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2008 In France
This article lists events from the year 2008 in France. Incumbents * President of France, President: Nicolas Sarkozy * Prime Minister of France, Prime Minister: François Fillon Events *1 January – Smoking banned in all public places (including bars and restaurants) in France. *2 February – Wedding of Nicolas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni. *9 and 16 March – 2008 French cantonal elections, Cantonal elections held. *12 March – Lazare Ponticelli, the country's last surviving First World War veteran, dies aged 110 – eight months before the 90th anniversary of the Armistice. *April – The Citroën C5 sedan is launched, whilst the station wagon was launched in May. *1 April – 2008 French mistaken virginity case *1 July – France assumes the Presidency of the Council of the European Union. *2 July – Íngrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages are Operation Jaque, rescued from FARC by Colombian security forces. *13 July – First meeting of Mediterranean Union, in Paris *10 Sept ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2008
2008 was designated as: *International Year of Languages *International Year of Planet Earth *International Year of the Potato *International Year of Sanitation The Great Recession, a worldwide recession which began in 2007, continued through the entirety of 2008. Events January * January 1 – Cyprus and Malta adopt the euro currency. * January 14 – At 19:04:39 Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, the uncrewed MESSENGER space probe is at its closest approach during its first flyby of the planet Mercury (planet), Mercury. * January 21 **Stock markets around the world plunge amid growing fears of a Great Recession in the United States, U.S. Great Recession, fueled by the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. **Online activist group Anonymous (hacker group), Anonymous initiates Project Chanology, after a News leak, leaked interview of Tom Cruise by the Church of Scientology is published on YouTube, and the Church of Scientology issued a DMCA takedown, "copyright infringement" claim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Presidency Of The Council Of The European Union
The presidency of the Council of the European Union is responsible for the functioning of the Council of the European Union, which is the co-legislator of the EU legislature alongside the European Parliament. It rotates among the member states of the EU every six months. The presidency is not an individual, but rather the position is held by a national government. It is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the " president of the European Union". The presidency's function is to chair meetings of the council, determine its agendas, set a work program and facilitate dialogue both at Council meetings and with other EU institutions. The presidency is currently, as of January 2025, held by Poland. Three successive presidencies are known as ''presidency trios''. The current trio is made up of Poland (January–June 2025), Denmark (July–December 2025), and Cyprus (January–June 2026). The 2020 German presidency began the second cycle of presidencies, after the system was introduce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Luc Montagnier
Luc Montagnier ( , ; 18 August 1932 – 8 February 2022) was a French virologist and joint recipient, with and , of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus ( HIV). He worked as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris and as a full-time professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. In 2017, Montagnier was criticised by other academics for using his Nobel prize status to "spread dangerous health messages outside of his field of knowledge". During the COVID-19 pandemic, Montagnier promoted the lab-leak theory that SARS-CoV-2, the causative virus, was deliberately created and escaped from a laboratory. Such a claim has been rejected by virologists. Early life and education Montagnier was born in Chabris in central France. Montagnier became interested in science as a teenager. He studied science at the University of Poitiers, France, and then became an assistant in the Faculty of Sciences at Sorbonne Univers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi
(; born 30 July 1947) is a French virologist and Director of the Regulation of Retroviral Infections Division () and Professor at the in Paris. Born in Paris, Barré-Sinoussi performed some of the fundamental work in the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS. In 2008, Barré-Sinoussi was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with her former mentor, Luc Montagnier, for their discovery of HIV. She mandatorily retired from active research on 31 August 2015, and fully retired by some time in 2017. Early life Barré-Sinoussi was interested in science from a very young age. During her vacations as a child, she would spend hours analyzing insects and animals, comparing their behaviors and trying to understand why some run faster than others for example. Soon after, Barré-Sinoussi realized she was very talented in the sciences compared to her humanity courses. She expressed interest to her parents that she would like to att ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canet-en-Roussillon
Canet-en-Roussillon (; ; , ; , ) is a communes of France, commune and town in the France, French Departments of France, department of the Pyrénées-Orientales, regions of France, administrative region of Occitania (administrative region), Occitania. Geography Canet-en-Roussillon is located in the canton of La Côte Sableuse and in the arrondissement of Perpignan, to the east of Perpignan. It is part of the Comarques of Northern Catalonia, Northern Catalan comarca of Rosselló (comarca), Rosselló. History The city walls were destroyed in the 19th century. With the development of sea bathing, the first beach settlement for bathers of the coast of Pyrénées-Orientales was created by Louise Lombard in 1849. As early as 1854 municipal laws were established regulating types of bathing suits and separating sea bathing zones for men and women. Government and politics Mayors File :Canet-en-Roussillon - Signature Basile Darbon (1910).jpg, Signature of mayor Basile Darbon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the west almost by the Morocco–Spain border. The Mediterranean Sea covers an area of about , representing 0.7% of the global ocean surface, but its connection to the Atlantic via the Strait of Gibraltar—the narrow strait that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and separates the Iberian Peninsula in Europe from Morocco in Africa—is only wide. Geological evidence indicates that around 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and was partly or completely desiccation, desiccated over a period of some 600,000 years during the Messinian salinity crisis before being refilled by the Zanclean flood about 5.3 million years ago. The sea was an important ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
