France’s new foreign minister has rejected a reported message from al Qaida’s North Africa branch saying Paris should negotiate with Osama bin Laden over the fate of five French hostages seized from an African mining town.

Eurozone ministers are set to meet in Brussels later as the debt crisis again threatens the bloc’s economic stability. The spotlight has fallen on weaker member countries, and whether they can manage their debt without help from European Union...

Al-Qaeda has warned Paris not to attempt to rescue five French nationals kidnapped by the jihadists in Niger, SITE monitoring group said Thursday, as France mobilised its forces to find them. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb posted a statement on...

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy faced new pressure on Thursday, including fresh criticism of his recent law-and-order drive and a police search of his ruling party’s headquarters. In Strasbourg, the official seat of the European...

Rescue efforts are continuing in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, after a condemned building collapsed, killing at least 14 people. The building, said to be three to five storeys high, fell down on Wednesday in the Garki district. Locals said around 50...

“So people want to keep Kyoto, OK let’s keep Kyoto. But let us agree on an overall political umbrella,” he said in a speech to delegates. The EU wants U.N. climate talks to agree a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol because...

A senior aide to French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Thursday defended Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand who is facing calls for his resignation for having written about paying boys for sex. The revelations were made in a 2005 autobiography...

The French Interior Minister faced calls for his resignation last night after he was caught on camera making apparently racist remarks directed at Arabs. As outrage greeted the video clip on the internet Brice Hortefeux claimed that critics had...

The boy, who said he was 15 but looked younger, recounted how his family left Afghanistan after his mother lost her leg in an explosion in 2004. They spent three years in Iran, where he went to school for the first time, learning English and discovering...

A young French academic and local employees of the British and French embassies appeared before an Iranian judge Saturday along with dozens of opposition figures accused of involvement in the country’s postelection unrest. The extraordinary mass...