Word: french
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What They're in French First Lady Carla Bruni might blame hubby Nicolas Sarkozy for the lukewarm reviews of her latest folk-pop album, Comme Si Rien N'Etait (As If Nothing Happened). Though nearly half a million people logged on to the chanteuse's website before the much hyped July 11 release, sales are slow, and 55% of French voters think Sarkozy is merely using his wife to boost his image. With lyrics like "my lord, my darling, my orgy" (which presumably refer to Sarkozy)--that's quite an image indeed...
...made by a different country, I don't drink Budweiser anymore. I'll go back to Wild Turkey.' JORDAN MOORE, 21-year-old resident of St. Louis, Mo., on the $52 billion sale of iconic American brewery Anheuser-Busch to InBev NV of Belgium. Wild Turkey is owned by French company Pernod Ricard...
...health experts have long pointed to France with special admiration. Here, they said, was a society that masters moderate drinking. In wine-sipping France, the argument went, libation is just a small part of the broad festival of life, not the mind-altering prerequisite for a good time. The French don't wink like the English do at double-fisted drinking; they scorn people who lose control and get drunk in public. It's a neat argument. But it sounds a little Pollyannish now that France itself is grappling with widespread binge-drinking among its youth...
...categories over the past decade, it has begun to skyrocket among those minors who say they drink. The most recent official figures show that 12% of people under the age of 18 qualify as regular drinkers, compared with 22% among adults. However, 26% of those frequently consuming French minors admit to having been repeatedly drunk within the previous year, compared with just 5.5% among their adult counterparts. Worse still, fully half of 17-year-olds reported having been drunk at least once during the previous month...
...government has made ambitious plans to tackle the problem head-on. French Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot announced that she would scrap France's relatively permissive rules on sales of alcohol to youths. She told the Sunday paper Journal du Dimanche that she would impose a "total prohibition of alcohol sale to minors" by early 2009, and would also ban open bars during celebrations. Open-bar bashes - where participants can drink unlimited quantities of alcohol in exchange for a flat fee - have become, Bachelot says, a "classic element of student parties that encourages binge-drinking." All that underage chugging, Bachelot says...