Free Republic

France is to launch a French-language news channel next year in a long-awaited attempt to challenge the dominance of the American view of world current affairs, the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, said yesterday. The government will provide €30m (£21m) in start-up funding for the channel, which will "allow international broadcasting that will express the diversity to which our nation is attached," Mr Raffarin said. The CII (International Information Channel) project, better known in France as "CNN à la Francaise", is a pet project of Jacques Chirac's and was first announced shortly after his 2002 re-election. It was initially greeted with...

PARIS, March 31 — Desperate to recover from a humiliating electoral defeat for the governing party, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin turned his cabinet upside down on Wednesday, putting France's flamboyant foreign minister in charge of law and order and its law-and-order interior minister in charge of the economy. In other moves, the ministers of finance, national education, culture, health and the environment and several deputy ministers were fired. The cabinet shake-up came three days after President Jacques Chirac's conservative party was decisively defeated by the left-leaning opposition in regional elections and a day after Mr. Chirac decided not to fire...

UPDATE 3-France to keep spending capped but eyes tax cuts Reuters, 05.05.03, 3:26 PM ET (Rewrites with Raffarin, more Lambert quotes) By Catherine Bremer PARIS, May 5 (Reuters) - France vowed on Monday to keep 2004 budget spending capped at 2003 levels, as it braces for a telling-off from Brussels over the hole in its public finances but said it still intended to go ahead with tax cuts. Grappling with a sluggish economy and a public deficit that has smashed through euro zone limits, Budget Minister Alain Lambert said he would push for a zero rise in spending in the...

French PM wades into a tide of anti-Americanism By John Lichfield in Paris 03 April 2003 The Prime Minister of France, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, is expected to make a statement today denouncing anti-Americanism and making it clear that France is "on the side of democracy" in the Iraq war. Although the French government remains convinced that the war is unjustified and probably illegal, M. Raffarin has been alarmed by signs of growing anti-American and anti-Semitic feeling at anti-war demonstrations in Paris and other French cities. He has also been disturbed by an opinion poll earlier this week that suggested one in...

<p>Paris -- A day after Jacques Chirac ruffled feathers by advising several Eastern European countries to shut up about the Iraq crisis, a new poll found that more than three-quarters of the French considered their president courageous in bucking Washington's rush to war.</p>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Details emerged on Friday of a tough U.S.-drafted Security Council resolution that would give Iraq less than six weeks to disclose any weapons of mass destruction and hold the threat of military action over its head. President Bush, facing resistance in Europe and at home to his avowed policy of forcing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power, repeated his willingness to act without U.N. approval if necessary. "Our last choice is to commit our troops to harm's way, but if we have to, to defend our freedoms, if we have to, the United States will lead a...