Word: frenched
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...does most of the world travel on the right side today? Theories differ, but there's no doubt Napoleon was a major influence. The French have used the right since at least the late 18th century (there's evidence of a Parisian "keep-right" law dating to 1794). Some say that before the French Revolution, aristocrats drove their carriages on the left, forcing the peasantry to the right. Amid the upheaval, fearful aristocrats sought to blend in with the proletariat by traveling on the right as well. Regardless of the origin, Napoleon brought right-hand traffic to the nations...
...favorite to win the position of Director General at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, Hosni's chances of winning that role later this month have been hit by an international campaign launched earlier this year. It began with a boom last May, when French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, and French film director Claude Lanzmann authored an editorial in Le Monde accusing Hosni of being a "dangerous man" who'd been responsible for a series of "insane declarations" regarding Israel and Jews. (See pictures...
...Blame it on Françafrique, the name given to the relationship between successive governments in Paris and the client regimes that arose across Africa as France swapped colonial control of nations in exchange for arrangements conducive to French political and business interests. For decades, Françafrique produced corrupt and brutal yet stable African partners for France and helped Paris fend off the rival influences of Britain, the U.S. and more recently China. Typically, the authoritarian African leaders who gained from this relationship grew magnificently rich as their people, inversely, became impoverished. And no ruler was more iconic...
...that reason, the Bongo succession was viewed as a test of the repeated promises French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made to turn the page on Françafrique by treating African partners as equals - and allowing their voters to decide their destinies for themselves. "If you choose democracy, liberty, justice and law, then France will be with you to construct them," Sarkozy told a crowd of university students in Dakar, Senegal, in July...
...Bongo's election victory, with 41.7% of the vote, was gained by fraud further suggests that Sarkozy is finding it easier to live with Françafrique than to end it. And he's not the only one. Just hours before the announcement of the election results on Thursday, French Foreign Affairs Minister Bernard Kouchner said he'd been in contact with Ali Ben Bongo and his two main rivals, all of whom were claiming victory. "I hope they will come to an arrangement as they always have in Gabon," said Kouchner, in what didn't exactly sound like...