French

PARIS -- Nighttime rioting around French public housing developments continued to rage early today, spreading to the outskirts of more cities and leaving the authorities frustrated by their inability to stop what many are calling France's worst civil unrest since the 1968 student revolts. Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin met with eight of his ministers and a top Muslim official yesterday, trying to find a way to break the chain of violent events. But the violence continued, with two schools destroyed in the Essonne region south of Paris and more cars going up in flames.

LONDON -- The Maastricht Treaty on European monetary and political union is in trouble again, and in France of all places.The Danes in June rejected the treaty because, among other reasons, they resented their political leaders' attempts to frighten them into approving it.Today French political leaders are doing the same thing: They are predicting political and economic disarray, chaos even, should the French people veto the treaty in their referendum, set...

JEN KAPLAN'S eighth-grade French classes at Patuxent Valley Middle School have spent the past two weeks preparing for this week's brief opening of the Millennium Cafe, Kaplan's salute to French culture. As she has for the past three years -- and before that in the Baltimore schools where she taught -- Kaplan has had her students run a bistro for faculty and family. It's a complex undertaking for the second-year French scholars. First, they have to learn food and restaurant vocabulary.

PARIS - The Walt Disney Co. and three French banks agreed to bail out Euro Disney SCA for the second time in a decade to prevent Europe's biggest theme-park operator from defaulting on $2.9 billion of debt. Euro Disney, which is 39-percent-owned by Walt Disney, would sell new stock under an agreement reached yesterday. The accord needs to be approved by creditors holding more than half of the debt, said Pieter Boterman, a spokesman for the French theme park company. Euro Disney shares rose 2.9 percent.

Funny, Valentine's Day gets the world thinking about underwear, a traditional gift that suggests the possibility of frilly moments of intimacy. Just in time for the season, there's a new source for lingerie laces and satins. Pour Elle & Lui (For Her & Him) opened this week at Towson Town Center, and it's not for her and him to wear, but for her to wear and him to appreciate. The French have a talent for lingerie, as they do for cooking -- delicious but never heavy-handed. A bit of this, a -- of that and voila!

PARIS - The anti-war movement in France has turned anti-Israeli, as demonstrations against the war in Iraq have evolved into a battleground for French Arab Muslims to attack Israel, Jews and Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. As tens of thousands of protesters against the U.S.-led war took to the streets in Paris yesterday, 5,000 police officers and a team of marshals were stationed alongside them. Their goal was to prevent a recurrence of an event during a march a week ago where protesters marching with a pro-Palestinian group attacked members of the left-wing Zionist youth group Hachomer Hatzair.

WASHINGTON -- Representatives of the French governmen have asked that royalties for an AIDS blood test be turned over to them because, they say, French researchers were the ones who discovered the virus that was used to create the test. But Americans have blocked such a move.The action came Wednesday at a board meeting of the French and American AIDS Foundation in Bethesda. The board makes policy on matters related to the 1987 agreement between the United States and France to divide the royalties evenly and take equal credit for the discovery of the blood tests.

After a two-year hiatus, former Chairman Sandra H. French has decided to seek another term on the Howard County Board of Education. French, who served on the board from 1992 to 2004, said she has been wrestling with the idea for the past six months. "I felt as if I made a difference and wanted to continue to make a difference," French said yesterday. "I love education; I love our students. It all just seems to point toward serving on the board again." French, 62, said she has spent some of the past two years substitute teaching at county secondary schools, which she said has given her more insight about students.

WHETHER Concorde ever flies again will depend in part on whether correcting defects makes economic sense. That is reason for pessimism. Britain's Civil Aviation Authority suspended the barrier-busting airliner's certificate of airworthiness, pending manufacturers' correction of whatever allowed a shredded tire to destroy an engine during take-off in Paris on July 25. That sole disaster after 24 years of commercial service transformed Concorde from the...

The storming of Paris by farmers enraged by their government'sbending to American demands that certain French agricultural subsidies be eliminated is not so much about ''a few million tons of oilseeds'' as it is about preserving a culture and way of life.In the United States, where traces of the rural ideal can still be found in remaindered coffee table art books, there are 30 percent fewer farmers, as an average of the total population, than in France. While roughly 25 percent of all Americans and Frenchmen live in rural areas, almost all the rural French are in agricultural work as compared to only 2 percent of the rural Americans.