Word: nord
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...moviegoers into laugh away some of their own enduring regional prejudices. The movie tells the tale of Philippe Abrams, a manager in France's postal system whose efforts to finagle a transfer to the sunny Riviera go wildly wrong. His bosses punish him by sending him instead to the Nord Pas de Calais, warning him of its reputed cold, gloom, incessant rain, and expanses of flat, barren land pocked by slag heaps, abandoned mines, and derelict factories. Just as dismal, he is told, are the region's residents: beer-guzzling, perpetually-unemployed louts who never saw anything deep-fried they...
When Americans want an iconic image of poverty, joblessness, alcoholism, and despair, they look to trailer parks. The rough French equivalent is the Nord Pas de Calais department, a swath of hardscrabble land that makes up about a third of France's northern border. While the neighboring Belgians remain the favorite butt of French jokes about simpletons, France has traditionally considered its indigenous northerners, known as Ch'ti, too miserable to even joke about. Instead, the Ch'ti were the folks filmmakers habitually went to for dismal, Zola-esque images of France's post-industrial decline and squalor. But that...
Acting Chairman Nancy Nord, who announced the Mattel recall of 9 million toys last week, touted the CPSC's "effective system of checks and balances to prevent unsafe products from being sold." But even she has recommended reforms to Congress, including a new civil penalty cap of $10 million. Her proposals are among the many to strengthen the CPSC as the challenge presented by Chinese-made toys has underlined its weaknesses. PIRG's Mierzwinski recommends a simple first step: "Why doesn't the President nominate a safety advocate...
Doing that, of course, would require improving China's food and product safety at the source. "We'd rather have the products manufactured safely in the first place," says acting Consumer Product Safety Commission chairman Nancy Nord. Despite our buying power, the U.S. government simply has very little leverage to impose new restrictions on Chinese goods, in part because it is lobbying China to open up its markets to U.S. goods. "This can't be the Federal Government's responsibility," says Pietra Rivoli, a professor at Georgetown's business school and author of the book The Travels...
Similar tension is evident far beyond Saint-Gilles. In the wake of the 2005 riots in suburban projects and pitched battles between police and immigrant youth last month in Paris' Gare du Nord train station, more French are gravitating toward hard-line positions. Sarkozy, the former Interior Minister, is a natural law-and-order candidate who spent his time in office noisily battling crime and deporting illegal aliens. But even some of his allies have questioned his campaign pledge to create a "Ministry for Immigration and National Identity"--a linkage many decry as a Le Penesque invocation of a creeping...