.France has left itself with a ‘home run’ to a Six Nations Grand Slam after the tournament leader held its nerve to beat Wales 26-20 at the Millennium Stadium.
Victory appeared all but assured at half-time with France 20-0 in front following two interception tries.
But Wales, just as it did in its dramatic come-from-behind 31-24 win over Scotland last time out, rallied and cut France’s lead to 20-13 heading into the final quarter under the Millennium’s closed retractable roof.
Replacement fly half Frederic Michalak scored a penalty nine minutes from time that, importantly, put France two scores in front.
However, against a team of France’s all-round quality Wales left itself with just too much of a mountain to climb on this occasion.
There was still time for wing Shane Williams, on his 33rd birthday, to become the first Wales player to score 50 tries after a typical jinking run.
And with just two minutes left, scrum half Morgan Parra kicked his third penalty after Wales was caught offside in front of its posts.
Fly half Stephen Jones converted and Wales, who had been 14-24 behind against Scotland with minutes remaining, had hopes of another great escape. .
But France, unlike Scotland, booted the ensuing kick-off ‘dead’ through Michalak, belying his reputation for recklessness, and with that South African referee Jonathan Kaplan blew for full-time.”
France, which has now won three games in a row for the first time under coach Marc Lievremont, can look forward to wrapping up the Championship with matches in Paris against Italy and England on March 13 and 20 respectively.
“We’ve just got to stop pushing the self-destruct button.
“It was like watching the ghost of the Wales-Scotland match appear before us.
“We lost all coherence, you could feel that at half-time even,” Lievremont said.
“I’m very happy to win three in a row, but my emotions are divided between happiness and relief.
“I’m very happy to win three in a row, but my emotions are divided between happiness and relief.
France: 26 (Palisson, Trinh-Duc tries; Parra 2 conversions, 3 penalties, Michalak penalty)
Wales: 20 (Halfpenny, S Williams tries; S Jones 2 conversions, 2 penalties)
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.The Federal Opposition has revealed that an inaccurate version of the Australian flag was flown at the previous month’s burial ceremony for Australian World War I soldiers in northern France.
The Veterans Affairs Department has confirmed problems with the flag involved one of the stars on the Southern Cross being in the wrong place.
The department says the problem is a matter for the Army, which conducted the ceremony in Fromelles.
It also had the Union Jack upside down and was a different shape.
“I would think that we wouldn’t be flying or ordering any flags and declaring and using them as an Australian flag when they were so incorrect,” Ms Markus said.
Opposition veteran’s affairs spokeswoman Louise Markus says she wants an explanation.
“The Minister for Veterans Affairs was there.
“I understand even the dimensions of the flag were not accurate. He needs to be able to explain why a flag that was not our Australian flag was flown as if it was. He was representing the Government.
The soldiers, who were killed in the 1916 Battle of Fromelles, are being buried at a cemetery close to where their remains were found in 2008.”
The first of 250 unknown British and Australian soldiers who died in World War I were reburied the previous month.
DNA tests have been carried out on the remains and the results are expected in March.
The cemetery was built close to a muddy field where the mass grave was discovered.
.Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen has delayed his European tour by six months after the 75-year-old injured his back while exercising, his promoters said.
The musical and literary giant known for songs such as So Long, Marianne, Suzanne and First We Take Manhattan suffered a compression injury to his lower back, AEG Worldwide said.
Cohen, who returned to the stage in 2008 after a 15-year absence, will postpone a tour that was set to start in France on March 1 and undergo four to six months of physical therapy, the promoters said in a statement.
The rescheduled tour will start in the northern French city of Caen on September 15.
“Doctors have confirmed that Mr Cohen is otherwise in terrific shape, thanks to years of exercise and careful diet, and simply needs appropriate time to recover from the lower back injury,” Cohen’s manager Robert Kory said.
He will then play in Katowice, Poland, on October 4, Moscow on October 7 and the Slovak capital Bratislava on October 13, with four more dates to be announced later, AEG Worldwide said. He will continue on to the French cities of Grenoble, Strasbourg, Marseille, Tours and Lille through September 25. .
Last Sunday, Cohen was honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the Grammy music awards.
But he returned to the stage in May 2008 and has since performed 191 sold-out shows.E.
More than 1,000 renditions of Cohen’s work have been recorded by artists as diverse as R. Cohen is also a published novelist and poet.M, Elton John, Willie Nelson and Tori Amos.
In September last year, Cohen collapsed on stage while playing the eastern Spanish city of Valencia due to a suspected case of food poisoning.
In September last year, Cohen collapsed on stage while playing the eastern Spanish city of Valencia due to a suspected case of food poisoning
.US airline Continental and five individuals have gone on trial in Paris accused of manslaughter over the crash of an Air France Concorde 10 years ago.
