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France markets its interventionist free market

As the ink was drying Monday on a $65.5 billion merger deal promoted by the French government between Sanofi-Synthélabo and Aventis, the prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, took to the podium at his residence, where he had just met with a group of international businessmen.

Launching into a discussion of French competitiveness, Raffarin explained that France had become an exciting destination for foreign investment.

France, he said, was only misunderstood – so much so that the government was planning to begin an advertising campaign at the end of May to attract more foreign investors to the home of Bordeaux wine and high-speed trains. “France has changed,” was the central message of a nine-page PowerPoint presentation on the advertising strategy.

Movie review: 'Bon Voyage'

Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s “Bon Voyage” is the sort of movie we don’t see often enough anymore.

A French romantic comedy-mystery-adventure set during the hectic days after Germany’s crushing pre-WWII battlefield victory, it’s brilliantly written and gorgeously mounted. It’s a genre piece full of great actors and fabulous scenery, a rousing, full-blooded entertainment that uses serious themes and events mostly for pure pleasure.

French director Jose Giovanni dies

French-born director, screenwriter and author Jose Giovanni, who had a string of crime movie hits featuring stars including Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, has died. He was 80.

Giovanni died Saturday of a brain hemorrhage in a clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland, funeral director Jean-Robert Decaillet told The Associated Press by telephone. He had been hospitalized since Wednesday.

Giovanni, from the Mediterranean island of Corsica, was born June 22, 1923. He moved to the Swiss Alpine village of Marecottes in the late 1960s and later was naturalized a citizen of his adopted homeland.

France vows piracy crackdown

FRANCE’S culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, vowed his country will get tough with illegal copiers of music and films, saying such piracy threatened French creativity.

“To be a pirate today is to put our culture and musical creation in peril,” he told journalists at a music festival in the central city of Bourges on Sunday.

“I attach the greatest importance to defending authors, composers, creators, technicians,” he said, adding that he would be meeting representatives of the French music and cinema industries in the next few days to start laying out a strategy.

“I want to see what technical measures can be taken to minimise these risks, which are leading to lay-offs,” he said.

France seeks to preserve influence in bigger EU

France, one of the founders and most active member states of the European Union, is struggling to adapt to a much-bigger bloc which it fears will water down its influence and challenge its leadership on EU foreign policy, European experts said.

Those concerns, and the wariness it has engendered among many of the 10 new EU members towards Paris, could cause strains along the way, they said.

That explains why “France has been dragging its heels over enlargement,” Philippe Moreau-Desfarge of the French Institute on International Relations said.

France suspends imam's expulsion order

An administrative court here cleared a path on Friday for the return to France of a Muslim prayer leader who was expelled to Algeria after he condoned wife-beating and the stoning of women.

The expulsion order was temporarily suspended by the court, which noted that the deportation of the prayer leader, Abdelkader Bouziane, separated him from his family in France.

The ruling allows Bouziane to return to France, although at his own cost, at least until the court rules in several weeks whether the expulsion order was legal.

The court did not order the French government to arrange his return but expressed “serious doubt” about the order’s legality.