Word: frenched
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...slash its deficit of 11.4% to just 3% by 2013, although the country - which is still reeling from the recession, with unemployment of nearly 19% - has been vague about how it will do that beyond proposing $69 billion in cost-cutting measures over the next four years. Last month, French officials somehow managed to sound proud when they announced that France's 2009 deficit of 7.9% was lower than the expected 8.2% - and that they would hold it below 8.2% for the rest of this year. (Read "Why Greece Could Be the Next Dubai...
...stress about deficit spending - especially in the wake of the worst recession to hit the continent in a lifetime? Because the habit isn't new, and it is clearly harder to kick than governments pretend. Observers note that the borrowing kick has already lifted French public debt to nearly 80% of GDP - a level that Germany is within shouting distance of, and which Italy, Belgium and Greece are well beyond. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...French, however, do not quite feel humiliated. Wronged, perhaps, but not humiliated. In a trial that opens outside Paris on Tuesday, French officials will try to pin the blame for the Concorde's demise on Continental Airlines. It was not, they insist, the Concorde's design that led to its demise; indeed the plane still has cherished status among many in France as a feat of engineering and aesthetics, hence the monument at Charles de Gaulle. (See four decades of the Concorde's supersonic magic...
...neglected to replace a crucial tire spacer on the aircraft in maintenance work four days before the crash. Continental is the only company charged, along with the firm's former welder John Taylor, who fixed the titanium strip to the Continental DC-10, and his supervisor Stanley Ford. The French are also going after their own. In the same trial, Concorde's former head of testing Henri Perrier and former chief engineer Jacques Herubel as well as France's retired civil aviation chief Claude Frantzen are also charged with involuntary manslaughter for having failed to detect and fix faults...
...France unfairly fingered a U.S. company in order to protect the Concorde's legacy? In late January, a documentary on the French network Canal+ argued that point. In the film, several eyewitnesses say they remembered seeing flames coming from the plane on the runway before it hit Continental's stray metal piece, suggesting that something was wrong with the Concorde itself. That is a key point in the defense strategy pursued by Continental's lawyers, who say they have 28 witnesses who can provide similar testimony. The lawyers told the Parisien newspaper last Friday that they intend...