.French police have arrested Agathe Habyarimana, the widow of Rwanda’s assassinated ex-president, who is wanted in her homeland as one of the alleged masterminds of the 1994 genocide.
The arrest came just five days after President Nicolas Sarkozy made the first trip by a French leader to Rwanda since the genocide.
French police – acting on an international arrest warrant issued by Rwanda – arrested Habyarimana at her home in Courcouronnes, south of Paris on Tuesday morning.
Habyarimana has lived in a Paris suburb for 12 years, having fled Rwanda after her husband Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in April 1994 and his supporters launched a massacre of 800,000 civilians.
The Tutsi-led government in Kigali has accused the 67-year-old of being a member of the Hutu inner circle that planned the mass killings. .
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She has steadfastly denied the charge
.A pay telephone line for French Roman Catholics to confess their sins has drawn criticism from bishops.
“For advice on confessing, press one. To listen to some confessions, press three,” says a soothing male voice, welcoming the caller to “Le Fil du Seigneur”, or “The Line of the Lord” service. To confess, press two.34 euros a minute.
“In case of serious or mortal sins – that is, sins that have cut you off from Christ our Lord, it is indispensable to confide in a priest,” warns the service, which charges 0.”
The service was set up this month at the beginning of the Christian fasting period of Lent by a group of Catholics working for AABAS, a small Paris company that provides telephone messaging services, its creator told AFP.
The Conference of French Bishops warn in a statement that the line has “no approval from the Catholic Church in France.
She asked for her second name not be cited because she had received threats about the service.
The creator, known only as Camille, says it does not offer absolution for sins, which only a priest can provide.
It is believed the line received about 300 calls in its first week.
“The idea is to confess sins which are not capital sins, but minor sins, directly to God,” she said.
The bishops say telephone services have a role to play in lending an ear to the aged, isolated or those with disabilities, but “it is unacceptable to allow confusion over the notion of confession”.
Callers do not talk to a person but are offered an “atmosphere of piety and reflection,” where they can listen to prayers, music and other people’s confessions and can opt to record their own.”
Camille says part of the money received for the calls goes to charity. .
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.Unseeded Frenchman Michael Llodra has pulled off an upset at the ATP Open 13 tournament in Marseille, beating top seed and world number eight Robin Soderling of Sweden 7-6 (7-2), 6-4.
“Against this kind of player you have to seize every opportunity, which I think I managed to do,” the 29-year-old said after the quarter-final match. After winning the first set, I knew he would be nervous.
“I made a lot of effort to come back and win the tie-break.”
Llodra, who beat Cypriot Marcos Baghdatis in the previous round, will play Germany’s unseeded Mischa Zverev in the last four after he beat 19-year-old Frenchman Guillaume Rufin 7-5, 6-7 (4-/7), 6-3. So I took this opportunity to break in the second set.
That means a repeat of last year’s Tsonga-Llodra final remains very much a possibility.
World number 10 Jo-Wilfried Tsonga also came through his quarter-final against Ukraine’s Illya Marchenko, winning 6-3, 6-4.
The 24-year-old’s powerful serve was in full working order and after taking the first set 6-3 he sewed up victory in one hour and 34 minutes.
Current title-holder Tsonga broke Marchenko’s serve in the fourth game of the first set to lead 3-1.
“Even if I didn’t play well, I’m glad I won.
“Against him (Marchenko), you have to be focused all the time because as soon as you drop your game, he immediately takes advantage,” Tsonga said.”
In the other all-French quarter-final, eighth seed Julien Benneteau beat third-seeded world number 13 Gael Monfils 6-3, 7-5.
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.Yvo de Boer, head of the UN’s climate change convention, will resign as of July 1, his office announced.
De Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will join the consultancy group KPMG as global adviser on climate and sustainability and work with a number of universities, the UNFCCC secretariat said.
