France's Elvis Comes Out of Coma

Forget Silvio Berlusconi's statuette to the face—in France, the headlines are all about the medical travails of Johnny Hallyday, a beloved and aging French music star who was put in a medically induced coma twice "in order to avoid suffering" after a postoperative infection from a herniated disk procedure. The 66-year-old Hallyday, who rose to prominence in the 1960s by first covering Elvis Presley tunes and then writing his own, is known as France's Elvis and hailed for his Springsteen-esque regular-guy attitude. France has been riveted by his illness. As the newspaper Le Monde put it, the rocker's health problems put all of France into "a national coma." Even French president Nicolas Sarkozy commented, saying that "for each of us" Hallyday's illness "means something personal," adding, "it is moving to see him fight adversity."