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PSAYINGS.5Q.56. Rocked by the ballooning crisis, the French government has announced extraordinary measures to return the nation to a state of normalcy. President Jacques Chirac has rolled back the curfew on youth in French cities from 2 am to the stroke of midnight, lowered the boom on consumption of spirits by minors to a ration of two liters of wine per day, and declared Arabic the new national language of France. He has expressed confidence that these steps will end the violence and enable the task of repairing the damage to begin.

Toward this end, Chirac has also announced a draconian plan to fill the extreme shortage of automobiles which now exists in major cities throughout the nation. Exercising the long unused "droit de l'empereur" (literally, the right to be insufferably dictatorial), which dates to the time of Napoleon, he has commanded all the sovereign nations of the world to return to France all French cars and trucks in the possession of their citizens, regardless of age, condition, or value. The order, he has decreed, is to be complied with at once, at the foreign owner's expense, on pain of punitive actions to be specified later.

The French foreign ministry has already published a list of all French vehicles exported to the United States in the last half century, along with identifying photographs supplied by French intelligence. The owners of the following are directed to make immediate arrangements for shipment of these vehicles back to France: