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!).

                          

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.

Surely, if you have been following developments at all, you have noticed recent reports, ever-more frequent, of “Syrian Army deserters” fighting back against, and indeed killing, some fractions of the military and police forces sent to violently suppress the demonstrations. These demonstrations have been overwhelmingly peaceful over these long, long months – months, and days, seem long when you head out onto the streets, time after time, to offer yourself to get shot – and this has been a point of pride for the opposition. Then again: eight months, and not only is Assad still in power, with over 3,500 dead at his hands according to UN figures (and thousands of others locked up and tortured in jail), but he is still playing silly games like promising the Arab League to withdraw the army from Syria’s cities and then doing no such thing.

It’s no surprise, then, that this “no violence” discipline has started to waver. Actually, more than that: this “Free Syrian Army” (ASL is its French-language abbreviation) has existed since July, where it was first formed on the Turkish-Syrian border by a renegade Syrian Army colonel, one Riad Al-Assad, of whom Reuters provides a photo in the article, in civilian shirt-sleeves. (You’d have to assume he is no relation to Syria’s ruling family.)

Why the Turkish-Syrian border? Because of some sort of Turkish support? Not at all: rather, Syrian Army deserters tend to flee in that direction. And there are more and more of these deserters, who, no matter what they might feel about the protestors’ cause, are often prompted to flee by the prospect of suffering the death penalty should they refuse orders to fire upon civilians. Only deserters are accepted – the ASL will not arm or train civilians – but apparently these forces already number some 10,000 to 17,000 soldiers (comparison: the Syrian Army is around 200,000), organized in 18 battalions, athough understandably short on arms and ammunition. This did not stop them, however, from carrying out a quite impressive attack on Wednesday (16 November) on a Syrian Secret Service aerial intelligence installation on the outskirts of Damascus.

Not Overjoyed

There’s just one thing: Too many parties are not particularly happy to see the emergence of this ASL. The Syrian National Council (the leading organization of dissident political leaders, located outside of Syria itself; French abbreviation CNS) has an awkward relationship with these forces; these politicians have largely not yet given up the attitude that the opposition should remain peaceful, and they are also suspicious of the post-Assad influence that ASL is likely to wield. Further, no foreign government or organization of governments (e.g. the Arab League) is pleased to see the ASL either, because none of them desire to see Syria descend into some bloody civil war – Libya all over again, you could say, but this time in quite different terrain and a much more crucial geopolitical position (in terms of the serious disruption such a civil war would surely cause among the neighbors, among which Israel). Not the Russians; not the Americans or anyone else.

The cruel irony, though, is that it is the seeming reluctance of any of these outside parties actually to intervene in an effective way to stop the continuing slaughter of the Syrian people which has provided a major impetus to the formation of these renegade armed forces, one of whose missions it is to try to stop it. Allah, many in Syria have apparently decided, will only help those who help themselves, no matter what that takes.

                          

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.

                          

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.

Solyndra, the President’s Tricky Trap

The American solar collector start-up was just declared bankrupt, two years after having received $500 million from the government.

By Lorraine Millot, Washington correspondent

“Companies like Solyndra open the way to a brighter and more prosperous future,” Barack Obama declared on the company’s premises in Fremont (California) in May 2010. Fifteen months later, Solyndra is bankrupt. Its 1,100 employees learned Wednesday morning, arriving at work, that they had no further need to show up at the factory; they would receive their last check by mail. The loan of 535 million dollars (377 million euros) that the federal government had granted in March 2009 to this start-up which promised super-performing solar-collectors in tube form, not panel, will without doubt never be repaid.

A model enterprise, “a sign of American ingeniousness and dynamism” according to the Head of State in 2010, the Solyndra problem is turning into a nightmare for Barack Obama, at the very moment when he wants to convince people – including Congress, in his address next Thursday – that he can still create jobs (especially “green” ones) even while reducing the public deficit. “We sensed from the beginning that there was something shady going on there” is the attack Republicans Cliff Stearns and Fred Upton, members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, have already launched while opening a committee investigation into Solyndra.

