Word: messieres
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...groups. For an occupying force--as the old imperial powers learned the hard way--keeping public order in such circumstances is the hardest of all tasks. Sooner or later, everyone hates the outsider. The occupation of Iraq has been a mess for months. It just got a whole lot messier. --With reporting by Timothy J. Burger and James Carney/Washington
...head of Vivendi Universal, Jean-Marie Messier was the flamboyant king of spin - and in the end he flamed out. Now Messier's successor, Jean-René Fourtou, has a new title: the king of spinning off. In the 14 months since Fourtou took over the debt-laden French conglomerate (it has more than 6,000 individual holdings), he has been breaking down the empire piece by piece. Out went the cluster of Internet ventures that never lived up to their hype, the book and magazine publishers for which Messier overpaid, and the water utility that was once the company...
...board signed off on a plan to increase its stake in a Moroccan telecom firm. But if he wanted to focus principally on telecommunications, then Fourtou's most logical move would have been to sell the U.S. entertainment assets outright; Edgar Bronfman Jr., who originally sold Universal to Messier and is on Vivendi's board, offered $8 billion in cash. Fourtou himself acknowledges that he doesn't yet have a final strategy. One possibility, he said last week, is to split Vivendi into two companies: one focusing on entertainment, the other on telecommunications. "Should they remain together?" he asked...
Indecent Proposal Add this to the already bloated annals of fat-cat pay: a U.S. arbitration panel last week upheld a $23.6 million severance payout for Jean-Marie Messier, the ousted CEO of Vivendi Universal. Jean-René Fourtou, Messier's successor, described the payout as "indecent" and promised to contest the decision. He has little room for maneuver: the payout was written into a U.S. contract agreed to last July by two Vivendi directors, Marc Viénot and Edgar Bronfman Jr., to persuade Messier to depart quickly and quietly. The full board rejected the contract days later, after...
...civilian casualties may prove the most shocking. With Iraqi fighters mixing with civilians, it has been hard to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. And highly touted smart weapons have turned out to be messier than advertised. A 2,000-lb. bomb steered by a JDAM guidance device may rarely miss its mark by more than 13 ft.--the length of the steering system and the explosive--but when the bomb blows, it sends high-speed shrapnel flying as far as a mile. There may be a lot of uncounted innocents in such a big footprint...