Word: frenchness
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...inducing pleasure rather than peccability. The film chronicles two women’s journeys of self-discovery: a bored housewife, Julia Child (Meryl Streep), gleefully bests male chefs at Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris and writes the revolutionary “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” while Julie Powell (Amy Adams), frustrated with her dead-end cubicle job and nursing an ambition to become a writer, cooks—and blogs—her way through all of Child’s recipes 50 years later. The two storylines are parallel but totally separate...
...succeed his father Omar Bongo, who died in June after having ruled the nation with an iron fist for 41 years. On Thursday, opposition supporters clashed with security forces in the capital, Libreville, while others in the main economic city of Port-Gentil ransacked shops, set fire to the French consulate and attacked the compound of French oil giant Total. Their grievances were clear: after having helped Omar Bongo squash his political opponents and allegedly siphon off a vast fortune from resource-rich Gabon's coffers, protesters say, French officials now stand idle as Ali Ben Bongo uses that money...
...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...