PARIS -- French President Francois Hollande has signed into law a bill allowing same-sex marriage, making France the 14th country to legalize gay weddings.

France's official journal announced on Saturday the bill had become law after the Constitutional Council gave it the go-ahead on Friday.

The bill, a campaign pledge by the Socialist president, has been for months hotly contested by many conservatives in France, where allowing gay marriage is one of the biggest social reforms since abolition of the death penalty in 1981.

Opponents have staged huge and often violent demonstrations against the bill and have called yet another protest on May 26. The leader of opposition to gay marriage, a political activist and humorist who goes under the name of Frigide Barjot, has said the protest would draw millions into the streets.

Montpellier mayor Helene Mandroux, who is due to celebrate France's first gay marriage in the southern city on May 29, said the law marked a major social advance.

"Love has won out over hate," she said, while voicing concerns the first gay wedding could attract violent protests.

France, a predominantly Catholic country, follows 13 others including Canada, Denmark, Sweden and most recently Uruguay and New Zealand in allowing gay and lesbian couples to wed. In the United States, Washington D.C. and 12 states have legalized same-sex marriage.

Unlike former president Francois Mitterrand's abolition of the death penalty, which most French people opposed at the time, polls showed more than half the country backed gay marriage.

Nonetheless, with Hollande's popularity ratings at record lows a year into office, the law has proved costly for the president with critics saying it has distracted his attention from reviving the recession-hit economy.

After lawmakers adopted the bill in late April, opponents had sought to scupper it with a last-ditch appeal to the Constitutional Council.

Related stories:

• France legalizes gay marriage despite angry protests
• New Zealand becomes 13th country to legalize gay marriage
• Protesters in France: Gay marriage would hurt children

Marc Piasecki / Getty Images Contributor

CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 17: A man is taken away by the police after the reported sounds of gunshots were heard in front of the Martinez Hotel beach on May 17, 2013 in Cannes France.

CANNES, France -- A man was arrested at the Cannes film festival on Friday after firing a starting pistol during a live TV broadcast on the palm-lined waterfront, sending actors Christoph Waltz and Daniel Auteuil running for cover.

French TV station Canal+ was interviewing Austria's Oscar-winning Waltz and French actor Auteuil live on its nightly news show from a beach-front set before a crowd of spectators when a man fired two shots into the air.

"The bodyguards jumped over the barriers into the crowd and pulled him to the ground. The police arrived and told everyone to run because there was a grenade in his hand," witness Arthur Laiguesse told Reuters.

Police arrested the man at the scene and found he was carrying a dummy grenade and a knife, authorities said.

"It really appears to be a crazy guy," said a police source.

After the man was taken away, the show's producers told the crowd the program would continue: "The show must go on."

Waltz, who has won two best supporting actor Oscars for "Django Unchained" and "Inglourious Basterds", and Auteuil, both of whom are serving on the Cannes jury, returned to the set.

The shooting was the second security incident on day three of the 12-day festival, the world's largest cinema showcase that attracts thousands of actors, directors, film executives, journalists and fans.

A police source said $1.4 million worth of Chopard jewelry intended to adorn movie stars had been stolen from a room at the Suite Novotel hotel overnight on Thursday.

But Chopard said the value had been exaggerated and the items were not for actresses to use, declining to give further details.

Related stories:

• Cannes caper: Pricey trove of jewels stolen from hotel room during film festival

Mozkito / Photonews via Getty Images, file

The burned-out remains of the van used in the Feb. 18 diamond heist are shown in Zaventem, Belgium. Using a van and car to break down a security fence, a gang of robbers stole diamonds estimated to be worth $50 million from a plane bound for Zurich. Police have now arrested 31 people.

BRUSSELS - Authorities claimed a major breakthrough on Wednesday in their investigation of a spectacular $50 million diamond heist, detaining at least 31 people in a three-nation sweep some three months after robbers pulled off the theft with clockwork precision at Brussels Airport

A Frenchman who is believed to have been one of the actual robbers at the airport was arrested in France, while six to eight people were detained in Geneva, and 24 in and around Brussels. Police did not indicate what the other suspects' roles might have been.

What's more, police say they have proof that diamonds found in Switzerland were part of the cache that was spirited away in the brazen Feb. 18 robbery that ranks among the biggest diamond heists of recent times.

After two months of investigation on some of the suspects, police moved in. Suspects in France and Switzerland were detained on Tuesday, and the following day Belgian police carried out a massive operation, with 250 police involved in 40 house searches.

"In Switzerland, we have found diamonds that we can already say are coming from the heist, and in Belgium large amounts of money have been found. And the investigation is still ongoing," said Jean-Marc Meilleur, a spokesman for the Brussels prosecutor's office. He said police had also found luxury cars.