The announcement came nearly two months after the Copenhagen summit on climate change, seen even by its supporters as a disappointment and by its critics as a chaotic failure. .
The UNFCCC, an offshoot of the 1992 Rio summit, gathers 194 nations in the search for combating the causes of man-made climate change and easing its effects.
“I believe the time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge, working on climate and sustainability with the private sector and academia,” he said.
In a statement Mr de Boer said it had been a “difficult decision” to step down.
“Copenhagen did not provide us with a clear agreement in legal terms, but the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming.”
A Dutch national, Mr de Boer was appointed the UNFCCC’s executive secretary in September 2006.
“This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen.
Instead, after nearly two weeks of talks, the summit was only able to yield a general agreement on limiting warming to two degrees Celsius.
He had pinned hopes on a breakthrough in Copenhagen that would unlock a new treaty on climate change that would take effect after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol’s current pledges expire.
The document did not gain approval at a plenary session of the UNFCCC, and it has so far failed to gain the official endorsement of major developing emitters which helped to craft it.
The accord did not spell out the means for achieving this goal, and the pledges made under it are only voluntary.
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.Yvo de Boer, head of the UN’s climate change convention, will resign as of July 1, his office announced.
De Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will join the consultancy group KPMG as global adviser on climate and sustainability and work with a number of universities, the UNFCCC secretariat said.
The announcement came nearly two months after the Copenhagen summit on climate change, seen even by its supporters as a disappointment and by its critics as a chaotic failure. .
The UNFCCC, an offshoot of the 1992 Rio summit, gathers 194 nations in the search for combating the causes of man-made climate change and easing its effects.
“I believe the time is ripe for me to take on a new challenge, working on climate and sustainability with the private sector and academia,” he said.
In a statement Mr de Boer said it had been a “difficult decision” to step down.
“Copenhagen did not provide us with a clear agreement in legal terms, but the political commitment and sense of direction toward a low-emissions world are overwhelming.”
A Dutch national, Mr de Boer was appointed the UNFCCC’s executive secretary in September 2006.
“This calls for new partnerships with the business sector and I now have the chance to help make this happen.
Instead, after nearly two weeks of talks, the summit was only able to yield a general agreement on limiting warming to two degrees Celsius.
He had pinned hopes on a breakthrough in Copenhagen that would unlock a new treaty on climate change that would take effect after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol’s current pledges expire.
The document did not gain approval at a plenary session of the UNFCCC, and it has so far failed to gain the official endorsement of major developing emitters which helped to craft it.
The accord did not spell out the means for achieving this goal, and the pledges made under it are only voluntary.
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.New Manchester City recruit Patrick Vieira says he has a “100 per cent chance” of playing for France at next summer’s World Cup finals, despite having not represented his country since June 2009.
“As I’m an optimist, I’m going to say 100 per cent,” he said in response to a question about his chances of playing in South Africa on the Canal Football Club television show overnight.
“The desire is there, it’s my goal.”
Vieira, who has yet to play for his new club, admitted that he had received “no guarantees” from France coach Raymond Domenech, who he met shortly before Christmas, and conceded that the situation “is not as simple as that”. In my head, I don’t see myself missing the World Cup.
“You have to play, which is the important thing for me.
“But he said that as soon as I’m playing, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be selected,” said Vieira, whose last France appearance saw him captain Les Bleus to a 1-0 defeat against Nigeria in Saint-Etienne last June. I have five months.
He joined City from reigning Italian champion Inter Milan on January 8.”
Vieira, 33, was a member of the France team that won the 1998 World Cup and the 2000 European Championship and has 107 caps.
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.Filmmaker Roman Polanski won more damages on Tuesday (local time) from French publications that printed photographs of him at his Swiss home where he is confined pending extradition proceedings in a child sex case.
A Paris court convicted the magazines VSD and Voici and the weekly newspaper Journal de Dimanche of breaching Polanski’s privacy by publishing zoom-lens pictures of him and his children without permission.
