Beijing - Chinese lawyers said Friday that they had filed a lawsuit with a Paris court in a last-minute bid to stop the auction of two bronze animal heads that were allegedly stolen from China by British and French troops 150 years ago.
"We handed the lawsuit to the Paris court just now," Xie Tongxiang, one of the leaders of a group petitioning for the return of the bronzes to China, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
The lawyers asked the court to order the withdrawal of the two heads from the auction of a Yves Saint Laurent art collection scheduled to be held by Christie's in Paris beginning Monday, Xie said.
Paris - French President Nicolas Sarkozy, angered by protest incidents in the past, is now paying visits to local communities with protection provided by hundreds of police and gendarmes, officials confirmed Thursday.
A visit to the Loire valley town of Daumeray with a population of 1,600, took place with 700 police providing security, the gendarme office in Angers said.
Sarkozy visited a farm there, where he made remarks about modernisation taking place in French agriculture.
Paris - Some 2,500 of the world's 6,000 languages are currently threatened with extinction, according to the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, launched by UNESCO on Thursday in Paris.
"The death of a language means at the same time the disappearance of a cultural heritage, from stories through legends to proverbs and jokes," UNESCO head Koichiro Matsuura said.
Paris - The world economic crisis will last well into 2010 unless the global banking sector is restructured and cleansed of its toxic assets, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warned Thursday in Paris.
"If there is no clean-up of the banks, most of the stimulus will be lost," Dominique Strauss-Kahn said, adding: "Things are moving too slowly."
"We are still looking for a recovery at the beginning of 2010, but only if the right policies are implemented," Strauss-Kahn said at a press conference opening the OECD Global Forum on Competition in Paris.
Paris - French President Nicolas Sarkozy, angered by protest incidents in the past, is now paying visits to local communities with protection provided by hundreds of police and gendarmes, officials confirmed Thursday.
Paris - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Thursday in Paris that 
Paris - Some 2,500 of the world's 6,000 languages are currently threatened with extinction, according to the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, launched by UNESCO on Thursday in Paris.
Paris - The world economic crisis will last well into 2010 unless the global banking sector is restructured and cleansed of its toxic assets, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warned Thursday in Paris.
