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Ever wonder what our nation looks like to folks from afar? Here we look at how a uniquely American story--the kind of news we have trouble explaining even to ourselves--is being told overseas. Want to see a particular topic covered here? Let us know.

Orange County Republican Party official Marilyn Davenport sent an email this past weekend with an image showing President Obama as a chimpanzee along with the words, "Now you know why--No birth certificate!" The latest, courtesy of the LA Times, is that after describing the fuss over the weekend as "much to do about nothing," Davenport admitted Monday, "I wasn't wise in sending the email out. I shouldn't have done it. I really wasn't thinking when I did it. I had poor judgment." She doesn't, however, think she is racist, a word tossed around quite a bit even by fellow GOPers. Agence-France Presse offered a writeup and foreign newspapers pounced. Even the AFP report, though, is getting spun slightly different ways in different countries. The sense one gets reviewing coverage is that, though conservatives have accused liberal media figures of playing up birtherism, the foreign press is at least as fascinated by the nativist movement as our own.

French: Not Amused

"It was a joke! I have black friends." That's the Davenport line, printed in the OC Weekly on Sunday, that the French media like 20minutes.fr and Le Figaro, as well as Terra Colombia and Argentina's La Razón picked up through the AFP writeup. The French version of the AFP report reads: "Ms. Davenport reacted to the affair in the local press, in a joking tone." The article also explains, for readers, that the original email "echoes the fringe of the Republican movement which doubts President Obama's birth in the United States." The blog BondaManjak, which offers a focus on news from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, promptly complained that "the worst part of this story" was that the 20 Minutes "shut down the debate before it started" by saying "after a number of outbursts on this type of subject, the editorial team feels forced to close this article for comments."