Polanski is under house arrest while Swiss authorities consider a demand by the United States to deport him to face charges of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl in California in 1977.
It ordered them to pay a total of 16,000 euros ($24,700) in fines, costs and compensation to him and his wife, French actress Emmanuelle Seigner.
.A French software engineer said on Friday he was claiming a world record for calculating Pi, the constant that has fascinated mathematicians for millennia.
Fabrice Bellard said he used an inexpensive desktop computer – and not a supercomputer used in past records – to calculate Pi to close toly 2.
That is around 123 billion digits more than the previous record set last August by Japanese professor Daisuke Takahashi, he said.7 trillion decimal places.577 billion digits.
Professor Takahashi, using a T2K Open Supercomputer, took 29 hours to crunch Pi to 2.
The gear cost “a bit less than 2,000 euros” ($3,123), Mr Bellard, who earns a living as a software consultant in digital television in Paris, said in an email exchange.
Mr Bellard took 131 days, comprising 103 for the computation in binary digits, 13 days for verification, 12 days to convert the binary digits to a base of 10 and three final days to check the conversion. The only unusual thing is that it has five 1.
“It is a completely standard PC. Mainstream PCs generally have only one 1-teraoctet disk.5-teraoctet hard disks.
Extracts of the 2,699,999,990,000-digit outcome have been published so that they can be compared to preceding records in order to gain independent verification, Mr Bellard said.”
Bellard has placed on his website details of the achievement, including the use of a high-powered mathematical engine called the Chudnovsky algorithm that chewed through the computation. .
Files containing the digits are also being offered to any outside organisation keen on hosting the record, he said..14159. in a string whose digits are believed never to repeat or end..
“Optimising these algorithms to get good performance is a difficult programming challenge,” he said.
Bellard said he was “not especially interested” in Pi’s digits but more in taking up the gauntlet of writing the software to carry out the arithmetic.
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.France has deported to Egypt a radical imam who for months had been inciting followers in Paris area mosques to rise up against the West, the government said.
Described as dangerous, Ali Ibrahim Al-Sudani was detained and sent back to Egypt under an emergency deportation order, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said in a statement. .
The Egyptian national was the 29th imam or Islamic preacher to have been deported from France since 2001, according to the interior ministry.
Mr Sudani, aged around 27, showed “contempt for our society’s values and incited violence,” he added.
French security agencies had been tracking Sudani since 2008 and found his Jihadist teachings to be “quite hardline,” said an official close to the case.
In all, 129 Islamic radicals have been expelled from French territory, it added.
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.Sudanese journalist Lubna Ahmed Hussein says she has donned a full Islamic veil to sneak out of Sudan and travel to France, two months after she was freed from jail for wearing trousers.
On a visit to Paris to promote her new book, Ms Hussein accused Khartoum of trying to block her departure and said she was determined to exercise her right to travel freely.
“They wanted to prevent me from leaving; I resorted to the niqab and managed to leave,” said Ms Hussein, who was jailed for a day in September for violating Sudan’s clothing decency laws by wearing trousers.
“I did not flee Sudan.
“I requested documents to be able to leave, to be able to travel, and this is the only means I found to be able to leave Sudan,” she said. . I am a Sudanese citizen.
Ms Hussein faced a punishment of 40 lashes when she was convicted in July for wearing her green trousers in public.
After she refused to pay the fine, Ms Hussein served a one-day jail sentence.
But a Sudanese court in September ordered her to pay a fine instead, while 10 of the 12 other women arrested with her at a Khartoum restaurant on July 3 were lashed.
The Paris welcome for Ms Hussein came as France was debating measures to prohibit women from wearing the full Islamic veil, which President Nicolas Sarkozy has said is a symbol of women’s subservience.
More than 43,000 women were arrested last year in the Khartoum region by police tasked with enforcing Sudan’s laws on indecent clothing for women.
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