The left wing idiots at Marianne, in a desperate bid to define everything foreign in the same way the worst of French society always have (instead of letting others define themselves) has their moment of cynicism after the O-gasm. Except for the fact that they’re at heart a bunch of ignorant and insensitive boors pretending that their hyperventilating somehow hakes them look smart.

The comments about the cartoon are even more amusing. The readers take the various moments of anti-social destruction and marauding in France as some sort of natural outcome of the US election, or more to the point, the fact that they though about the subject. Among the delusional as well as the likes of the readers of Marianne2, thinking about a subject give rise to events in meatspace, I suppose.

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I think that it is important for Europe to understand that even though I'm now President and George Bush is no longer President, al Qaeda is still a threat

Devant les étudiants de Strasbourg, il a parlé d'Abou Ghraib, l'ancienne prison américaine en Irak, un nom qui ne revient pas souvent dans le discours public américain, en essayant de les convaincre qu'ils peuvent désormais se joindre aux Etats-Unis sans avoir peur de "se regarder dans la glace".

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à la stupéfaction du protocole, Michelle a eu l'audace de lui poser la main sur le dos. Elle a eu droit à un regard assassin de la reine.

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Lexington … mentioned that the White House has engaged in a debate with the media about whether Mrs Obama should show her “perfectly toned” upper limbs in public

Being familiar with constitutional law, perhaps Barack Obama could put this particular fashion controversy surrounding his wife to rest by referring to the second amendment’s right to bare arms.

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News reports quoted French men and women hailing the first African-American president of the United States as a hopeful sign for global racial reconciliation.

But is there another reason they're so smitten? Might they be imagining the decline of America and the rise of a Eurocentric multilateralism?

Barack Obama's words to the thousands of squealing young French and German fans at the Rhenus Sports Arena in Strasbourg certainly seem in harmony with such hopes.

"In America," the president claimed, "there's a failure to appreciate
Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."

President Obama promised that "America is changing" and that there would now be "unprecedented coordination" in our policies.

He lamented that "we got sidetracked by Iraq"; he extolled the "social safety net that exists in almost all of Europe that doesn't exist in the United States."

And he described the G-20 summit he just attended in London last week as "a success of nations coming together, working out their differences, and moving boldly forward."

But is multilateralism really the great hope for the future that the president and his French and German devotees are convinced it is?

"We just emerged from an era marked by irresponsibility," the president claimed in reference to the global financial crisis.

But when he flaunts his "excellent meeting with President Medvedev of Russia" to begin the reduction of U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles with the claim that working with Moscow will "give us greater moral authority to say to Iran, 'don't develop a nuclear weapon,' to say to North Korea, 'don't proliferate nuclear weapons,' " isn't he actually embarking on a new era of naive foreign policy irresponsibility?

The Russia and Communist China the president wants to "partner" with are directly responsible for giving Iran and North Korea the nuclear expertise and equipment that have empowered those two oppressive terror states to pursue the ability to incinerate a city.

And does the president really believe that Kim Jong-il or the Ayatollah Khomenei respond, as he put it, to "moral authority" the way civilized leaders do?

It's Europe that has things to learn from America, not vice versa.

Europe can learn that with an injection of U.S.-style market competition, French patients need not wait month-upon-month for heart bypass surgery. They can learn that Iran is a clear and present danger requiring force from a united free world, not talk.

While they're at it, they might also learn to express some gratitude for the $13 billion American taxpayers shelled out during the post-war years (over $100 billion in current dollars) to rebuild their countries — after the U.S. came to their rescue during the war itself, spilling the blood of hundreds of thousands to defeat Hitler.

The United States of America is the world's lone superpower — unless and until we choose to relinquish that responsibility.

The last thing our sometime friends and allies across the pond need is a U.S. president bemoaning America's role in the world and serving as an echo chamber to those in Europe who would like to see us weakened or irrelevant.

