Salon.com > Mary Papenfuss

The French Hillary

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 13:08:00 +0000

Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe, where a female politician's four out-of-wedlock children charm the voting public, where her bikini-worthy 53-year-old body is a valuable political asset, and where she is likely to become president before her more powerful male partner, the fellow politician with whom she had those kids.

Welcome to the twilight zone, France, and the Gallic version of political power couple Hillary and Bill Clinton. After last Tuesday, Hillary Clinton's chances of following her husband to the White House are looking rosier. In France, however, her counterpart is only a day away from becoming her party's official nominee for the presidency. And the French Hillary's romantic partner, an unsuccessful candidate for the same post, will be relegated to the sidelines.

Ségolène Royal is favored to win the nod on Thursday, when some 200,000 card-carrying Socialists vote to pick their candidate in next spring's presidential race. The winner will be announced Friday. "Ségo" is the strong favorite among the public, backed in a recent poll by 58 percent of left-leaning voters. For a time, the biggest threat to her candidacy appeared to be the man who shares her bed, Socialist Party leader François Hollande. In this political pairing, unlike the American version, it's the woman who has the charisma and gets to go first, and the man who's the stuffy wonk. But just as in the States, the press can't quite decide whether they're rivals or co-conspirators.

Paris is burning

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 10:07:00 +0000

Baby revolutionaries Étienne Phillip, 16, and 17-year-old Christiane T. are lounging on the metal chairs along the boat pond in the Jardin du Luxembourg, ready for their next demonstration. Blocks away a phalanx of cops stand guard behind stanchions blocking access to the Sorbonne. The teens are part of one of several clusters of young people in the park highlighting book passages, writing reports and playing cards because they've been locked out of nearby high schools and universities in the wake of protests against the new French labor contract that would make it easy to fire young workers.

The two are laughing, leaning back in the sun, but they exude a quiet resolve. "It's an important fight for us," Christiane explains. "It's our future. It's the future of most of France."

Told that just hours earlier Prime Minister Dominique Villepin had vowed to keep fighting for the Contrat Première Embauche (CPE) or First Employment Contract, which would allow new workers under 26 to be fired any time without cause during a two-year period, Christiane simply shrugs and returns to her book. "Now that we're part of the European Union, there's pressure to change," says Étienne. "But we're not going to." Asked what they want, Christiane replies: "Total retreat." It echoes the call for a "coup de grâce" to the CPE from Jean-Claude Mailly, the head of France's powerful union Force Ouvriere, one of several key unions that have joined the battle against the new contract.

Pro-choice groups agonize over fetal murder law

Thu, 24 Apr 2003 19:50:00 +0000

When Mavra Start, head of the Morris County, N.J., chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), told a local newspaper that charging Scott Peterson with double murder in the death of his wife Laci and unborn son Conner could aid the antiabortion movement, she was blindsided by fierce criticism -- some of which came from feminists. In less than 24 hours, Start backed off from her comments, saying that she was merely "thinking out loud."

The conflict raised by the double murder charges against is a painful one, made worse by the obvious suffering of the young woman's family. But the quiet controversy around a California law that recognizes a fetus as a full-fledged murder victim raises a fundamental question that threatens to split the feminist movement as it battles to maintain a woman's legal right to abortion: Do laws that criminalize fetal harm encroach on the rights of the mother?

Can this marriage be saved?

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 23:03:00 +0000

The United Nations Security Council: Can't live with it, can't live without it.

Such is the quandary facing the Bush administration as it attempts to wrangle aid from the United Nations for reconstruction of post-invasion Iraq while ceding little control in the region. The United Nations, meanwhile, has its own dilemma: How does it respond to chaos and human suffering in Iraq after a war fiercely opposed by certain members of its Security Council, while maintaining some semblance of legitimacy and control?