“Setback.” To make things even worse, the Obama administration is basically suspected of having “favored” this particular start-up in order to reward a big contributor to the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, the millionaire George Kaiser, who was one of Solyndra’s biggest investors. “What happened here, I think, was that they gave money to people who were either contributors or big supporters,” is Cliff Stearns’ accusation.

“If Obama’s intention was to help the economy and create jobs with this loan-guarantee of half a billion dollars, it’s clear that this is a setback, and I suspect that it was even predictable,” observes Sam Wilkinson, analyst for IMS Research. The product that Solyndra tried to bring onto the market was “very good,” this analyst emphasizes – its tubes enabled the capture of sunlight the whole day long, throughout the Earth’s rotation. “The problem is that Solyndra didn’t manage to reduce production costs,” explains the IMS analyst. “Despite all their advantages, Solyndra’s tubes did not justify a price that was far above those of the competition – one of the reasons for that, by the way, being that Chinese companies receive much more public money than American producers . . . ” According to information released by the company itself, Solyndra’s production costs reached $2/watt. The Chinese competition, which has already gained around 60% of the world market, is today at $1.20 or $1.25 per watt instead.

In 2011 the price for solar-panels sunk more than 40%. Before Solyndra, two other American producers were declared bankrupt this year, Spectrawatt Inc. and Evergreen Solar Inc. “It’s still too early to say whether the guaranteed loans granted by the American government to these solar-panel producers are a failure or not, considering that only three or four companies have benefited from them,” is the nuance offered by Shyam Mehta, an analyst for GTM Research. “But it’s certain that the US won’t be able to beat the Chinese at the low-cost game. Not only because Beijing supports its industry much more than Washington does, but there are also all those costs that are lower in China: salaries, electricity, materials . . . ”

“Obsolete.” The 500 million lost by the American government with its Solyndra venture isn’t any big thing compared with the billions which it continues to spend to support nuclear energy and to grant tax-advantages to oil companies, that’s how the situation is set in context by Dana Blankenhorn, a passionate blogger on the subject of renewable energy. The American government’s error lies in having wanted “to play the role of the market” by putting its bets on Solyndra’s technology, rather than devoting its subsidies to research, he judges. “In solar, the technologies change very quickly. The silicon collectors that dominate the market now will perhaps be completely out-of-date soon. The Chinese dominate the market with technologies that are already largely obsolete. Where we can beat them is with new technologies, it’s there that the State needs to invest.” The argument is no doubt true . . . but it is not necessarily what one will hear during the next electoral campaign when the subject of Solyndra – Obama’s “cherished project” – is brought up.

                          

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.

                          

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.

                          

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:

• After the alleged incident, Tristane was understandably upset and called her mother immediately, who rushed to meet her.
  
• Her mother – Mme. Mansouret – then called up her friend, Brigitte Guillemette, ex-wife of DSK – and also Tristane’s godmother! Upon hearing the story, Mme. Guillemette allegedly told Mme. Mansouret that she had been aware of various “incidents” DSK had had with students, but that she never thought he could go so far as what he was alleged to have tried with Tristane Banon.
  
• So Ms. Guillemette then called up DSK to confront him with what had happened. He told her that he just couldn’t control himself when he saw Tristane; after all, he had had sexual relations with the mother only a few years before, and he just freaked out in the presence of the daughter. (Péter un câble – literally “to fart a cable” – colorful, but it’s unsure here whether these were DSK’s actual words or the L’Express journalist’s paraphrase).
  
• After this, Mme. Guillemette called Tristane’s mother back. She wanted more information about the incident. She also wanted to know whether they intended to file a criminal complaint, and further advised her friend simply to go meet “Dominique” to sort things out that way.
  

