarde-sur-Valserine to discuss the conditions of the closure.

Paris  - A French soldier allegedly killed two fellow Foreign Legion members and a peacekeeper from Togo in an unexplained shooting Tuesday in Chad, French Defence Minister Herve Morin said late Tuesday in Paris.

The suspected killer was being sought by Chadian security forces.

The three legionaries were reportedly members of a French regiment based with European EUFOR troops in Abeche, Chad. The slain Togolese soldier was assigned to the United Nation's MINURCAT peacekeeping mission.

Paris - French transport technology company Thales said Tuesday it had signed a contract in Saudi Arabia to provide a train control system for the North-South Railway project.

The contract, which was signed in cooperation with the Saudi BinLadin Group, is worth 340 million euros (451 million dollars), Thales said.

As part of the project, Thales is supplying main line signalling, telecommunication, supervision, security and fare collection systems, while the BinLadin Group will carry out the construction.

Paris - As stories of the extravagant bonuses of executives vie for headlines with reports of mass layoffs, a poll published Tuesday found that nearly half of all French adults approve of workers holding bosses hostage to press their demands.

In the survey, which was carried out by the CSA institute and published in the daily Le Parisien, 45 per cent of respondents said the tactic was "acceptable."

Paris - A team of French surgeons has performed the first- ever successful simultaneous transplant of a person's face and hands, French media reported Tuesday.

The recipient, a 30-year-old man, was severely burned in an accident in 2004. He suffered profound third-degree burns on his face and had to have all his fingers amputated.

Sainte-Engrace, France  - You had better not be prone to dizziness, if you cross the Himalayan-style suspension bridge at Holzarte in the French Pyrenees. Under your feet yawns a gorge some 150 metres deep, clearly visible in gaps between the slats. And the bridge sways more violently the closer you come to the middle.

Italian carpenters built the structure in the 1920s, when villages in the Pyrenees were isolated. Today, it serves as a starting point for hikes in Basque country and the former French province of Bearn.