.The Black Eyed Peas were mistakenly declared best international group at France’s top music awards.
Choreographer Kamel Ouali presented the US band with the prize at the NRJ Awards in Cannes on Saturday. .
Last year Katy Perry was mistakenly given the trophy for best international song when it should have gone to Rihanna.
The prize was then given to the real winners, German band Tokio Hotel.
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.French climber Alain Robert, known as Spiderman for his death-defying antics, has set his sights on scaling Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower, a report said.
The Gulf emirate of Dubai opened the glistening 828 metre concrete, glass and steel skyscraper on January 4 this year.
“I’ll have to do it …
“I know the people of Dubai, they are interested [in seeing me climb the skyscraper]. maybe between January and April 2011,” Mr Robert was quoted as saying by Malaysia’s official Bernama news agency.”
The tower, the tallest in the world, was named in honour of the Abu Dhabi leader whose billions of dollars bailed out Dubai from its financial crisis last year.
He has climbed skyscrapers including the Empire State Building, the Sears Tower and Taipei 101, according to his website.
Mr Robert, 47, was in Malaysia to receive an award for his extraordinary feats in scaling tall buildings.
“The problem in Dubai is the hot weather [of] up to 40 degrees Celsius,” he said.
He admitted that climbing the Dubai tower will be a tough mission because of the Middle Eastern heat. For me, climbing is as important as eating and breathing.
“My biggest fear is to waste my time on Earth. Climbing skyscrapers is my lifetime love and passion. .
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.A French court found the niece of a British minister guilty of murder and has sentenced her to 15 years in jail for the alcohol-fuelled slaying of a young Frenchman she had befriended in a bar.
Jessica Davies, 30, was also ordered to pay 105,000 euros ($165,452) in damages to the family of the dead man.
Davies told the court close to Paris that she had knifed Olivier Mugnier, 24, to death in November 2007, but said her recollection of the multiple stabbings had vanished “into a black hole”. Her uncle is Quentin Davies, the British minister for defence equipment and support.
Davies, a former model, was born in London and has a French mother and British father. Later that night she phoned the emergency services and when police arrived they found her cradling the young man’s naked body.
Davies met Mr Mugnier by chance in an Irish bar on the outskirts of Paris and took him back to her flat.
French media said she told police: “I am a monster…”
It emerged that she had been drinking heavily and had also taken a large quantity of medicines prescribed to treat her depression. I wanted to cut him a bit and [the knife] went right in.
The court heard that Davies had been traumatised by the separation of her parents during her adolescence and had once tried to commit suicide, using the same knife she later turned on Mr Mugnier. .
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.Northern Europe is bracing for what is expected to be the coldest day yet of the big freeze affecting the region.
Conditions have left many people dead and another Eurostar train has been stranded in the Channel Tunnel. .
The Arctic freeze has seen temperatures in central Sweden plunge to between minus 30 and minus 40 degrees Celsius, the coldest weather in more than 25 years.
In Germany, at least nine homeless men have frozen to death.
Around 10,000 schools shut down in Britain and will not reopen until well into next week.
Gas supplies are running low in the UK where the national grid has had to start rationing supplies of energy.
One Eurostar train arrived in London two hours late after breaking down in the Channel Tunnel, while four others were cancelled after snow got into the engines.
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The average weather in Britain recently has been only 2 degrees warmer than the North Pole
.Revellers have started ringing in the New Year across the globe with spectacular fireworks displays and massive parties hosted by world capitals against a backdrop of tightened security.
Party-goers in the South Pacific were the first to raise their glasses to 2010, leading the world into a new decade after one scarred by war, terrorist attacks, natural disaster and financial turmoil.5 million people crowded the Sydney Harbour foreshore to watch a vast array of fireworks burst into the night sky at midnight, launched from the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge and four barges on the water.
In Australia, about 1.
Paris’s Eiffel Tower was ready to be transformed into a multicoloured light show for its party while in Berlin more than 1 million revellers were expected on the boulevard leading to the Brandenburg Gate, the symbol of German unity, with live bands and DJs to crank up the party.
Thousands of people crammed into Hong Kong’s harbour, where 9,000 fireworks were unleashed in a display that lasted close toly five minutes, shot off from the city’s tallest skyscraper as well as other buildings
But in Thailand, police banned fireworks after a New Year’s Eve blaze at a Bangkok nightclub a year ago killed 65 people.
