PARIS (AP) — French lawmakers on Monday overwhelmingly approved a bill to enshrine abortion rights in France’s constitution, making it the only country to explicitly guarantee a woman’s right to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy.

BERLIN, Feb. 17: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a bilateral security agreement with Germany and planned to sign another with France on Friday, securing a strong signal of long-term backing as Kyiv works to shore up Western support nearly two years after Russia launched its full-scale war.

JAIPUR, India, Jan 26: President Emmanuel Macron was given a red carpet reception in India on Thursday with a welcome parade of elephants, as France eyes lucrative deals with the world's fifth-largest economy.

PARIS (AP) — France saw its youngest-ever prime minister and first openly gay one named Tuesday as President Emmanuel Macron seeks a fresh start for the rest of his term amid growing political pressure from the far right.

PARIS (AP) — Six teenagers go on trial Monday in Paris for their alleged roles in the beheading of a teacher who showed caricatures of the prophet of Islam to his class, a killing that led authorities to reaffirm France’s cherished rights of expression and secularism.

KATHMANDU, Oct 21: President Ram Chandra Paudel is going to France.

KATHMANDU, Aug 28: President Ram Chandra Poudel has appointed Sudhir Bhattarai as the ambassador of Nepal to the Republic of France, Tej Bahadur Chhetri as the ambassador of Nepal to the United Arab Emirates and Ghanshyam Lamsal as the ambassador of Nepal to Kuwait.

PARIS, July 2: Young rioters clashed with police late Saturday and early Sunday and targeted a mayor’s home with a burning car as France faced a fifth night of unrest sparked by the police killing of a teenager, but overall violence appeared to lessen compared to previous nights.

NANTERRE, France: Hushed and visibly anguished, hundreds of mourners from France’s Islamic community formed a solemn procession from a mosque to a hillside cemetery on Saturday to bury a 17-year-old whose killing by police has triggered days of rioting and looting across the nation.

PARIS, July 1:  France’s Interior Ministry said Saturday that 1,311 people were arrested around the country during a fourth night of riots triggered by the deadly shooting of a 17-year-old by police.

GANDAKI, June 3: The anniversary of the first ascent to Mt Annapurna is being observed today with a variety of programs. On June 3, 1950, Maurice Herzog of France successfully climbed Mt Annapurna.

KATHMANDU, Jan 17: A team of experts from France has arrived in Nepal to study the ATR plane crash of Yeti Airlines that took place in Pokhara on January 15.

KATHMANDU, Dec 23: French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, responsible for multiple murders in the 1970s across Asia, told AFP he felt "great" after being released from prison in Nepal where he served almost 20 years.

Some historians believe the April Fools' customs began in France, although no one knows for sure. It may stem from a calendar change in 16th century France -- the moving of New Year's Day from April 1 to January 1 when the Gregorian calendar was adopted.

The Eiffel Tower grew by six meters (nearly 20 feet) on Tuesday after engineers hoisted a new communications antenna at the very top of France’s most iconic landmark.

PARIS, Jan 18: The COVID-19 situation continues to worsen in France, with 464,769 new cases detected in the past 24 hours, it was announced by the country's public health agency on Tuesday. This broke the previous daily record of 368,149 cases.

PARIS, Jan 5: France reported on Tuesday 271,686 new cases of COVID-19 detected in the last 24 hours, the highest daily record since the outbreak of the pandemic in the country. According to data released by the French Public Health Agency, a total of 20,186 COVID-19 patients are currently hospitalized and 3,665 of them are in intensive care.

KATHMANDU, Jan 4: Scientists have confirmed a new variant of the novel coronavirus dubbed B.1.640.2 in France. It is also known as the ‘IHU’ variant following its discovery at the IHU Mediterranee Infection.

PARIS, Jan 2: France became the sixth country in the world to report more than 10 million COVID-19 infections since the outbreak of the pandemic, according to official data published on Saturday.

PARIS, Dec 4: France has carried out an evacuation mission in Afghanistan, taking 258 Afghans as well as 11 French, some 60 Dutch nationals and an unspecified number of people linked to them out of the country, a French foreign ministry spokeswoman said on Friday.

For Erin Tridle and her boyfriend, it was love at first sight. They met while the American was traveling in France in the summer of 2019. They said, “I love you,” on day two. “People tell us it’s like something from a movie,” she said.

KATHMANDU, Sept 30: The Newly-appointed ambassadors of various four countries to Nepal have presented Letters of Credence to President Bidya Devi Bhandari on Thursday.

WASHINGTON/CANBERRA, Sept 17: China on Thursday denounced a new Indo-Pacific security alliance between the United States, Britain and Australia, saying such partnerships should not target third countries and warning of an intensified arms race in the region.

PARIS/BERLIN, Aug 5: Germany and France will go ahead with COVID-19 vaccine boosters from September, disregarding an appeal by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to hold off until more people are vaccinated across the globe.

