He’s a controversial figure. He has made many a wacky pronouncement in the past. He’s the lightning-rod for most of the opprobrium that currently heads Iran’s way over its alleged plan to gain a nuclear weapons capability – even though, as most commentators seem to miss, he holds quite limited power himself, even as President of the Islamic Republic.

Still, one of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tasks in that capacity is representing Iran at public events outside the country, including most recently the funeral of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. You could well imagine that that was an occasion at which the Iranian president truly wanted to be present – not a happy one, to be sure, but one celebrating the life of another political leader with whom he often made common cause in an anti-American capacity.

So he was there, alright. But he got into trouble:

Aux funérailles de Chavez, Ahmadinejad choque les conservateurs iraniens http://t.co/FHClQpUWkh

March 11, 2013 2:58 am via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

What trouble? After all, all you can see by way of illustration if you click through to the Le Monde “Big Browser Blog” article is Mahmoud tearfully consoling some lady (who turns out to be Hugo Chávez’ mother).

But that’s just it – you don’t touch women in public if you’re a good Muslim! Indeed, some devout Muslim functionaries in the Netherlands (for example) even refuse to shake women’s hands, which can lead to awkward problems when they are supposed to meet with female cabinet ministers. So Ahmadinejad has gotten considerable push-back about this from back home, including angry denunciations from a couple members of the Iranian parliament, one of whom accused the President of “losing control” at the funeral.

The only response so far from the Ahmadinejad side is from his spokesman, who denies that the President embraced Chávez’ mother. I guess it all depends on your definition – calling Bill Clinton!

BTW to give credit where it is due, this Le Monde piece specifically credits a Le Huffington Post* article as its source. Yes, Arianna has expanded her empire there, but also to the UK (no-brainer), Italy, and Spain! Sharp-eyed EuroSavant fans will have noticed by now how I have incorporated pieces from those sources (but not the UK) into my Twitter-stream. Anyway, it says on its site that Le Huffington Post works “in association with the Le Monde Group,” so that sort of borrowing is perfectly alright.

* Special note for francophones and francophiles: Who knew that the “h” in “Huffington” would be aspirated?

Yes, that’s the news today from France’s Le Figaro, which announces a new Bowie album, to be titled Where Are We Now?:

David Bowie revient avec un nouvel album pour mars http://t.co/wM9MtVtQ

January 8, 2013 9:31 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Le_Figaro

Le Figaro

Where indeed? Readers can click through to the article itself to ponder that question as it pertains to Ziggy Stardust himself, as the piece is topped by a revealing screen-shot of the maestro today at age 66. Other than that, there are only two further remarks that I think pertain:

• You see in the tweet, and at places in the article itself, mention of mars, but that has nothing to do with Bowie’s past obsession with the Red Planet or the spiders that might issue therefrom; it’s simply the French word for the month of March, which is when the new album is due out.
  
• What’s he doing coming out with an album (his first in ten years) anyway? There’s a persuasive argument that music albums are but things of the past.

You might have heard about the recent kerfluffle involving the Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated (for Cyrano de Bergerac) French actor Gérard Depardieu. French President François Hollande recently carried out his pledge to increase the top marginal income tax rate in his country to75%, and Depardieu has become the point-man for resistance to that among the French wealthy. He has written vituperative public letters to the president, for example; but he has also asked for and received Russian citizenship (where income taxes are at only 13%, for everyone). He’s apparently good friends with Vladimir Putin, according to the French weekly L’Express (and numerous other publications):

Quand Gérard Depardieu fait la com’ de Vladimir Poutine http://t.co/5rWqHj33

January 6, 2013 11:37 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@LEXPRESS

LEXPRESS

Yes, good buddies they are, интимные приятели . . . if you click through there to the article you can see a nice photo of the two men embarking on a bear-hug. “Did you see my latest film?” Gérard asks Vladimir, “I sent it to you.” (Depardieu’s latest project was a franco-russian co-production on the life of Rasputin, in which he took up the title role.) And Brigitte Bardot is threatening to follow him to Russia, although over a dispute involving two sick elephants (I kid you not! Click thru!) rather than taxes.

But here’s the punchline to all this, beyond the patronized pachyderms, which I provide as a public service to those (very few) of you who have not already figured it out for yourselves. Russia may impose only a 13% tax-rate, but it’s really not a very nice place to go and live; Depardieu’s praise of the state of democracy there, which formed part of his open letters, only shows how ignorant he is, for Russia has no rule of law and the rich there stay that way only through Vladimir Putin’s good graces (as shown by the counter-example of former oil company CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky).

There’s yet another L’Express article of note here, entitled Russia: Depardieu among the crazies? For the spot in Russia Depardieu has picked out for himself – should he really want to spend time there – is said to be the southern Moscow suburb of Белые Столбы (“White Posts”). But as journalist Alla Chevelkina (note the name) points out, Depardieu apparently is unaware that Russia’s most famous mental institution – which in the bad old days also housed numerous Russian dissidents as part of the Soviet regime’s employment of psychiatry as a weapon against such “troublemakers” – is in the same neighborhood and shares the “White Posts” name. Or that Russians use the expression “gone to the White Posts” to denote someone who has been packed away to the crazy-house.

UPDATE: And now the newspaper Libération tells us that Depardieu was greeted as a hero upon his arrival in Russia, and offered a house and the post of Minister of Culture! The thing is, all of those have to do with the Russian Republic of Mordovia, some who’s-ever-heard-of-it place apparently located somewhere to the east of the former Stalingrad.

