Strasbourg - The European Parliament on Wednesday awarded its Sakharov Prize to jailed Chinese human rights activist Hu Jia, rebuffing warnings from Beijing that doing so might damage the European Union's relations with China.

The prize, which each year honours worthy human rights activists around the world, was given to Hu in absentia.

"I would like to express my deep concern that our laureate Hu Jia could not be here today with us and receive the award in person as he remains imprisoned for defending human rights in China - freedom of speech, freedom of thought and the basic right of access to the health service," said Laima Andrikiene, the conservatives' spokesman on human rights issues.

Paris /Oran, Algeria - Members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are expected to approve a cut in oil production of up to 2 million barrels per day when they meet later Wednesday in the Algerian city of Oran.

With global oil demand falling this year for the first time since 1983, the 12-member cartel has already found consensus that a drastic production cut is necessary to shore up the price of oil, OPEC President Chakib Khelil said.

The price of a barrel of crude oil has fallen by some 70 per cent in five months because of the global economic slump.

Strasbourg, France - Nicolas Sarkozy on Tuesday defended the European Union's watered-down deal on climate change, saying the compromises that have been agreed by leaders will avoid imposing unbearable sacrifices on its citizens.

"We didn't want to impose constrictions which no country in the world could have survived socially," said the French president in his final address to the European Parliament at the helm of the bloc's rotating presidency.

Paris - French police have defused five explosive devices planted in a large downt

New York  - The brokerage of alleged Wall Street fraudster Bernard Madoff will be liquidated to help compensate his victims, officials said Monday.

A New York judge ruled in favour of a liquidation request by the Securities Investor Protection Corp (SIPC), a government-funded organization that protects brokerage clients.

Madoff, 70, a major Wall Street broker, was arrested Thursday for running a 50-billion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

He claimed he had only 200 to 300 million dollars left, while prosecutors were uncertain how much money Madoff's clients, among them banks, prominent investors and celebrities, have lost.

Tokyo  - French fashion house LVMH Moet Hennessy-Louis Vuitton SA has abandoned its plans to open a flagship store in Tokyo's ritzy Ginza district as the global financial crisis hits Japan's booming luxury market, a newspaper reported Tuesday.

Declining sales were cited as the reason for scrapping plans to open the Louis Vuitton store in 2010 in a 12-storey building in one of the world's most luxurious shopping areas, Japan's Nikkei, its leading financial newspaper, reported without citing sources.

The store would have been one of the largest Louis Vuitton shops in the world and could have competed in size with the brand's main store in Paris.