The French criminal court is examining conflicting explanations of why the supersonic jet smashed into a hotel in a ball of fire just after take-off from Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on July 25, 2000.
A former French civil aviation official and two former Concorde engineers face the same charge in the trial that is expected to last four months. .
The court will decide whether to side with investigators and technical experts who say the crash was caused by a strip of metal that fell off a Continental jet which took off shortly before the Concorde.
Witnesses saw flames coming from the jet as it was taking off from the airport.
But lawyers for Continental say they will prove the ill-fated jet was already on fire before it hit the metal debris.
Investigators say the strip shredded one tyre on Concorde’s landing gear, resulting in a blow-out and sending debris flying into an engine and a fuel tank to spark the fire.
Continental faces a maximum fine of 375,000 euros ($592,800) if found guilty.
Some of the relatives of the victims are represented at the trial, but most have already accepted compensation from Air France. The individuals face up to five years in jail and a fine of up to 75,000 euros ($118,575).
.The first of 250 unknown British and Australian soldiers who died during World War I will be reburied later this evening in France with full military honours.
A special ceremony will take place in the village of Fromelles close to the battlefield where more than 7,000 allied soldiers, most of them Australian, were killed in July 1916. .
“These men have laid at rest since that time in an unmarked grave.
Federal Veterans Affairs Minister Alan Griffin says the battle was the first major engagement involving Australian troops on the Western Front in WWI
“The circumstances were it was also the bloodiest 24 hours in Australia’s military history before or since,” he said.”
He says there will also be a ceremony marking the anniversary of the battle later this year. Their remains have recently been discovered and are now in a process of receiving a dignified burial that they so richly deserve.
“There will be a full ceremony today to inter the first of those soldiers,” he said.”
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“Over the next month most of the remaining remains will be interred, and then there will be a final ceremony at the anniversary of the battle in July of this year, where the last of those men will be interred with full military honours
.Former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin has been acquitted on charges of plotting a smear campaign against long-time rival Nicolas Sarkozy in order to sabotage his presidential bid.
Mr Villepin immediately vowed to return to the political fray, criticising Mr Sarkozy’s policies for “not giving results” and saying he would challenge the president from within their ruling UMP party.
He is now believed to be considering a run for president in 2012. .
The court ruled there were no grounds to convict the 56-year-old politician of complicity to slander Mr Sarkozy in 2004 when the two men were angling to succeed president Jacques Chirac.
The silver-haired politician said he now looked forward to “serving the French people and contributing in a spirit of unity to the recovery of France”.
“After many years of ordeal, my innocence has been recognised,” Mr Villepin said after walking out of the Paris courtroom.
Speaking on French television later, Mr Villepin said: “I want to offer an alternative to policies that I believe are not giving results..”
“We need new ideas, new proposals… I think that there are other possible answers within the ruling majority. Nicolas Sarkozy has his way.
“I want to be above the traditional partisan divisions.
“I want to be above the traditional partisan divisions.
Mr Villepin and four other defendants were accused of using falsified bank accounts to discredit Mr Sarkozy ahead of his party’s nomination for the 2007 presidential vote.
The French leader is also struggling with poor approval ratings.
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Mr Sarkozy’s name was on the bogus list of hundreds of account holders at the Clearstream financial clearing house which allegedly took bribes from the sale of French warships to Taiwan
.France captain Thierry Henry’s infamous handball in the World Cup play-off win over Ireland will go under the microscope on Monday (local time) when FIFA’s disciplinary commission assess the incident.
Two months to the day since the Barcelona man’s controversial intervention secured the 1-1 draw that took France to South Africa and ended Ireland’s World Cup dream in the second leg of their play-off tie in Paris, Henry will face up to the possibility of a fine or even a ban.
“I had a phone conversation with Thierry Henry,” Blatter said.
The meeting of the 21-man disciplinary panel, an independent body chaired by the Swiss Marcel Mathier, was announced by FIFA president Sepp Blatter in Cape Town on December 2 following an extraordinary executive committee meeting. It was a conversation between sportsmen.
“We didn’t talk about guilty or not guilty.”
Blatter’s diplomacy can be explained by the lack of precedent regarding retrospective punishments meted out to players. I didn’t say that he would be punished, I said he’d be the subject of an investigation.
Despite the media storm that followed the match, with the goal dubbed “The Hand of Frog” in the Irish press and Irish prime minister Brian Cowen calling for a replay, Henry is likely to escape lightly.
The disciplinary commission is likely to issue a symbolic penalty, as FIFA’s rules do not explicitly address incidents of such a nature and a heavy punishment would create an unwelcome precedent for world football’s governing body.
Blatter, meanwhile, has raised the possibility of awarding “moral compensation” to the Irish team.