Word on the ‘Nets is that that infamous “47%” video might well have been the coup de grâce that will ultimately ensure that Mitt Romney loses the 2012 presidential race. However, it never rains, but it pours: now another embarrassing Romney video has surfaced, and France’s Le Monde is all over it:

Une nouvelle vidéo embarrassante pour Romney http://t.co/TN2jw7ts

September 27, 2012 2:54 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

This one shows Romney back in 1985, addressing employees of Bain & Co. at the time of the creation of Bain Capital, the Bain “private equity” subsidiary of which Romney was placed in charge.

Hopefully you’re curious, and you can simply click through to be able to check out this 1:21-minute-long clip yourself – helpfully, with a full English (not French) transcription appearing simultaneously along the bottom. (more…)

Here at €S we greeted the oncoming prospect of the London 2012 Olympic Games with an examination of whether it really makes sense economically for a city to host them, which came to the daring conclusion: “It depends.” Now they are over – do we have any preliminary verdict?

Well, there is one from Michel de Poncins of the French on-line commentary site Contretemps, and it is grim:

Les JO de Londres : vers la ruine ? La cérémonie de clôture des JO de Londres a mis dimanche un terme aux fest… http://t.co/OeA9SNfA

August 14, 2012 7:30 am via Social Proxy by MailchimpReplyRetweetFavorite

@Contrepoints

Contrepoints

Vers la ruine? – “towards ruin?” De Poncins asks, and his lede is no more cheery:

The closing ceremony of the London Olympic Games on Sunday put an end to the festivities. Now it’s the hour of drawing up the balance. Were these Games once more a financial catastrophe?

After all, let’s remember that Montréal was still paying for staging the 1976 Summer Games some thirty years later, while the 2004 Games undoubtedly accelerated Greece’s slide into sovereign bankruptcy.

So what about London? First of all, there is Games’ official price-tag: €11 billion. That in itself, claims De Poncins, came in at four times what it originally was supposed to cost. In a sense, though, that doesn’t really matter – because even that €11 billion hardly covers the true cost, which is not really calculable but must be supplemented by “an unknown quantity of adjacent expenses.” Besides, ordinary tourist traffic for the hotels was noticeably lower in London during the Games, and a price must also be added for all the inconvenience they caused to simply getting around the city, during the Games themselves but also during all the construction leading up to them.

Clearly, what we have here is what you could term an “Olympics Scrooge”: De Poncin’s focus is solely on the money-costs, whose extent he claims is unknowable, even while he ignores the less tangible but still potentially substantial benefits that can be accrued from the Olympics of boosting a given city’s image. As we saw in our previous treatment, that certainly was the case for Barcelona in 1992 and even for Munich in 1972 to some degree, despite the massacre of the Israeli athletes. There’s no reason to think a similar effect was missing here; the Games themselves seemed to have been run very well, and press accounts describe even a sort of euphoria eventually taking hold among Londoners over what was going on.

So this isn’t meant to be your most-unbiased accounting of whether the 2012 Games gave to London more than they demanded. Indeed, M. de Poncin has a particular axe to grind: He focuses on costs because he is against governmental spending on the Olympics – or on sport in general – in any form! Olympics lead to unemployment, don’t you know: the greater government spending involved must be supported by higher taxes, which depress the economy, throwing people out of work, etc.

That’s where they are coming from on this Contretemps site. And you can tell, because they now have a second article up on the London Olympics – “A celebration of the virtues of competition.” Lede:

The economy functions in the same way as an Olympic competition. Rivalry tends to make everyone better. And no enterprise or no country can maintain an advantage indefinitely.

You know, it can be a tough life when you happen to have a lot of money at your disposal. Just ask Mitt Romney. Or nose around a bit in Geneva:

#Economie – Des fortunes de France vivraient l’enfer à Genève: Un reportage sur les exilés fiscaux français clou… http://t.co/9Fgmrp4d

July 25, 2012 1:17 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@news_suisse

News Suisse

A little background: The new French Socialist government of François Hollande (dominating both the executive and the legislature) made it clear both pre- and post-election that it intends to substantially raise taxes on the rich. As a result, many of those rich are upping stakes and leaving, often just across the border to more tax-friendly but still francophone climes in Belgium or Switzerland, where they can escape French taxes if they live there for at least 183 days in the year.

Trouble is, it’s not that simple, at least when it comes to Geneva, where for all their money these tax-exiles have to deal with substantial culture-shock. That @news_suisse tweet links to a piece in Geneva’s own Tribune de Genève by Dino Auciello, about how his own venerable hometown is somehow just so uncomfortable and, well, boring for these wealthy wanderers. It’s not difficult to detect Auciello’s thick irony just below the surface, as in his lede:

Poor French fiscal exiles! Those who flee from ever more oppressive fiscal authorities, now the promised land of Geneva reveals itself to them as a veritable hell.

Things are so humdrum there, he reports, that “aside from golf and adultery, distractions are rare.” (more…)

From all the talk in recent years about Social Media, you would think media outlets (especially) would be quicker to use them.

Case in point:

Japan ambassador returns to Beijing amid territorial spat http://t.co/b6rSwGyl

July 16, 2012 5:32 am via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Reuters

Reuters Top News

“Territorial spat”: so now you have all sorts of fuss & bother about supposed rising tension on either side of the East China Sea, even though the Reuters article quotes the Japanese Foreign Minister denying that the temporary recall had anything to do with any disputed waters.

And well he might deny that:

LeMonde Unbearable tragedy: National mourning in #Japan as 1st #panda born there in 24yrs (@ #Tokyo zoo) dies http://t.co/bq5d6bdl

July 16, 2012 1:05 pm via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@EuroSavant

EuroSavant

As should be obvious, the ambassador had to return to receive detailed information and instructions for complaining to the Chinese about that mother panda they had provided to the Tokyo Zoo – clearly unable to produce a live offspring!

