Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...strange-sounding names and bizarre accents often telephone his establishment, asking to discuss their governments' foreign debts. Says Marlet: "No one ever gets credit here, and I have enough debts of my own to worry about." The experienced manager instead refers his callers to a telephone number at the French Finance Ministry on the Rue de Rivoli...
...institutions," as one representative called it. The club has no official charter, no staff of its own or even a permanent headquarters. It works by a set of unwritten rules and owes much of its significance to the refined negotiating skills and political savoir faire of a succession of French Finance Ministry officials who, in the words of former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency John Heimann, "have rolled over a vast amount of Third World debt with a minimum of fuss...
Trichet, 44, should know. His official job is chief domestic policy aide to French Finance Minister Edouard Balladur. But Trichet also presides over Paris Club affairs from behind his Louis XV desk in a spacious office overlooking the Louvre gardens. So far this year, representatives of 13 countries have come to Trichet to request rescheduling discussions. Among the visitors: Brazil, Argentina and Egypt. The previous record for the club was in 1985, when 17 countries renegotiated their debts, five of them twice...
...agility and intelligence of Ted Koppel, the authority and credibility of Walter Cronkite in his heyday and the popularity of Johnny Carson. When his show comes on French TV every Friday night, right after a dubbed version of Miami Vice, it is something of a national event. Some 6 million people tune in faithfully -- cab drivers as well as business executives, concierges as well as intellectuals. But even more remarkable than the lofty status of Bernard Pivot is the subject of his program: books...
Pivot is host of Apostrophes, an urbane 90-minute discussion of literature and ideas with some of the world's most famous authors. Henry Kissinger has appeared, as have French Presidents Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand. Most weeks, however, writers like Saul Bellow, Carlos Fuentes, Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag and others of lesser renown are the stars...