Press Interpreter

08/17/06--Between those who underline that she is a woman and those who mainly point out that she is Indian by birth, the appointment of Indra Nooyi at the head of PepsiCo did not go unnoticed. As announced by the firm through a press release on Monday, August 14th, she is to take up her duties as general manager as soon as October 1st. She will take the chair on the month of May 2007. Mrs Nooyi will then be at the head of the 61st company in the country, a group which makes a 33 billion dollar (26 billion euro) turnover.

06/17/06 -- After two weeks of debate, on Thursday night the Senate passed the bill on immigration on the first reading, fought every step of the way by the opposition Socialist and French Communist Parties.

04/30/06 -- Several tens of thousands of peopled marched on Saturday in New York, to demand the immediate withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, and announced their intention to pursue this campaign until the American Parliamentary elections in November.

03/29/06 -- Military operations in Afghanistan -- Another Canadian Soldier is Killed -- A Canadian soldier was killed in the Kandahar region, in Afghanistan, on Wednesday morning.

03/19/06 -- After the CPE* opponents' newest show of force on Saturday, Dominique de Villepin still seemed determined not to back down on Sunday despite the ultimatum of the unions, which are calling on Jacques Chirac and are starting to raise the specter of a multi-industry strike.

03/12/06 -- Robert Feliciaggi, 63, Corsican elected representative and shareholder in many gaming businesses in France and Africa, was cut down by multiple bullets on Friday, March 10 at about 11pm, while he was picking up his vehicle at the Campo dell'Oro airport near Ajaccio. According to initial witness accounts, the shooter appears to have acted alone, his face masked by a hood. "Mr. Feliciaggi had landed on a flight from Paris and was leaning over the trunk of his car when the assassin hit him in the head with at least three bullets from very short distance," specified a police source. Mr. Feliciaggi had been about to take the wheel of his car in an isolated part of the airport. The shooter escaped in a car that appeared to have been waiting for him not far away. Mr. Feliciaggi was quickly taken to the Ajaccio hospital, where he succumbed to his wounds an hour later.

03/01/06 -- Obituary --Joelle Aubron, member of Direct Action ("AD"), died on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 1, at the age of 46 said Alain Pojolat, member of the support committee for imprisoned members of AD. She had lung cancer and had been in coma for many days.

03/02/06 -- Algeria Journal -- The Algerian government has acted on its threat: since February 25, 42 private schools located mostly in Algiers and in the Kabylie have been closed, sometimes with the help of the police. The motive: the private schools had refused to submit to the strict curricular and pedagogical requirements of the national education program.

02/28/06 -- Point of View -- Yves Michaud's article, published in Le Monde on February 24, 2006, presents a twofold epistemological inquiry: establishing the relevance of a dialogue between philosophical and juridical schools of thought and demonstrating that the truth is just the momentary correction of errors. It's a mistake to write that the Superior Council of the Magistracy (CSM) is composed of people nominated "by the President for the basic essentials" when in fact, out of eighteen members, only one is nominated by the head of State! It's also inaccurate to write that the CSM rarely sanctions magistrates when the figures from annual reports demonstrate the opposite. And it's always wrong to write that the CSM is the arrogant defender of the narrow interests of the magistrates, when in fact it is, to put it modestly, one of the authorities constitutionally charged with ensuring checks and balances!

02/28/06 -- Le Monde Editorial -- This is the government that, in 2006, decided, organized, and announced under the authority of Dominique de Villepin himself, from Matignon,* without consultation of any kind, not even with social partners or the Brussels Commission, in the space of a weekend, the merger of the private company Suez with the nationalized enterprise Gaz de France [GDF], creating the world's second largest electricity and gas conglomerate. The operation was hastily carried out in the name of "economic patriotism" due to a threatened takeover by the Italian [gas and power company] Enel** and the strategic character of the (unconventional) power business of Suez.

