MADRID/PARIS, Nov 17 (Reuters) – Spain and France struggled with government bond auctions on Thursday, throwing into sharp relief the threat of larger euro zone economies succumbing to the debt crisis that began in Greece and is already lapping at Italy’s shores.

Madrid was forced to pay the highest borrowing costs since 1997 at a sale of 10-year bonds, with yields a steepling 1.5 points above the average paid at similar tenders this year. The euro fell on the foreign exchanges in response.

Paris fared a little better, but again had to pay markedly more to shift nearly 7 billion euros of government paper. Fears that the euro zone’s second largest economy is getting sucked into the maelstrom have taken the two-year debt crisis to a new level this week.

“The euro zone has got to deliver something which is going to calm markets down and at the moment markets feel like they are being given no comfort whatsoever,” said Marc Ostwald, strategist at Monument Securities.

Prime Minister Mario Monti outlines austerity measures aimed at restoring confidence in Italy’s strained public finances later, when he goes before the Senate to seek a vote of confidence in his new government.

With Italy’s borrowing costs now at untenable levels, Monti will have to work fast to calm financial markets given Italy needs to refinance some 200 billion euros ($273 billion) of bonds by the end of April.

But no amount of austerity in Greece, Italy, Spain and France is likely to convince the markets without some dramatic action in the shorter-term, probably involving the European Central Bank.

PARIS, Nov 17 (Reuters) – France’s cost of borrowing over two and four years jumped by around half a percentage point at an auction on Thursday, reflecting growing concerns it may be dragged into the euro zone’s sovereign debt crisis.

The government sold 6.98 billion euros of medium-term BTAN notes at the auction on Thursday, at the top of its projected range, but borrowing costs rose for three out of four lines compared to previous sales.

Investors are increasingly eyeing France — the euro zone’s weakest triple-A rated sovereign — as the next domino to fall in a sovereign debt crisis that is already threatening to envelop Italy and Spain.

The French/German 10-year yield spread rose to more than 200 basis points on secondary bond markets on Thursday for the first time since the launch of the euro.

Debt management agency Agence France Tresor said it had placed 950 million euros, and 1.07 billion euros, respectively, of its 2.00 percent BTANs maturing Sept. 2013 and July 2015.

The BTAN maturing Sept. 2013 had an average yield of 1.85 percent — compared to 1.31 percent at the last auction a month ago. The note maturing July 2015 had an average yield of 2.44 percent versus 1.96 percent.

For detailed auction results and comparisons to previous sales, click on

PARIS/MOSCOW (Reuters) – Western countries called on Wednesday for new sanctions against Iran over a U.N. report that it has worked to design atom bombs, but veto-wielder Russia indicated it would block new measures at the U.N. Security Council.

The report, obtained by Reuters on Tuesday, laid bare a trove of intelligence suggesting Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, including accusations of work on atom bomb triggers and computer-simulated detonations.

France said it would summon the Security Council. Britain said the standoff was entering a more dangerous phase and the risk of conflict would increase if Iran does not negotiate.

The Security Council has already imposed four rounds of sanctions on Tehran since 2006 over its nuclear program, which Western countries suspect is being used to develop weapons but Iran says is purely peaceful.

There has been concern that if world powers cannot close ranks on isolating Iran to nudge it into serious talks, then Israel — which feels endangered by Tehran’s nuclear program — will attack it, precipitating a Middle East conflict.

“Convening of the U.N. Security Council is called for,” French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told RFI radio. Pressure must be intensified, he said, after years of Iranian defiance of U.N. resolutions demanding it halt sensitive uranium enrichment.

“If Iran refuses to conform to the demands of the international community and refuses any serious cooperation, we stand ready to adopt, with other willing countries, sanctions on an unprecedented scale,” Juppe said.

TALENCE, France (Reuters) – To understand why Mitt Romney persists in the face of rejection, opposition and indifference from his own party, look no further than the two and a half years he spent in France, getting up at 6:30 a.m. every day to venture forth and have doors slammed in his face for 10 hours.

The fresh-faced Latter-Day Saints who came to France in the late 1960s to preach the message of Jesus Christ — of whom Republican presidential candidate Romney is the best known — discovered a secular and sceptical populace, and few willing converts.

