Word: frenched
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...trial pitting French President Nicolas Sarkozy against fellow conservative and former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has just opened and already the French media is buzzing with words like hatred, treason and war. In the same courtroom in which a French revolutionary tribunal sentenced Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793, a panel of judges will hear whether de Villepin was actively involved in a smear campaign that was apparently designed to torpedo Sarkozy's ultimately successful 2007 presidential bid. The outcome will determine whether the flamboyant de Villepin's political career dies on the spike of a guilty verdict...
...case is known as "Clearstream" - a reference to a Luxembourg bank in which a number of top French politicians and business figures purportedly held accounts containing illegal kickback money from arms contracts. Those claims turned out to be false - as was the forged list of names of 89 Clearstream account holders that was sent to a French investigating judge in 2004 by an anonymous whistle-blower. Among those cited were then Finance Minister Sarkozy, who at the time was locked in a fierce battle with his boss, Prime Minister de Villepin, over who would run as the right's standard...
...crossing to Britain has become all but impossible over the years, as British immigration officials have increasingly tightened security, using sniffer dogs and carbon-dioxide detectors in the ports. As a result, thousands of immigrants have found themselves stranded along the French coast, living with little sanitation or clean water...
Unlike most of Europe's illegal immigrants, the men in the makeshift camp known as "the Jungle" near the French port of Calais have hardly kept out of sight of the locals. Surviving under leaky plastic sheeting amid discarded food and dirty clothing, the men - most of whom fled desperate violence and poverty - have spent months, sometimes even years, as the most visible challenges to, and victims of, Europe's tangled immigration laws...
...Jungle lived up to its name on Tuesday as hundreds of French riot police stormed the camp and arrested 278 people - almost all Afghan, and nearly half of them children. The French government says the raid was a much-needed crackdown on human traffickers. But even as police were leading immigrants out of the camp, refugee organizations warned that the action would do little to deter desperate people from making the hazardous journey across Europe, and instead blamed French officials for failing to deal with them. "The French government has effectively washed its hands of the problem and deliberately held...