A lone thief stole five paintings worth about €100m in an overnight raid on a Paris art museum.

The Vatican today tried to defuse growing anger over remarks by the pope's top aide that the paedophile priest scandal was caused by homosexuality and not the church's celibacy rule.

A bike-sharing scheme launched in Paris a year ago has proved so popular that the city’s mayor wants to extend it to include electric cars.

Paris’s historically low-rise skyline could get a new look after the city council agreed to look at easing building height restrictions.

The first round of French local elections today is being seen as a tough test for conservative president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose popularity has plummeted during 10 months in office.

A PARCEL bomb addressed to a lawyer killed his secretary and injured five other people yesterday in central Paris.

Far-right extremists were suspected of sending a parcel bomb that killed a secretary in a Paris lawyers’ office today.

One of the world’s most glamorous couples, Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria and basketball champion Tony Parker, married today in a civil ceremony in Paris that kicked off a weekend wedding extravaganza expected to include church vows and a star-studded chateau bash.

Union leaders failed in talks today to force France’s prime minister to withdraw a divisive new jobs law and said they would go ahead with plans for a nationwide strike next week.

France’s embattled prime minister faced a tough and potentially pivotal meeting today with unions demanding that he toss out a divisive new jobs law after protests turned bloody and left a Paris park littered with shattered glass and ashes.

LONDON was celebrating last night as it won the right to host the 2012 Olympic Games after pulling off a spectacular victory.

French president Jacques Chirac claimed he would offer his personal congratulations to Queen Elizabeth II and Tony Blair after London pipped Paris in the race to stage the 2012 Olympics.

Paris turned back the clock today for a grand fete to remember the tears, the joy and the euphoria that heralded the liberation of the French capital 60 years ago as it threw off the shackles of Nazi occupation.

Arsonists burned a Jewish community centre in eastern Paris before dawn yesterday, leaving behind red graffiti with menacing anti-Semitic messages such as “Jews get out”, police said.

Paris’ mayor Bertrand Delanoe said he was “saddened and sickened” by anti-Semitic graffiti, including a sign saying “Death to Jews”, found scrawled on a wall on the grounds of Notre Dame Cathedral.

Anti-Semitic graffiti was found scrawled on a wall in the grounds of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris today.

As many as 400 unidentified or abandoned bodies, some in refrigerated trucks, awaited temporary burial today outside Paris as authorities struggled to cope with the fall-out from France’s deadly heat wave.

Parisians who have to spend their summer in the French capital will nonetheless have a chance to stroll on the sand and relax under palm trees in deck chairs.

THE Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe was recovering in hospital today after being stabbed during an overnight concert at City Hall, city officials and firefighters said.

An attacker today stabbed Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe in the abdomen at city hall, where a late-night concert had been organised, fire-fighters said.

The future of the millennium wheel in the heart of Paris is to be settled by a court after the owner defied an order from the mayor to dismantle it.

THE ‘battle for Paris’ drew to a cliffhanging close yesterday as stragglers cast their final votes in municipal polls which could see the end of 130 years of right wing rule in the French capital.

French socialists today moved into position to wrest Paris from the right in the first round of municipal elections but failed to carry the country as polls had predicted.