Meilleur was scant on detail, yielding no clues how police got on the trail of the suspects. Authorities were expected to announce later Wednesday how many of the detainees would be charged and arrested.

In Geneva, a police statement said that "a very important quantity of diamonds was seized" during the sweep "coming from the spectacular heist at Brussels airport." While Belgian authorities spoke of six detentions in Switzerland, Geneva police put it at eight, including a businessman and a lawyer. Authorities were alerted when suddenly a member of a major criminal organization appeared in their city. The value of the diamonds was still being estimated.

It was the first breakthrough in a robbery that many had started comparing to an "Ocean's Eleven"-type Hollywood script for its clinically clean execution during which no one was injured.

On a cold winter evening, the diamonds had been loaded on a plane bound for Zurich when robbers, dressed in dark police clothing and hoods, drove through a hole they had cut in the airport fence in two black cars with blue police lights flashing. They drove onto the tarmac, approached the plane, brandished machine guns, offloaded the diamonds, then made their getaway in an operation that barely took five minutes. Later that night, investigators found the charred remains of a van most likely used in the heist, but little else.

The stolen parcels contained both rough and polished stones. The trail ran dry until the surprise announcement on Wednesday.

Meilleur said that the man held in France is suspected to be one of the robbers. "This person has a very heavy judicial background in France and his extradition to Belgium has been requested."

Belgian authorities said that about 10 of the 24 people detained in Belgium were known criminals. The suspects ranged in age from 30 to 50, they said.

The diamond industry, too, was totally caught by surprise by Wednesday's developments. "But we can only be happy," said Caroline De Wolf, spokeswoman for the Antwerp World Diamond Center.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Related:

• Robbers snatch $50 million of diamonds off plane

This story was originally published on Wed May 8, 2013 6:40 AM EDT

Francois Nascimbeni / AFP - Getty Images

Firemen are at work near the collapsed section of an apartment building on April 28, 2013 in Reims, France.

PARIS — Part of a five-storey residential building collapsed in the center of the northeastern French city of Reims on Sunday, killing two people and injuring at least 10, officials said.

The collapse, which left several apartments dangling in open air, may have been caused by a gas explosion and investigations were continuing, regional official Michel Bernard told BFM-TV.

The casualty toll was provisional and could rise, he said. Around 10 of the 40 apartments in the 1960s-era building were affected by the 11.15 a.m. (5:15 a.m. EDT) collapse. "There is a lot of rubble to clear," he said.

France became the 14th country in the world to allow same-sex couples to wed Tuesday, when its parliament approved a law that has sparked often violent street protests and a rise in homophobic attacks.

Lawmakers in the lower house National Assembly, where President Francois Hollande’s Socialists have an absolute majority, passed the bill by 331 votes for and 225 against.

The law also allows same-sex couples to adopt children.

“I hope people across the country will celebrate this moment,” Martin Gaillard, a 31-year-old advocate of gay marriage, told English-language news site France24.com.

Opponents of the law have held increasingly angry protests in recent weeks, including a string of confrontations with police in Paris.

They fought hard to scuttle the parliamentary bill because it also allows the use of surrogate motherhood by gay couples wanting children.

The debate is also blamed for fanning a spate of homophobic attacks, including the beating up of a 24-year-old in the southern city of Nice on Saturday, Reuters reported.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Related:

New Zealand becomes 13th country to legalize gay marriage

Protesters in France: Gay marriage would hurt children 

This story was originally published on Tue Apr 23, 2013 11:33 AM EDT

A car bomb went off outside the French Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, on Tuesday, a Libyan Foreign Ministry official said.

The official said two guards were hurt, but no one had died.

Television images showed extensive damage to buildings in the area.

"I think there were two blasts, the first was very loud and then there was a smaller one," a  witness told Reuters. "There was some black smoke at first, and then it turned white."

Ismail Zitouny / Reuters

People stand among debris outside the French Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, after a car bomb exploded Tuesday.

In Paris, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius condemned what he called a heinous attack and said everything would be done to find the perpetrators, the news service reported.

"I send my solidarity and deepest sympathy to the two injured French guards and my wishes for their recovery," he said in a statement. 

In September, an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi left four Americans dead, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Related:

US recruiting Libyan anti-militant force, rebel commander says

Suspect arrested in connection with Benghazi attack

This story was originally published on Tue Apr 23, 2013 3:40 AM EDT

Reinnier Kaze / AFP - Getty Images

(From left) Former French hostages Tanguy Moulin-Fournier, his wife Albane and his brother Cyril pose at the French embassy in Yaounde on Friday. The family of seven were kidnapped in Cameroon in February by an Islamist movement from neighboring Nigeria.

