An Afghan migrant has died after being hit by a truck near the French coastal city of Calais.

The Sunday’s Well Rebels, Ireland’s only Mixed Ability Rugby team, travel to England next week to compete in the first Mixed Ability Rugby World Tournament (MARWT).

ARRAS, in the Pas-de-Calais, has the rat as its symbol. Grain stored there in medieval times attracted the rodents and, perhaps, ‘un rat’ was a pun on the city’s name.

Four men suspected of being members of the Basque separatist group Eta, including a suspected military chief, have been arrested in northern France, a judicial official said today.

FRENCH police cleared out, then bulldozed, a squalid forest camp near the northern city of Calais yesterday, detaining hundreds of illegal immigrants who had hoped to slip across the English Channel into Britain.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, aiming to push through his reform-driven renaissance of the country, looked set to win a powerful majority as the French voted in today’s run-off elections for parliament. The only question was the size of the victory – large or massive.

Rioters shrugged off emergency laws that took effect today, as they looted and burned two superstores, set fire to a newspaper office and paralysed France’s second-largest city’s subway system with a firebomb.

A train collided with a truck carrying gas bottles in northern France today, setting off explosions and injuring at least two people, authorities said.

Ten of 17 defendants were convicted today of raping and abusing a group of children in a high-profile paedophilia case that has riveted France for weeks.

Police have evicted about 70 Iraqi and Afghan refugees desperate to enter Britain from a church in Calais, ending a five-day stand-off.

DOZENS of desperate refugees occupying a church in the French port of Calais threatened to kill themselves yesterday if police moved to forcibly evict them.

FRENCH government officials yesterday offered a five-day “reprieve” to a group of refugees staging a sit-in at a French church over the closure of the Sangatte holding centre to new arrivals.

Two villages in northern France were evacuated today as bomb squads prepared to defuse an unexploded 1,100 pound bomb dropped by the US air force during the Second World War.