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The New York Times Co has threatened to shut The Boston Globe unless the newspaper's unions agree to $20 million in concessions, the Globe reported on Friday, quoting union leaders.

The union officials said executives from Globe and the Times, which owns the Boston newspaper, made the demands on Thursday morning in a meeting with leaders of the newspaper's 13 unions, the Globe reported.

"Management told union leaders Thursday that the Globe will lose $85 million in 2009, unless serious cutbacks are made, according to a Globe employee briefed on the discussions," the Globe report said. That compares with an estimated $50 million loss last year, the newspaper quoted the employee as saying.

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Just a few weeks after retention bonuses at American International Group became a national scandal, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage-financing giants that the government rescued last fall, have outlined plans to pay an additional $159 million in bonuses to retain employees in 2009 and 2010, on top of the nearly $51 million already paid out last year.

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Ce film peut aussi jouer son rôle sur la question de la mémoire, qui divise l'Europe : à l'Ouest, on garde une image positive du communisme pendant la guerre ; à l'Est, on a le sentiment d'avoir été abandonné et enfermé pendant quarante-cinq ans ; et dans une Russie hypernationaliste, le communisme redevient une période glorieuse.

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…les ados qui sont accros aux séries à succès telles que "Skins", "Gossip Girl", "True Blood" ou "Desperate Housewives" n'attendent pas qu'elles arrivent en version française sur le petit écran. C'est en version originale qu'ils les dévorent, au rythme de plusieurs épisodes à la file, emmagasinant ainsi une somme de dialogues qui, s'ils ne relèvent pas toujours d'un lexique raffiné, ancrent dans leur mémoire les expressions et intonations anglo-saxonnes.

"On observe un intérêt différent des élèves par rapport à l'anglais, très probablement lié aux séries qu'ils téléchargent ou visionnent en streaming sur Internet, observe Isabelle, qui enseigne dans un lycée de Sartrouville (Yvelines). A l'oral, ces élèves se révèlent bien meilleurs, l'accent et les intonations sont plus justes, les syllabes sont accentuées convenablement. La musicalité de la langue est maîtrisée plus spontanément."

J'ai un score de 274/300 au TOEFL, et j'avoue que le fait de savoir par coeurs quelques saisons de Friends y a un peu contribué…

La "novlangue" [Newspeak] fait fureur. Dans mon lycée, bien meilleur pour son enseignement que pour sa gastronomie, on ne disait pas la cantine, mais "le goulag". Le chef ne réussissait que le pain et la moutarde. Il ne faut pas s'étonner que les gamins préfèrent les MacDo.

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"C'est un malheureux concours de circonstances", estime un commerçant témoin de la scène. "Le type n'a pas eu de chance, il avait le même visage que le violeur. N'importe quel père aurait fait pareil." Selon lui, l'incident était inévitable : "Un pédophile était en cavale depuis un an et la police ne réagissait pas. La loi de la rue a dû prendre le relais."

Ce sinistre incident s'est achevé à l'hôpital en réanimation : la victime, totalement défigurée, souffre de multiples fractures et contusions au visage, à l'abdomen et aux jambes.

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With motifs of climate-friendly transport woven into the fabric of the building, the Tricycle Cinema in north London was the ideal location to premiere Franny Armstrong's new film, The Age of Stupid. One story in the film concerns the conflict between a wind energy entrepreneur and his rather self-satisfied and uptight posh local opponents who dislike the idea of any change to the landscape. The posh people win.

Afterwards, in the cinema bar, a slightly intense woman came up to me and asked, "Why don't they make the wind turbines out of glass, then no one would be able to see them?"

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The New York Times’ Senior Vice President for Corporate Communications Catherine Mathis … wrote, “In response to your questions to our reporter, Stephanie Strom, we do not discuss our newsgathering and won’t comment except to say that political considerations played no role in our decisions about how to cover this story or any other story about President Obama.”

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