Memo to Secretary of State Clinton: If you consider your squabble with the North Korean authorities as still unresolved and are just waiting to launch a new salvo, I’m glad to provide you with some more ammunition. According to a new report in the French weekly Le Point, you could accuse them of shelling out government funds for luxury yachts from abroad while their people starve back home. Italian authorities back on May 28 seized two luxury yachts with a combined value of €12.5 million, under construction at Viareggio on the coast of Tuscany. This was at the request of Austrian prosecutors in Vienna, as the order for these, along with several cars, had been placed by an Austrian national who thereupon transferred title to them all to a Chinese company suspected as acting as a front for the North Korean government. Naturally, the shipment of any sort of luxury goods to North Korea is prohibited, specifically by UN Security Council resolution 1718 of October, 2006, passed in the wake of that country’s first nuclear test.

Swine flu is coming soon to hit us again, almost anywhere on Earth we might find ourselves. We know that; indeed, some of us possibly intend to seek out one of those swine flu parties to go to, about which I wrote previously in this space, in order to try to gain immunity against the autumn’s follow-up virus.

Of course, normal social intercourse under the shadow of a communicable disease rather demands that individuals take whatever prophylactic measures are necessary to avoid spreading the virus to others, if one has it, or catching it from others if one does not. That’s why illustrations accompanying swine flu news-reports usually show people wearing medical face-masks. Unfortunately, word has now come from the respected Dutch daily Trouw: Face-masks are not the solution.

Says who? Says Louise Knegtel of the BCM Academy (a.k.a. the Business Continuity & Crisis Management Institute), who these days is going around frenetically conducting three or four workshops per day about the “Mexican” (i.e. swine) flu and how businesses should prepare for it. She notes that face-masks will probably be useless because they only work if they are consistently worn, i.e. by everyone and at all times, and humans are simply not made that way. Sure, you can get all draconian and insist upon and enforce the wearing of face-masks by everyone in your firm, but then what about your suppliers? Your customers who come for a consultation/business meeting?

It probably won’t work (and, believe me, that’s not really the Dutch management style in any case). Better to go with other measures like repeatedly cleaning telephones and doorknobs, using the stairs instead of the elevator, and “limiting social contact” within your company, i.e. letting people work from home, holding teleconferences rather than in-person get-togethers, etc. Even this is not enough to make your firm ready for what Ms. Knegtel forecasts could be 50% employee absence if the new flu outbreak gets serious. (Note that a lot of this will likely be the result, not of sick employees per se, but people needing to go home to take care of children whose schools have closed against the illness.) Way before the flu strikes a firm needs to prepare carefully, designating key activities and key personnel, planning how to keep them going even when people go missing, maybe pre-designating a “crisis manager” (presumably one assumed to be least at risk of getting the flu him/herself) to take charge when the problems start.

Whoa, then: all talk of “Kiss me, you swine!” aside, it looks like experts are taking the prospect of a serious swine/Mexican flu epidemic in the fall quite seriously. This point is reinforced by an article in Le Monde of a couple of days ago, Europe: Authorities prepare to confront the virus, a brief, collective effort by Le Monde’s correspondents in the major European capitals (including Paris, bien sûr) to summarize preparations country-by-country. The common pattern emerges of governments having placed huge orders with the relevant pharmacy companies (Sanofi, GSK, Novartis) for flu vaccines and established plans for prioritized vaccinations for if/when the more serious H1N1 flu comes. That is, as large as the orders have been, there is still not enough vaccine for everyone, so public workers, people already in vulnerable states of health, etc. get it first. (Also interesting is that the French name for this disease seems to be “the flu A(H1N1)”; we may need to compile a lexicon if different countries/languages persist in using their own, idiosyncratic swine-flu names like this.)

Happy fortieth Man-on-the-Moon anniversary! Did you celebrate yesterday, maybe take your very own “one small step for man”? Let me tell you, the Europeans are still jealous! Why else would an editorial appear in Le Monde, that pillar of the French media establishment, whose very title declares Forty years after Armstrong, Europe should affirm its space ambition?