U.N. analyst Bruce Jones, deputy director of the Center on International Cooperation, a research institute on multinational responses to world problems based at New York University, rejects the idea that the credibility of the United Nations is at stake; nor does he speculate that the United States could fail to rebuild Iraq without the help -- and endorsement -- of the United Nations. But the author of "Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure," and onetime chief of staff to the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, insists that neither the U.N. nor the U.S. can function well without the other.

Building a better war

Thu, 06 Mar 2003 19:34:00 +0000

Human Rights Watch is nothing if not pragmatic.

The New York-based organization, which investigates human rights abuses worldwide by traveling to trouble spots to interview victims and witnesses, vehemently opposes human rights abuses -- yet also seeks dialogue with governments guilty of gross violations, and dictators that other human rights groups won't deal with. When total compliance with international law is unattainable, HRW battles for degrees of improvement.

So while antiwar activists are pouring into the streets to protest America's threatened invasion of Iraq, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has taken a proactive role in its own unusual gray area of warfare. Rather than trying to block an Iraqi invasion, or even arguing against it, HRW has, in effect, been trying to build a better war in Iraq. It's not so much supporting the unthinkable, the group insists, as attempting to mitigate the damage of what may be inevitable.

Murder most foul

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 20:26:00 +0000

Laci Peterson was due to give birth to a baby boy -- her first child -- this month. Instead, the 27-year-old Modesto mother-to-be is presumed dead. Her body is missing; her husband, though not an official suspect in his wife's disappearance, is under intense scrutiny by detectives in the case. Weary volunteers, scouring land and water since Peterson's disappearance Christmas Eve, focused on the New Melones Reservoir last weekend. Police searched the Peterson home for the second time early last week, removing several bags of evidence. Any hope that Laci and her baby are alive has nearly evaporated. "When we're looking in places under water, we're looking for a body," reported Police Chief Roy Wasden.

There's much for a woman to fear when she's pregnant -- the "What to Expect When You're Expecting" books gingerly spell out the many medical hazards in chapters too frightening for some women to read: preeclampsia, miscarriage, stillbirth, stroke and hemorrhage are complications that American women, many of whom enjoy some of the best prenatal care in the world, are familiar with.

Devout and defiled

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 20:23:00 +0000

It wasn't until Terrie Light had children of her own that she revealed her darkest secret: She had been raped, at the age of 8, by a priest in the rectory of a church in the Oakland Diocese.

"It was a violent, sadistic attack. I kept it inside of me for years," says the 51-year-old mother of six. "When my oldest son turned 7, I couldn't ignore it any longer. I was a good Catholic girl -- obedient, respectful. I always felt guilty because I was pretty. I tried not to be attractive because I thought that being attractive was somehow sinful. I think a lot of sex abuse victims were good Catholic girls."

Light, the Northern California representative of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), who eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with the church, hopes a new California law suspending the statute of limitations on sex abuse will give others like her the courage to finally come forward and begin to shift national attention in the burgeoning clerical abuse scandal to include a hidden but major population of victims -- women.

The patient or the portfolio?

Mon, 09 Dec 2002 20:49:00 +0000

Five years ago, terminal cancer patients were given hope that a longer life -- possibly even a cure for the disease -- could be within reach. Researchers at several hospitals, including the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas in Houston, were conducting trials on what was being regarded as something of a cancer wonder drug -- an agent that appeared to successfully block a growth factor that turns cells malignant. Abdominal tumors nearly disappeared in a 28-year-old Miami woman taking the drug.

But this year the Miami woman died, months after the federal Food and Drug Administration rejected the application for the drug's approval, saying some clinical tests designed by the manufacturer had flaws that failed to prove the drug's effectiveness.

The drug was Erbitux, the company ImClone Systems. The FDA's rejection sent ImClone's stocks into a nosedive, and an insider-trading scandal erupted. Only then did the 195 patients who participated in clinical trials at M.D. Anderson learn that its president, John Mendelsohn, held a major stake in ImClone and sat on its board of directors at the same time his researchers were testing the company's drug.