YAOUNDE, Cameroon -- A French family of seven, including four children, have been released in Cameroon following secret talks, France said on Friday, ending two months of captivity in the hands of Nigerian Islamist militants.

Armed men on motorcycles snatched the family on February 19 while they were on holiday near the Waza national park in north Cameroon, some 6 miles from the Nigerian border.

"I spoke to the father this morning ... He told me how happy and relieved he was," French President Francois Hollande told a news conference in Paris on Friday. "This is an immense relief. This will redouble our determination to free the hostages who remain."

Eight French hostages remain held by al Qaeda-linked Islamist militant groups in the Sahel region.

Hollande said there had been contacts over the last few weeks to discreetly free the family under French terms and denied any ransom was paid.

"France has not changed its position, which is not to pay ransoms," he said.

The father of the kidnapped family, Tanguy Moulin-Fournier, worked in Cameroon for French utility firm GDF Suez. He was kidnapped with his wife, two daughters and two sons, and his brother, who was visiting them on holiday.

"We are very happy to be released. I want to thank (Cameroon) President Paul Biya for making all the effort to ensure our release," his tired-looking wife, Albane Moulin-Fournier, said on Cameroon television, holding her smallest child.

Both adult males of the family had thick beards while the children looked drawn, and wore flip-flops, knee-length trousers and tee-shirts.

Ferdinand Ngoh Ngoh, secretary-general of Cameroon's presidency, said all family members were well.

State television showed the family descending from a plane where they were greeted on the tarmac by the French ambassador who took them to the embassy in the capital Yaounde.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius was due to meet them there, a French official said, and they would be repatriated to France as soon as possible.

The release of the hostages is a rare piece of good news for Hollande's government, which is struggling to cut unemployment and has been hit by a tax fraud scandal which has forced its budget minister to resign.

Mostly Muslim northern Cameroon is considered an area within the operational sphere of Islamist militants including Boko Haram, Nigeria's biggest security threat.

Gunmen claiming to be from Boko Haram released videos of the family in March, threatening to kill them unless Nigeria and Cameroon released Muslim militants held in detention.

Cameroon denied it was holding any militants and it was unclear if any of the group's demands had been met.

Additional reporting by John Irish and Brian Love in Paris.

Related:

Nigeria in 'massive manhunt' for French hostages

French special forces join search for family of 7 kidnapped in Africa

French family with 4 children kidnapped by Islamists in Africa

Guillaume Horcajuelo / EPA

Jean Claude Mas, former head of Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), smokes a cigarette Wednesday during a break on the first day of his trial in Marseille, southern France.

MARSEILLE, France -- Five French executives faced jeers from victims Wednesday as they went on trial accused of  supplying women with hundreds of thousands of substandard breast implants and triggering a global health scare.

More than 300,000 women around the world were fitted over a decade with implants from the French company Poly Implant Prothese (PIP), and the trial includes 5,000 civil plaintiffs and 300 lawyers.

PIP's founder and chief executive, 73-year-old Jean-Claude Mas, has admitted filling the implants with an unapproved homemade recipe made of industrial-grade silicone gel.

Mas and four PIP executives, including the chief financial officer, are charged with aggravated fraud and risk maximum prison terms of five years each, plus fines, for selling the implants around the world from 2001 to 2010, when they were ordered off the market.

A vast exhibition building close to PIP's former premises has been set up as a makeshift courtroom to accommodate the huge crowds expected for the trial, due to last until May 14.

Mas arrived at court under police escort and faced a crush of cameras as the trial began in the southern city of Marseille.

"Bastard!" shouted someone in the audience of some 300 victims as Mas appeared live on a giant video screen.

Of the more than 5,000 individual lawsuits filed against PIP -- once the world's third-largest supplier of breast implants -- and its executives, 220 have come from women outside France.

A French woman who alleges that one of her PIP implants began to leak four years after their insertion said outside the courtroom that victims were both scared and angry.

"We had foreign bodies put inside us that were flawed ... we could have maybe died from it. The anger is because we were tricked," said Tomassine Catalano. "It's frightening."

Rush for removal
The scandal -- revealed after inspectors pursuing a tip-off discovered vats of industrial-grade silicone outside the PIP factory in 2010 -- sparked worldwide panic when the government recommended removal of the implants due to an abnormally high rupture rate.

Health experts say no link has been established between PIP implants and breast cancer, but in the months after the scandal broke, plastic surgeons around the world reported a flood of removal requests from worried patients.

Half the French women with PIP implants, or nearly 15,000, have already opted for removal, whether because of rupture or as a precaution, according to the government.

Mas was released in October from eight months in detention following a failure to post bail. He told police that 75 percent of PIP's implants had contained the homemade gel, which was never been approved by regulators, although he denies it was unsafe. He and the other executives deny the charges.

