A FRENCH novelist will file a criminal complaint today accusing Dominique Strauss-Kahn of attempted rape, her lawyer said, throwing fresh uncertainty into a fierce national debate about whether the former International Monetary Fund chief can return to his country’s presidential race.

ONE of two mail bombs sent from Yemen last week was disarmed just 17 minutes before it was set to go off, the French interior minister said yesterday.

Police have arrested two brothers suspected of planning a terrorist attack in France.

Roman Polanski made his first public appearance since being released this week from house arrest, attending the Montreux Jazz Festival to watch his wife perform on stage.

Investigating judges filed preliminary charges against a trader accused of causing billions of euros in losses at France's second-largest bank.

French protesters, declaring themselves on the brink of victory, hoped today to rally at least a million people for nationwide marches and strikes against a law – aimed at stemming joblessness – that has plunged the country into crisis.

French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy today said that Iran’s nuclear programme was a cover for clandestine military activity.

Britain had Margaret Thatcher, Germany has Angela Merkel. Could France get Segolene Royal?

France’s debt-ridden public finances are in a “very worrying” state, a government-commissioned report warned, urging the country’s leaders to balance the budget by 2010 at the latest.

Disadvantaged youths “deserve to be helped, recognised and encouraged,” French President Jacques Chirac said as he met today with a group of successful young entrepreneurs from the low-income neighbourhoods where rioting broke out this month.

Residents from riot-torn suburbs were to march in Paris today – Armistice Day, marking the end of WWI – waving white handkerchiefs to call for an end to more than two weeks of violence.

French President Jacques Chirac called a security meeting of his top ministers tonight after urban rioting spread – with arsonists striking from the Mediterranean to the German border and into central Paris for the first time.

The French government faced mounting pressure today as suburban unrest took on dangerous new momentum, with shots fired at police and fire crews as they battled youths who torched car dealerships and public buses and hurled rocks at commuter trains.

Turkish authorities have ordered poultry farmers in a quarantined area in western Turkey to hand over birds for culling or face fines and possible jail sentences as Turkey tried to contain an outbreak of suspected bird flu.

President Jacques Chirac today met his beleaguered prime minister, who was widely expected to be fired after France roundly rejected the European Union’s first constitution in a referendum that threw the Union’s future into disarray.

German Foreign Minister Joshka Fischer said yesterday that, were a referendum on the EU constitution held in Germany, it would pass.

AN appeal by Israel’s leader for French Jews to flee for their safety prompted an outcry in France yesterday, with lawmakers and Jewish groups urging Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to mind his own business.

Iraqi gunmen killed an Italian hostage – and threatened in a videotape to execute three other kidnapped Italians unless US troops pull out of the country.

Sobbing family members bearing flowers went to a shipyard today to identify the bodies of 15 people who plunged to their deaths when a crowded gangway leading to the luxury liner Queen Mary 2 suddenly collapsed.

Flags flew at half-mast throughout St Nazaire in France today as the industrial port city mourned the deaths of 15 people killed when a crowded gangway leading to the docked luxury ship Queen Mary 2 suddenly collapsed.

TESTS to identify whether a ba

The latest audio recording attributed to Osama bin Laden is not authentic, according to a report by a Swiss research institute.

A 68-year-old man was mistakenly declared dead and refrigerated for five hours at a funeral parlour before a worker noticed he was alive, a Bordeaux hospital said today.

The wife of kidnapped Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl appealed for his release tonight.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, says Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, is the only person capable of advancing the peace process in the Middle East.