Today in class when I informed my students that France has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, many of them seemed shocked. “Why?” one said, “they’re wimps!”
It seems that the British feel the same way.
In other news, Laurent Fabius (“a former Socialist prime minister and also a potential presidential candidate in 2007″) refers to visiting poor and Muslim neighborhoods that have been undergoing problems as “play[ing] the cowboy.”