Why haven’t we heard more about this?

Obama signe un décret controversé sur le contrôle d’Internet en cas de catastrophe http://t.co/k77uRyZy

July 11, 2012 11:59 am via HootSuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

French words often are in similar form to their English counterparts, so you probably can make out the meaning here: this has to do with retaining control of the Internet in the event of some “catastrophe.” Specifically, President Obama signed a new Executive Order on the subject, back on July 10.

The Order is labeled “controversial” in that tweet, but I became aware of it in the first place only from that source and have not been able to find much additional discussion elsewhere. The President basically reshuffled the responsibilities assigned to various federal agencies should either some natural disaster or national security menace arise that threatens US communications. Such criticism as there is has focused on the Order’s section 5.2, which seems to give the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to seize and control private communications networks, e.g. the Internet.

This Le Monde article does provide a link to the tech-site The Verge, which was one media source that did mention this new Executive Order and critique it; you can go there for further explanation in English.

Most of Europe lately has been preoccupied with happenings in Spain and in Greece. In the meantime, however, there have been ominous developments in Egypt, where not only has the second round of the presidential election been concluded (official results have yet to be announced), but where the existing legislature has been dissolved by the High Constitutional Court – an action doubly strange due to Egypt not really having any constitution, other than that under which the deposed Hosni Mubarak ruled for all those decades.

What does it all mean? The French daily Libération tries to provide an answer:

Egypte : «Une bataille de tranchées entre l’armée et les Frères musulmans» http://t.co/F4jFUewU

June 19, 2012 2:20 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@liberation_info

Libération

This piece is essentially a brief interview, by writer Cordélia Bonal, of Egypt expert Tewfik Aclimandos of the Collège de France. Some highlights:

• The Egyptian military might have moved too soon. It can be presumed that they were behind the Constitutional Court’s ruling, with the motivation of preventing a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood would dominate the legislature and the presidency at the same time. Yet the presidency has not necessarily fallen within their grasp; the military/old regime candidate for the position, Ahmad Shafiq, seems to have done very well in the second round and might even have won (despite premature claims of victory by the Brotherhood – anyway, we will soon see).
  
• Thus the military might have overreached. In any case, it clearly is not willing to go off quietly into the night. In addition to engineering the dissolution of the legilature, it has explicitly given itself a veto over any future constitution, and it has set up a Council of National Defense, composed (naturally) overwhelmingly of military officials. This organ offers a potential base for future military rule, or at least continued dominance over national politics by officials who were largely in place under Mubarak.
  
• Whatever might happen, Egypt finds itself in a difficult situation, “between two profound authoritarianisms” (i.e. military on one side, Muslim Brotherhood on the other, which currently polls show enjoys only 25% support). That doesn’t mean the revolution is over, “it is still in people’s heads.” There just seems to be a long way still to go.

OK America, you’ve had your fun with your TSA airport follies for far too long now. Where to begin? You’ve repeatedly humiliated a major Southwest Asia movie star when he has visited, just because of his last name. You’ve had your “anomalies in the crotch area.” Etcetera.

But now it’s no longer just a matter of fun-and-games for a domestic audience:

Une fillette de 18 mois débarquée d’un avion pour soupçons de terrorisme http://t.co/b97wKeTw

May 15, 2012 11:47 am via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

Now it’s Le Monde: A little girl of 18 months taken from airplane on suspicion of terrorism. It’s another made-in-USA incident, occurring at the Fort Lauderdale airport. Apparently airport authorities claimed the little girl was on the “No-Fly” list. It should further be no surprise that her parents are of Middle Eastern origin, that the wife wears a veil in public.

Go ahead, check it out, for there’s also a nice video embedded in that report, giving the local news broadcast on the incident (so in English). But again, this is a report in the “Big Browser” blog of the leading French newspaper Le Monde. When will you realise that this is leaking out to the foreign press now, making America a laughing-stock? When will you get embarrassed enough and stop all this “security theater” already?

The Arab Spring of 2011, as we all know, is still with us as there is some blatant unfinished business. Some may take the opportunity here to bring up Bahrain, or even Jordan or Morocco, but I’m referring instead to the country now catching the vast majority of the world’s attention. That was supercharged yesterday with the reported deaths there of an American and a French journalist, so I mean Syria, of course, where anti-government agitation has now been going on at least since last March, and where the government apparently is now carrying out its ambition to blast one of its major cities, Homs, to the ground.

Governments everywhere gnash their teeth in reaction, asking what can be done in the face of Russia’s and China’s refusal to allow the passage of any UN Security Council Resolution which, under international law, is necessary for any active intervention. Still, there is some good news, brought to us today in Le Monde:

Au bord de l’asphyxie financière, le régime syrien poursuit la répression http://t.co/wBFsN8LD

February 23, 2012 1:12 pm via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

L’asphyxie financière: financial asphyxiation – it seems that at least the economic sanctions that Europe, America, and the Arab League imposed on the Damascus regime some time back are finally starting to have an affect. Simply put, Syria is being starved of foreign exchange, since it can hardly earn any – no one will buy its oil. There are maybe “three or four months” worth of foreign currency left, is what is now estimated within diplomatic circles. After that, the Syrian pound “will crumble”; even if they can find importers for what they need in the midst of all the official sanctions, they’ll have nothing to pay them with.

Of course, this will likely make life equally uncomfortable for the rebels as well as the Syrian government. But perhaps of greater relevance is the question whether those rebels can hold out another three or four months.

