.At least 50 people have been killed in violent storms that have caused chaos in Europe.
Most were killed in France, but Spain, Germany and Portugal have all recorded fatalities.
Packing winds just under 150 kilometres an hour, the intense low caused havoc in many countries.
In the French Vendee region, houses were inundated and people had to be rescued by helicopter from their roofs.
Flooding was most serious in France and Spain and a 10-year-old boy was one of a number of people killed by falling trees.
Up to a million people were without power.
At least a dozen people in France remain unaccounted for and there have been at least 60 injuries.
The UK is on flood alert and authorities in Denmark are on standby as the storm continues to track north.
.A move by a French fast-food chain to offer halal menus at a handful of restaurants has some politicians fuming, in the latest row over France’s increasingly visible Muslim minority.
The Quick chain has taken pork off its menu in eateries in Roubaix, northern France, as well as in Marseille and in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil, to try to tap into the growing market of Muslim customers.
But politicians have complained that the switch to no-bacon hamburgers, launched three months ago, is depriving non-Muslims of their right to the standard menu.
“I’m not bothered by the fact that there is a halal menu,” he said.
Roubaix Mayor Rene Vandierendonck plans to file a complaint for discrimination, arguing that non-Muslims now have to trek to the suburbs to get a bacon burger, as Quick is the only fast-food place in the city centre.”
French far-right politician Marine Le Pen suggested the Halal menus were providing a financial boost to Muslim organisations that certify meat as having been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic practices.
“But this is going too far because it is the only menu on offer and it has become discrimination.
Ms Le Pen condemned the menu switch as “unacceptable” and denounced a form of “Islamisation”.
But in eight of Quick’s 350 restaurants, the “Strong Bacon” double cheese hamburger is not on offer, replaced by a halal version with smoked turkey.
In cities and towns across France, Quick’s red-and-white signs are as familiar a sight as McDonald’s golden arches, offering the usual array of hamburgers, french fries and soft drinks.
The government has frowned on Quick’s decision, suggesting that it was a form of “communautarisme”, a pejorative term suggesting that a group is exhibiting a ghetto attitude.
One customer was quoted in Le Parisien daily as saying that “it’s just not the same”.
President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government is drafting legislation to ban the wearing of the full Islamic veil and is sponsoring a debate on national identity that has exposed fears about immigration.
- Series of controversies -
Home to Europe’s biggest Muslim minority, estimated at between 5 and 6 million, France has been caught up in a series of controversies that have highlighted its unease with Islam in a strictly secular society.
Responding to the hubbub over the halal hamburgers, the head of France’s Muslim Council called for reason to prevail and announced that he planned to meet with Quick’s owners.
Responding to the hubbub over the halal hamburgers, the head of France’s Muslim Council called for reason to prevail and announced that he planned to meet with Quick’s owners.
“There are plenty of restaurants that do not offer halal meals and Muslims are not complaining of discrimination. .
Lionnel Lucca, a deputy from Sarkozy’s right-wing UMP party, has called for a boycott of Quick to press for “freedom of choice to be restored” at the fast-food outlets.”
Quick manager Luc Demain, who runs the outlet in Roubaix among others, said there had been a slight increase in business since the new halal menus had been introduced and that he had not received complaints from customers.
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.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
.A foreign national who forced his French wife to wear the full Islamic veil will be denied French citizenship, the immigration minister said.
Eric Besson says he signed a decree rejecting the man’s citizenship application after it emerged he had ordered his wife to cover herself with the head-to-toe veil.
The man’s name and nationality were not made public.
“It emerged during the inquiry and the interview process that this person forced his wife to wear the full veil, deprived her of freedom of movement with her face exposed, and rejected the principles of secularism and equality between men and women,” Mr Besson said in a statement.
The French Government is seeking legal advice before drafting legislation that would outlaw the burqa or niqab in as many areas as possible, Prime Minister Francois Fillon has said.
The decision came after a parliament report last week called for a ban on the full Islamic veil in all schools, hospitals, government offices and public transport.
Home to Europe’s biggest Muslim minority, France has been debating whether to ban the burqa that is worn by only about 1,900 women nationwide, according to interior ministry figures.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has proclaimed the burqa “not welcome” in secular France and come out in favour of legislation to outlaw the veil, but has warned against stigmatising Muslims.
A French court denied citizenship to a veiled Moroccan woman on the grounds that her “radical” practice of Islam was incompatible with French values. .
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.The first of 250 unknown British and Australian soldiers who died in World War I have been reburied in France amid chilly conditions.
The soldiers, who were killed in the 1916 Battle of Fromelles, are being buried at a cemetery near where their remains were discovered in 2008.
Australian, British and French flags flew at half mast as the coffin was lowered into a grave in the new military cemetery.
A volley of gunshots marked the official burial of the fallen.
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.
“I think, in a way, that’s a little bit of a bonus,” he said.
The organiser of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, David Richardson, says he hopes they will then be able to put names on some of the headstones.
“I think any individual identities afterwards will be really the icing on the cake.
“There are so many cemeteries here in France and Belgium and all over the world where we work, where there are unknown soldiers, so I think individual burials for us are just fantastic.
“I’ll be more relieved at the end of February when we’ve buried the full 250, but it’s great to see the cemetery fit for burial,” he said.”