In New York, a downpour of confetti was to mark midnight at a traditional mass celebration in Times Square in the heart of Manhattan.
Celebrations in Britain centred on the London Eye, the giant wheel across the River Thames from the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, the world’s most famous clock.
“It will be a full fledged deployment of resources,” city police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
But after security jitters rekindled by a Christmas Day bomb plot against a passenger jet claimed by Al Qaeda, undercover police, surveillance cameras and radiation and biological detection equipment were to monitor the crowds.”
In Finland, a lone gunman chose the last day of the year to kill four people in a rampage in a shopping mall. “We assume here that New York is the number one terrorist target in America.
The US embassy in Indonesia said meanwhile it had received a warning of a possible attack on the resort island of Bali, the scene of multiple bombings targeting Westerners, but local authorities denied knowledge of any alert. He also murdered a former girlfriend and was later found dead himself. .
In Pakistan, where the Taliban’s bloody campaign rebounded in 2009, spirits were dampened in the city of Karachi by a deadly suicide attack during a holy Shiite Muslim ceremony on Monday that killed 43 people.
For Cyprus, New Year’s Eve was the last chance to smoke in pubs, clubs and cafes, with new anti-smoking law in force from January 1.
In neighbouring Afghanistan, soldiers maintained their alert after two deadly militant attacks claimed the lives of eight Americans and five Canadians, while two French journalists were reported kidnapped by Taliban.
“New Year’s Day, the 1st of January 2010, marks the beginning of the most important year in our country since 1994,” Zuma said.
And in South Africa, President Jacob Zuma used his New Year message to call for unity for the 2010 football World Cup - the first ever to be held in Africa. “We have to put the culture of negativity behind us.
“It must be the year in which we work together to make the Soccer World Cup the biggest turning point in the marketing of our country,” he said.
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New Year’s Eve also presented much of the world with a blue moon - the second full moon appearing in a calendar month - for only the second time in close toly two decades
.Veteran French rocker Johnny Hallyday has been released from a Los Angeles hospital where he underwent a back operation earlier this month, his publicists said.
“The doctors judged that Johnny Hallyday’s current state of health has improved and justifies a return home to his family while he continues to receive the medical treatment he needs,” they said.
He will spend Christmas at his home in Los Angeles with his wife Laeticia and two daughters.
He has begun legal action to determine whether the surgeon who performed the operation in Paris was at fault and earlier this week submitted a letter to French judges declaring that he had “come close to death”.
Hallyday, 66, who had been due to resume a concert tour in January, was admitted to the Cedars-Sinai hospital on December 7 suffering complications after an earlier operation in Paris.
His health problems have forced the cancellation of the remainder of his concert tour, prompting widespread speculation about the likely financial impact for insurers and promoters.
Hallyday, one of France’s most popular entertainers in a career spanning almost 50 years, is particularly famous for his energetic live performances.
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.Four Eurostar trains with hundreds of people on board have broken down in the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.
The trains were on their way from Paris to London when they suffered serious technical failures and rescue locomotives are being sent down the tunnel to get the passengers out.
A Eurostar spokesman says the breakdowns happened when the trains entered the tunnel where temperatures were higher compared to the sub-zero conditions in northern France.
A total of around 1,200 to 1,300 passengers from two of the trains in one tunnel are being evacuated on an empty vehicle shuttle being sent to collect them from the other tunnel, the spokesman said.
“Currently the tunnels are closed,” the spokesman said, calling the situation “unprecedented”.
“At the moment we’re not giving timescales.
The third train, in the other tunnel, is scheduled to be pushed out later. We hope to get this done as quickly as possible,” the spokesman said.
The spokesman said the passengers are safe and well as the heating and electricity systems in the carriages are functioning.
A fourth passenger train had earlier broken down and was pulled to its London terminus. They have been stranded for several hours and its not yet clear when they’ll reach London.
But for the hundreds on board each train it could be a long night.
“Subsequent to that, as the snow stopped falling, we were preparing to run shuttles through with passengers from the UK, and we had a succession of Eurostar breakdowns in the tunnel.
“The weather in France was absolutely appalling and we were cooperating with the French authorities to limit the amount of traffic getting through to the French motorways,” the spokesman said. .