Governments are falling all around Europe: Greece, Italy – and next, after national elections happening tomorrow, the Spanish government. True, the current Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has had enough and won’t be standing for re-election himself, but polls show a crushing defeat is in store for his successor at the head of Spain’s Socialist Party, Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba. What else do you expect, with > 20% unemployment, shaky banks and a government imposing more and more austerity even as it flirts with default anyway?

The next Prime Minister will surely be the leader of Spain’s other major party, the right-wing Partido Popular (commonly translated as “People’s Party”), Mariano Rajoy, to the point that Rajoy has already started issuing messages (e.g. “Give us a break!”) meant for the European financial establishment. But there’s another area of policy (among many, admittedly) where he has held strict radio silence:

Espagne : mariages gays express sur le Web avant les élections http://t.co/FMHPonil

November 18, 2011 8:36 pm via dlvr.itReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

That’s right: Strict old, conservative Spain actually turned out to be rather progressive back in 2005, when it approved homosexual marriage. (Actually, not only that, but also gay couple adoption and inheritance rights to same-sex partners.) But that was when the Socialists were in power. Would the conservative People’s Party – especially if it comes in with the expected landslide – repeal that? After all, at the time they did vote against the 2005 laws pretty much en bloc.

As this article from Le Monde shows, many thousands of Spanish gays are not willing to take that chance. So it turns out that this very weekend is an especially festive and happy one there on the Iberian Peninsula as the number of marriages is WAY above normal. Well OK: maybe rather “festive” and “happy,” considering the constrained circumstances – but in all cases certainly “gay.”

“But how can Spain’s marriage infrastructure handle this rat-through-the-python bulge in demand”? you might be asking. (OK, maybe you wouldn’t particularly use “marriage infrastructure.”) One thing that is helping a lot is a high-tech innovation from the small Andalusian village of Jun, near Granada, whose mayor, José Antonio Rodriguez, has set up a system for marrying people on-line. It only takes five days; you don’t actually have to visit there; and apparently you’ll be completely, legally married afterwards. Rodriguez says that, whereas Jun had only eleven same-sex marriages in all of 2010, it now does fifty per week.

Who knows? Maybe that same sort of solution is for you – IF you share that particular sexual preference, have arranged a willing partner to join you in conjugal bliss, and know at least a little bit of Spanish. You can follow Mayor Rodriguez on Twitter at @alcaldejun (38,180 followers when last I looked!).

Subtly, but surely, an important milestone has been reached in the eight-month uprising in Syria, as Marie Simon writes in an interesting new article in the French newsmagazine L’Express:

Jour après jour, la Syrie semble glisser vers la guerre civile http://t.co/LoWegPXI via @Lexpress

November 18, 2011 3:15 pm via Tweet ButtonReplyRetweetFavorite

@Monde_LEXPRESS

Marie Simon

The lede:

Part of the opposition is resigned to letting the weapons talk to gain the fall of Bashar Al-Assad’s regime, in the absence of any international intervention. The latest actions of the new “Free Syrian Army” trouble the international community.

(more…)

BACK in the USSR! We’ve already been treated recently to some prime Soviet nostalgia, in the form of the Yulia Timoshenko show-trial in the Ukraine. Now from Le Monde we see how that’s been joined by the lock-step Kremlin solidarity of old: current Russian president Dmitri Medvedev has endorsed his own replacement by Vladimir Putin.

Many commentators – rightly, and including the Le Monde editorial board itself – had seen Putin’s end-of-September announcement that he would run for (and therefore win) re-instatement as president in 2012 as taking Russian political development back to the Brezhnev era, if not even back to the time of the Czars. Not so, said Medvedev yesterday on Russian television – it is “something else . . . a means to resolve the challenges we have set for ourselves.” So he’s fine with missing out on the chance to “run” for the second presidential term he himself is entitled to under the Russian constitution.

On the other hand – surprise! – he’s not happy with the current state of Russian government:

I’ve been a lawyer, and I thought that I knew very well how the state apparatus works. I was mistaken, things are much more difficult and in a certain way more frightening. That’s why we must think about how to change the system of managing the State.

Aha, so there at least is a note of dissension! But note that this comes after he admits that he has only around one year left as president, and hasn’t even indicated what political function – if any – he will fulfill after that. Medvedev’s term in office has been chock-full of ambitious pronouncements like this – that Russia must be more investment-friendly, more subject to the rule of law, etc. – that came to nothing. This is certainly just one more.

Among those who follow the American renewable-energy industry, the recent bankruptcy of the California-based solar-energy firm Solyndra was confusing and dismaying. Isn’t “green energy technology” of the type this firm embodies – namely solar – the new boom industry, where fortunes are there just waiting to be made? The company had even received just over $500 million in a federal government-guaranteed loan last year – which the federal government, indeed, will now have to step in and guarantee.

But things are not so simple, and few know that better than Dana Blankenhorn, a long-standing blogger and analyst of IT, of open source software, and of renewable energy. It seems that others outside the US are also curious about what happened to Solyndra, to the point that the Washington correspondent for the left-wing French newspaper Libération, one Lorraine Millot, got in contact with Mr. Blankenhorn while writing an article on the subject, which is here.

It’s an interesting one, and as a favor to Mr. Blankenhorn (whose on-line work I’ve been reading for at least a decade) and as a service both to his readers and mine, I offer a full personal translation (i.e. no Google Translate – I don’t touch that stuff) after the jump. (more…)

The long New York nightmare is over for Dominique Strauss-Kahn: all charges against him involving alleged sexual violence against the Sofitel housekeeper have been dismissed. (Of course, he will go home to France to face yet another rape charge out of an alleged incident from 2003.)