He says it is a relief to see the soldiers reburied.”
DNA consultant Dr Peter Jones agrees.
“It’s the first new cemetery since World War II, but to build something from scratch on a brand new site in a limited time scale in a wet field in northern France has posed some challenges.
“At the very, very best, with everything working completely perfectly, the most we’re likely to match up is about 100,” he said. He says with 1,600 soldiers missing after the Battle of Fromelle and only 800 families having come forward to give forensic samples, it is a difficult task.
“The bloodiest 24 hours in our military history, before, or since,” he said.
Australia’s Veteran’s Affairs Minister, Alan Griffin, described the Battle of Fromelles as one of the most tragic chapters in Australia’s history. .
The obsession of a Melbourne amateur historian led to the discovery of the mass graves two years ago.
.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
.The Federal Government has ramped up warnings about Microsoft’s web browser Internet Explorer, which has come under attack from hackers.
The Government is warning that people risk having their computers infiltrated and passwords stolen unless they install temporary fixes from Microsoft or use alternative browsers.
The Government says Microsoft has acknowledged all recent versions of the program are vulnerable.
The French and German governments have warned internet users in Europe to avoid Microsoft’s popular web browser.
It also says people should remember to regularly update their security software and change passwords oftenly.
Senior lecturer in network engineering at Melbourne’s RMIT University, Mark Gregory, says industry and governments are not prepared for the changing threats to cyberspace.
The concern follows revelations that hackers used a crack in Internet Explorer to mount an attack on Google and a number of other companies.
“The digital network is like the wild west.
“It is being used in ways that it wasn’t meant to be used and we need to get organisations, companies and governments . It is unregulated,” he said…”
Bill Caelli, from the Information Security Institute at the Queensland University of Technology, says the Government and regulators must step in to protect internet users. focused on taking action to make the digital network more secure for the general public.
“How many builders have put smoke detectors in the new homes and houses? How many people have put fences around their pools to protect children?” he said.
“How many builders have put smoke detectors in the new homes and houses? How many people have put fences around their pools to protect children?” he said.”
The Government says Microsoft has not solved the security glitch and Australians should use alternative browsers. It’s always been driven by regulatory [sic], by society itself, and that’s the role of government.
“There are other browsers that are available that appear to be being targeted less by the hackers and by these organisations than what Internet Explorer is being targeted,” he said. .
“On that basis you’d have to argue that if security was a principal concern then using another browser would be wise until the incidence is reduced.
“I don’t think there was any inference in what they said that Internet Explorer was any more deficient in terms of security than any of the other browsers, just that it was being targeted more.
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Editor’s note (19 January 2010): This story has been amended to reflect the fact that web users can install temporary fixes from Microsoft to reduce their risk
.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.
.Snow and icy weather has disrupted travel across Europe, closing Geneva airport on one of its busiest tourist weekends of the year and prompting a state of emergency on part of Germany’s Baltic coast.
Thousands of passengers were stranded at Geneva’s Cointrin airport after heavy overnight snow kept it closed until noon.
“It was the first time we had so much snow on the runway since 1985,” said airport spokesman Bertrand Staempfli as departures began at midday.
Many British, German and other European skiers use Geneva airport to reach popular Swiss and French ski resorts in the close toby Alpine region, including Verbier.
Delays were expected as frustrated passengers queued to re-book flights at the airport, where 100,000 people had been due to transit over the weekend.
Schools across the state will stay closed on Monday.
Hundreds of motorists had to abandon their cars in the north-eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where 25 centimetres of snow fell and the district of Ostvorpommern declared a state of emergency, local authorities said.
Levees in parts of the neighbouring state of Schleswig-Holstein showed cracks on Sunday, threatening low-lying areas with floods, police said.
In Poland, at least 200,000 households suffered a power outage and shoppers and workers were evacuated from a shopping centre in the western city of Leszno when its roof began to give way under 1. Coastal towns like Flensburg and Travemuende had suffered flooding by afternoon.
A police spokesman said that since the onset of cold weather in October, 152 people had been found frozen to death in Poland.5 metres of snow, rescue services said. .
- Cars trapped -
On Germany’s Baltic island of Fehmarn, some 5,000 residents were shut in by the blizzards, while scores were trapped in their cars for hours on the A20 autobahn because normal snow ploughs could not reach them, authorities said.
The weather had caused over 1,100 road accidents between Saturday and Sunday morning in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, according to the regional government.
The weather had caused over 1,100 road accidents between Saturday and Sunday morning in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, according to the regional government.
In the south-western state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, snow caused more than 900 road accidents between Friday and midday on Sunday, seriously injuring 15 people and causing 4 million euros of damage, the regional interior ministry said. At least 16 people have been badly injured in the state due to the snow since Saturday.
In Britain, chemical firm Ineos said it had diverted 12,000 tonnes of salt for use on British roads that had originally been destined for Germany.
Ninety-one flights were cancelled on Sunday at Frankfurt airport, Germany’s busiest, compared to 225 the day before.
The government told local authorities to reduce the amount of salt they put on roads by a quarter at the end of last week in a bid to conserve supplies.
“Because we’ve been inundated with calls from local authorities, we’ve decided to retain the supplies in the UK,” a spokesman said.
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