Commentariat

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Nicolas Sarkozy faces a hard task when he travels to Moscow today in an attempt to bridge East-West differences over the Georgia crisis that have, if anything, widened in recent weeks. A month after the Georgian government launched its ill-fated assault on the breakaway region of South Ossetia, the French President, who holds the EU presidency, has to persuade Russia to abide by the six-point peace plan he brokered. This would involve Russia withdrawing forces from Georgia proper, agreeing to the free movement of monitors in a buffer zone between South Ossetia and Georgia and initiating a framework for security talks between Tblisi and Moscow.

Born on Hogmanay 1935, Jeff Torrington grew up in Glasgow’s iconic area of
old-time tenement deprivation, the Gorbals, and worked in the Linwood car
manufacturing plant, the home of a symbol of the new era coming into being,
the 1960s Hillman Imp. Torrington contracted tuberculosis at the age of 13
and while recuperating in a Govan sanatorium became a voracious reader
(teaching himself French to read Camus and Sartre), and also became a
humanist.

The simple rustic Tuscan tactics of Pier Francesco Guarguaglini, the chief of Finmeccanica, clearly pay higher dividends than the more Machiavellian approach of the Italian company’s French and German rivals

Letters: The American and French push to deliver humanitarian aid to Burma is a position the UN has an obligation to support

France’s blue-chip companies seem to be increasingly featuring on the menu of international private equity firms and activist investors, let alone French ones

Fiachra Gibbons: Having lost the Olympics to London, and put up with years of Anglo-Saxon pontificating on the virtues of multiculturalism, you will have to forgive the French if they feel a little smug

Since hanging up his boots in 1997, the philosophising French fruitcake Eric Cantona has employed his charisma in the field of acting. Who can forget his part as a 16th-century French Ambassador in the Cate Blanchett-led Elizabeth? Eric had one line, telling the Queen’s suitor, the Duc d’Anjou: “She is a woman, Sire. They say one thing but mean another. No man can unlock their secrets.” There have since been minor movies and ads.

The past 30 years have been a sad story for the French textiles industry. The decision this week of DMC to seek bankruptcy court protection from creditors seems to have put a final nail in the industry’s coffin