Some may decry this result as yet another instance of the rich and powerful getting away with abusing the poor – after all, there was clearly some sort of sexual contact involved. The problem, though, is the personal credibility of the victim, one Nafissatou Diallo, an emigrant from Guinea. Those needing convincing of this would do well to consult the precise and complete dissection of that credibility assembled on the US affairs blog maintained by the French newspaper Libération named (in English) “Great America.” The piece is called The DKS affair: The lies of Nafissatou Diallo, and it is derived directly from the court document put forward by the New York City’s prosecutors office asking for dismissal.

Here are her biggest untruths, enumerated 1-2-3 as in the piece itself:

1. She changed her story about what actually happened that May 14 morning too many times. After the alleged rape did she go cower in the corridor, as she first told the grand jury? Or did she carry on cleaning another room, before deciding to report the incident? Her self-reported movements do not correspond to what the key-cards of the rooms in question show.
   
2. She had lied before about having been raped. Specifically: gang-raped, back in Guinea, with her daughter allegedly torn out of her arms and watching from the floor near-by. And she told this story in a very moving, seemingly-sincere way – only to disavow it later as merely something she had thought up to better her chances of gaining asylum in the US.
   
3. Similarly, it seems Ms. Diallo’s life is riddled through with other significant falsehoods. She has not reported the very income she earns from the Sofitel, in order to qualify for low-income housing. She entered the US in the first place using someone else’s papers. She has explained some large sums appearing in her bank account as originating from her fiancé, who is in the clothing & accessories business – he has actually been imprisoned for trafficking in marijuana.

There it is, then, all laid out, admittedly from a newspaper from the Left of the French political spectrum, which therefore can be expected to be on DSK’s side. Nonetheless, the operative concept here is that, in the end, DSK’s guilt would have to be established “beyond all resonable doubt” to twelve jurors. That just was not going to happen.

Let’s now get away from Dominique Strauss-Kahn – hopefully for quite a while! – and turn our attention to serious matters, like, say, saving the euro. One big roadblock to doing that is the increasing refusal by the electorates of solid, solvent, predominantly Northern European EU member-states to pledge more money to bail out Greece. “Why should we do that,” Germans ask for example, “when those lazy Greeks all get to retire at age 55?”

Now Patrick Saint-Paul of the French newspaper Le Figaro, possibly acting out of some sense of Mediterranean solidarity, offers a riposte that the Greeks can use: Germans go to sleep on the job! Or at least they soon might do so: the article discusses a recent proposal by a high official of the DGB (Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund, one of the country’s biggest unions) that all German workers should have the right to a “siesta” on the job, i.e. a period in the early afternoon to just go take a nap.

Of course, the suggestion is being offered not as a concession to labor but rather as a clever way to enable them to be even more productive. “A siesta reduces the risk of heart-attack and allows one to resume work full of energy,” states Annelie Buntenbach of the DGB’s governing board. Then there’s this from the inevitable expert-professor, this time one specializing in “psychological biology”: “A rest at noon permits one to make up for a period of weak productivity and occurs just at the point where chances of an accident are at their highest.”

Anyway, Saint-Paul goes on to mention that, although everyone thinks Germans work harder than Greeks, that isn’t necessarily true: OECD statistics purport to show that the former work only 1,390 hours per year and the latter 2,119. But that might just be a difference without any true distinction.

Entranced by the Dallas-like soap-opera that the whole Rupert Murdoch/News Corp. affair is becoming? Well, don’t forget we still have the adventures of that old monetary rogue, Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), to follow. But surely the New York City charges are about to be dropped? True, but on the other hand it looks like French authorities are now taking rather seriously the accusation by the journalist Tristane Banon that DSK tried to rape her back in February, 2003, on the occasion of an interview.

Now this affair’s soap-opera credentials have been considerably boosted by surprise testimony arising out of the six hours of interrogation Ms. Banon’s mother, Anne Mansouret, underwent last week. (This is now all over the French press, but all articles point to L’Express, which had the scoop: Affair Banon-DSK: The secrets of Anne Mansouret). Get this: Mme. Mansouret actually had had intimate relations with DSK herself, namely at the Paris offices of the OECD in 2000, when DSK was special counselor to the Secretary General.

She claims it only happened once – it was “consensual but clearly violent/beastly [brutale]” and she had no desire for any repeat – but it is relevant to the case because it is likely to have affected the advice she gave her daughter as to how to proceed when Tristane unexpectedly found herself alone with DSK three years later in a room whose door he had just locked from the inside.

Here’s what happened afterwards, after the fold, as L’Express extracted from Mme. Mansouret’s testimony: (more…)

What’s up now with the French and Libya? Nicolas Sarkozy’s government was the first to recognize the rebels’ National Transitional Council as the country’s valid government, and also led the way both in urging NATO military intervention last March and in actually conducting the very first bombing raids. But now Prime Minister François Fillon is saying “[a] political solution in Libya is more indispensable than ever” while Foreign Minister Alain Juppé claims to have word that Qaddafi is ready to head into exile.

Le Monde provides a perspective, in an unsigned article (Libya, a political objective now uncertain for L’Elysée). Put simply, it’s something akin to buyer’s remorse. France was looking forward to a glorious “big brother” role with the assistance it provided the rebels, one that would go far towards erasing – so officials hoped – her rather ugly colonial history in the area. Most of all, though, this was supposed to be short and sweet, something – in the words of Juppé back in March – that was to “be calculated in days or weeks – certainly not in months.”

Well, now it is months later, and the fighting is still going on. The rebels do seem to be making some sort of progress, yet it still seems doubtful that they can take full control before the onset of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan on 1 August complicates their efforts considerably.

