PARIS (Reuters) – France’s opposition Socialists on Tuesday challenged a government plan to ban full Islamic veils in all public places, proposing a milder bill based on practicality rather than values.

The government is expected to present legislation next week to outlaw face-covering veils on the grounds that they are demeaning to women, even though legal experts have warned that such a prohibition could violate religious freedom.

“What we want is efficiency rather than symbolism,” Jean-Marc Ayrault, head of the Socialists’ group in parliament, told reporters.

The Socialist draft says that everyone must keep their face uncovered when using public services to permit identification.

In practice, this could mean women would have to remove face veils to pick up their children from school, or during wedding ceremonies at town halls.

Several human rights organisations have spoken out against a general prohibition on veils such as the burqa and the niqab.

A committee of the Council of Europe — a European human rights body based in Strasbourg — also said on Tuesday it opposed such a ban, which is being discussed in France as well as Belgium.

PARIS (Reuters) – The French parliament on Tuesday approved the restitution of tattooed, mummified heads of Maori warriors to New Zealand, centuries after they were brought to Europe and displayed as exotic oddities.

The decision is part of a broader effort by some European museums to return artifacts plundered by explorers, giving in to pressure from communities around the world who want to bring home their dead and lay them to rest.

“From a ritual showing the respect of a tribe and family toward their dead, the mummified heads became the object of a particularly barbaric trade due to the curiosity of travelers and European collectors,” Parliamentary Relations Minister Henri de Raincourt said when he presented the law last week.

It is the first time that a French law has authorized the return of an entire category of museum items, rather than a specific object, and marks a success for activists campaigning for the restitution of bodies and antiquities.

U.S. and European museums have long resisted such claims, fearing they would lead to the departure of prized mummies and other archaeological treasures.

New Zealand has demanded the return of the heads since the 1980s. The dispute became a national issue in France only when the Rouen town council voted in 2007 to give back a head kept in its Natural History Museum since 1875.

That decision was annulled, with France’s Culture Ministry saying at the time it could not be made at the local level.

PARIS (Reuters) – French parliament is set to approve on Tuesday the restitution of tattooed, mummified heads of Maori warriors to New Zealand, centuries after they were brought to Europe and displayed as exotic oddities.

The decision is part of a broader effort by some European museums to return artifacts plundered by explorers, giving in to pressure from communities around the world who want to bring home their dead and lay them to rest.

“From a ritual showing the respect of a tribe and family toward their dead, the mummified heads became the object of a particularly barbaric trade due to the curiosity of travellers and European collectors,” Parliamentary Relations Minister Henri de Raincourt said when he presented the law last week.

It is the first time that a French law has authorized the return of an entire category of museum items, rather than a specific object, and marks a success for activists campaigning for the restitution of bodies and antiquities.

U.S. and European museums have long resisted such claims, fearing they would lead to the departure of prized mummies and other archaeological treasures.

New Zealand has demanded since the 1980s that the heads be returned. The dispute only turned into a national issue in France when the council in the town of Rouen voted in 2007 to give back a head kept in its Natural History Museum since 1875.

That decision was annulled because it did not follow the formal procedure for handling public artifacts. The new law, which has cross-party support, will apply to more than a dozen Maori heads kept in French museums.

PARIS (Reuters) – A French Muslim threatened by the government with being stripped of his passport for practicing polygamy said Monday he had only one wife and several mistresses.

The case of Lies Hebbadj, an Algerian-born butcher who became a citizen when he married a French woman in 1999, has flared into a major political row with opposition parties accusing the government of exploiting the situation.

The story came to light Friday, when Hebbadj’s wife, Anne, complained she had been fined for driving while wearing an Islamic veil, which police said was dangerous.

The government, which days earlier announced it planned to ban the full veil from the streets of France, said Hebbadj appeared to have several wives and suggested that he lose his French nationality.

But Hebbadj denied having more than one wife, saying other women he has had children with were his lovers.

“If one can be stripped of one’s French nationality for having mistresses, then many French could lose theirs,” he said.

A person can see their French passport taken away if they acquired it through fraud — if, for instance, Hebbadj hid an existing marriage when he married Anne. Mistresses, however, are hardly unusual in France, where former President Francois Mitterrand maintained a hidden, second family for years.

PARIS, April 26 (Reuters) – French Prime Minister Nicolas Sarkozy will look to bury past tensions with China and win its support in global issues from Iran’s nuclear plan to monetary reform during a visit to Beijing this week. Accompanied by Economy Minister Christine Lagarde and other ministers, Sarkozy will present his ideas for a global currency system that relies less on the dollar, though officials do not expect him to talk specifically about the yuan.

Relations between France and China hit a low in 2008 when protesters disrupted the passage of the Olympic torch through Paris and Sarkozy met Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

While Sarkozy may bring up the subject of human rights to placate voters at home, the focus will be on charming China, a key player in top diplomatic disputes as well as one of France’s main rivals in Africa in its quest for raw materials.

Underlining the importance France places on China, the April 28-30 stay will be Sarkozy’s fourth trip to China since his election in 2007, and his second full state visit.

His wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, often skips his overseas voyages, but she will be by his side this week and together they will open France’s pavilion at the World Expo in Shanghai.

