Tricolors - Magazine

French unemployed at 25-year low

Unemployment in France has reached a 25-year low - dropping 0.9% in May to 2.2 million, the government said. The decline takes the jobless rate to 8.1%, still giving France one of the worst unemployment records in Europe.
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Versailles' Hall of Mirrors reopens to the public

Magnificent, historic room was closed for extensive 3-year renovation. VERSAILLES, France - The Chateau of Versailles reopened its Hall of Mirrors to the public Monday after more than three years of work to restore the gilded gallery of 357 mirrors, the castle's crown jewel.
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Famed WWII cemetery gets visitor center

Normandy American Cemetery seen by nearly 1 million visitors a year. COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France - Photos of fresh-faced privates, wizened U.S. generals and the largest amphibious military operation in history. Dented army canteens that once dotted killing fields in France. The booming sounds of gunships echoing over the waves in Normandy — this time, on video.
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French Socialist Party�s power couple to split

France’s closest equivalent to Clintons were politically, romantically tied. PARIS - The rumors were true: The famously dysfunctional couple at the head of France's main opposition Socialist Party is breaking up. Segolene Royal had shown little delicacy in sweeping aside Francois Hollande — Socialist party boss and the father of her four children — to bid for the French presidency herself.
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French wine-growers go guerrilla

A shadowy group in France has issued the French government with an unusual ultimatum: raise the price of wine or blood will flow. The group's name is the Crav, which stands for nothing more threatening than the Union for Viticultural Action in the Languedoc region in the south.
Read more on BBC NEWS by Caroline Wyatt

Sarkozy tipped for safe majority

Opinion polls in France suggest that the country's new right-wing President, Nicolas Sarkozy, is about to savour a fresh all-out victory in the parliamentary elections. The elections start with a first round on Sunday, with the second and decisive stage on 17 June.
Read more on BBC NEWS by Caroline Wyatt

Princess Diana�s sons: Don't air crash photos

TV channel's planned use of fatal crash pictures called 'gross disrespect'. LONDON - Princess Diana’s sons have urged a British television channel not to use photographs of her fatal car crash in a documentary airing Wednesday, royal officials said.
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The Most Beautiful French Come from New York

Berliners are in for a treat this summer as yet another blockbuster art show opens -- this time it's French 19th-century masterpieces from New York's Met. But can the show live up to the phenomenon that was the MoMA exhibition in 2004? Berlin is covered in an elegant French frosting of red, white and blue, and half-naked ladies coquettishly adorn thousands of posters across the city. Another sell-out art blockbuster show has just arrived in the German capital: This time French 19th-century masterpieces, all the way from New York City.
Read more on SPIEGEL ONLINE by Siobhan Dowling

Tintin and the Movie Moguls?

Spielberg's clout and Peter Jackson's Gollum technology are finally bringing the boy detective out of retirement. And so to the old pub poser: how many famous Belgians can you name? Eddy Merckx ... Plastic Bertrand ... does Hercule Poirot count? Perhaps it was Charles de Gaulle’s pronouncement, “My only international rival is Tintin”, that perpetuated the myth that the intrepid boy reporter hailed from la belle France. That, and the reading habits of a legion of glum exchange school-kids from Normandy.
Read more in The Sunday Times Timesonline by Jeff Dawson

Profile: Rachida Dati

Lawyer Rachida Dati, named as French justice minister by President Sarkozy, is the first person of North African origin to hold a top government post in Paris. She was born in 1965 to an Moroccan mason father and an Algerian mother, one of 12 children raised in humble circumstances.
Read more on BBC NEWS