According to the article, Sarkozy had a somewhat earlier date in mind for a rebel victory: 14 July, or Bastille Day, just two days away, when the usual parade of military hardware down the Champs Elysées could be spiffed up considerably on the wave of a cut-and-dried successful military campaign. But that certainly will not happen, and meanwhile Le Monde reports how the French president recently changed his mind from a trip across the Mediterranean to go visit the rebels’ self-styled Libyan Republic and opted to visit actual French troops in Afghanistan instead.

At least Sarkozy has just confronted the issue of submitting his military operations to approval of the legislature rather better than Barack Obama has done, and indeed has gained renewed votes of support for Libya actions from the Assemblée and the Senate, when there were fears that this was not certain. But the fighting goes on, and perhaps it should not be so surprising that the French should start lowering their standards for how they think it should end, as long as it does so quickly.

Threat identified! Threat identified! Prof. Krugman, please call your office!

Paul Krugman continue de divaguer: Il est maintenant très évident que les recettes keynésiennes n’ont pas réussi… http://bit.ly/p7mR9Z

July 7, 2011 7:58 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Contrepoints

Contrepoints

And coming out of France, of all places! I thought liberals like Krugman were always in league with those cheese-eating surrender-monkeys!

But seriously, folks . . . I follow daily, and for that matter closely, Paul Krugman’s highly-influential New York Times blog The Conscience of a Liberal. I mean, who does not? – if you’re interested in economics generally and in the general economic mess the West has gotten itself into specifically. It’s just amusing suddenly to stumble upon a hotbed of anti-Krugman argument and invective from what you would think to be an unlikely source, and indeed one that has supplied this site’s Twitter-feed with the occasional news-bit – very occasional. (And yes, I know, Prof. Krugman is unlikely to care much – not about EuroSavant, certainly, and neither about Contretemps.) (more…)

Party pooper! It now emerges that George W. Bush is not especially happy over Osama Bin Laden’s death. I’ll let Andy Borowitz put it best:

Bush “not overjoyed” by Osama news: “I don’t rejoice at the death of another person, especially one I couldn’t find.”

May 13, 2011 4:41 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BorowitzReport

Andy Borowitz

Careful, Mr. President! You shouldn’t be saying things like that – you’ll sound like the French!

Un crime parfait http://lemde.fr/l5TC2a

May 13, 2011 2:03 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

You read that right: Christian Salmon of the French government’s research institute CNRS, writing in Le Monde, goes so far as to call the operation that dispatched Bin Ladin “a perfect crime,” according to the definition of philosopher Jean Baudrillard:

[A] crime whose authors are anonymous, whose narrative is impossible, whose body is unfindable, and for which all pieces of evidence have disappeared in the Pakistani night, even while it was filmed by cameras mounted on commando’s helmets and followed directly by the American executive. Invisible target. Invisible execution. Invisible cadaver. A veritable black hole in the mediasphere.

He’s sort of suspicious of what the Americans claim to have happened, you could say. It’s like something out of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Purloined Letter (but the French were always particularly fond of Poe). Even then, the Americans failed to smash that Osama Bin Laden myth of the lone cave-dwelling fighter, “who appears and disappears as he likes, taunting the greatest world power, an Arabian Clint Eastwood, a Muslim Robin Hood who claims to avenge the Palestinian people’s suffering.” Fundamentalists are ready to rename the Arabian Sea as the “Martyr’s Sea,” for heaven’s sake!

Similarly Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer of King’s College, London, also writing in Le Monde, is not very impressed by the Abottabad operation:

Tuer l’ennemi public numéro 1, est-ce “rendre justice”? http://lemde.fr/lZQWgY

May 13, 2011 2:03 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

President Obama, in his televised announcement, declared that “justice has been done.” Vilmer: “That’s surprising: if it was enough to kill him to do justice for the victims [of Al-Qaeda], why did they claim to want to arrest him?” Actually, Vilmer does not for a moment believe that the SEAL Team 6 commandos had any other orders than to kill. Bin Laden wasn’t armed; there was no return fire during that raid. No, it was far easy to kill him than to deal with all the issues having a live Osama Bin Laden on their hands would entail, including arguments over the death penalty and the possibility of retaliatory hostages being taken.

To use an Israeli term, then, this was a “targeted assasination.” But that’s OK – there’s no problem with such a concept for any country that does still practice capital punishment. France, however, does not do that, and has not done so for thirty years. Ultimately, Vilmer is disappointed not so much with Obama – as in, that’s the Americans, what can you expect? – as he is with his own leaders (Sarkozy, Foreign Minister Juppé) who were quick to echo the American president’s assertion that justice had been served. If one claims to remain true to French ideals, he wants to say, it’s not possible to be glad at Bin Laden’s death, one must rather regret that what really was constituted as an assasination squad through its actions made any true justice impossible.

¡¡You’re the next contestant on Who Wants to be a Martyr?!!

Portrait du “docteur” Zawahiri, le successeur potentiel de Ben Laden http://lemde.fr/jWKbaC

May 5, 2011 8:56 am via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@lemondefr

Le Monde

Anyway, Doctor, for as long as you are still around and in-line to head the Al-Qaeda organization – and keep in mind that two of your operatives have already been killed recently in Yemen by unmanned drones (link in Danish) – let’s take a look at this examination of your background, thoughtfully provided by Le Monde.

Firstly, for this visual age of ours it’s important to have a “grip & grin”-type photo together with the predecessor, as a token that he at least regarded the subject as a decent jihadi sort of fellow. Check! (True: there’s no “grip” in the picture provided here, and for that matter also very little “grin”; I think those things are probably un-Islamic.) In good newspaper-style, though, author Cécile Hennion cuts right to the essentials of why Zawahiri is the best bet to succeed Osama Bin Laden in her very first paragraph:

“Doctor” Zawahiri, with an Egyptian degree in surgery, is considered the ideologist of Al-Qaeda and the “brain” behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. He has for a long time been Osama Bin Laden’s principal lieutenant and personal doctor.

