Paris - Both houses of the Algerian parliament are due to meet Wednesday to decide whether to change the constitution to allow President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to stay on for a third term.

If passed, the 71-year-old president could take up a third five- year term in the spring of 2009.

Parliament would also vote on cutting some of the prime minister's powers in favour of the president.

Paris  - Following a series of mysterious attacks on railway infrastructure in the past week, police in France have arrested eight suspects, the Interior Ministry announced on Tuesday.

More than 40 high-speed trains between Paris and London, Brussels, Amsterdam and Cologne had to be transferred to traditional tracks on Saturday, resulting in more than 150 trains running late, after metal pipes were placed atop overhead powerlines at four separate locations.

Brussels - European Union foreign ministers sidelined Lithuanian objections Monday and decided to re-start talks on a strategic treaty with Russia which it froze after Russia's August war with Georgia.

"It was a very solid discussion, all EU member states except one are in line to take up the (EU-Russia) partnership talks again," said French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, who chaired the talks as holder of the EU's rotating presidency.

Paris - The French presidency of the European Union on Monday firmly criticized Israel's demolition of Arab-owned houses in East Jerusalem.

"The European Union expresses its deep concern about the operations of destruction of Palestinian houses carried out in recent days by Israeli authorities in several quarters of East Jerusalem," a spokesman for the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Berlin - A senior Rwandan official, Rose Kabuye, who has been arrested in Germany on a European warrant, has agreed to be extradited to France, a justice official said Monday in Frankfurt.

Kabuye, 47, is chief of protocol to Rwandan President Paul Kagame and a leading member of his Rwandan Patriotic Front.

After her Sunday detention when she landed in Frankfurt, Rwandan authorities immediately summoned the German ambassador in Kigali to protest.

Paris - Afghan-born Atiq Rahimi was on Monday named winner of France's most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, for his novel Synge Sabour.

The title of the novel - Rahimi's fourth, but the first to be written in French - is taken from the Persian name of a magic black stone that represents patience and which absorbs all suffering and pain.

The book is in the form of a monologue of an Afghan woman addressing her soldier-husband who lies in a coma in their house.

The monologue ultimately becomes an outcry for all Afghan women - indeed, all women - about wishing to become free of domestic, social and religious oppression and a tirade against the man whom she is nursing.