during the 1980s). He likewise limited the interest rate to 5% on French loans to intermediate-income countries (that is, Ivory Coast, Congo, Cameroon and Gabon). He also criticized interventionism in sovereign matters, which was according to him only another form of "colonialism". However, according to François Mitterrand, this did not imply lessened concern on the part of Paris for its former colonies. François Mitterrand thus continued with the African policy of de Gaulle inaugurated in 1960, which followed the relative failure of the 1958 creation of the French Community. All in all, François Mitterrand's La Baule speech, which marked a relative turning point in France's policy concerning its former colonies, has been compared with the 1956 loi-cadre Defferre which was responding to anti-colonialist feelings. African heads of state themselves reacted to François Mitterrand's speech at most with indifference. Omar Bongo, President of Gabon, declared that he would rather have "events counsel him;" Abdou Diouf, President of Senegal, said that, according to him, the best solution was a "strong government" and a "good faith opposition;" the President of Chad, Hissène Habré (nicknamed the "African Pinochet") claimed that it was contradictory to demand that African states should simultaneously carry on a "democratic policy" and "social and economic policies which limited their sovereignty", in a clear allusion to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank's "structural adjustment programs". Hassan II, the king of Morocco, said for his part that "Africa was too open to the world to remain indifferent to what was happening around it", but that Western countries should "help young democracies open out, without putting a knife under their throat, without a brutal transition to multipartyism." All in all, the La Baule speech has been said to be on one hand "one of the foundations of political renewal in Africa French speaking area", and on the other hand "cooperation with France", this despite "incoherence and inconsistency, like any public policy". Discovery of HIV Controversy surrounding the discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) was intense after American researcher Robert Gallo and French scientist Luc Montagnier both claimed to have discovered it. The two scientists had given the new virus different names. The controversy was eventually settled by an agreement (helped along by the mediation of Dr Jonas Salk) between President Ronald Reagan and François Mitterrand which gave equal credit to both men and their teams. Apology to the Huguenots In