BUDAPEST, June 28: Switzerland's Yann Sommer saved France striker Kylian Mbappe's penalty to secure a 5-4 shootout win over the world champions following a thrilling 3-3 draw after extra time on Monday to reach the Euro 2020 quarter-finals where they will meet Spain.

June 27: Winning the toughest group at the European Championship wasn’t really a big surprise for the World Cup champions. Winning only one match in that group was, though.

MUNICH, June 16: Mats Hummels’ return to the national team went better for France than it did for Germany.

ITALY, June 12: France striker Wissam Ben Yedder said the reigning world champions are in the toughest group at the European Championship and that they must make a strong start to their campaign against Germany in Tuesday's opener.

STANFORD – In French President Emmanuel Macron, the United States has the best ally it could hope for in the Élysée Palace. In fact, Macron may now be the only US allied leader with a genuine liberal-internationalist worldview to match that of US President Joe Biden.

The harsh sentence handed down to former French president Nicolas Sarkozy confirms anew an ancient truth of politics: Even in the world’s most firmly entrenched democracies, corruption remains a curse.

PARIS, March 1: Judges found former president Nicolas Sarkozy guilty of trying to bribe a judge and of influence-peddling on Monday and sentenced him to three years in jail, with two years suspended.

The baguette - a mix of wheat flour, water, yeast, salt and a pinch of savoir-faire and as much a symbol of France as the Eiffel Tower - may soon join UNESCO’s listing of cultural treasures.

When the clocks strike midnight on New Year’s Eve, France will be under curfew and its citizens plan to celebrate with gourmet food rather than large groups of friends.

PARIS, Dec 26: France recorded its first case of the new variant of coronavirus, as the number of cases and deaths from COVID-19 mounted in the country, increasing concerns of a new wave of the virus hitting the euro zone’s second-biggest economy.

PARIS, Dec 23: Three French police officers were shot dead by a man when they arrived at a home in Saint-Just, a remote village in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in central France, to respond to a domestic violence call, police said on Wednesday.

KATHMANDU, Dec 17: The French government has shown interest in providing technical support to facilitate the flights of Airbus aircraft with the national flag-carrier, Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC).

LONDON, Dec 11: A mask of the deity Bhairav that is nearly 500 years old has been sold for Rs 7 million in Paris, France. The mask’s manufacture is predicted to date between the 15th and 17th century. It has been sold for 50,000 euros which converts to Rs 7.1 million through an online auction.

NICE, FRANCE, Oct 29: An attacker with a knife killed three people, including a woman who was decapitated, at a church in the French city of Nice on Thursday, police said, in an incident the city’s mayor described as terrorism.

PARIS, Oct 17: A suspect shot dead by police after the gruesome beheading of a history teacher in an attack near Paris was an 18-year-old Moscow-born Chechen refugee, officials said Saturday.

PARIS, Oct 17: A middle school history teacher in France was knifed to death near the school where earlier this month he had shown his pupils cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, considered blasphemous by Muslims, French officials said on Friday.

PARIS, Sept 25: At least two people were stabbed on Friday near the former offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris that was attacked by Islamist militants over five years ago, in an incident anti-terrorism police were investigating.

MELAMCHI, March 26: Three people from Sindhulanchowk district are kept in quarantines after authorities confirmed that they returned Nepal in the same aircraft travelled by 19-year-old lady, who was tested positive for COVID-19 upon her arrival at home from France via Qatar. The three had returned Kathmandu on March 17 from an aircraft of the Air Arabia.

PARIS, March 15: France will shut shops, restaurants and entertainment facilities from Sunday with its 67 million people told to stay home to help fight the rapid acceleration of the coronavirus in a country where the number of cases has doubled in 72 hours.

PARIS, March 15: French voters headed to the polls on Sunday for local elections after the government decided to press ahead with the vote despite a rapid acceleration of the coronavirus across the country.

BARCELONA, SPAIN, March 15: Spain locked down its 46 million citizens and France ordered the closing of just about everything the rest of the world loves about it — the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the cafes and restaurants — as governments took increasingly desperate measures to put more space between people and contain the coronavirus.

KATHMANDU, March 14: Suspecting irregularities, parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Friday directed the government to scrap the procurement of a security printing press from France under a government to government (G2G) model.

Madonna has cancelled the last two stops of her latest tour in France after the country said it was banning events of more than 1,000 people to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

France has been facing transport strikes for one and a half months against the government, which is trying to reform its pension system. President Immanuel Macron wants to replace the current system of 42 pension regimes with a single point scheme that will be the same for everybody. It has caused a brutal travel disruption especially in Paris and its surrounding region causing misery to millions of commuters.

TOULOUSE, France, Nov 18 : A 15-year-old girl died and several people are likely missing after a bridge collapsed into a river in southwestern France on Monday, emergency services said.

LYON, France, Sept 1: One person was killed and at least nine others wounded on Saturday in the city of Villeurbanne near Lyon in central France after a suspected knife attack, a police source told Reuters.