Paris/New York  - European aerospace group EADS is willing to consider splitting a multi-billion-dollar US Air Force tanker deal with its American archrival Boeing, company head Louis Gallois was quoted on Friday as saying.

In return, Gallois told The New York Times, EADS and its American partner, Northrop Grumman, asked that they be allowed to build at least 12 tanker planes a year. That number was necessary to cover the cost of building a factory in Mobile, Alabama, he said.

Paris (France), Apr. 17 : French president Nicholas Sarkozy has managed to insult three of his country''s closest allies over a brief lunch at the Elysée Palace.

Sarkozy described U S President Obama was inexperienced and badly briefed on climate change, the Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero wasn''t very clever and German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not share his foresight about how to tackle the global financial crisis.

Paris  - While US President Barack Obama is very intelligent and charismatic, he is "not always at his best when it comes to decisions and efficiency", French President Nicolas Sarkozy was quoted Thursday as saying.

"He has only been elected for two months and has never managed a ministry in his life," Sarkozy was quoted as saying by Liberation newspaper. There were things on which Obama had no opinion, he added.

Paris - French Farms and Fisheries Minister Michel Barnier said Thursday he was negotiating with other countries to obtain higher catch quotas in an effort to end a blockade of northern ports by French fishermen.

Barnier told RTL radio that he was working on exchanging quotas with other European countries to allow France's fishermen to catch more sole without surpassing EU-imposed quotas. French fishermen have already exhausted their quota for sole for 2009.

Mammootty’s upcoming flick Palery Maanikyam is based on the murder-investigation story that took place in the early seventies but now the makers of the flick is planning to give a new face lift to the film’s story track.

The news is doing the rounds that director Renjith and his crew is planning to shoot the first schedule of the flick in the beautiful city of Paris. Mammootty is playing the character of an investigator who is landing in Paris from the nation’s capital in order to probe the murder of a man named Manikyan.

Paris  - French sailors operating from a frigate in the Indian Ocean have boarded what was described as a pirate mother-ship and arrested 11 pirates, the French Defence Ministry said Wednesday.

In the operation, which took place some 900 kilometres east of the Kenyan port of Mombasa, the sailors seized the 10-meter-long ship which was carrying a large reserve of petrol and two "assault skiffs," the ministry said in a statement.

The 11 pirates were arrested and transferred to the frigate, the Nivose.