Paris - France will remain at the UN racism conference in Geneva and plans to sign its concluding declaration, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Tuesday.

"Yesterday (Monday) we all left the hall together," Kouchner told Europe 1 radio, referring to the walkout of European ambassadors in reaction to comments by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about Israel. "But we are not leaving the conference."

Paris - Employees at a French factory belonging to the US auto equipment supplier Molex held two company executives hostage overnight in an attempt to prevent the site from being shut down in the summer, French media reported Tuesday.

Co-manager Marcus Kerriou and the head of human resoruces, Coline Colboc, were forced to spend the night on mattresses in a conference room at the site, near the southern city of Toulouse.

The factory's 283 employees, who are to be made redundant in June, have made a number of demands, including compensation of 100 million euros (130 million dollars).

Esha Deol has not been seen around after the debacle of her last film Hijack. Industrywalas have been left wondering where she has disappeared. But our sources have found out that she is very much in Mumbai, cooling her heels at hew new house in Goregaon where she is put up with her mom, actress Hema Malini and sister Aahana. A close pal of Esha has now also revealed that she is being considered as the brand ambassador of a Paris based cosmetic giant.

Paris - Turkish writer Nedim Gursel is to go on trial in Ankara for insulting religious values in his latest novel, The Daughters of Allah, Gursel confirmed to the German Press Agency dpa on Friday.

"The authorities accuse me of insulting religious values and thereby being a danger to public security," Gursel said in Paris, where he is research director of comparative literature at CNRS and professor of Turkish at the Oriental Language Institute.

Paris/New York  - European aerospace group EADS is willing to consider splitting a multi-billion-dollar US Air Force tanker deal with its American archrival Boeing, company head Louis Gallois was quoted on Friday as saying.

In return, Gallois told The New York Times, EADS and its American partner, Northrop Grumman, asked that they be allowed to build at least 12 tanker planes a year. That number was necessary to cover the cost of building a factory in Mobile, Alabama, he said.

Paris (France), Apr. 17 : French president Nicholas Sarkozy has managed to insult three of his country''s closest allies over a brief lunch at the Elysée Palace.

Sarkozy described U S President Obama was inexperienced and badly briefed on climate change, the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wasn''t very clever and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not share his foresight about how to tackle the global financial crisis.