Paris - Spain's largest tour and travel group, Marsans, has ordered 61 aircraft from European manufacturer Airbus, including four A380 superjumbos, Airbus said on Friday.

The order also includes 10 long-haul A350 planes, which will not be delivered to customers until at least 2013, and 42 planes from the medium-distance A320 family, Airbus said in a statement released in the southern French city of Toulouse.

"We are very proud to become the first operators of the A380 in Spain and Latin America," Marsans head Gonzalo Pascual said.

Paris - French shares shrugged off a substantial interest rate cut by the European Central Bank and ended Thursday's session with a big loss.

The Paris Bourse's CAC 40 index closed off by 6.38 per cent, at 3,387.25, as all 40 listed stocks lost ground.

The sell-off was led by steel giant ArcelorMittal, which lost nearly 20 per cent, to 16.75 euros, on fears that the recession will be deeper and more stubborn than expected.

Paris - French transport equipment manufacturer Alstom said Thursday it had registered record orders and a healthy profits rise in the first half of its current business year.

Paris - A 24-hour strike by train conductors protesting new working hours severely disrupted French train service throughout the country on Thursday.

The French national rail service SNCF said only about half of all scheduled regional trains were running, while an average of two of three high-speed TGV trains were operating.

Suburban rail service in and out of Paris was also affected by the job action, with about one of two scheduled trains running on average.

Paris - An overwhelming majority of the French people think that the election of Barack Obama is good for the image of the United States, according to a poll made public on Thursday.

In the survey, conducted by the OpinionWay institute for the daily Le Figaro, 85 per cent of respondents said that Obama's election as US president was either very good or good for the country's image.

That sentiment was the same across the entire French political spectrum, with even a majority of supporters of the anti-immigrant right-wing extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen agreeing with it.

Paris, Nov 6 : Following a fifth orbit-raising maneuver, India’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft has successfully settled into a trajectory that will take it to the Moon.

Chandrayaan-1 is India’s first mission to venture beyond Earth’s orbit.

After launch on 22 October, the spacecraft was first injected into an elliptical 7-hr orbit around Earth, between 255 km and 22 860 km above our planet.