02/25/06 -- Analysis* -- With all due respect to the European competition commissioner, concentration in the energy sector will continue apace in the next few years. The two most recent mergers announced since the beginning of the week -- the 29 billion Euro takeover bid of German E.ON for the Spanish electric utility Endesa and the appetite of Italian Enel for French Suez -- undermine Neelie Kroes. Since Europe must completely liberalize its electricity and gas markets by July 1, 2007, a question arises: is the emergence of giants centered on the core business of these markets and on the Old Continent compatible with the creation of a unified competitive market?

02/24/06 -- Interview with Pierre-Jean Luizard, researcher at CNRS and author of "The Iraq Question" (published by Fayard).

The attack on Wednesday on a Shiite mosque in Iraq provoked a wave of rioting and violence. Just in Baghdad, tens of Sunnis have been found dead. How are these recent events foreshadowed by the history of the relations between these two communities in Iraq?

There has existed in Iraq for the past two years a creeping civil war between the majority Shiites, who are in power, and the minority Sunnis, who represent close to 20% of the Iraqi population. It was triggered by Sunni fundamentalists linked to al Qaeda. They decided to make war against the Shiites of Iraq, which is to say against the United States as it is represented in the Iraqi community. This war has already killed tens of thousands, notably Shiites, the victims of waves of attacks.

02/02/06 -- Twelve drawings, published on September 30, 2005, by the Danish weekly Jyllands-Posten and entitled “The 12 faces of Mahommed� are stirring up emotions amongst Muslims and anger in Arab countries. One of the caricatures depicts the head of the Prophet sporting a bomb-shaped turban. Dalil Boubakeur, who directs the Muslim Council of France (Conseil français du culte musulman - CFCM), sees it as a new sign of “islamophobia towards Muslims and their religion.� Whilst it has not taken on the stature of the Salman Rushdie affair, when the author became the subject of a fatwa in 1988 condemning him to death for his interpretation of the Koran, the controversy is still swelling, such that some of the Arab countries have demanded - fortunately in vain - that Denmark “sanction� the caricaturists.

01/30/06 -- Canada-USA Relations -- Bush and Martin talked together

Retiring Prime Minister Paul Martin received on Thursday a phone call from President George W. Bush.

A spokesperson from the Whitehouse declared that Mr. Bush had spoken with the Prime Minister "to tell him that he had appreciated the work that had been accomplished together and to wish him good luck".

12/02/05 -- “It is quite possible that there were flights,� Jean-Baptiste Mattéi the spokesperson of the Foreign Minister declared on Friday. This refers to the allegations in this week’s Figaro, concerning stop-overs in France of aeroplanes chartered by the CIA to transport Islamist prisoners.

11/14/05 -- On Monday morning, at a meeting of ministers called expressly for the purpose, the government approved a draft law extending the state of emergency for three months starting November 21.* The President of the National Assembly swiftly announced that the draft law will be considered on Tuesday at 4:30 PM. According to an April 3, 1955, law, the government may declare a state of emergency by decree for a maximum of 12 days -- which was done on November 8. But the extension of the state of emergency must be confirmed by a law voted on by the Parliament.

11/09/05 -- Curfews were ordered on Wednesday, November 9, in several large cities in France, where suburban violence nevertheless seemed to be on the decline after the government's establishment of a state of emergency to rein in a crisis that has raged for nearly two weeks.

11/09/05 -- The Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy, announced on Wednesday, November 9, at the National Assembly that he had demanded that prefects expel all foreigners convicted in connection with the urban violence of the past 13 nights, "including" holders of a residency permit.

11/05/05 -- On Saturday, after nine nights of riots, during which 900 vehicles have been torched and some 250 people questioned, in Ile-de-France but also more and more outside the capital, UMP* deputy Nicolas Dupont-Aignan observed that Jacques Chirac was "strangely silent" and asked that he "speak to the Nation right away" to present certain urgent measures. The cohort of the president of the Republic, approached by Agence France Presse (AFP), said that Mr. Chirac would speak about the urban violence "when the moment comes, if he deems it necessary."

