Paris- French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, on Wednesday called for a new pan-European security structure.

At an international conference in the south-eastern French resort of Evian, Sarkozy called for a total reconstruction of the European security structure.

Paris  - The Paris Bourse was in freefall early Wednesday after Wall Street and Asian markets nosedived on recession fears.

Paris, Oct 8: Reports from the ESA (European Space Agency) indicate that the ozone hole in 2008 is larger than last year.

Ozone is a protective atmospheric layer found in about 25 kilometers altitude that acts as a sunlight filter shielding life on Earth from harmful ultraviolet rays, which can increase the risk of skin cancer and cataracts and harm marine life.

Paris - The public prosecutor's office of Paris on Tuesday demanded that former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin stand trial for slander, the internet site of the daily Le Figaro reported.

Villepin, who was the diplomatic pointman of France's opposition to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, is suspected of involvement in a complex scheme allegedly hatched to discredit French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

The so-called Clearstream Affair dates back to 2004, when Sarkozy's name appeared on a list of 800 people and companies allegedly holding accounts at the Luxembourg-based financial clearing house Clearstream.

Paris, Oct 7 : The COROT space telescope has discovered a massive planet-sized object orbiting its parent star closely, unlike anything ever spotted before, leaving scientists puzzled as to whether this oddity is actually a planet or a failed star.

The object, named COROT-exo-3b, is about the size of Jupiter, but packs more than 20 times the mass. It takes only 4 days and 6 hours to orbit its parent star, which is slightly larger than the Sun.

Paris - French virologists Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who were awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine, will always be associated with the discovery of the retrovirus that causes AIDS.

In 1982, Montagnier headed a team at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, of which Barre-Sinoussi was a member, that was asked for assistance in establishing the possible viral cause of a mysterious new syndrome, AIDS.