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French director Jose Giovanni dies

French-born director, screenwriter and author Jose Giovanni, who had a string of crime movie hits featuring stars including Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, has died. He was 80.

Giovanni died Saturday of a brain hemorrhage in a clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland, funeral director Jean-Robert Decaillet told The Associated Press by telephone. He had been hospitalized since Wednesday.

Giovanni, from the Mediterranean island of Corsica, was born June 22, 1923. He moved to the Swiss Alpine village of Marecottes in the late 1960s and later was naturalized a citizen of his adopted homeland.

France vows piracy crackdown

FRANCE’S culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, vowed his country will get tough with illegal copiers of music and films, saying such piracy threatened French creativity.

“To be a pirate today is to put our culture and musical creation in peril,” he told journalists at a music festival in the central city of Bourges on Sunday.

“I attach the greatest importance to defending authors, composers, creators, technicians,” he said, adding that he would be meeting representatives of the French music and cinema industries in the next few days to start laying out a strategy.

“I want to see what technical measures can be taken to minimise these risks, which are leading to lay-offs,” he said.

France seeks to preserve influence in bigger EU

France, one of the founders and most active member states of the European Union, is struggling to adapt to a much-bigger bloc which it fears will water down its influence and challenge its leadership on EU foreign policy, European experts said.

Those concerns, and the wariness it has engendered among many of the 10 new EU members towards Paris, could cause strains along the way, they said.

That explains why “France has been dragging its heels over enlargement,” Philippe Moreau-Desfarge of the French Institute on International Relations said.

France suspends imam's expulsion order

An administrative court here cleared a path on Friday for the return to France of a Muslim prayer leader who was expelled to Algeria after he condoned wife-beating and the stoning of women.

The expulsion order was temporarily suspended by the court, which noted that the deportation of the prayer leader, Abdelkader Bouziane, separated him from his family in France.

The ruling allows Bouziane to return to France, although at his own cost, at least until the court rules in several weeks whether the expulsion order was legal.

The court did not order the French government to arrange his return but expressed “serious doubt” about the order’s legality.

Gay marriage spreads to France

France is set to have its first same-sex wedding this year, after a local Mayor took exception to the lack of access to marriage for lesbian and gay couples.

Noel Mamere, mayor of the town of Begles in south west France, has said he will conduct the ceremony for the two men in June, after finding no laws in the country that could block it. Although not marriage, France has offered civil union ceremonies, similar in the rights and responsibilities to our currently debated Civil Partnerships bill, since 2000.

Villepin targets non-French imams

Speaking a day after he deported an Algerian imam for saying Islam let husbands beat adulterous wives, Villepin urged the country’s prefects Thursday to expel any foreign preacher who advocated violence, hate, racism or abuses of human rights.

Only about 10 percent of imams in France are citizens and about half of all imams in the country speak French, experts say.

Most are imported from Arab countries, where some have been trained in radical Islamist views that clash with France’s secular laws.