Since the British press have been having all sorts of fun over the "snub"* Gordon Brown thanks to a canceled meeting with John McCain it's worth noting that press sillyness is not confined to the anglosphere by any means. Art Goldhammer has the details:
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Le Figaro has a perfidious piece on Ségolène Royal's visit to the US. It leads with the insinuation that she was somehow snubbed by Barack Obama because she attended his rally without obtaining a picture of herself with the candidate. I said yesterday that I would not share my private impressions of Mme Royal, but in this case I will make an exception, because I had a conversation with her about the Obama rally. It came up because I asked her if she was following the American election campaign--it was Ash Wednesday, the day after super-Tuesday in our Christian political calendar--and she told me how interesting it had been to watch Barack in action and to see the crowd's reaction to his unique speaking style. To my mind, it was entirely to her credit that she went to the rally out of curiosity, without a VIP invitation, and that she had enough interest in the United States and American politics to rub shoulders with the ordinary people who had turned out in large numbers to hear Obama speak at Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American liberty.
*A media favourite: refers to a newspaper concoction normally explained by clashing timetables, good manners (cf Obama "snubbing" Hillary at the State of the Union) or an old-fashioned cock-up . Occam's Razor must never be deployed.