Turks annoyed by Chirac´s beer mug

TURKEY'S foreign minister has criticised Jacques Chirac's leaving present from the EU - a beer mug depicting an 18th century Ottoman defeat by the French. “The EU should concern itself more with the future than with the past. If it has a future vision, it should concern itself with the future,” Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul told a news conference yesterday. “It is not befitting for the EU's vision to harp on about the past.” The lid of the beer mug, presented to Chirac as a retirement gift at his last European Union summit at the weekend, portrays the 1799 defeat of Ottoman forces by Napoleon in Egypt.