XL Airways Germany Flight 888T
XL Airways Germany Flight 888T (GXL888T) was an acceptance flight for an Airbus A320 on 27 November 2008. The aircraft crashed into the Mediterranean Sea, off Canet-en-Roussillon on the French coast, close to the Spanish border, killing all seven people on board. The subsequent investigation attributed the accident to incorrect maintenance procedures that allowed water to enter and freeze in the angle-of-attack sensors during flight, rendering them inoperative, combined with the crew's attempt to perform a test at a dangerously low altitude. Background Flight test purpose The aircraft was on a flight test (or "acceptance flight") that had taken off from Perpignan–Rivesaltes Airport, made an overflight of Bay of Biscay, before flying back to Perpignan Airport. At the time of the crash, it was due to commence a touch-and-go landing at Perpignan Airport before flying to and landing in Frankfurt Airport, from where it would have taken a ferry flight to Auckland, New Zealand. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
French Fifth Republic
The Fifth Republic () is France's current republic, republican system of government. It was established on 4 October 1958 by Charles de Gaulle under the Constitution of France, Constitution of the Fifth Republic.. The Fifth Republic emerged from the collapse of the French Fourth Republic, Fourth Republic, replacing the former parliamentary republic with a semi-presidential republic, semi-presidential (or dual-executive) system that split powers between a President of France, president as head of state and a Prime Minister of France, prime minister as head of government. Charles de Gaulle, who was the List of Presidents of France#French Fifth Republic (1958–present), first French president elected under the Fifth Republic in December 1958, believed in a strong head of state, which he described as embodying ("the spirit of the nation"). Under the fifth republic, the president has the right to dissolve the national assembly and hold new parliamentary elections. If the president ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Constitution Of France
The current Constitution of France was adopted on 4 October 1958. It is typically called the Constitution of the Fifth Republic , and it replaced the Constitution of the Fourth Republic of 1946 with the exception of the preamble per a 1971 decision of the Constitutional Council. The current Constitution regards the separation of church and state, democracy, social welfare, and indivisibility as core principles of the French state. Charles de Gaulle was the main driving force in introducing the new constitution and inaugurating the Fifth Republic, while the text was drafted by Michel Debré. Since then, the constitution has been amended twenty-five times, notably in 2008 and most recently in 2024. Provisions Preamble The preamble of the constitution recalls the ''Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen'' from 1789 and establishes France as a secular and democratic country, deriving its sovereignty from the people. Since 2005 it includes the ten articles ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel in circumference and as deep as beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva. The first collisions were achieved in 2010 at an energy of 3.5 tera-electronvolts (TeV) per beam, about four times the previous world record. The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC was announced in 2012. Between 2013 and 2015, the LHC was shut down and upgraded; after those upgrades it reached 6.5 TeV per beam (13.0 TeV total collision energy). At the end of 2018, it was shut down for maintenance and further upgrades, and reopened over three years later in April 2022. The collider has four crossing points where the accelerated particles ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mediterranean Union
The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the west almost by the Morocco–Spain border. The Mediterranean Sea covers an area of about , representing 0.7% of the global ocean surface, but its connection to the Atlantic via the Strait of Gibraltar—the narrow strait that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and separates the Iberian Peninsula in Europe from Morocco in Africa—is only wide. Geological evidence indicates that around 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and was partly or completely desiccated over a period of some 600,000 years during the Messinian salinity crisis before being refilled by the Zanclean flood about 5.3 million years ago. The sea was an important route for me ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colombia
Colombia, officially the Republic of Colombia, is a country primarily located in South America with Insular region of Colombia, insular regions in North America. The Colombian mainland is bordered by the Caribbean Sea to the north, Venezuela to the east and northeast, Brazil to the southeast, Peru and Ecuador to the south and southwest, the Pacific Ocean to the west, and Panama to the northwest. Colombia is divided into 32 Departments of Colombia, departments. The Capital District of Bogotá is also the List of cities in Colombia by population, country's largest city hosting the main financial and cultural hub. Other major urban areas include Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, Colombia, Cartagena, Santa Marta, Cúcuta, Ibagué, Villavicencio and Bucaramanga. It covers an area of 1,141,748 square kilometers (440,831 sq mi) and has a population of around 52 million. Its rich cultural heritage—including language, religion, cuisine, and art—reflects its history as a co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