Sarkozy will meet President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, with officials hoping the encounters will help along talks over a new round of United Nations sanctions against Iran.

China would like to water down the proposed punitive measures and the talks are progressing only slowly, Western diplomats and officials say. Iran is China’s third-biggest crude oil supplier, after Saudi Arabia and Angola.

PARIS (Reuters) – French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s 82-year-old artist father is putting on his first show in Paris, featuring naked buttocks, exploding television sets and a portrait of French First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

A day before the opening on Saturday, however, Pal Sarkozy and his German creative partner, Werner Hornung, appeared to be tiring of the presidential connection and resulting media storm.

“Oh no, not again the one with Carla, let’s take another one,” Pal Sarkozy told photographers looking at the portrait of Bruni-Sarkozy perched on a piano and playing the guitar to a backdrop of angel wings and rays of light — a gift for the presidential couple’s wedding in 2008.

A red rose placed on the piano is meant to symbolize love as well as Bruni-Sarkozy’s political views, which are more to the left than her husband’s.

After posing with the digital, computer-generated portraits of Bruni-Sarkozy and the president for glossy magazines around the world, the artists have decided to stop showing those works.

“I’m fed up, I can’t take it anymore,” Hornung told Reuters. “We’re not going to show them next time. They aren’t our masterpieces — we have 70 paintings and everyone only talks about these two.”

Pal Sarkozy, a dashing charmer who bears a striking resemblance to the president but is much taller, has been drawing since his youth. Some of his sketches from the 1940s were included in the exhibition, which is just a stones’ throw from the presidential Elysee palace.

PARIS (Reuters) – France’s government on Thursday announced it would apply a proposed ban on face-covering Islamic veils to visiting tourists as well as residents, even as skepticism mounted over the legality of the plan.

Junior family minister Nadine Morano said visitors would have to “respect the law” and uncover their faces, prompting critics to speculate whether Saudi luxury shoppers would be forced to unveil themselves on the glitzy Champs-Elysees.

“When you arrive in a country you have to respect the laws of that country,” Morano said on France Info radio. “If I go to certain countries I’m also forced to respect the law.”

French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday backed a strict public ban of the veil, commonly referred to in France as the burqa, eschewing more moderate proposals that focused on limits in state institutions such as schools and town halls.

The draft bill will be presented to the cabinet next month.

“Why should we accept (the veil) on the bus and not in the town hall?” Morano said. She repeated Sarkozy’s line that the veil hurts the dignity of women and equality between the sexes.

Prime Minister Francois Fillon said on Wednesday he was ready to take on a “legal risk” by supporting the ban, which could be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that it violates freedom of religion.

PARIS (Reuters) – A dubious piece of Internet gossip has turned into a political debacle for President Nicolas Sarkozy, with a row over his private life taking up energy and goodwill badly needed for difficult economic reforms.

French media mostly stayed quiet when the rumor of problems in Sarkozy’s third marriage surfaced on the Internet last month.

But the presidential office’s mishandling of it has become the talk of the town, at a time when his approval ratings are at all-time lows and public debt forecasts at record highs.

Initially dismissive of the story, presidential aides fanned the flames this week by suggesting Sarkozy was the victim of a “plot” to destabilize him. A police investigation was launched into the rumor, immediately giving new legs to the story.

He now faces discontent from hard-pressed members of his UMP party fed up with using air time to defend the presidential couple instead of explaining reforms, including a politically sensitive overhaul of the costly pension system.

“The UMP members of parliament are annoyed, they really didn’t need this right now,” Jean-Francois Cope, the party’s parliamentary leader, was quoted as saying by newspaper Le Monde. “They are exasperated by this latest outpouring.”

The hooplah comes two weeks after the center-right UMP suffered a drubbing in regional elections from voters concerned about issues ranging from crime and security to jobs and a bloated budget deficit that threatens cuts in public services.

PARIS, March 31 (Reuters) – French Defence Minister Herve Morin on Wednesday expressed doubts over a NATO push for costly missile systems to defend against states such as Iran, pointing to tight military budgets. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a vocal proponent of missile defence, met Morin to discuss issues from the war in Afghanistan to the future of the military alliance. While Rasmussen said he hoped NATO states would make a decision on missile defence at a summit in November, Morin countered that European forces sometimes lacked even basic equipment such as helicopters. "Given the cost of a missile defence system and given limited defence budgets, my deeper concern is that missile defence would come at the expense of the military capacity of Europeans, which is already often a European weakness," Morin said in a joint news conference. Last year, U.S. President Barack Obama scrapped the previous administration’s project to install a land-based missile shield in NATO members Czech Republic and Poland. Under the revamped plan, based on an updated assessment of the threat posed by Iran, the U.S. will deploy missile interceptors in NATO member states Romania and Bulgaria. The system is supposed to link up with existing NATO hardware. Western powers suspect Iran of developing nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian atomic programme. Iran denies this. "We need to define missile defence as a mission of the alliance," Rasmussen said. "We are faced with a real threat from missiles, in particular from Iran." Russia has criticised plans for a shield, seeing it as a threat to its own nuclear arsenal.