Youths fired buckshot at police in clashes in the French city of Amiens overnight yesterday, setting cars and a nursery school alight in a resurgence of urban unrest that president François Hollande said he would do everything to confront.

A schoolteacher has told a judge she almost doubled the mortgage on her home and gave her father €240,000 for a building site he never transferred into her name or that of her husband.

Heavy snow and sub-zero temperatures have swept across Europe killing at least eight homeless people, closing major airports and causing hundreds of road accidents.

Heavy snow also caused problems in airports across Europe today.

Europe was struggling to restore roads and railways today after heavy snow caused hundreds of accidents, halted flights, downed power lines in Poland and trapped more than 160 people overnight on a frozen German road.

Basque separatist group ETA clearly intended to cause casualties in a bomb attack it planned this week, Spain’s interior minister said today.

A new case of the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain has been found in a wild duck in a part of south-eastern France already hit by the disease, authorities said today.

The US government is getting ready for the possible arrival of bird flu, and has held “significant planning sessions” in case of an outbreak, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said yesterday in Berlin.

The H5N1 bird flu virus has killed 15 wild swans in south-eastern France where two wild ducks and a turkey farm were contaminated by the disease.

The H5 bird flu virus turned up on a turkey farm in south-eastern France, but it was not immediately clear whether it was the deadly strain, France’s agriculture minister said today.

A second case of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus has been confirmed in a wild duck in France, Agriculture Ministry officials said today.

Snowstorms sweeping across Europe stranded hundreds of motorists in northern France and brought chaos to other countries today.

Some 3,000 police fanned out around Paris today ahead of feared weekend attacks on high-profile targets such as the Eiffel Tower, as the number of vehicles torched overnight rose slightly elsewhere in France, according to officials.

At least 20 people were killed today when a German tour bus overturned on a road in the rain in south-eastern France.