News

Arafat to Be Flown for Treatment in France

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – Seriously ailing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat agreed on Thursday to be rushed to a French hospital as fears grew for the icon of the struggle for a Palestinian state.

Aides said Palestinian, Tunisian, Jordanian and Egyptian physicians had advised that Arafat, 75, had to be taken abroad, moving him from the West Bank compound where he has been penned by Israel forces for over 2-1/2 years.

France had accepted a request for treatment, a presidential spokeswoman said. Jordanian helicopters would carry Arafat to Jordan early on Friday and from there he would be brought to Paris aboard a French jet, Arafat aides said.

France mulls cure to wine sector's hangover

France’s beleaguered wine industry is giving the government a headache.

Paris is torn between promoting public health and supporting French wine, which has been hit hard by competition from “New World” rivals such as Australia and South Africa and become less fashionable at home.

Less than a week after deputies from the National Assembly lower house proposed wine adverts should be more colourful to boost sales, senators from the upper house say they want bottles to have labels warning pregnant women of the dangers of alcohol.

Opposition Socialist deputy Jean-Marie Le Guen said the conservative government’s policies were incoherent.

In crackdown, France nabs suspected guerrilla leader

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Hunt for 'Code' clues in France

Along the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, not even one dead curator sprawls on the museum’s famous parquet floor.

And in the hayloft of a chateau outside Paris, the secret listening post just isn’t there.

Yet even if they can’t find all the details mentioned in the book, fans of “The Da Vinci Code” seem to have an insatiable need to link the fiction to reality — especially at the Louvre, where the opening murder scene takes place.

Jacque le Roux, an art historian and Louvre tour guide, happily sets straight the implausibilities in the murder mystery — including one in the first paragraph, where the victim is described as a 76-year-old curator.

Everyone knows the mandatory retirement age in France is 65, he says.

French winegrowers puzzled by vandalism

Winegrowers in northeast France are puzzled over the mysterious destruction of large swaths of two vineyards in Alsace, a region along the German border known for full-bodied white wines.

Saboteurs using long-handled pruning shears destroyed about 2,800 grape vines in the past two weeks by slashing their stems close to the soil, the director of the Alsace Wine Growers Association said Friday.

“We don’t really know who could have done this, whether it’s the work of a lunatic – or if it’s a settling of scores,” Jean-Paul Goulby said. “It’s very strange.”

The value of the damage is difficult to estimate, Goulby said, because future crops must be taken into account.

French town is named historic Civil War site

American cannon blasts bellowed in the English Channel 140 years ago, and bloodied bodies lined the deck of a sinking Confederate ship. Onlookers watched in horror from the Normandy coast.

On June 19, 1864, far from battlefields at home, the USS Kearsarge hunted down and sank a dreaded Confederate raider in one of the most important naval battles of the U.S. Civil War — off the coast of France.

The Confederate ship Alabama today lies where it sank under 198 feet of swirling currents about seven nautical miles off the French town of Cherbourg.

French Novelist Francoise Sagan Dead

French novelist Francoise Sagan, known for her haunting novel, Bonjour Tristesse, died Friday at the age of 69.

The Agence France-Presse news agency reported Ms. Sagan died in a hospital in the Normandy town of Honfleur Friday evening. The news agency cited cardio-respiratory problems as the cause of death.

Doctors said the novelist had been admitted several times in recent months to the hospital, which was near her home.

Ms. Sagan catapulted to fame as a teenager, with her first novel Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness). The bittersweet work depicted life of French bourgeois society at its most sophisticated and cynical. Ms. Sagan came from the same upper class surroundings that she wrote about.

Rabies scare mars French hunting season, spells death for runaways

The 2004 hunting season opens across much of France Sunday, but for enthusiasts in southwestern France this year will be different: hunters will be barred from using dogs because of last month’s rabies outbreak in the region.

Some 100,000 hunters in the departments of Dordogne, Gironde and Lot-et-Garonne have been ordered to leave their dogs at home or face a fine as authorities seek to prevent the pets becoming carriers of the disease.

Confinement to home was not the worst fate the animals faced this weekend, however.

Mauresmo tops rankings

Despite losing in the US Open quarter-finals, Mauresmo will take over at the top by virtue of Lindsay Davenport’s failure to win her home Grand Slam.

Mauresmo ends the 45-week reign of Belgium’s Justine Henin-Hardenne at the top of the WTA rankings.

Mauresmo is only the 14th woman to become world number one since the rankings began in November 1975.

Captors ask France for ransom and pledge

A statement purportedly from the captors of two French journalists in Iraq gave France 48 hours Monday to accept three new conditions – agreeing to a recent truce offer by Osama bin Laden, paying a $5 million ransom and pledging not to get involved in Iraq.

The Islamic Army of Iraq has decided to make “the following demands to release the two French hostages,” said a statement posted on an Islamic Web site. The statement, whose authenticity could not be confirmed, listed the demands as “accepting a truce between them and Sheik Osama bin Laden, paying a $5 million ransom and pledging not to engage militarily and commercially in Iraq.”