Word: chirac
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When the global all-news channel France 24 launched last month, French President Jacques Chirac cooed that it would help France "maintain and diffuse its view of the world." After a month on the air, that conceit still engenders sneers. "Let's face it," says one prominent French government critic, "you're either a journalist or a functionary of the foreign minister, not both." But the ambition of running parallel editorial operations in English and French on a $112 million budget annual budget - about a fifth of CNN's - earns points at the very least for sheer panache. Can France...
...ambitious position for an otherwise militantly free-market candidate. Initially reticent to respond to what it snubbed as a grandstanding manipulation of unfortunates, France's conservative government returned from its Christmas break with promises to increase and improve shelter capacity for the homeless. Under personal orders of President Jacques Chirac, the government then promised to add $92 million in immediate funding to the $1.4 billion it spends annually on the most needy...
...reaction that is at least as hostile" as the bid, and parliament considered a new merger law that would block the deal. In Paris, Finance Minister Thierry Breton lambasted Mittal's decision to make an unsolicited bid, accusing him of having "a grammar problem," while President Jacques Chirac searched for ways to stop the takeover. One former French Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, wrote an angry screed entitled "Europe Should Say No," that advocated the introduction of a blanket ban on acquisitions by non-Europeans. At Arcelor itself, chief executive Guy Dollé slammed Mittal Steel as "a company of Indians...
...Chirac ought to have one compelling reason for at least tolerating Sarkozy: he is the only real hope Chirac's party has of beating the incandescent Socialist candidate, S?gol?ne Royal. Still, the Chiraquiens appear poised to wage internecine war between now and the January 14 party conference where a candidate will be chosen - almost two months during which the Socialists will be mending their divisions and, they hope, broadening their appeal...
...campaign of a thousand cuts is under way, and for what? Chirac doesn't want a "rupture" from his self-preserving balancing act between right and left, which has left French society in aspic for the last 11 years. Does he want to block Sarkozy badly enough to countenance a Socialist victory? The next two months should yield an answer. But no one should put it past...