On bad days, the young Americans were greeted with guns, or barking dogs chased at their heels. Romney has said his mission, which took him through Le Havre, Paris and Bordeaux, was testing.

But it was precisely this challenge that helped cement Romney’s tenacity and his faith, say current and former missionaries.

“Being a missionary was not an easy thing,” said Christian Euvrard, director of the church-run Paris Institute of Religion, who remembers Romney as outgoing and enthusiastic in his work. “You can’t go home without having learned a lot of lessons.”

David Wood, who served at the same time as Romney, called their experience “character-building” and “life-changing”.

“It was difficult work, we spent a lot of time going from door to door … It was tough going,” he said of the mission. “It solidified his beliefs in the church, certainly gave him ample opportunity to develop leadership skills, skills in motivating people.”

TALENCE, France (Reuters) – To understand why Mitt Romney persists in the face of rejection, opposition and indifference from his own party, look no further than the two and a half years he spent in France, getting up at 6:30 a.m. every day to venture forth and have doors slammed in his face for 10 hours.

The fresh-faced Latter-Day Saints who came to France in the late 1960s to preach the message of Jesus Christ — of whom Republican presidential candidate Romney is the best known — discovered a secular and skeptical populace, and few willing converts.

On bad days, the young Americans were greeted with guns, or barking dogs chased at their heels. Romney has said his mission, which took him through Le Havre, Paris and Bordeaux, was testing.

But it was precisely this challenge that helped cement Romney’s tenacity and his faith, say current and former missionaries.

“Being a missionary was not an easy thing,” said Christian Euvrard, director of the church-run Paris Institute of Religion, who remembers Romney as outgoing and enthusiastic in his work. “You can’t go home without having learned a lot of lessons.”

David Wood, who served at the same time as Romney, called their experience “character-building” and “life-changing.”

“It was difficult work, we spent a lot of time going from door to door … It was tough going,” he said of the mission. “It solidified his beliefs in the church, certainly gave him ample opportunity to develop leadership skills, skills in motivating people.”

PARIS (Reuters) – Urban guerrilla ‘Carlos the Jackal’ smiled and flashed a clenched fist salute on Monday when he went on trial for deadly Paris bomb attacks he is accused of mounting at the height of his “anti-imperialist campaign” in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I am a revolutionary by profession,” Ilich Ramirez Sanchez declared to a special terrorism court of judges, his bluster clearly undiminished by two decades served in French prisons since his 1994 capture in Khartoum by French special forces.

Ramirez is now 62, sports a grey beard and carries a paunch; but over some 30 years, he was the face of militant Marxist struggle, his taste for Havana cigars, Che Guevara-style berets, alcohol and women only adding to his revolutionary allure.

For his small coterie of admirers, some of whom were in court on Monday, he was a romantic anti-imperialist fighter, for others a cold-blooded killer.

Ramirez, dressed in a casual blue jacket and blue sweater, sat in a hardened glass box, guarded by three police officers, occasionally dangling an arm casually through an opening as he watched proceedings.

He faces a second term of life in prison if convicted for four bombings in 1982 and 1983 that killed 11 people and wounded nearly 200. He was sentenced to life in 1997 by a French court for killing two police officers and an informant.

The leftist guerrilla — who exuded the confidence of someone invited, rather than ordered, to attend trial — spoke expansively of his past contacts. He told the judge that Yasser Arafat “himself” had given him Palestinian citizenship.

PARIS (Reuters) – France will announce up to 8 billion euros in cuts and tax hikes on Monday, imposing more pain on voters to shore up its credit rating and hold down its deficit in a make-or-break gamble for President Nicolas Sarkozy six months before an election.

Sarkozy’s center-right government says extra savings are urgently needed to keep France’s finances from going off the rails, since it cut its growth forecast for next year to 1 percent from 1.75 percent last week.

The cuts, which Prime Minister Francois Fillon is expected to announce at 6:00 a.m. EST on Monday, come on top of 12 billion euros ($16.6 billion) in savings the government announced just three months ago.

Like other European countries struggling with public finances, France has seen demonstrations and strikes from a public angry at the imposition of cutbacks during hard times.