As the article’s author reminds us straight off the bat, using the words of John F. Kennedy, “It’s not just one man who will go to the Moon, it’s the entire country. Because each of us must mobilize to send him there.” Still, although they have yet sent no one there yet, Europe has been fairly active in space for quite a while. By now they have the powerful Ariane 5 rocket to their credit, which at the beginning of this month launched into orbit the world’s largest commercial satellite, a communications satellite weighing more than 7 tons. The European Space Agency has also made certain major contributions to the International Space Station, including delivering to it last year the first Automated Transfer Vehicle, an unmanned craft designed for resupply trips back-and-forth. Oh, and Europe’s space effort definitely means jobs, as this writer shrewdly points out: 40,000 directly employed in 2008, with around 250,000 further secondary jobs. (more…)

If you’re into peer-to-peer downloading of large files (e.g. movies, music) from the Internet, you know already know all about it; if you’re not, here’s a quick summary. The most popular program for doing so is called BitTorrent, and for quite some time The Pirate Bay, a site based in Sweden, was the most popular place to go to get the files you might be interested in (you know, like Hollywood movies still in general public release – or even yet to embark upon public release). Naturally, The Pirate Bay came under some considerable legal pressure for its activities, until this past spring the main personnel behind it were sentenced to jail and to the payment of a hefty SEK 30 million fine. (They are appealing the verdict.) In the meantime, the Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB has announced its intention to buy The Pirate Bay next month and give it a “new business model” that makes the site’s activities strictly legal. In the meantime, though, some of the people behind The Pirate Bay have formed The Pirate Party – with chapters not just in Sweden but other countries as well – to advance their free-file-sharing political views, which already won one seat in the European Parliament in the early-June elections.

The (eventual) metamorphosis of The Pirate Bay to legality is especially good news for the French government, which has been busy since the beginning of the year trying to come up with legal measures to pass to outlaw the sort of free downloading of copyrighted commercial material that The Pirate Bay did so much to facilitate. After modifying their legislation to meet the objections from France’s Constitutional Court, which had first thrown it out, the French Senate has recently passed it, so that it is close to becoming law. It would empower a state agency – called Hadopi – to detect this sort of activity and, if two warnings to desist are ignored, pass on to French judges information about the offense for them to assign penalties, including fines, jail, and disconnection from the Net.

Ah, but can anyone ever stop truly determined Internet “pirates”? Le Monde reporter Maël Inizan now reports on another site now arising like a phoenix from The Pirate Bay’s ashes to save the cause of free downloading (Illegal downloading: a new site takes up the torch of The Pirate Bay). (more…)

Pangnirtung: ever heard of it? The Wikipedia article claims it is known as the “Switzerland of the Arctic”; its mayor goes by the marvelous name of “Mosesee Qappik.” For our purposes here, though, all we need to know – besides the comforting fact that it’s OK just to call it “Pang” – is that it’s an Inuit town located on the Arctic Circle, on Baffin Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut – and one that finds itself on the front line of world climate change. Le Monde correspondent Martine Jacot recently paid a visit to Pang to write about what is going on there (In the Arctic, the Inuits dread the network-effects of climate change); as world leaders haggle at the G8 in Italy over ceilings for temperature-rises and quotas for greenhouse gas emissions, it might be handy to consider for a bit what these people are going through already.

“Here as elsewhere in the Canadian Arctic,” states Ron Mongeau, a local government administrator, “climatic warming is not an illusion or a threat. Every day, it affects those who live there, who are dependent on hunting and fishing.” The average temperature there has indeed gone up by 1.4 degrees (that must be ºC) since the nineties, and the summer temperature has exceeded what used to be the hottest measurement on record (22ºC) five years in a row now.

OK OK, but what does that really mean on the ground – where the caribou’s hoof hits the road, so to speak? Well, speaking of, the caribou are all messed up about what is happening: during their autumn migrations they now find too many rivers not yet frozen-over, as they expect them to be from the past, and so have had to take wide detours. As for the humans living in the area (keep in mind, though, that they’re certainly outnumbered by the caribou), it seems everything they thought they knew about how their weather was supposed to be, year-round, has gone out the window. This past winter was somehow the coldest that anyone could remember; spring of 2008, however, was much warmer than usual, something that resulted in a “wall of water” flood hitting the town in June, after which the inhabitants had to live for months with potable water only available from trucks. Instances have now multiplied of snowmobiles traversing areas of snow and ice that turn out to be much softer than expected, so that both machine and rider get entrapped and have to be rescued, and everyone is afraid that the warmed-up soil will weaken the foundations of their buildings.

