Paris

Nicolas Sarkozy's Union for Popular Movement (UMP) party proved to be the big winner at the second round of France's local elections.

Paris and Lyon, France's two biggest cities have been excluded from the vote on Sunday.

BELGRADE - All male drag ballet corps Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo from New York, which is known for portraying classical ballet in a humorous style, will premier in Serbia in Belgrade's Theatre on Terazije on Sunday.

The corps will perform Swan Lake, Paquita and the Dying Swan.

Trockadero is also scheduled to perform in Novi Sad in the Serbian National Theatre.

The Empire State Building dimmed its lights and the Eiffel Tower went dark March 28 as iconic landmarks across the world observed Earth Hour, the global climate change awareness campaign.
 
The usually glittering nighttime majesty of the Empire State Building was set to "faint sparkle" in New York, while theaters on Broadway also toned down the neon. 
 

Rain and … Saharan dust made for a muddy mix in southern Greece on Thursday and Friday, with vehicles in the greater Athens area looking like they just competed in a Paris-Dakar race.
A brownish-reddish hue hung over the Greek capital for most of Friday, a combination of low cloud cover and the Saharan dust carried by balmy southern winds.

The Travelers' Choice Award-winning destinations sifted through millions of reviews of grand cities and exciting trip ideas to come up with a list of top 25 destinations for 2015.

1. Marrakech, Morocco
Reviewers pointed to the "magical place" with its markets, gardens, palaces and mosques.

2. Siem Reap, Cambodia

3. Istanbul, Turkey

4. Hanoi, Vietnam

Romanians on both sides of the Pruth River and abroad will celebrate, at the end of this week, the anniversary of 97 years since the Union of Basarabia with Romania, during events initiated by the Unionist Platform Actiunea 2012.

Unfurling of longest tricolour flag during a Unionist Platform Actiunea 2012 event in 2013
Photo credit: (c) Cristian NISTOR / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

By Dalton Bennett & Shawn Pogatchnik

VELES, FYROM - This is the moment when Sandrine Koffi's dream of a new life in Europe ended - and her nightmare of an infant lost in the night began.

German co-pilot "intentionally crashed aircraft"

PARIS -- The co-pilot of a Germanwings passenger plane that crashed in France earlier this week "intentionally brought the aircraft down," investigators have announced.

There are no indications that the incident, that killed 150 passengers and crew, was a terrorist act, they added on Thursday.

A French court on March 24 sentenced two Kurds to five years in prison and seven others to lesser terms in an extortion case linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Investigators probed an extortion racket linked to a PKK campaign to raise funds among Kurdish immigrants through a so-called revolutionary tax.

France's BEA (Bureau of Investigations and Analyses) said it has successfully extracted recordings from the cockpit voice recorder of the Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday.

BEA Director Remi Jouty said at a news conference at its headquarters outside Paris on Wednesday it could take days to get "usable" information from the voice recordings.