Curious, then, that he wasn’t present at that Abottabad compound during that deadly raid last Monday morning (local Punjabi time). Nonetheless, he suffers no shortage of terrorist bona fides. For instance, after Osama Bin Laden came back to his native Saudi Arabia a hero from fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, but then had to flee the country due to his anti-regime agitation, it was initially only the House of Saud that he swore to lead a jihad against. Zawahiri, who first met him in Afghanistan, convinced him to widen his target to all “apostate regimes of the Muslim world.” The Doctor was also behind the fatwa of the late 1990s which declared that it was the responsibility of all good Muslims to kill Americans and their allies. (more…)

Wow – check out this article from Le Monde entitled “Syria: ‘There’s no reason why the popular will won’t triumph.’” Anyone following the news lately knows very well that serious, often violent demonstrations have been happening for about the past week in various major Syrian cities, including the capital Damascus. Is the regime of famed optometrist Bashar al-Assad (that last name means “lion” in Arabic, by the way) destined to be the latest to topple in the Arab Spring?

This quite excellent article – structured as a moderated chat in which names like “Mazen,” “hakan,” “Jack,” and “Heisenberg”* pose a series of questions – is pretty much a one-stop briefing on what is going on over there and the historical background that has led events to this pass.
(more…)

NOW IT CAN BE REVEALED, specifically by Valérie Collet in the French paper Le Figaro in a piece entitled “The anti-terrorist struggle passes through airplanes’ toilets”:

For three weeks the toilets of French airline companies have been at the center of a genuine anti-terrorist combat undertaken with the greatest discretion.

What’s this all about? Well, you might remember those oxygen-masks that are supposed to drop from the panel above your seat on a jet airliner when cabin pressure drops for some reason. Ah, but what if you happen to be in the bathroom at the time? No worries, most advanced airliners have a system of chemically-fabricated oxygen located in that room’s false ceiling to take care of your breathing needs there.

Until now, that is. To the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that contraption in the bathroom is not just an oxygen system – it’s something there ready for cagey terrorists to set fire to, explode, and thereby bring down the plane. So it has to go.

Leaving aside for the moment here the technical validity of the FAA’s objection, the most impressive thing about this affair is the way that agency has shown it can impose its will on the rest of the world’s airliners. As Mme. Collet points out, there are 12,000 planes to which this directive applies flying for American and European companies alone, and many more beyond those that are based in Asia. Yet all of them – one assumes – want to have the capability to fly to the American market and therefore need to get rid of those bathroom oxygen devices. One reason it seems this matter is finally being brought to public attention in a French publication is that, surprisingly, the French are being particularly quick to accede to the FAA’s demands; whereas the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has left it up to national airline authorities to react to the FAA’s demands as they will, the French agency (the DGAC) decided at the beginning of the year to carry out the FAA’s instructions as quickly as possible.

OK, but where does that leave those unfortunates who find themselves caught in the bathroom during a depressurization? Such incidents are certainly not unheard-of: Mme. Collet cites here figures from the French pilots union that there have been 19 of them within the last eight months in European airspace alone, and when they happen, pilots know they’re supposed to descend as quickly as possible to an elevation where there’s enough air pressure for people to breathe normally (around 4,200 meters). But from the usual airline cruising altitudes of around 10,000 meters that takes at least three minutes or more – and, meanwhile, you’re certain to have people stuck in bathrooms, unable to breathe or really to do much at all (except hold on to that cabin’s roof) as the airplane finds itself in a steep dive.

At least they won’t be able to blow anything up, either. And that’s the important thing.

We all like green energy, right? In particular, we all like sun energy, and we all like wind energy. I mean, it’s like simply plucking megawatts out of the sky for free – once you’ve made your initial investment in equipment and installation, to be sure. And while we also have recently become aware of some downsides to big windmill-parks – their funny noise, their ugliness (to some), the fact they kill birds – if you just put them offshore, everything should be OK, right? Whom could they bother out there?

Well, think again. In particular, I put up that great photo of the NW France offshore cathedral/monastery Mont-Saint-Michel (credit: Olivier Boitet) for a reason, mainly to ask you to add some windmills to the picture with your imagination, and see what you think then. For that is precisely the news we get from a local French newspaper called Ouest-France (to which I was referred by an article in Le Parisien): windmills are coming, so it seems, to the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. (more…)

Remember “Anonymous,” that loose band of hackers that a few weeks ago took up the role of avenging angels for Julian Assange’s Wikileaks organization, attacking the sites of the credit-card providers, banks, etc. that had refused to process its payments? Well, where are they now? Have they gone off to find more interesting off-line pursuits with the advent of the New Year?

Hardly. An interesting article today in Le Monde (no by-line) indicates that they’ve taken up a new target, not really Wikileaks-related and ordinarily so off-the-map in geopolitics terms as to usually never attract attention: Tunisia, specifically its government. A couple days ago I twittered in this space about “Trouble in Tunisia,” basically some violent police-student confrontations in a mid-sized city off to the west, near the Algerian border. But this Le Monde article shows that I didn’t even know the half of it. (Probably fortunately for me at the time: I had only 140 characters to work with!) (more…)

Reporters for the French newspaper Libération managed to sit down with the recently-released Burmese opposition leader in the office of her National League for Democracy party in the northern part of Rangoon. They’re unfortunately reserving the full transcript of the resulting interview for the paper’s paid on-line section, but some valuable extracts are placed here.