Article 57 of FIFA’s disciplinary code concerns “anyone who insults someone in any way, especially by using offensive gestures or language, or who violates the principles of fair play or whose behaviour is unsporting in any other way” and refers to punishments ranging from warnings to the return of awards.
France was losing 1-0 to Ireland at the Stade de France on November 18, having won the first leg 1-0, when Henry teed up William Gallas for what proved to be the decisive goal after illegally controlling the ball with his hand.
“That could be a special trophy or a prize, we’ll have to see,” he said.
.Two women have died and 47 others were hurt in a bus crash in the south of England as ice and snow continues to throw the UK’s transport systems into chaos.
Snow and ice on the runways caused many flights to be cancelled.
All 129 passengers were taken off the plane and no injuries were reported.
A Ryanair plane overshot the runway as it landed at Prestwick Airport in the west of Scotland.
Thousands of people left stranded by a three-day Eurostar service cancellation formed long queues at London’s Saint Pancras International Station in the hope of finally getting to the continent.
As snow turns to ice, traffic conditions have become treacherous.
All Eurostar’s trains for Wednesday filled up by lunchtime.
Tempers frayed amid confusion over who would get priority on the reduced number of trains that began running on Tuesday.
Passengers were urged to turn up an hour early. The operator said it would continue to run a modified timetable on Thursday.
Meanwhile, floodwaters drenched most of Venice, as a combination of wind, rain and the lagoon city’s periodic tidal phenomenon saw water levels rise by 143 centimetres, a record for the year, officials said.
Many online shoppers shoppers in the UK have been told not to expect their goods by Christmas after snow stalled deliveries.
Heavy rains closed motorways in southern Spain and Portugal, where power lines were also cut by heavy winds overnight. .
In northern Germany, a seven-year-old boy was stopped by police, driving back to a parking lot having ploughed the snow off the street with his parents’ front loader.
Snowfall also forced school closures in northern Spain.
- ABC/AFP
.Services have returned almost to normal after three days of chaos on the Eurostar rail link between the UK and France.
But many parts of Europe continue to face severe transport disruptions and there have been more deaths as a severe cold snap sweeps the continent.
More than 80 people have died across Europe, including 42 in Poland and another 27 in Ukraine who have frozen to death.
Air, rail and road transport has been severely disrupted across northern Europe where as much as 50 centimetres of snow has fallen with more expected in the coming days.
Another 13 people died in car accidents in Austria, Finland and Germany, where temperatures dropped well below zero.
More freezing fog was expected at Stansted, north of London, and forecasters from Britain’s Met Office also issued severe weather warnings across the country, warning of icy roads and thick snow in eastern Scotland.
But after three days of cancelled services, Eurostar trains began running again between Brussels, Paris and London: an investigation has been launched into the disruption of services.
Britain’s Automobile Association said Monday was their busiest night for 25 years, with about 700 calls received every hour.
“There was no way that I was going to throw customers out into that,” said store managing director Deborah Strazza.
In Buckinghamshire, west of London, about 100 people, including 20 children, spent the night in the John Lewis department store after being snowed in.”
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.Paris’s top museums shut on Wednesday (local time) as staff went on strike, protesting against cost cuts that they see as a threat to priceless art.
Museums such as The Louvre, which houses the Mona Lisa at the heart of an art collection spanning millennia, help make France the world’s top tourist destination.
But staff say job cuts and lower subsidies are endangering this status.
The Louvre opened more than an hour late after workers met under its famous glass pyramid to discuss strike options.
“The fewer staff there are, the greater the risk that the museum opens in conditions that are unacceptable in terms of security - be it for the artworks, visitors or building,” said Didier Alaime, spokesperson of the CGT union’s culture section.
Its employees will meet tomorrow morning to decide on further action after talks with culture minister Frederic Mitterrand.
The Musee d’Orsay - home to Edouard Manet’s Olympia, some of Vincent Van Gogh’s most striking landscapes and room after room of sun-dappled impressionist paintings - was closed for the day.
The Rodin museum, which has spearheaded the protest movement, has been closed since last week.
Union workers are particularly angered by a government plan to fill only half the vacancies left by retired officials.
France’s government is restructuring its culture sector as part of broader budget cuts, arguing it is improving quality while controlling costs through audits and other initiatives.
“Today you have to ask yourself whether you should only do commercially successful exhibitions rather than shows that are maybe more narrow, more complicated,” Alaime said. .
France’s museums play a crucial part in pulling in the crowds.
Tourism accounts for around 6 per cent of gross domestic product in France, though the outlook for this year is gloomy as crisis-hit Europeans, Americans and Japanese stay at home.
Last year, more than 80 million people visited France; the Louvre alone sees about 6 million visitors a year.
Last year, more than 80 million people visited France; the Louvre alone sees about 6 million visitors a year