Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Still, the fireworks blasted off in Tripoli on Sept. 1 with many world leaders - including Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy - absent. While many African and Arab leaders as well as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez were there, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was the only Western European leader to attend. Britain's Prince Andrew, who is scheduled to hold trade talks with Gaddafi this week, also canceled. (See the top 10 Berlusconi-isms...
...April when Save the Rich, which denounces a system it says is rigged to keep the wealthy and powerful in their privileged positions, publicized its facetious demand for a minimum wage for rich people by barging in on a swanky Rotary Club lunch honoring Jean Sarkozy - son of French President Nicolas Sarkozy and a rising political star in his own right. With a boom-box blaring the theme music from the series Dallas, Save the Rich members handed Sarkozy fils an award for "Best Daddy's Boy" and congratulated him on his work to protect France's cosseted élite...
...sounds a lot like France has just discovered the type of protests that have been used in places like the U.S. and Britain for years, that's partly true. It's also true that previous generations of French protesters have taken on single issues. But that has nearly always been as part of a mass movement. "Think of the feminists, the antiracism movement, the defenders of the needy - even the union demos that used to end by marchers helping themselves to whatever they found on supermarket shelves. All these things were earlier manifestations of what we're seeing with these...
Central to the movement is the handful of single-issue collectives Bayou and his fellow activists have founded. Take Black Thursday, which is named - in a wink to the housing crisis faced by thousands of university students and young French workers - for the day France's best-known classified real estate supplement comes out. The group stages high profile squatting campaigns of empty state- and municipal-owned buildings. Last month, for example, 10 Black Thursday squatters theatrically moved out of a disused building for handicapped students they had occupied since January. That's how long it took to get municipal...
...politicians on the spot by spelling out plausible solutions to the biggest issues facing the country. Since his election in 2007, President Sarkozy has pushed through a wide array of measures designed to fix some of those problems - labor flexibility, opportunities for young graduates, hiring incentives - which French politicians have been unwilling or unable to tackle for decades. But Sarkozy's reforms have rarely delivered all they promised, and continue to ignore some problems. With young French so frustrated and angry, it's little wonder that the new protest movement is growing in popularity. "We had little choice...