On the bright side, at least the Pangnirtung Fjord upon which the town is situated is now always ice-free in the summer, so that cruise ships have now made the place a regular stop on their itinerary. Many of those rich tourists like to visit in the first place to fish for the Arctic char (related to the salmon, and whose red/pink flesh is a rare delicacy), but the char population has noticeably thinned out lately because the warmer waters are no longer so suitable for the Arctic shrimp upon which they feed.

UPDATE: Here’s a related piece in English, about how they’re already having to cope with global warming in Greenland, from Yahoo! News (h/t to Some Assembly Required).

President Obama heads today to L’Aquila, Italy, for the three-day Group of 8 (G8) summit, and the New York Times has little hope anything useful will come out of it, due to “inexcusably lax planning by the host government, Italy, and the political weakness of many of the leaders attending.” Oh, and there’s also the slight possibility that another earthquake might hit the place just at the wrong time and trigger an evacuation plan to quickly fly the world’s seven top leaders somewhere else. (China’s Hu Jintao has already broken off his attendance there to fly back because of the continuing civil unrest in Xinjiang.)

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (usually known just as “Lula”) is also in Italy, although Brazil is not one of the countries making up the G8. That’s apparently because national leaders of other big and/or important countries which don’t quite qualify for the G8 are nonetheless often summoned to show up for token appearances as well. In an exclusive interview with Le Monde, though, Lula makes it known that he is not particularly grateful for the invitation: as one might expect, what you could call the “off-G8″ leaders are mainly there, as he puts it, “to have some coffee – the most expensive coffee in the world! – and for photos.”

As much as I might be enamored of that “off-G8″ neologism of mine just above (you know, like “off-Broadway”?), I’m afraid there’s a better, already-existing term we could use for those other countries like Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, namely the G20, after the somewhat-larger international summit of world leaders that had its first occasion last November in Washington, its second last April in London, and is scheduled to have its third next September in Pittsburgh. And indeed, in this interview Lula essentially calls for scrapping the G8 structure for yearly international summits in favor of the G20: “The G20 is more important than the G8, more representative, therefore closer to the realities of the crisis we are now going through.” He fears that the only reason the world’s richest countries allowed the G20 forum to get started at all was because they felt it was necessary for dealing with the world economic crisis (indeed, the G20′s short history does suggest that). Instead, though, he advocates not only abolition of the G8 but also an expansion of the G20 structure, to the point where it starts to look a bit like the way the European Union functions, in that regular G20 meetings would also be scheduled for officials below the head-of-government level as well, e.g. meetings of G20 finance ministers, of agricultural ministers, etc.

It’s a relatively short interview (just four questions), but Lula is a practiced politician and so manages to get in plugs for his other pet causes as well, like ratification of the Doha world trade round; a general dismantlement of the trade barriers keeping developing countries from selling their agricultural produce to developed countries; and, if governments think ethanol is a valid alternative energy source, then for the use of sugar cane to make it (like they do in Brazil, quite successfully) rather than corn (like they do in the US, quite unsuccessfully so far). He has also come up with an inside-the-G8 insurgent ally to help put additional pressure on that organization; it should come as no surprise that that is French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who together with Lula (as reported in yet another Le Monde article) is calling for the establishment of a world-wide “Alliance for Change” to “devote priority attention to the social dimension of globalization,” i.e. outside of the G8 structure because, according to those leaders, the G8 has shown itself as unwilling ever to address that subject on its own.

Back at the Tour de France, the “team time trial” that constitutes Stage 4 yesterday resulted in a strong victory for Lance Armstrong’s Astana team that put him up to second place, just two-tenths of a second behind the current leader, Fabian Cancellara. “Astana cruised so fast along 24.2 miles . . . of narrow and snaking roads,” wrote New York Times reporter Juliet Macur, “that the pack looked like a giant blur of blue and yellow.”

