Paris  - An appeals court in the northern French city of Douai on Monday reversed an earlier court decision annulling a marriage on the ground that the bride had lied about her non-virginity.

"A lie is no basis for the annulment of a marriage if it does not concern the fundamental character (of one of the partners)," the court wrote in its judgment.

The attorney for the husband said that the ruling "threatens individual liberties."

The couple, both Moroccan-born Muslims, married in 2006. The husband, a 30-year-old engineer who, asked for the annulment after his bride was unable to produce a bloody bedsheet on the wedding night.

Madrid, Paris - Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on Monday hailed the arrest of the suspected military leader of the militant Basque separatist group ETA as a "determining" blow to the group, "which is weaker today."

Mikel Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, known by his alias Txeroki, was "directly responsible for some of the latest killings" by ETA, Zapatero said.

Txeroki was arrested at 3:30 am with a woman near the Cauterets ski resort 30 kilometres from Lourdes in the Pyrenees in a coordinated operation between French and Spanish security forces.

The suspects were asleep when police broke into their flat, Spanish media reported. Both were armed.

Paris - Many flights were cancelled Saturday at Charles de Gaulle international airport in Paris as pilots went on strike.

Carrier Air France said that a third of long-haul flights and half of all other flights would have to be cancelled.

The pilots' union was due to meet Saturday to discuss whether to continue the strike, which was due to end Monday at midnight.

The pilots are protesting a change to working regulations that would allow them to choose to retire at 65 instead of the current 60, which they see as a first step to extending their working lives.

Paris, Nov 15: ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton telescope has been used to test, for the first time, the physical processes that make magnetars, an atypical class of neutron stars, produce X-rays.

Neutron stars are remnants of massive stars (10-50 times as massive as our Sun) that have collapsed on to themselves under their own weight.

Made almost entirely of neutrons (subatomic particles with no electric charge), these stellar corpses concentrate more than the mass of our Sun within a sphere about 20 km in diameter.

Nice, France - The United States and Russia should both refrain from siting any new weapons systems in Europe before a major summit of European and North American powers in June or July 2009, the French and Russian presidents said on Friday.

The European Union is "concerned" by Russian threats to site missiles in its Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, and "there should be no deployment ... until we have discussed the new geo-political terms for pan-European security," French President Nicolas Sarkozy said after talks with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev.

Brussels/Paris, Nov. 14 : U. S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has accused Russia of engaging in Cold War brinkmanship through its threats to position nuclear weapons on its European border.

Gates claimed that the Kremlin was trying to intimidate President-elect Barack Obama into dropping American plans for a new missile defence system based in Eastern Europe.