Paris - One day before the opening of the G20 summit in London, France and China have put an end to their bilateral tension over Tibet, the French foreign ministry said on Wednesday.

"France and China reiterate their attachment to the principle of non-interference as laid down by the United Nations Charter, and agree to reinforce their collaboration on issues of fundamental interest to the two countries," the ministry said in a press statement.

Paris - Workers at a French factory of the US industrial equipment manufacturer Caterpillar have taken hostage four of its senior managers after the company announced that the site would be shut down, Europe 1 radio reported on Wednesday.

Among the four individuals being held by some 50 workers at the site in the city of Grenoble is the head of Caterpillar-France, Nicolas Polutnik. If the factory is shut, 773 employees will be made redundant.

Paris - The economies of the world's industrial nations will contract by an average of 4.3 per cent in 2009, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said Tuesday in Paris.

In addition, unemployment rates in many OECD member countries will surpass 10 per cent by the end of 2010, the OECD said in its Economic Outlook Interim Report.

Paris  - French President Nicolas Sarkozy has threatened to walk out of this week's summit of G20 nations in London if it does not look to be achieving concrete results, the daily Le Figaro reported on Tuesday.

"If there is no progress in London, there will be an empty chair. I will get up and leave," Sarkozy said in an aside during a recent meeting of his cabinet.

The newly appointed deputy head of Sarkozy's office, Xavier Musca, on Monday underlined France's insistence that irreversible decisions be taken at the summit.

Paris - When France is officially welcomed back to NATO's military command structure at the group's April 3-4 summit, it will restore what French President Nicolas Sarkozy suggested was normalcy to the country's relationship with the transatlantic alliance.

The French president linked parliamentary approval of his decision to return Paris to full NATO membership to a vote of confidence in the government's entire foreign policy, a tactic that irritated even members of his own centre-right UMP party.

Paris  - After a tumultuous seven-week trial, a Paris appeals court late Friday sentenced a Corsican shepherd, Yvan Colonna, to life in prison for the 1998 murder of the prefect of that Mediterranean island.

The sentence therefore upheld the judgment delivered in the first trial, in 2007, that the 48-year-old Colonna was the man who fired three bullets into the head and neck of the prefect, Claude Erignac, in a street in the city of Ajaccio on February 6, 1998.