That’s all fine; but we also have, observing from the sidelines, one Antoine Vayer, once a trainer of the Festina bicycle-racing team, but who for ten years now has instead studied athletic physiology intensively, to the point that he is currently Professor of Physical Education at a French university. More to the point, however, is the research organization he has founded, called “AlternatiV,” devoted to the problem of bicycle-race doping. Because now Antoine Vayer has the sort of implacable hostility to that practice that can only come from those who used to be knee-deep in sin themselves.

Along the way, Vayer has also grabbed a cushy summer gig for himself as expert commentator covering each July’s Tour de France for a newspaper, first for Le Monde back in 1999, now for Libération. And it’s in a recent article there (entitled Loaded down like mules) that he puts forward the new approach for detecting doping that he has worked out. (Vayer sets the right tone at the very beginning of his piece with an apt derivative of an ancient saying: Male sanus in corpore inhumano, or “Unsound spirit in an inhuman body” – it’s supposed to be “Sound mind in a healthy body” – but I frankly found the exposition of his ideas to be clearer in a an article appearing somewhat later in Le Monde, Tour of Fraud: from “miraculous” to “mutant” doping, by the writer “E.M.,” which is also what alerted me to this issue in the first place.) (more…)

. . . er, yes, I know that Michael Jackson died, I’m just trying to see whether I can hold off having to write about that. Though if I get any more e-mail requests, I guess my hand will be forced.

For now, though, I’d rather discuss the Clean Energy and Security Act, otherwise known as the Waxman-Markey bill after its leading Congressional sponsors, that was passed in the US House of Representatives yesterday by a narrow 219-212 vote. This is the legislation that would move the US towards a “cap and trade” approach to regulating greenhouse-gas emissions. One key to understanding the push for such a law is clearly the issue’s whole international aspect: the rest of the world rather expects the United States to embark on something of this sort, whether it is Europe that already is further ahead in its environmental legislation or it is China and India who are definitely behind, but looking on to see whether there will ultimately be American inaction that can justify their own.

That’s why it is good to see an article in the authoritative French newspaper Le Monde such as the one just written by Corine Lesnes. Obama launches his green revolution, she proclaims in the piece’s very title, which features at the top an oddly hagiographic photo of Obama standing in front of what seems to be an early-American wilderness mural, perhaps during a visit to the Department of the Interior. (more…)

You’ve surely heard about it, if you’re reading this from the other side (i.e. the Western) of the Big Pond, and word has spread over to us here on the European side as well: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, missing for six days, turned out not to have gone hiking in those Appalachian Mountains that he loves so well, as his office staff claimed, but instead jetted down to Buenos Aires to meet with a local Latin lover there – supposedly employing all those five days (left after you subtract travel time) to put an end to the relationship. This the governor tearfully acknowledged to the world at a bizarre press-conference yesterday.

Who better to look to for a first take on all this than the French? (Other than the Argentinians, but this weblog is called EuroSavant). For that we can go to L’Express’ correspondent in the States, Philippe Coste, and his blog-entry The governor and his labrynth. You might recall – although it was more than ten years ago – that the French, in particular, were mystified by the whole to-do around the Monica Lewinsky affair and President Clinton’s impeachment; powerful French politicians, all the way up to past President François Mitterand (and for that matter – who knows? – even president-at-that-time Jacques Chirac), had routinely kept mistresses on the side, but these had always been kept decorously hushed-up, in keeping with the French electorate’s acceptance of and lack of interest in such things. (more…)

French Prime Minister François Fillon is a geek, and he’s proud of it. He was quick to declare his “geekness” in an interview he gave to the tech magazine SVM (“le mag!”), which appears in July/August 2009 issue. That link provides some of that interview – in French of course – but only part of it, as SVM naturally wants you buy “le mag” to be able to read it in its entirety.

But we don’t have to do that, since Benjamin Ferran of Le Figaro picked up on Fillon’s declaration, and in a recent article examines more closely Fillon’s alleged geeky credentials. As a good first step, he defines his terms: what is a “geek,” anyway? For that, he turns to France’s Secretary of State for the Digital Economy, currently one Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, who states that geeks are persons “that you don’t want to cross” because they can spend “8 to 20 hours in front of a screen,” something which “gives them that light tan.”

