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Wednesday, April 23, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:08 AM:
We're going to start the evening's blogging with the French news, because France had some big news today:Says Le Monde's headline, Iraq: division at UN over sanctions. France has proposed a provisory lifting of sanctions now that the regime they targeted is quite defunct. Washington, of course, was frosted that they weren't offering a permanent lifting, but that may be for show, because this means France has given up on the idea that the UN and the UN alone will get to decide whether their sweetheart deal with Saddam will survive Saddam's ouster (on this, TurkeyBlog likes Safire's suggestion that New Iraq will honor Saddam's deals when Putin honors the Czar's debts).
Le Figaro: "Pneumopathy" : Five Reasons to be Afraid. Also in the AFP breaking news box, "The United States Wants to Punish France." The headline is there because Colin Powell made it clear that the status of our relationship with France was under review and he was not tending toward a positive assessment, but maybe the headline should have said this. As it stands, the headline is as incongruous in a breaking news box as an announcement that Liberace was gay - we'd already figured it out, thanks.
Libé: Embargo against Iraq almost over. It's interesting that Le Monde sees the tension and Libé sees the endgame; makes you wonder which one is truly the more sophisticated newspaper. It's as though Le Monde has felt the need to descend into self-parodying "searching" commentary in an effort to make sure that NYT has some company at the bottom sometimes.
Because Ouest-France is down right now, we'll give you La Nouvelle République's latest headline (link at left) : Demonstration of force by Shiites at Kerbala. It's the same as everyone else's headline last night.
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