That’s supposed to be the French for “crying wolf” – I admit it, I had to go to an outside reference-source for that information and yes, it does seem suspiciously close to the English expression – but what brought that saying to my mind was this piece in Der Spiegel about the latest warnings of an imminent terrorist-strike issuing from the Direction centrale du renseignement intérieur (DCRI) or intelligence bureau of the French Interior Ministry (i.e. more-or-less their FBI).

Now that the American Department of Homeland Security has recently officially retired its much-derided color-coded (excessively-hyphenated) terror-alert system, could it be the French government which has now pulled into the lead in the Chicken Little stakes of driving its citizens crazy via repeated terror-warnings, until they just tune out and don’t listen anymore? After all, we heard this same sort of warning from the same source – and saw men in uniform with automatic weapons patrolling at the base of the Eiffel Tower, and all the rest – just last October, and nothing at all happened then.

Indeed, if you examine it closely this latest advisory is spiced-up with some new elements. It’s the recent revolution in Tunisia that is said to be one reason for the heightened alert; the DCRI claims to have intercepted a communication from Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQMI) urging attacks against both France and the US before they can get a chance to install new “vassals” in power there. More intriguingly, a second indication comes from the steep rise that the DCRI has detected in “Europeans” being trained in those infamous terror-camps located in the no-man’s-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan – that is, whites looking like any other native resident of Paris, or Lyon, or Frankfurt. So now it’s apparently not enough to be cautious around “Arab-looking” people, the next suicide-bomber could look like any other “European”!

That’s a sure-fire recipe for heightening the general climate of paranoia in France. What possesses the French authorities to issue such warnings? Even if they truly believe in what they are saying, can such proclamations really put the population on some sort of meaningful “alert” that will make any material difference in stopping an attack? You don’t see this sort of thing in Germany; the Spiegel piece is short and resolutely opinion-free, but you still have to think that its (unnamed) authors are wondering just what has gotten into the French as of late.

UPDATE: Whoops, the US authorities are back at it, color-coded chart or no: the terrorism threat there is now “at it’s most heightened state” since 9/11, says Janet Napolitano. FYI – and FWIW!

Check out the first sentence of this piece in La Libre Belgique by Philippe Paquet: “For those who believe they have touched bottom when it comes to absurdity and political stupidity in Belgium, Malawi provides reasons for hope.” How? Well, obviously because there is even more absurdity and political stupidity to be found there! Curious, such an attitude – still, are we to allow it anyway, in view of the fact that the Belgians did not actually rape & pillage that particular African land over eighty years of colonial rule, but rather what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, located two countries away?

In any case, the article’s title is “The wind turns in Malawi,” but don’t get too impressed, Paquet is merely trying to be clever*. After a brief mention of that country’s intention to raise its official retirement age to 70 – that when life expectancy even for women is only 51 years – we get to the real subject: Get a load of this, he crows, the Malawi Assembly (i.e. parliament) is bringing back a law from British colonial times that makes it illegal to fart in public!

He then takes that theme and runs with it. I’ll leave most of its further ramifications to French-readers interested enough to click through to the original. But just to give you a trace . . . apparently one good thing about the dictatorship under Kamuzu Banda that ruled the country for thirty years after independence in 1964 was that people were much more discrete with their personal gas-emissions during that time. So does that mean that dictatorship always smells better? No, Paquet points out, look at China, where this particular aspect of personal behavior has been notoriously loose for centuries, under kings, presidents, and Communist dictators.

* Much as I also try to do all the time when crafting titles for the posts of this weblog, I have to admit!

That’s five months in darkness, including during daytime hours, the fate of numerous locations located in Europe’s Alpine regions where the configuration of the surrounding mountains is unfortunately such that, when the sun gets too low in the sky, it is entirely blocked out for its entire daily course. Die Zeit manages to produce an interesting article spanning no less than three webpages – complete with a couple interesting photographs – about a new solution for this problem: giant mirrors!

Yes, it’s inevitably true that other people in similarly-mountainous areas of the world experience this problem as well, but they likely have other more serious challenges of an economic and/or political nature to contend with first. You could call this seasonal sun-deprivation an affliction of the affluent – but it’s an affliction nonetheless. After all, just imagine having to live for months at a time without any sun yourself! Not surprisingly, towns caught in this predicament invariably display a heightened number of mental health disturbances as well as the related problem of simply keeping people from moving away permanently.

As mentioned, the new solution comes in the form of giant mirrors, placed on the opposite hillsides to beam back some sunlight (when available and not, say, hidden behind clouds) to where the locals live. These devices are not as simple – and therefore not as cheap – as you might think: considering that they need to come with sophisticated machinery to actually track the sun’s course and keep the mirror oriented correctly, each such rig costs in the tens of thousands of euros. What’s more, the output cannot be any broad flood of sunlight, but rather a relatively narrow beam. Still, when put on a steady aim to hit one room in a house through the window, it does make that “sunroom” an enjoyable place to catch some rays. (The photo on the second webpage shows what that looks like.) No surprise that this “heliostat” technology is now offered by German firms, but the concept has spread down through the Alps, i.e. through Switzerland and into Northern Italy.