Is Sen. John McCain’s visit Friday morning to the Benghazi strong-hold of Libya’s rebel forces a sign of creeping escalation in the conflict with strongman Muammar Gaddafi that may lead to eventual troop deployment by Western nations? Impossible to know at this point, of course, but events coinciding with McCain’s visit to …
Barack Obama, don’t try this at home (as if…):
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is attempting to fulfill his 2007 campaign promise to boost long-stagnant household purchasing power—easily the biggest plank in a wider election platform that has, also, mostly come to naught. So, four years on, monumentally unpopular, and up for …
French films may still be popular with cultural polyglots in New York, London, and other cosmopolitan capitals–and, of course, remain a staple of the global art house circuit. But there’s one crowd that the cream of le cinéma français is no longer thrilling, charming, or luring to theaters with trademark marathon dialogue, …
Given French society’s reputation of unbridled sexual attitudes and libertine habits, it’s probably not surprising that a new proposal to combat prostitution is provoking considerable push-back. On the face of it, the initiative appears to be generating heat by sending two pillars of French life clashing in conflict: France’s …
It’s increasingly looking like the only factor capable of resolving the international community’s dilemma in Libya is also the one element to that will never cooperate in finding a solution: Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi himself. Because as the meetings, summits, and declarations of coalition partners come and go, it becomes …
The good news, according to France’s official National Consultative Commission on Human Rights (CNCDH), was the number of racist and anti-Semitic acts in France dropped significantly in 2010—down 13.6% from 2009. But the bad news, the CNCDH’s annual report adds, is that in contrast to that decline in the number of reported racist …
It sparked the protest, denunciation, and even arrests many had feared, yet as France’s legal ban of the burqa took effect April 11, it had many viewing the interdiction of facial coverings in public as one of the strangest and least enforceable laws in the long and cluttered French history of trying to legislate every aspect of …
France’s predominant role in international operations like the NATO-led mission over Libya–or this week’s United Nations helicopter strikes in Ivory Coast–have generated a flurry of media reports suggesting formerly Clark Kent-like French diplomats have shed their earlier mild mannered restraint, and have started wading into …
The U.S. Republican party isn’t the only big conservative force in Western politics experiencing divisions between its traditionally moderate majority and a defiantly rightward-leaning wing. France’s ruling Union for a Popular Majority (UMP) is similarly witnessing public clashes between internal factions generated by efforts to …
French pundits who had feared an historically high score by the extreme-right National Front (FN) in Sunday’s second round of local polling breathed a sigh of relief when the party’s tally didn’t meet expectations. But while the FN’s 11% performance was well below its 15% first-round take—and nearly half of the 20% result some …
Though it took painfully long for the international community to mount its 11th hour intervention into what looked like a looming massacre in the Libya, it’s clear Thursday’s vote by the UN Security Council approving military action to halt fighting and protect civilians won’t signal the beginning to a swift end of the conflict …
Stop the presses–or, better yet, don’t.
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi—the no-longer-as-credible-as-once-hoped son of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi—is claiming his family financed the victorious 2007 campaign of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and now wants that money back. And if the Frenchman doesn’t pay up, the younger Gaddafi …
Given the enormity of human suffering and risk of an atomic catastrophe in Japan, it seems almost indecent to be offering up commentary out of safe, comfy Europe. But despite the understandably shocked and fearful reaction to a possible reactor melt down at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power station, it’s probably worth questioning even …