Word: frenchness
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...people unsettled by rapid social change and radical ideas. Such voters, historically decisive in U.K. polls, tend to view liberals and urban sophisticates with deep suspicion, and might be expected to react to the profoundly liberal, unambiguously sophisticated Clegg with all the enthusiasm of vampires invited to dunk their French fries in aioli...
Amid protests from the U.S. and Georgia, French President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed on March 1 that France was negotiating the sale of four Mistral-class assault ships to Russia. The announcement, which came at the start of Russian President Dmitri Medvedev's three-day state visit, marks the first such deal between Moscow and a NATO country. While Sarkozy described the deal as an attempt to move beyond Soviet-era politics, nearby nations have raised concerns about the decision to sell the ships--which can carry troops, helicopters and armored vehicles--to a country that launched an offensive against...
...March 2, a Spanish court sentenced Arnaldo Otegi--leader of Batasuna, the political wing of the Basque separatist group ETA--to two years in jail for "glorifying terrorism" during a 2005 speech. It was the second major blow to the organization that week, following the arrest by French authorities of ETA leader Ibon Gogeascoechea and two accomplices. More than 30 suspected ETA members have been arrested this year...
...organizers of the New York International Children's Film Festival (NYICFF), which runs through March 21, understand that their target is not really children. This year's special attraction, for example, is a retrospective of 50 years of French animation. For those who find that too trifling a diversion, there's In the Attic, touted as a "Soviet-era allegory" by "legendary Czech stop-motion animation master Jiri Barta." No? How about the U.S. premiere of the German Expressionist film Little White Lies, which foreshadows the arrival of fascism through the microcosm of one school...
Amuse-Bouche, the risibly titled animated French short-films program at the NYICFF, ran the gamut from an ingenious retelling of the fable of the lion and the mouse to Masques, a confrontation between two masks floating over a desert landscape. And if it's hard to imagine any children enjoying Black Tea, about a man's complicated feelings for a hot beverage, expressed in such terms as "microbes in the dental pulp," it's equally hard to imagine them not loving Oktapodi, a romantic comedy about octopuses. Mostly, however, the kids in the audience seemed nonplussed...