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French President Jacques Chirac gestures during a news conference following talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the German government guest house Schloss Meseberg some 70 kilometres north of Berlin February 23, 2007. The leaders of Germany and France said on Friday that they stood behind European plane maker Airbus and vowed to leave it to company management to decide on job cuts while stressing they should be balanced. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann (GERMANY)

Police fought running battles with rioters in central Paris last night as youths attacked officers with bangers, bottles and concrete at the end of a mass demonstration against a youth employment law that has caused a political crisis for Jacques Chirac's ruling party. Trade unionists and student leaders said up to three million people took to the streets across France yesterday - the second time in eight days that the country has seen its biggest street demonstrations in almost 40 years. The protests, including one by hundreds of thousands of students and scholars who marched through central Paris, were mainly...

PARIS: A bestselling new biography accuses French leader Jacques Chirac of presiding over a national drift into inertia, division and debt. The Tragedy of the President, by political journalist Franz-Olivier Giesbert, has sold almost 200,000 copies in two weeks - a new print run is under way - and is the talk of Paris for its damning yet affectionate portrait of the 73-year-old French President. According to Giesbert, who edits the Centre-Right news weekly Le Point, Chirac has "been transformed with age into the incarnation of French decline". Through a political career that began in 1962 in the cabinet of...

VISITING French President Jacques Chirac has praised Saudi reforms overnight, and urged respect between Islam and the West in a charm offensive that may win contracts from the world's biggest oil exporter. Addressing Saudi's consultative Shura council, which reformers hope will one day act as a parliament that balances the powers of the absolute monarchy, Mr Chirac said France could contribute to "spectacular development" in Saudi Arabia. "Saudi Arabia and France can unite efforts to foil those who, flaming the fire of fanaticism, incite an unfortunate 'clash of ignorance', described as a 'clash of civilisations'," said Mr Chirac, the first...

VIENNA, Austria - Her Majesty would not have been amused. Neither would President Bush or his French counterpart, Jacques Chirac, over a Vienna-wide art project depicting them naked and engaged in a sexual act with British Queen Elizabeth II. The work of “euroPART,” an independent artists’ group, the scenes being displayed on electronic billboards across the Austrian capital were also embarrassing for the government just days before the country assumes the European Union’s rotating presidency Sunday. Austrian media reported that the offending images were yanked Wednesday — just a day after they started flashing at motorists — on personal orders...

FRANCE has to heed the warning from the riots that rocked cities across the country last month, Pope Benedict said today, urging the French government to do more to promote racial integration. "The internal violence which left its mark on societies can only be condemned, however, it was a message, notably from youth," the pope said in an address during an audience with the new French ambassador to the Vatican. The riots in France's poor suburbs began after the accidental deaths of two youths apparently fleeing police but grew into protests by youngsters of North African and African origin as...