The Right Stuff

Having laid low while President Jacques Chirac took the heat for losing France's referendum on the European constitution, Nicolas Sarkozy is back, in the guise of a self-styled crimebuster.

After an 11-year-old boy was killed by a stray bullet while washing the family car in La Courneuve, a desolate banlieue outside Paris, France's newly reappointed Interior Minister vowed that "the thugs will disappear" and that he'd "cleanse" the quarter. Two days later, Sarkozy decried that a man who had been granted early release from life imprisonment is now implicated in the June murder of a 37-year-old jogger....