Well . . . it’s at least fair to say that Ferran would have been better-off turning to the prime minister himself for a definition, as his in-depth examination of Fillon certainly shows that the latter was not just just whistling Dixie when boasting about his tech know-how to SVM. Among other things, Ferran notes that Fillon speaks knowledgeably in that interview about “RSS feeds” (his reader of choice is Newswire) and of the “open-source CMS software Drupal“; he reads on-line “the sites of the biggest French, English, and American newspapers” (including, nota bene, the Journal du Geek); he was surfing the Internet as early as 1993, using the original NCSA “Mosaic” browser; and as for equipment, he carries both an iPhone 3G and a Nokia E61i, and he has worked with over thirty computers over the years, starting with the “Toshiba T2100 portable.” (He probably means here instead the Toshiba T1000.)

On the other hand, while he now uses Apple equipment (specifically, two MacBook Pros and an iMac), he only made the PC-to-Mac switch six months ago; for many, that marks him as a hopeless computer dilettante. And anyway, as Ferran points out (implicitly kicking aside the expert contribution to the debate from Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet cited above), many people’s definition of “geek” necessarily include heavy involvement in computer games. On that subject, Fillon does not utter a word, other than in his revealing response to an interview question about whether his eight-year-old son Arnaud is into such things: “Unfortunately, yes! DS, Playstation and Wii. My wife is trying to supervise that.”

Famous American director Woody Allen, fresh from picking up $5 million from a lawsuit he won last month against American Apparel for violation of privacy (they used without permission an image of him from Annie Hall), is now visiting Paris and so has things French on his mind. For one thing, while summer of ’09 will find him filming “a serious comedy, not frivolous” mostly in London, he already intends to spend the following summer in Paris on another movie project entirely. That’s far enough ahead that either the story and other details for that work have not been worked out and/or he simply prefers not to reveal them yet. Still, during a stop there this week to promote his latest work, Whatever Works, he made clear his choice of leading lady: as the French newspaper Le Figaro reports, he dreams of filming current French First Lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.

This he declared at a press conference in the French capital in response to the question of who he would film if he could choose anyone in the world. “Without a shadow of a doubt,” he replied, “Carla Bruni! I’m sure she would be marvelous. She has charisma and she has the capability of always showing herself to her public to best effect, and I could give her any role.”

In fact, as the article’s author (identified only as “C.J.”) points out, Bruni has already appeared in a couple of films – but only in cameo roles – such as the ’90s works “Paparazzi” and “Catwalk.” (The article helpfully links here for the full list of her appearances, but be aware that this list also includes television. For movies, scroll down to where that list starts with “17. Paparazzi.”) Then again, she has also clearly demonstrated her disinclination to allow her status as France’s First Lady from preventing her from getting involved in anything that might catch her fancy, such as releasing another album of songs shortly after her marriage to the French president. In any event, Allen will have a perfect opportunity to follow this up – if he’s truly serious – as he is scheduled for a private visit this weekend to the Elysée Palace, France’s White House.

Fear not, all you thousands of EuroSavant fans, whether on Twitter, by RSS, or simply frequent direct visitors to the site! While I’m always on the look-out for news of quirky Euro-events that I can pass on to you (see, for example, immediately below), especially if they provide fertile breeding-ground for puns, I do also regularly treat the major news of the day when I can add to the discussion a new insight or perspective as gleaned from the European press.

As of this Sunday, the world’s burning news is of course the recent election in Iran, the apparent plot by the authorities in that country to steal it, and the people’s reaction thereto. Unfortunately, all of this is occurring so far over a weekend, which might be another dastardly trick by the current Tehran regime designed to limit take-up of the story by the regular European press, some parts of which do not work on Sunday at all (although there’s also word that the American MSM has been similarly slow off the starting-blocks). (more…)