“There are currently three Eurostars broken down blocking both tunnels.
“That’s an awful lot of people to move safely from one train into a service tunnel and then from that service tunnel through on to a shuttle.
“We’re talking about 600 to 700 people on each train.”
- AFP/BBC
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“Nobody’s been transferred, we’re working it through as safely and as smoothly as we can
.A protester who presented himself as an Iraqi journalist in exile has hurled a shoe at the colleague who a year ago found fame by throwing his own footwear at then-US president George W Bush.
Television reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi was in Paris to promote his campaign for the “victims of the US occupation in Iraq” when a fellow Iraqi critic turned the tables on him, shouting: “Here’s another shoe for you.
The shoe was thrown hard at Mr Zaidi’s head, but he managed to dodge it and it bounced harmlessly off a curtain erected behind the speakers by the event’s hosts, the Foreign Press Welcome Centre in Paris.”
The thickset man with an Iraqi accent made a brief speech in Arabic during the question-and-answer session, defending US policy and accusing Mr Zaidi of “working for dictatorship in Iraq”, before throwing his shoe.
“When I used this method, it was against the occupation.
Mr Zaidi’s brother grappled with and slapped the man, whom witnesses later described as an asylum-seeker they know only as Khayat, before venue staff and bystanders separated them and the aggressor was hustled away.
“I always knew the occupier and his lackeys would stop at nothing to get to me. I did not use it against a compatriot,” Mr Zaidi said.
Mr Zaidi, a journalist for Iraq’s Al-Baghdadia television, threw his shoes at Mr Bush during the US leader’s final visit to Iraq, protesting the six-year-old occupation with a cry of: “This is the farewell kiss, you dog.”
Following the commotion, the news conference continued with Mr Zaidi taking questions about his famous assault on Mr Bush on December 14 last year, which was shown around the world and made him a hero in the Arab world.
Asked about the huge sums and even offers of marriage made by admirers during his jail term, Mr Zaidi said he had asked his family to refuse all gifts “until I find a way that they can be passed on to the people of Iraq”. .
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.A second auction of art and furniture once owned by Yves Saint Laurent has raised 8.9 million euros ($14.
The first sale of treasures belonging to Saint Laurent and his companion Pierre Berge raised more than 370 million euros in February in one of the biggest auctions Paris has ever seen.45 million), Christie’s says.
The November 17-20 auction featured almost 1,200 works that used to decorate various properties owned by the couple, including Chateau Gabriel - a 19th century Normandy country house.
Christie’s had estimated the second sale would rake in between 3 and 4 million euros, with all the proceeds going to an AIDS research charity.
Among the objects that saw heavy bidding were a pair of armchairs, made at the start of the 19th century, which eventually sold for 241,000 euros.
Christie’s says 98 per cent of the lots have found a buyer. It was valued at between 300 and 500 euros, but sold for 109,000 euros.
Another unexpected hit was an umbrella holder, which used to stand at the entrance to Saint Laurent and Berge’s Paris apartment.
Berge decided to sell it all after Saint Laurent died last year.
Saint Laurent and Berge built up one of the world’s biggest and most important private art collections over some five decades.
.Chancellor Angela Merkel has become the first German leader to attend a service in France on Remembrance Day.
Two days after French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Ms Merkel stood together in the German capital to celebrate 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, they were together again and this time it was the German Chancellor herself making history.
Arriving together at the Arc De Triomphe in Paris, Ms Merkel and Mr Sarkozy laid a wreath at France’s tomb of the unknown soldier and rekindled the flame that guards it.
She became the first German chancellor to attend Armistice commemorations in France.
In the UK, Queen Elizabeth II led Britain in marking the day at Westminster Abbey in central London, at a service also attended by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Saluting Ms Merkel’s participation in the ceremony, Mr Sarkozy said the friendship between the two countries was a treasure to be protected through increasingly close political cooperation.
Of the 8 million British soldiers who fought in World War I, only 108-year-old Royal Navy veteran Claude Choules, who lives in Perth, remains.
The final three World War I veterans living in Britain all died earlier this year.
In Afghanistan, British troops on the front line also paused to commemorate the fallen.
But Choules shunned Wednesday’s Armistice Day commemorations there because he is against the glorification of war, his daughter said.