What to do? She consulted widely with people whose judgment she respected, especially within the Socialist Party. The answers she got were that, although DSK’s deviant behavior was widely-known (one female politician admitted he was “dangerous towards women”), it would be better just to let things lie. This was what she also heard from no less than François Hollande, already then (as now) a Socialist Party leader, with whom she ordinarily would never expect to talk, but who here first sought her out, anxious that she would rock the boat by allowing her daughter to report to the police, and who even offered to call up DSK himself if that would dissuade her from that.

It’s clear, then, why Tristane Banon did not press charges eight years ago. But why is she doing so now? Obviously due to the influence of the New York Sofitel incident, even as that is petering out. But it’s again mainly under the influence of her mother, who claims to finally want to seize this chance to let the world know that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is not some charming French lady’s-man, but rather . . . well, in L’Express’ words, un predateur qui cherche non pas à plaire mais à prendre, se comportant avec l’”obscénité d’un soudard” – “a predator who seeks not to please but to take, behaving with the ‘obscenity of a marauder.’”

*Whew!* Is everything clear?

And if all that is not enough for you, DSK’s daughter Camille has also been drawn into this mess, having been called in for interrogation by detectives yesterday. “Aha,” you may say, “looks like in France they also follow the American practice of rounding up anyone who might have the remotest connection with the accused!” Not really: turns out Camille Strauss-Kahn’s is the daughter by DSK of Brigitte Guillemette*, Tristane’s godmother, and Tristan and Camille were good friends at the time of the alleged rape incident with DSK.

So she might also have some interesting things to say. Stay tuned.

* Why can’t daughters and mothers at least share the same last name in France? I thought it was somewhat of a traditionalist, Catholic society!

                          

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.

                          

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.)

Anyway, if you please, check out the article to which the above tweet links: Paul Krugman continues to ramble (as in “ramble & rave like a madman,” my Larousse tells me). The lede?

Keynsians are currently in hot water since it’s now quite evident that their prescriptions have not succeeded in relaunching the American economy. Despite billions of dollars committed, they tell us that it hasn’t been enough . . . They look for explanations to prove their point, but in so doing they only succeed in painting themselves into a narrower corner of their ivory tower.

So writes someone going by the name Le Minarchiste – probably a play on words – who zeroes in particularly on Krugman’s recent theme that “money is not a problem,” i.e. there is plenty of money out there, but banks are simply not willing to use it to make loans, nor firms in order to invest and hire people. Revenons sur terre si vous le voulez bien – let’s get back down to earth here: banks won’t loan, businesses won’t invest because too-high taxes make it unlikely they will get a satisfactory return for doing so. It’s after-all small business that is America’s jobs and economic-growth motor, and small business feels itself constrained not only by those taxes but by the general regulatory uncertainty and inflationary government-deficit policies.

Throughout the piece this Le Minarchiste peppers his text with references to one supposed expert after another. And he takes the very graphs Krugman recently used on his blog to prove his point (“money is not a problem,” remember) to disprove Krugman’s assertion, in a neat bit of rhetorical ju-jitsu. He even has the class – or his graphics editor does – to put at the top a fantastic shot of Prof. Krugman expounding a point (likely at one of the Sunday talk-show programs he frequents) and looking very dashing indeed.

Anyway, I think I’ll remain largely on Krugman’s side. But I admit that I don’t ordinarily go looking for on-line views that contrary to his (“counterpoints,” as it were), other than when the good professor himself includes such links in his writings.

Maybe I should. If so, this Contrepoints site looks like a good place to go. Check it out: on this same “Continue de divaguer” page you also have more juicy anti-Krugman articles linked off to the side:

• Paul Krugman is wrong to demand a new economic recovery plan
  
• Paul Krugman should stop all the politics
  
• Krugman vs. Hayek – that’s Friedrich Hayek, the mid-20th century high priest of “Austrian school” free-market capitalism
  
• Krugman vs. Murphy – that’s Robert Murphy, a contemporary economics professor, also of the “Austrian School,” who apparently has been badgering Krugman to engage in public debate

                          

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.