An invitation to dinner at the French embassy in London is the dream of any true gourmet. Ambassador Jean Chauvel's chef is one of the world's great cooks. A tiny Tonkinese, Bui Van Han, 50, has presided over the Chauvel kitchen for 22 years, is a graduate of Paris' famed Cordon Bleu school, a master of haute cuisine. In the posts where he has cooked for the Chauvels—Paris, Bern, New York —the mere memory of his Pauppiette de Sole la Richelieu or Cotelettes de ...

Barack Obama's autopen does not sleep. So, unlike the President, who was roused from a hotel bed recently at 5:45 a.m. in a French resort town to approve a last-minute extension of the Patriot Act, the machine never missed a wink. As the minutes ticked toward midnight on May 26 in Washington, Obama wrote a document authorizing an immediate phone call from the hotel hallway to the White House, where, in an undisclosed room in the building next door, the ...

We Americans can't help getting a jolt of tabloidy satisfaction every time the wealthy and well-connected French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn makes another humiliating court appearance in conjunction with charges that he tried to rape a New York City hotel housekeeper. After all, we love nothing better than seeing the powerful and formerly smug dragged across the front pages in ignominy. Especially when he has to make his way through representatives of a hotel-housekeepers union who shouted, "Shame ...

NOT since the Bismarck has there been such a sea hunt. In the teeth of a gale that whipped the azure Mediterranean into an ash-gray cauldron of 20-foot waves, five Israeli-manned gunboats scooted to Haifa last week on a 3,000-mile dash from the northern French port of Cherbourg. At various points, they were tracked by French reconnaissance planes, an R.A.F. Canberra from Malta, Soviet tankers, the radar forests of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, television cameramen and even Italian fishermen. From ...

Dominique Strauss-Kahn has not been convicted of any crime. Neither would it be appropriate to indict French society — the pervasive sexism parading as a celebration of "difference," the self-indulgence of the "caviar left," of which he is a prime exemplar — for his behavior. To do so, after all, would be to fall into the same facile trap as the various French commentators who, in the days since the International Monetary Fund chief's arrest in ...

The news of the arrest of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 62, was shocking in its own right: late Saturday afternoon, Port Authority police took Strauss-Kahn from the First Class cabin of an Air France flight at Kennedy Airport about to depart for Paris amid allegations he attempted to rape a midtown Manhattan hotel maid earlier in the day. But considering the fact that the former French finance minister Strauss-Kahn was widely expected to run against President ...

INTERNATIONAL "Who Rules the World?" Opens, most auspiciously, the political New Year 1928. Not since the World War has a twelvemonth commenced with all nations so substantially at peace, with all major governments so markedly stable. While this unusual global calm prevails, it becomes possible and prudent to scan certain key nations and their great men, asking and answering a crisp, significant question: "Who rules the World?" British Empire. The strong trend of the Dominions is toward increasingly autonomous minor-nationhood, ...

THE BLEEDING HEART by Marilyn French Summit; 377 pages; $12.95 The bestseller is the AK-47 of the women's liberation movement. It has proved to be a highly effective weapon: relatively cheap, easy to mass produce, reliable and deadly even in inexperienced hands. A case in point was Marilyn French's first novel, The Women's Room . It hit middle-class America at the right time. Consciousness was up; stale marriages were crumbling like mummies exposed to the air; Jacks were breaking their ...

"Dong Thap's House of Love Proves Popular Attraction," screams the headline. This isn't the front page of a bawdy magazine; it's an item on a Vietnamese news-agency website. The story relates to the house of Huynh Thuy Le, an ethnic Chinese man and the central character in French author Marguerite Duras' steamy, largely autobiographical novella, L'Amant , set in 1920s colonial Indochina. The book recounts 15-year-old Duras' illicit affair with Le, a bachelor 12 years her senior. Both Duras ...

Chefs of the Future! This is the third of a three-part series examining how restaurants may work in the years to come. Ludo Lefebvre has plenty of admirers. Jonathan Gold, the country's most respected restaurant critic, is a fan. So are millions of Top Chef: Masters devotees, who find the tattooed young French chef either downright dreamy or totally insufferable — or both. He has won Mobile 5-Star awards at two previous restaurants. And his current eatery, Ludo ...