Investigators estimate that Mas's formula allowed PIP to save nearly $1.6 million in one year alone.

On Wednesday, hoots erupted in court when Mas said he lived on a modest monthly retirement income of $2,350, prompting the judge to warn that the next person to disrupt proceedings would be thrown out.

Minutes before the trial began, a court in Paris rejected a defense request to have the case thrown out.

Mas and CFO Claude Couty are separately implicated in a civil case over fiscal fraud that has yet to reach trial. Mas is also under investigation for manslaughter following a complaint from the mother of a French woman with PIP implants who died of cancer in 2010.

Related:

France arrests breast implant boss amid scare

AFP - Getty Images, file

French President Francois Hollande vowed to bring transparency to government. An order for his ministers to publicly declare their wealth has shown some to be worth millions, putting them out of step with the common French citizen.

Michele Delaunay, minister for Senior Citizens in the socialist government of French President Francois Hollande, on Monday revealed that her personal wealth amounted to more than $7 million, including almost $20,000 worth of jewelry, along with antique furniture and paintings worth $260,000.

Writing in a regional newspaper, Sud Ouest, she acknowledges that the full extent of her wealth "will be hard to understand for the majority of French citizens who are currently experiencing financial hardship."

Minister of Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius possesses an even greater fortune: $7.8 million, including an apartment in Paris valued at $3.5 million.

AFP - Getty Images, file

Socialist Michele Delaunay had to admit that she is worth more than $7 million as part of French President Francois Hollande's order for his government ministers to make their holdings public.

They have been forced to reveal this information on government websites by President Francois Hollande, who demanded that all ministers publish details of their personal wealth by 11 p.m. ET on Monday. This followed a scandal brought on by the actions of another wealthy member of his government.

Jerome Cahuzac, the former budget minister and thus the man responsible for clamping down on tax evasion, was forced to admit he had a secret bank account in Switzerland containing $780,000, and he is now facing charges of tax fraud. Confirmation came only after he repeatedly denied the accusation, first made by a journalist working for the investigative website Mediapart.

Such a revelation would be damaging for any government, but is particularly dangerous for Hollande, elected on a platform of transparency and integrity.

During his campaign, he promised to address the financial problems facing France with an anti-austerity program but has struggled to deliver.

Now, after just 11 months in office, his approval rating is down to 29%, according to a poll carried out by CSA for Les Echos, released on April 4. That’s a drop of 4 percentage points in just one month, and 9 points down from his February rating.

The demand for each of his government's 37 ministers to publish details of their wealth online, a strategy he calls "moralization," is a key part of his effort to regain public trust.

Some of the revelations have provoked mirth. For example, Housing Minister Cecile Duflot, also of the Green Party, has revealed that she owns two cars -- a Renault Twingo worth $1,900 and a Renault 4L, worth even less.

The minister for industrial renewal, Arnaud Montebourg, has admitted he owns an armchair designed by American Charles Eames worth almost $6,000.

But politicians on both sides have grumbled about the exercise, saying it puts what should remain private into the public domain. Claude Bartolone, a leading socialist who is not a minister and therefore exempt from the process, told Le Figaro newspaper that letting the public see such information was akin to voyeurism.

Public analysis of the information is now under way. Hollande will have to hope that the exercise does not backfire by provoking a backlash against wealthy socialists, the "gauches caviares" as they are known -- as he is unlikely to be able to afford for his approval rating to sink further.

Jacques Brinon / AP

A visitor stands in front of the closed Louvre museum Paris, France, Wednesday.

PARIS - Tourists caught no glimpse of the Mona Lisa, Winged Victory or Venus de Milo on Wednesday due to a one-day closure of the Louvre, as guards protested that pickpockets were rampant at the world's most visited museum. 

Two hundred museum guards exercised their right to a work stoppage, forcing the museum to shut its doors for the day, union representatives said. 

The CGT union said guards were "fed up" by attacks and threats directed at them and visitors over the past few months by pickpockets.

The secretary general of the national union for museums (SNMD), David Maillard, said petty thieves were multiplying at the site, visited by nearly 9 million people each year.

"There are thefts and threats every day. The guards are fed up with being assaulted by pickpockets," Maillard told Reuters, adding that the unions want better security at the museum.

The Louvre, which confirmed the closure on its website, could not be immediately reached for comment, but unions said the museum would reopen on Thursday.

Paris police regularly patrol the city's most crowded tourist sites, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre.

But thieves who often operate in organised gangs are a constant frustration for authorities as they are easily able to exploit tourists and can lose themselves in crowds.

Many of those arrested do not hold French nationality or are minors, complicating judicial pursuit. 

Reuters contributed to this report.

Related:

Clashes, riot police, at French anti-gay marriage protest

France's 'rich tax' means Paris mansions for sale