Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...evening opened with Swiss-French composer Arthur Honegger’s symphonic poem “Pastorale d’été.” Though this work does not promise much in the way of dynamic variety or musical progression, Luisi did what he could with a compositionally-constrained piece. Honegger, one of six composers loosely identified as leaders of the musical avant-garde movement in the 1920s, employed languid horns and murmuring strings to capture the flavor of first light in a pastoral setting...
...write about aviation in more detail than almost anyone in the country. Did anything about this event really surprise you as you conducted your research? I was deeply impressed by the Airbus 320 and its flight-control system. What Bernard Ziegler did is still surprising to me. [Ziegler, a French engineer, developed the plane's fly-by-wire technology that uses computers to help stabilize and guide the aircraft.] I don't want to imply that the pilots would not have been able to land successfully if the plane didn't have [that technology.] They probably would have pulled...
...Some bloggers have wondered if it isn't simply in the French blood to root for an underdog taking on authority figures. Generations of French children have been enamored with traditional Guignol puppet shows, in which the protagonist, Guignol, fights with a rotten, bumbling policeman. The nation is also obsessed with the comic-book hero Asterix, a puny but cunning Gaul warrior who always gets the best of Julius Caesar's Roman armies despite being overmatched and outnumbered. (Read "Asterix at 50: A French Comic Hero Conquers the World...
...Even before the economic crisis, the French had made something of an antihero of Jérôme Kerviel, a young, rogue trader who lost $7.2 billion of the Société Générale bank's money in early 2008. He too had his moment in the Internet spotlight - there are still about 200 Kerviel fan groups on Facebook and websites selling T-shirts with phrases like "I am Jerome's girlfriend." These may see a surge in popularity now that Kerviel's fraud trial is set to resume next year in Paris after...
...maxillofacial surgeon, Jerome Sobel has brought a smile - literally - to hundreds of patients' faces. But the Lausanne physician has a second job that is far more somber: helping terminally ill people end their lives. Sobel is president for French-speaking Switzerland's chapter of EXIT, an assisted-suicide organization that provides a lethal dose of barbiturates to terminally ill patients who want to end their life. (See pictures of suicide in the U.S. Army recruiters' ranks...