Ratings agencies have been hinting they could cut France’s prized top credit rating because of its slowing growth and its potential liability for the cost of bailouts in the European debt crisis.

Without ever mentioning the word “austerity,” ministers from Sarkozy’s center-right government spent the weekend defending the need for fiscal vigilance amid fears of mounting debts in Western states.

“The 2012 budget will be one of the most rigorous budgets that France has seen since 1945,” said Fillon on Saturday, adding that France’s “hour of truth has arrived.”

PARIS, Nov 6 (Reuters) – France will do all it can to reach its revised target of 1 percent growth for next year, Finance Minister Francois Baroin said on Sunday, a day before the government is due to announce up to 8 billion euros in new budget tightening for 2012.

Last week, France lowered its growth projections for next year to 1 percent from 1.7 percent — raising the need for further belt-tightening measures by the centre-right government of President Nicolas Sarkozy.

“We are adapting to this economic slowdown,” Baroin told RTL radio on Sunday, defending the government’s handling of a euro zone crisis that has rattled markets and put France’s own triple A credit rating at risk.

Asked if France would meet its new 1 percent growth target for 2012, Baroin said the government will “do everything to reach this growth objective”, but he also sounded a cautious note, given the wider European environment.

“Caution is required in France, it’s required in Germany which herself corrected growth forecasts in the same proportions as we did with the same estimates as ours,” said Baroin.

On Monday, Prime Minister Francois Fillon is expected to announce an extra 6 to 8 billion euros ($8-$11 bln) in cuts and tax hikes to keep deficit reduction goals on track and safeguard France’s triple-A credit rating despite the lower growth.

Government ministers spent the weekend preparing the public for the new cuts, which are above and beyond the 11 billion euros of cuts already laid out in August for the 2012 budget.

PARIS (Reuters) – Gray hair and a paunch have replaced the beret, leather jacket and dark glasses but Carlos the Jackal’s defiance remains intact before he stands trial in France for a series of bombings in the 1980s.

The international revolutionary from Venezuela, born Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, built a career as one of the world’s best known guerrillas after a hostage-taking of OPEC oil ministers in the name of the Palestinian struggle in 1975.

Since his capture and sentencing nearly two decades ago, the Jackal has been resident of a French prison.

On Monday, Ramirez, already condemned to life in jail, will face a three-judge terrorism panel to answer charges he was behind four urban bombings in France that killed 11 people and wounded nearly 200 in the early 1980s.

“I am really in a combative mood,” Ramirez, 62, told Europe 1 radio last month. “I’m not fearful by nature…My character is suited to this kind of combat.”

The Marxist with a Che Guevara beret became the face of 1970s and 80s anti-imperialism, his taste for women and alcohol adding to his revolutionary mystique.

“He was the symbol of international leftist terrorism,” said Francois-Bernard Huyghe, a terrorism expert at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations, IRIS, in Paris. “One day it could be in the service of the Palestinian cause, the next day he could put bombs in French trains. He was a kind of star.”

PARIS (Reuters) – In the early hours of the morning, shadowy figures crouch behind the concrete blocks, bulldozers and rubble of one of the biggest building sites in central Paris to set their traps.

The lights from the nearby St. Eustache church cast a yellow glow over the ravaged landscape as the silent trappers place tuna and raw beef inside the wire cages and then step away to wait for the stealthy approach of their prey: feral black cats.

An 800 million euro ($1.01 billion) building project to modernize the ancient Paris market-turned subterranean shopping mall Les Halles has become a breeding colony for unwanted cats, spurring some Parisians into a humane effort to rescue them.

Since 2007, Valerie Massia, founder of the group Chadhal (an abbreviation of “Cats of Les Halles”), has humanely trapped over 100 abandoned and feral cats who prowl behind the overturned earth and “keep out” signs of the project.

Most Parisians don’t realize pets are dumped in their city, where the unsterilized continue to breed, and most have no concept of the work involved in rescuing them, said Massia, 49.

A local politician once exclaimed to her that it was “scandalous” that kittens could be found at Les Halles.

“But I told him, it’s not me who had the kittens! It’s not me who got knocked up by a big black cat!” said Massia, frustrated by those who assume she is a public service.