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A French soldier patrolling a business neighborhood west of Paris was stabbed in the neck and injured on Saturday by a man who fled the scene and is being sought by police, President Francois Hollande said. The 23-year-old was patrolling in uniform with two other soldiers as part of France's Vigipirate anti-terror surveillance plan when he was approached from behind around 6 p.m. and attacked with a knife or a box-cutter. A police union spokesman said surveillance footage of the attacker showed him as tall and bearded, aged about 35, possibly of North African origin and wearing a white Arab-style...

12/20/10 As the Korean peninsula enters what U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates calls "a difficult and potentially dangerous time," the long-dormant Korean conflict is rumbling back into the public consciousness. Government officials from the U.S., South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and other states throughout the region are planning for the worst-case scenario: renewed war, perhaps nuclear, and a massive exodus from South Korea. If tensions continue to escalate, hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians living in South Korea will flee, sparking one the biggest mass-evacuations since the British and French pulled 338,000 troops out of Dunkirk in 1940. (snip)...

SLO, Norway — A wartime president honored for peace, Barack Obama on Thursday praised past Nobel winners for giving "voice to the voiceless." Obama's first stop in this chilly, damp Nordic capital where he formally becomes a Nobel laureate himself was the Norwegian Nobel Institute, where the Nobel committee meets to decide who gets the prestigious prize. The president will receive his Nobel Peace Prize medal and diploma at a ceremony later.

Paris stampeded by colourful cows in the name of art Mon Apr 24, 12:57 PM ET PARIS (AFP) - To the long list of sights tourists can see in Paris will be added 110 surprising ones from this week, on a temporary basis: cows in all manner of poses and colours, bringing a Pop Art stampede to the City of Light. The herd of fibreglass bovines will be spread through the centre of the capital from Thursday, including along some famous landmarks, such as the Champs-Elysees, the Garnier Opera and in the chic Saint-Germain district. Among them is a sculpture...

TRAPPES, France -- For the Muslims of Trappes, decades of praying in basements and cramped rooms in decrepit buildings will soon be over, once the finishing touches are applied to their new, hard-won mosque - a shiny domed structure with a minaret and wooden Moroccan doors. It took sit-in protests in front of City Hall in Trappes, some 45 miles southwest of Paris, to get approval for the mosque in 2000. With different customs, beliefs and often skin color, parts of France's large immigrant population have been shunted to the margins of French life and left to struggle with dual...

Darth Vader and Imperial troops to storm Paris boulevard Thu May 12, 2:09 PM ET PARIS (AFP) - Hundreds of Darth Vaders and imperial troops will invade a Paris boulevard Friday for a convention to mark the launch of the long-awaited final episode of director George Lucas' "Star Wars" series. The three-day convention, to be held at the Grand Rex cinema, opens with a costume parade by fans along the boulevard followed by a concert with more than 60 musicians playing the theme tunes from the films. "Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith" is set to get its world...

Paris theatres by explosion strongly damages - two hurt With an explosion in a theatre in Paris on the early Sunday morning two humans were hurt. The ground floor of the Empire theatre in 17. Arrondissment was destroyed by the detonation completely, communicated a police speaker. In the surrounding buildings the windowpanes burst. The cause of the explosion was not first well-known. Two passanten were easily hurt according to the data.

PARIS - President Jacques Chirac said Thursday the evidence against Iraq presented by US Secretary of State Colin Powell to the UN Security Council was not enough to change France's anti-war stance. "We refuse to think that war is inevitable," Chirac said. The evidence furnished by Powell "justifies continued work by the United Nations weapons inspectors. Iraq must answer their questions and cooperate more actively," Chirac said through a spokeswoman. Chirac spoke by telephone Thursday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Mexican President Vicente Fox, Syrian President Bashar Assad and several other leaders to defend France's position. Chirac appeared to be...