Beijing  - A Chinese bidder who bought two controversial bronze sculptures in a Paris auction now refuses to pay for the items, which China regards a looted art.

Five days after auction house Christie's spectacular sale of the art collection of late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Berge, where the two lots raised China's hackles, a Chinese man revealed he was the successful bidder, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Brussels  - France defied its critics and demanded European Union support for the bloc's crisis-stricken car industry at an EU summit in Brussels on Sunday, diplomatic sources said.

The call came a day after the EU's second-largest member backed down on a bail-out plan which would have obliged producers to give preferential treatment to French factories and suppliers.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy now wants the EU as a whole to take steps to keep the bloc's auto producers afloat, diplomatic sources told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

As French football star Zinedine Zidane, or Zizou, came to Bangladesh in 2006, he had no clue the visit would inspire an entire film. But that's exactly what happened. Taraporevala wrote a script around it and the result is Little Zizou.

"The film's about a 11-year-old football-crazy boy called Zerxes, who refers to himself as little Zizou and Zidane as big Zizou. When Zidane visits Bangladesh, Zerxes prays to his deceased mother to bring the football star to the country," says Taraporevala, and quickly clarifies the film is not really about football as such.

London, Feb 27 : American musical group MGMT are suing French President Nicolas Sarkozy for using one of their hit songs without permission as a campaign soundtrack.

MGMT, formerly known as The Management, claim that Sarkozy''s UMP party used the track `Kids' at its national congress and in two online videos.

The political party admitted to using it by saying that it was a mistake, and they tried to rectify the matter by offering a symbolic gesture of one euro.

Paris - An appeals court in the French city of Bordeaux has frozen some 4.2 million euros (5.37 million dollars) in two French bank accounts belonging to the president of Gabon, Omar Bongo, the daily Sud Ouest reported on Thursday.

The court wants to force Bongo to pay 1.131 million euros to a French businessman, Rene Cardona, stemming from an incident in 1996.

At the time, Cardona's son had to pay the equivalent of 457,347 euros to Bongo to free his father from a jail cell in the Gabonese capital Libreville.

Paris - Badly stung by the financial crisis, the French mutual banking group Banque Populaire said Thursday it had lost 468 million euros (598 million dollars) in 2008, its first loss in decades.

Turnover for Banque Populaire was down 17.8 per cent over 2007, to 1.1 billion euros, the bank said in a press statement.