You can see the French press review live on France 24 at 7.10am, Paris time, from Monday to Friday.

Unedited television script

 USA Today: “Does a nation need God to be ‘happy’? Maybe not the French”

“Oh happy day! French President Nicolas Sarkozy is bringing a little French joie de vivre to the Group of 20 summit,” says USA Today. The French President will introduce a plan to assess social well-being based on complex social measures. This is based on an idea developed by a Commission in France headed by Stiglitz that happiness outranks GDP for citizens’ well being.

Sarkozy’s idea echoes a the conclusions of a study presented at an August meeting of the American Psychological Association: psychological wealth is what really counts. Researchers Ed Diener and his son Robert surveyed 136 000 people in 132 countries. Money does matter, it concluded… but it almost doesn’t matter at all for enjoying life.

The World Database of Happiness ranks the US at No.17 well behind the Scandinavian countries, Ireland, Switzerland, Australia, Guatemala, Luxembourg, and Mexico.

More research done by Phil Zuckerman for his book “Society without God: What the least religious nations can tell us about contentment”. He found that the Scandinavian countries – largely secular were very high on the list. France came in at no.8 and the USA stands at 44 according to this research.

Have a look at these photos of the French President jogging in Central Park on the Huffington Post website. Despite collapsing while jogging in July, Sarkozy hit the pavement this week while in NY for the UN General Assembly…This photo in particular should bring a smile to most faces!

Yesterday saw a continuation of documents being waved about at the UN General Assembly…This time it was Benjamin Netanyahu who angrily brandished Nazi orders for the extermination of Jews, as the Washington Post reports. “Have you no shame?” he said to delegates, who listened to Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s speech on Wednesday where he said the Holocaust was based on lies.

Despite the fact that Ahmadinejad did say in an interview on Wednesday that he’s willing to step up nuclear cooperation, Netanyahu appealed to the UN to stand up to Iran, saying it’s government can’t be trusted. He called it a “terrorist regime”.

Another speech of note was Hugo Chavez’s. He told the UN that he was moved by Obama’s assertion that no one country should dominate another. Of course, he said that Obama should act more firmly to implement this policy – lifting the embargo on Cuba, for instance.

Nonetheless, this contrasts somewhat Chavez’s speech at the UN three years ago where he called George Bush a “racist, imperialist devil who smelled of sulfur.”

“It doesn’t smell of sulfur here anymore. It smells of hope,” Chavez said on Thursday.

To the British press which is reacting to a biography of the Queen Mother that came out in the past week.The Daily Telegraph reviewed the book, written by William Shawcross. “In conveying her unwavering dutifulness, Shawcross has served his subject well – perhaps too well,” says the Telegraph.

Johann Hari writing in the Independent is far more critical. “To be fair to her, she did one thing well and that was to support far-right politics.”

Here are some other extracts of the article:

“It must be exhausting to be a monarchist, forever finding ways to pretend a family of cold, talentless snobs is better than the rest of us.

The system of monarchy – selecting a head of state solely because of the womb they passed through - …produces warped and dim people and demands that we scrape before them.”

“By the time she died, the Queen Mother was treating the British Treasury – our tax money – as her personal piggy bank, with her bills running way beyond the millions she was allotted every year.”

It is her support of far-right politics that most angers Hari:
“She supported minority tyrannies in Rhodesia and South Africa because… as the journalist Paul Callan – who knew her – put it “she is not fond of black folk.”

“The defenders of Elizabeth were left claiming her drunken inactivity was itself an achievement…WF Deedes the late Daily Telegraph columnist claimed, “In an increasingly earnest world, she teaches us all how to have fun.”

He even went so far as to call the late Queen Mother a “nasty leech”! I think it’s safe to conclude that Johann Hari is not a monarchist.