In your Friday media column: Facebook is unholy, business is business, and Nicolas Sarkozy got you a present!:

Former French president Jacques Chirac was, as the gleeful British press puts it, "mauled by his own 'clinically depressed' pet dog." He — and French stereotypes — are expected to make a full recovery.

The mayor of Paris actually doesn't care if Caroline Kennedy becomes a Senator, the Times has been forced to reveal. Also if you email them with a famous name they'll just print it.

Bomb in Paris Department Store leaves secular godless French baffled—how much more coddling do these terrorists need?

America, as we've learned, has a big PR problem. The rest of the world doesn't like us so much! Our current president is something of a laughingstock, you see, and we have this problem with expecting others to live up to the ideals we espouse as we fail to live up to them ourselves. You can see how that might bug people, right? Thankfully we're done with the Bush administration. Listen to how little Bush is respected by the Russians and French:

A French newspaper labeled a picture of Tina Fey on SNL as a real photo of Sarah Palin. But America's deep respect for the land of Descartes ensures that no mockery will ensue. [TV Squad]

Ha ha, wow, has the management of the Wrangler jeans company all been kidnapped and tied up in a closet, causing the company to be run currently by French anarchist intellectuals? Because that is my operating theory. First Wrangler—Wrangler!—set off its just plain dumb "We are animals" campaign with that cult-like hipster photo shoot by Ryan McGinley. Now (southern accent) Rain-guhlurr, proudly headquartered in Greens-bruh Nawth Cair-Lyna, has a commercial with some French guy talking about "Why do we live when we know we will die?" Uh, to watch NASCAR? Watch this abomination after the jump. Riots amongst Alabama denim fans TK:

The French government plans to create a database called Edvige that will log information about anyone in the country over the age of 13, including whether or not they are "likely to breach public order." The idea is to help crack down on crime, an issue President Nicholas Sarkozy successfully campaigned on. Other information that would be included?

ZOMG, Tokio Hotel Bill Kaulitz sex hoax!

The government of France has officially forfeited all the liberal cred it's earned over the past 500 years: yesterday, French prosecutors raided the office of an auto magazine, confiscated its computers and files, and arrested a reporter for the crime of publishing a scoop. A scoop about autos, the subject of the magazine! Because in France, freedom of the press must take a back seat to the concerns of the almighty Renault corporation.

Leave it to the French to [insert something racy here]. They have their own little scandal with a lady news anchor. It's similar to the issues we've dealt with here in the US—the chauvinist rise and fall of Katie Couric, last seen sympathizing with Hillary Clinton—but so much more French. The respected and beloved 60-year-old male presenter of Europe's most-watched news broadcast was just fired and replaced with a 41-year-old blonde cutie. And it's all the fault of crazy president Sarkozy!

Have you bought your Absolut Rainbow bottle yet? It's only available at Colette through July 1! It's "a tribute to support diversity and individual rights. The rainbow also stands for happiness and now for party...with Absolut!" Hey, the homosexual agenda is at least as scary as the Mexican takeover agenda. Where's the boycott? [via Selectism]

First, they came for photoshop, and I said "good luck putting a magazine together." The American Society of Magazine Editors may put together a panel that will brainstorm some "best-practice guidelines" for digital manipulation of photographs in our glossies. Not that they'd ban it, of course! They say they just don't want readers to be misled. We say SLIPPERY SLOPE. Because now, in France, they're taking this to its logical conclusion: they're banning pretty people. Or skinny people, anyway.

In the UK, entertainment reporters have a reputation for being tough and heartless when it comes to reporting on celebrities. But you have to give them this: They're also horny sleazebags. At least one is. His name is Rob Grainge, and he works for the London Paper. Now that French first lady Carla Bruni is getting so much press for her tour of England and other endeavors, the London Paper is trying to get some renewed interest in Grainge's interview with Bruni last year, when she was still a simple model and celebrity. And it is interesting, as a case study in a reporter being unable to control his metaphorical boner while interviewing a pretty woman.

Carla Bruni, who recently married noted ladies' man Nikolas Sarkozy and became the First Lady of France, used to be a model. A naked model. A nude—and relatively tasteful—portrait of Bruni by the photographer Michel Comte is up for sale at Christie's in April. The press duly reported on the upcoming sale, but there's been an admirable sense of maturity about it across the board. By contrast, imagine the prospect of a nude Hillary Clinton portrait surfacing. Or not. The Bruni photo is expected to sell for about $4,000, but you can see it for free, after the jump. NSFW, although it is art.

A huge new study of sexuality in France has just been released, with a shocking conclusion: French women like sex. They are becoming more like men in the age they first have sex (17-ish), the number of sexual partners, and the length of their sex lives—90% of women over 50 say they're still getting laid, versus a mere 50% in 1970. But more surprising than that is a worrying trend among young French men: they're just not that interested in this whole sex business, thank you very much!

Yesterday we found out that Firebrand, the big-money "advertainment" website that hoped to turn commercials into content that people would actually seek out, is going under. Not too surprising; the whole reason the TV ad genre is in trouble is that people don't want to see ads, and can now skip them with DVRs. But at least Firebrand will leave a useful legacy: it brought sexy French ads to the outside world. It already offered us the world's sexiest fruit ad, and now, as a bon voyage, we bring you this ad for "Naturism" in France. It ranks even higher than the fruit ad—probably due to being more SFW (still not 100%), but making you wish it wasn't.

Amazon will pay the equivalent of $1,500 per day in fines and continue to offer free shipping in France in defiance of a recently imposed court order. The high-minded and socialist-leaning French government passed the 1981 Lang law, which prevents selling books at a discount, to protect small booksellers from the predation of discount supermarkets. How visionary those legislators were to anticipate the coming of Amazon. Hoping to overturn the law, Bezos is trying to muster the support of French cheap-book lovers. But Amazon is unlikely to prevail even with the people's support. The High Court of Versailles is unlikely to appreciate the online book retailer's sense of revolution. Off with their savings!

The press's shaky grasp on Facebook usually manifests itself in opinions: "It's the new Google" (it's not), "it doesn't have the ad-clog and spam problems that plague MySpace (it does). But this time the French press got the entire story wrong. When the 28-year-old French man unaffiliated with Facebook claimed to be the company's new president in France, the country's press, including L'express and Le Parisien (which later front-paged a retraction), ran with it. Techcrunch.com has the long version, I've got the short version.

Orange, Apple's French iPhone partner, announced that it sold 70,000 iPhones during its first month of sales. This is "right in line" with the public target of 50,000-100,000 units sold. [Thomson Financial] (Photo by mukluk)