Traffic Accidents France

The gendarme was off duty and drunk, but driving. In his gray Opel Corsa, Yves Laude weaved down Route Nationale 23, dodging holiday traffic on the road cutting through the pastures of southern Normandy. Heading the other way, alone in her Volkswagen Golf, was Stephanie Abadie, 31, a real estate agent and the mother of two small boys.

A man plowed his car into a crowd at the finish line of Saturday's stage of the Tour de France, injuring four, one seriously, race officials said. The driver was denied entry at an area for accredited personnel when he tried to greet French star Laurent Jalabert after his victory, officials said. Then the man returned to his car, drove at high speed and smashed through several barriers into a group of people, said Patrice Clerc, president of the company that owns the Tour de France.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton will attend Princess Diana's funeral in recognition of the Clintons' personal relationship with her and their admiration for her humanitarian work, the White House said Tuesday.

A Paris court refused to reopen the investigation into the 1997 car crash that killed Britain's Princess Diana, her boyfriend Dodi Fayed and their driver, judicial sources said. Lawyers for Fayed's father, Mohammed Fayed, said they would appeal to France's highest court, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The Paris court had been asked to reconsider a lower court's decision to dismiss charges against news photographers who were following the car.

She didn't have platinum albums filled with songs that spoke to a generation. There was no body of work that embodied an era. Rather, Princess Diana's life touched. People of a variety of ages say they felt a very personal kinship with her life, even when it became dented and tarnished by life's harsher realities. Women around her age, especially, couldn't help comparing their life to hers, through her young marriage, children, in-law problems, self-esteem issues and messy divorce.

A man plowed his car into a crowd at the finish line of Saturday's stage of the Tour de France, injuring four, one seriously, race officials said. The driver was denied entry at an area for accredited personnel when he tried to greet French star Laurent Jalabert after his victory, officials said. Then the man returned to his car, drove at high speed and smashed through several barriers into a group of people, said Patrice Clerc, president of the company that owns the Tour de France.

A Beverly Hills waiter was there all night. A few mourners stood in the hot sun on crutches. People brought their mothers and their children and scraps of paper on which they had scribbled the thoughts they wanted to express in the black-leather-bound book with engraved gold letters on the front that read simply, Condolence Book. Dear Beautiful Princess, I came here today to thank you for your example. You did good works when you didn't have to.

"A perfect woman, nobly planned, to warn, to comfort and command, and yet a spirit still, and bright, with something of angelic light. Rest in peace, dear lady." So read the handwritten note--quoting a William Wordsworth poem--tacked to the gate of Kensington Palace, home of Diana, the princess of Wales.

France on Monday asked Zaire to lift the diplomatic immunity of its ambassador so that authorities might bring charges against him in the deaths of two boys killed when he hit them with a car he was driving. Public outrage in the small Riviera town where the boys lived led French officials to take the step against Ambassador Ramazani Baya, who remains in Paris.

Former bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, the sole survivor of the car crash that killed Princess Diana, filed suit against the Ritz Hotel and the Etoile-Limousine car service for "endangering the lives of others." At the time of the Aug. 31, 1997, crash, Rees-Jones was an employee of Ritz owner Mohammed Fayed, the father of Diana's friend Dodi Fayed, who also died in the crash.

A federal appeals court panel on Friday upheld a lower court ruling denying Mohamed Al Fayed access to U.S. intelligence records related to the 1997 deaths of his son, Dodi Fayed, and Princess Diana in a Paris car crash. The Egyptian-born tycoon, owner of Harrods department store in London, sued the CIA seeking documents he said included information from monitoring of Diana's telephone conversations.

A speeding car crashed into a group of 100 cyclists in southern France, killing four and seriously wounding three, police said. Fourteen other cyclists also were injured in the crash, which occurred between the towns of Vauvert and Aymargues, police said. About 30 ambulances and six helicopters transferred the injured to hospitals in Montpellier and Nimes. The car's 20-year-old driver also was injured in the accident and hospitalized in Nimes. He had not been drinking, police said.

Ministry of Defense police apologized for using, in a campaign against drunk driving, a picture of the car carrying Princess Diana that crashed, resulting in her death. The British agency withdrew a leaflet produced at its base at Alconbury, near Cambridge, that bore the picture. The accompanying text read: "Unfortunately, even a princess isn't safe with a drunk driver."

Two years after what must be the best-known car crash in recent history, French magistrates ruled Friday that a pack of pursuing paparazzi played no role in the accident that killed Britain's Princess Diana and dropped proceedings against them. The two magistrates instead placed the blame on the Frenchman who was at the wheel of the doomed Mercedes-Benz limousine.

France's state prosecutor has recommended dismissing charges against nine photographers and a press motorcyclist being formally investigated in the Aug. 31, 1997, car crash that killed Princess Diana, judicial officials said. The officials said the prosecutor decided that there was insufficient evidence to pursue the charges of manslaughter and failing to aid people in danger.

Nearly 17 months after Princess Diana's violent death, two French magistrates completed a painstaking investigation Friday that is believed to lay the bulk of blame on the drunk, speeding driver of her Mercedes. The probe, the most meticulous ever of an auto accident in France, turned up no trace of the white Fiat Uno that apparently brushed against Diana's limousine right before the accident, according to numerous press leaks.

It is easier, a grieving Britain has learned these last extraordinary few days, to bury a queen than a maverick princess. A queen may go in solemn splendor to her rest when the state observes the rigorous precedent, protocol and seamless ceremony for which Britain is famous. But if the late princess is Diana of Wales, ritual itself must be reinvented.

For the first time since the Paris auto accident that killed Diana, princess of Wales, last Aug. 31, all but one of the known witnesses to the midnight crash appeared Friday to reenact the scene before a French investigating judge. The extraordinary daylong proceeding, behind closed gates at the Paris Palace of Justice, drew the nine photographers and one motorcycle driver who are under investigation on manslaughter charges.

Former bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, the sole survivor of the car crash that killed Princess Diana, filed suit against the Ritz Hotel and the Etoile-Limousine car service for "endangering the lives of others." At the time of the Aug. 31, 1997, crash, Rees-Jones was an employee of Ritz owner Mohammed Fayed, the father of Diana's friend Dodi Fayed, who also died in the crash.

As Britain's royal family gathered to pray in private Monday at a small Scottish church, thousands of mourners laid flowers at the gates of Kensington Palace here to mark the first anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. Flags flew at half-staff over Buckingham Palace, and the royal family issued a statement thanking the public for its sympathy and remembrances of the 36-year-old princess, who died in a Paris car crash with her companion, Dodi Fayed, and their driver last Aug. 31.