A couple interesting points emerge. One is basically a variation on Barack Obama’s “We are the ones we have been waiting for!” Just as with Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Suu Kyi in her long-term imprisonment has long been the focus of attention for those seeking to democratize Burmese society, so that it’s only her recent freedom that has provided new hope that progress can be made. Yet she takes care to mildly remonstrate against such a preoccupation, saying that success will depend on many others than just her, and particularly on the young people she now sees swelling the ranks of her supporters.

The other is that, from the tenor of the reporters’ questions, it seems that that pro-democracy movement within the country is already divided into a number of factions. Or is it? Could this merely be some sort of military government tactic? That’s what Suu Ky suspects – although she admits she hasn’t yet had enough full exposure to the national political scene to be able to know for sure – and she is anyway relying on all parties being willing to work together to advance at least their broadest, most-important goal of bringing back truly free and fair elections for choosing the government.

It’s good to be Google! Most of the Western world may be struggling with various degrees of above-average unemployment, but one much remarked-upon news item of late concerned the Mountain View, CA powerhouse’s awarding a 10% across-the-board pay-rise to all employees, together with a one-off lump-sum gratuity of $1,000. One aspect of that move’s appeal was how much of a throw-back it seemed as a personnel measure, far-removed from today’s HR environment where bonuses going only to those identified as the company’s true high-achievers, not to every employee, are more the norm. Yet a few analysts could still see the logic in this approach (including, for example, this commentator on the Atlantic website).

Writing in Le Monde, Marion Solletty takes yet another cut at what this latest move by Google means:

. . . the star of Silicon Valley feels itself under threat. Its vital forces, the engineers who fine-tuned its mysterious algorithms, are leaving it. With the eye of a connoisseur they have watched the sparkling rise of the new stars of the Web, the social networks. And they respond to the call of the bold.

Search, and text ads, and YouTube videos: all that is just so yesterday, man, just so . . . 2008, you know! And then following directly comes the anecdote of Cedric Beust (with a suspiciously French name!), a six-year Google employee who now has left to join LinkedIn.

What goes around, comes around. According to Solletty, Google first stocked itself with quality personnel by raiding the leading Internet-related firms of its own period of skyrocketing growth. Now it’s the turn of others, including especially Facebook, whose employee total has gone from 1,000 to 1,700 within the past year (although it has had its own top-level defections), or Twitter, which has tripled from 100 employees to 300 in that same period.

Ironically, Google’s latest salary-move did cost it one employee. The internal company message announcing it (“CONFIDENTIAL: INTERNAL ONLY”), and lauding employees as “the best in the world,” was soon leaked to an industry blog so we could all savor the message, at least vicariously. But he who did the leakin’ was fired.

UPDATE: It’s worse for Google than we thought! TechCrunch now has this piece about a Google engineer threatening to leave to join Facebook and getting $3.5 million in stock to stay!

The reverberations of the Democratic Party’s grand defeat in Tuesday’s midterm elections continue to echo from various foreign observers. Now Le Monde Diplomatique (a monthly, strictly speaking) contributes a trenchant commentary, written by no less than the paper’s editorial director, Serge Halimi: Electoral rout for a president without a plan.

The verdict? Bitter disappointment, as you can tell from the headline. For we have to remember that, in reality, Obama’s real mission as American head of state has always been to make the country more like the France epitomized precisely by Le Monde Diplomatique – just ask any Tea Partier. (Well, they’d probably leave out that very last part, having never heard of the publication.) Halimi writes in a despairing tone that Obama since his inauguration has “missed the chance to profoundly reform his country by pointing it in a progressive direction.” What’s more: “That the Republicans are returning to the front rank two years after the debacle of President Bush says enough, in any rate, about the ravaging power of national dissatisfaction.” Ouch!

Now, perhaps the president feels the “frustration” he can sense in the electorate is all down to a mere failure of communication. Not so, writes Halimi, and here I must quote at length to do justice to his comprehensive indictment:

In reality, the American people have just expressed more than “frustration” or unhappiness ascribable to deficient “pedagogy.” They have punished a hesitant and cowardly economic policy when it came to reviving [economic] activity; the economist Paul Krugman has never ceased to prove that the level of federal budgetary reflation was insufficient to assure recovery, taking into account the austerity policies undertaken at the same time at the state level. The electorate equally disavowed a health reform which was the visible result of compromise and bad faith bargaining, including with the main pillars (pharmaceutical lobby and insurance lobby) of an unfair and onerous system. Finally, the young, the militants, turned away from a presidency that, even though it had assured legislative support, never knew how to demonstrate either “leadership” nor the will to make a drastic break on the question of the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, nor on the closure (promised but endlessly put off) of the Guantanamo prison, nor on the climate change front, nor even towards bringing to an end the discrimination that hits homosexuals serving the colors.

Those of you out there who are up on developments in browser technology will be aware that the latest hot thing is HTML5, the latest update to the fundamental language for depicting things on the Web, which among other things should allow for audio and video to be played on a webpage without any sort of plug-in. Well, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body in charge of developing and maintaining Web standards, recently tested a variety of browsers to see how they fared using HTML5. I’m sorry to report that Microsoft’s latest entry, Internet Explorer 9 (still in beta), performed best.

This is at least according to an article on the website of the French paper Libération (Internet Explorer: If you can’t make fun of it anymore . . .). There is even a handy table within the piece – from the W3C, in English – that gives a side-by-side comparison of IE9 and four other browsers (or browser-engines: WebKit) in seven categories. IE9 is given a perfect 100% rating in five of those categories.

But remember, HTML5 itself is still in beta and due to be officially issued in the middle of next year, by which time it will certainly have undergone further changes (and maybe even have new categories of things to be judged upon), so things can certainly change. And anyway, this come from a French newspaper – what do they know?