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Garnier, one of L'Oreal's top brands, has been accused of instructing an employment agency to hire only slim women of the "BBR type" as hostesses to hand out leaflets and samples of shampoos for a supermarket promotion campaign in 2001.

A BRITISH military helicopter was brought down in Basra today, killing four people aboard, officials said, and sparking clashes between troops and youths chanting militia slogans and hurling petrol bombs.

PALESTINIAN leader Mahmud Abbas overnight called "dangerous and surprising" Jordan's discovery of a cache of weapons attributed to Hamas.

DOZENS of Nepalese pro-democracy protesters were injured today when police fired on thousands who defied a curfew to march on the centre of the capital.

MOST Danes hold Muslim clerics responsible for the furore over cartoons of Prophet Mohammed that has engulfed the Muslim world, a poll has shown, revealing increasing hostility to Islam in Denmark. Danish imams have been harshly criticised for leading two delegations, representing 27 Muslim organisations, on trips to Egypt and Lebanon in December to rally support for their protests against the 12 cartoons that were first published in Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in September.

AN Egyptian cleric's controversial fatwa claiming that nudity during sexual intercourse invalidates a marriage has uncovered a rift among Islamic scholars...

THE French have had enough of the riots that are sullying their international reputation as the land of civility, as well as liberty, equality and fraternity. By the end of last week, there was a collective sense of relief as the nightly toll of burnt cars, and torched schools, nurseries, gyms, warehouses and small businesses rapidly diminished. A few hundred - as opposed to well over a thousand - incinerated cars and a significant drop in violence in the troubled suburbs of Paris signalled for most French citizens a welcome break from the fortnight of violence that had threatened the...

"As an Islamic movement it can set the entire region afire, overturn the most unstable regimes, and disturb the most solid," Foucault wrote enthusiastically. "Islam — which is not simply a religion, but an entire way of life, an adherence to a history and a civilization — has a good chance to become a gigantic powder keg, at the level of hundreds of millions of men"

A former chief UN weapons inspector has compared British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush to the Nazi war criminals who started World War II. Scott Ritter, a former US marine, said the US and Britain's "aggressive warfare" in Iraq was similar to German actions in Europe 66 years ago. "Both these men could be pulled up as war criminals for engaging in actions that we condemned Germany in 1946 for doing the same thing," he said. "Tony Blair and George Bush are guilty of the crime of planning and committing aggressive warfare." [snip] He said intelligence...