10/27/05 -- In a book, Father Pierre, the most popular man in France along with football player Zinédine Zidane, admits to having had sexual relationships, contests celibacy for priests, advocates the ordination of women, and addresses homosexuality and the possibility for gays of raising children.

10/22/05 -- Islamism. There are close to 100 000 koran-schools in the three countries of the Indian sub-continent. All are not extremist, but many cultivate intolerance.

How do fundamentalist Muslims form their ideology, which rejects other religions, lives in a mentally autistic universe, and which rejects modernity? The phenomenon has touched almost 700 million believers in the world, reproduces itself earliest in Koran-schools (madrassas), which have hardly evolved their education for three centuries. To understand this mind closing education we have visited fifteen madrassas in Bangladesh and Pakistan.

10/19/05 -- On Wednesday Zambia announced clinical trials, each lasting three months, of traditional medicines on 25 HIV positive patients in order to test their efficacy in controlling the AIDS virus.

09/29/05 -- Having degrees from the most prestigious universities, respected* by the Bar, feted by the religious right, but diplomatic with the opposition, Justice John Roberts, aged 50, combines all of the qualities George W Bush could wish for presiding over the Supreme Court.

08/30/05 -- For the third time since the beginning of the year, a fire of tremendous violence has enveloped a Parisian apartment building and brought about the deaths of at least seven people of African origin. This repetition, within an interval of a few days, of an incident of this nature has emphasised the feeling of overwhelming, which has taken hold of everybody, and demonstrated the helplessness of the public services to prevent such catastrophes.

07/06/05 -- Paris has lost, and its executioner is called London. The British capital will host the 2012 Olympics. It was a candidacy that was called for the past two months unrealistic by a number of Olympic "specialists." Tony Blair will have triumphed over Jacques Chirac once more. London won its bid in the fourth round of selection, after the successive elimination of Moscow, New York, Madrid, and Paris.

07/08/05 -- 2pm -- At the moment when bombs were exploding in London on Thursday, July 7, the office of the British presidency of the European Union was presenting, in Brussels, a plan of action for security in the presence of, notably, Gijs de Vries, the coordinator of EU antiterrorism policy. The experts were not all surprised by the announcement of these attacks. "The British authorities have always said loudly that an elevated risk of attack in their country must be taken into account," said M. de Vries in this vein.

06/25/05 -- The threat of Algerian terrorism is starting afresh in France. The intelligence services have revealed, with concern, these last months, that the Groupe Salafiste pour la Predication et le Combat (GSPC)* wishes to register their activities as being within the framework of an international djihad (holy war). Today the most structured Islamic organisation in Algeria, the GSPC would have come into contact with the Jordanian djihastistic Abou Moussab Al-Zarkaoui in October 2004 at the latest, who initially was the autonomous head of the group, Unification and Djihad, who pledged allegiance to Ossama Bin Laden and Al-Qaida, and became their leader in Iraq.

06/11/05 -- The word “quota� is igniting public debate. The head of the government, Dominique de Villepin, and his interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, are making it the key to their immigration policy. Sociologist and director of research at the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), doubts the effectiveness of this option for controlling the flow of immigration. The author of “the Republic and its Diversity� suspects the government of political ulterior motives.

06/13/05 -- The singer has been found not guilty on ten counts which had been weighing on him. He had been accused of, amongst other things, having sexually abused a minor of 13 in his Neverland ranch, that he had given him alcohol to drink in order to achieve his ends and had attempted to sequester the family to conceal it. He was risking up to 18 months in prison. The singer, aged 46, had not stopped claiming his innocence.

06/02/05 -- London announced, on Monday 6th June, the suspension of their referendum on the European Constitution, hoping to cause the other doubting countries to follow in its wake, in spite of the French-German alliance to persevere towards ratification.