Obama Manages To Blow It With France

Crispian Balmer of Reuters reports on Sarkozy's frustrations with the Obama Administration.

Stung by perceived snubs from U.S. President Barack Obama and encouraged by the growing importance of the G20, Sarkozy is increasingly reaching out to non-aligned states in an effort to extend France's international influence.

He has forged especially close ties with Brazil, is seeking alliances in central Asia and is intensifying his activities in the Middle East, using multi-billion dollar military and civilian nuclear trade deals as his calling card.

These initiatives are being played out against a discordant tone in Franco-American relations. This lack of harmony does not constitute a crisis, but is nonetheless raising eyebrows.

Nobody needs to root for Obama to fail. He is managing that very ably on his own.

France Arrests Physicist for Suspected Qaeda Ties

News from the New York Times. It looks like one of the scientist working on the CERN Large Hadron Collider managed to get himself arrested.

James Gillies, a CERN spokesman, said the physicist was still registered as a member of the research team but had not been seen for some time. In a statement, the center said that he had worked as an analyst on projects involving its Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, since 2003, but that he was not an employee and his project would not have been of any use to terrorists.

“His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism,” said the center’s statement, whose formal name is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. “None of our research has potential for military application, and all our results are published openly in the public domain.”

It seems that Al Qaeda ties are taken seriously in France.

Huzzah for France!