Paris - French President Nicolas Sarkozy, angered by protest incidents in the past, is now paying visits to local communities with protection provided by hundreds of police and gendarmes, officials confirmed Thursday.

A visit to the Loire valley town of Daumeray with a population of 1,600, took place with 700 police providing security, the gendarme office in Angers said.

Sarkozy visited a farm there, where he made remarks about modernisation taking place in French agriculture.

Paris - French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said Thursday in Paris that

Paris - Some 2,500 of the world's 6,000 languages are currently threatened with extinction, according to the Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, launched by UNESCO on Thursday in Paris.

"The death of a language means at the same time the disappearance of a cultural heritage, from stories through legends to proverbs and jokes," UNESCO head Koichiro Matsuura said.

Paris - The world economic crisis will last well into 2010 unless the global banking sector is restructured and cleansed of its toxic assets, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Dominique Strauss-Kahn, warned Thursday in Paris.

"If there is no clean-up of the banks, most of the stimulus will be lost," Dominique Strauss-Kahn said, adding: "Things are moving too slowly."

"We are still looking for a recovery at the beginning of 2010, but only if the right policies are implemented," Strauss-Kahn said at a press conference opening the OECD Global Forum on Competition in Paris.

Paris - French bank BNP Paribas said Thursday that its profits fell by 61.4 per cent, to 3.02 billion euros (3.8 billion dollars), in 2008.

The fall in profits was primarily due to a loss of 2 billion euros by its Finance and Investment Bank, because of the effects of the bankruptcy of the American investment bank Lehman Brothers, the bank said in a press statement.

BNP Paribas said it had lost 1.37 billion euros in the fourth quarter of last year, as the financial crisis deepened.

While turnover fell a fraction to 27 billion euros, the bank said it would slash dividend payments from 3.35 euros last year to 1 euro in
2009.