I already noted somewhat obliquely (admittedly in a very tangential manner: it’s the link down at the bottom of that post to the Poland in the EU weblog, under “UPDATE”) that the Czech EU presidency just organized and hosted in Prague a so-called Eastern Partnership summit – intended to improve EU relations with various ex-Soviet nations still under the shadow of the Russian Bear, including Ukraine and Belarus – and hardly anyone from the EU side showed up! As a “summit” it was supposed to be attended by all member-state heads of government. But I guess the EU is not yet that sort of organization where they send burly men to fetch dignitaries physically when their absence at an official event is noticed (nor is it likely ever to be), for only one head of government was there: Angela Merkel. (And of course a head of state – namely Václav Klaus, but note the distinction – acted as host; more on that below.) No Gordon Brown; no José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero; apparently no Donald Tusk, either, even though this Eastern Partnership is something originally proposed by Poland. No Austrian Chancellor, either (his name is Werner Faymann, BTW), and indeed nobody higher there for Austria than her EU ambassador, despite that country’s multiple interests (indeed, you could say its very location) in the East.

And no Nicolas Sarkozy. What vital functions did he have on his official schedule yesterday, when that Prague “summit” was wound up and the Eastern Partnership agreement signed without his participation? (more…)

You might have heard about an incident earlier this week when some man (an American citizen) managed to swim across the lake guarding one side of the compound in Rangoon, Burma where dissident leader (and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate) Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house-arrest for over 19 years. It seems he even stayed there for a couple days; it was only when he tried to swim back out the way he came that the Burmese police captured him, after which 20 officers then paid a visit to the compound, probably just to see what was going on, to question the residents there (basically Suu Kyi and her assistants) and check whether the guy had left anything behind. But that event was fairly widely-reported, including most certainly in the English-language press.

What I find more interesting is this article in France’s Nouvel Observateur (co-credited to the French news agency AFP) about Aung San Suu Kyi herself: she is not doing very well these days. First of all, she is 63 years old; I suppose that is an age when it is still possible to be in pretty good shape, except that being confined as essentially a prisoner of the dictatorial government of what is a very poor country is probably pretty much the opposite sort of environment to that which you would need to remain fit and healthy. (The article also notes that she refuses to accept the food sent in to her by the government.) According to the spokesman for her political party, the National League for Democracy (abbreviated as LND), Nyan Win, she can’t eat anymore, her blood pressure is low, and she suffers from dehydration. (And it is interesting that all this is coming out now; obviously this has something to do with the lake-swimmer’s visit, if only in the sense that journalists managed to contacted spokesman Nyan Win for comment on that incident and then asked follow-up questions about her current situation in general.)

The article mentions that, formally, the order putting her in house-arrest is supposed expire at the end of this month. Still, there can be little doubt that, one way or another (like a simple extension to the order), her status will be little changed after that point. The bigger question is whether she will even still be alive by then. And another one: What happens when she does die? Recall that August-September 2007 already saw widespread anti-government protests, with a prominent role played by Buddhist monks, sparked by nothing more than a government decision to remove subsidies on the price of various fuels.

“Make no mistake,” as Grégoire Biseau writes for the French left-leaning newspaper Libération, “the crisis continues to wreak devastation.” He cites only figures for France, but they still do not make for very reassuring reading: bankruptcies, for example, are up 21.3% in the first quarter of 2009 (presumably year-on-year), and profitability for non-financial firms is at its lowest level since 1985.

The question naturally arises: Surely there must be companies, somewhere, which are still doing well for themselves despite the tough times. Who are they? Perhaps more importantly – because of the clues that may be extractable for the rest of us – how are they managing to pull that off? As chief editor and team leader, Biseau enlists his colleagues at Libération to put together an article-collection addressing these questions, under the master-title of Seven aspects of getting around the crisis. (more…)

The leading French daily Le Monde has a weblog on its website that I’ve just discovered, called V Pour Vidéo. The tagline it uses to describe itself translates as “Video-essentials in a blog with real pieces of video inside” – language I imagine that you’d rather expect to see on a cereal-box! In any case, it does seem to be a weblog based around video, in a loose sense at least, with at least one video embedded in each blogpost.

Also, the blog-author’s name is Karim El Hadj – that’s something that should cause a double-take, when you realize that this is an affiliated product of the renowned Le Monde! I’m not saying that it’s surprising that someone who is clearly originally of Arab origin can come up with high-quality weblog content; I’m saying I’m surprised that such a person is, in effect, sponsored by such a pillar of the French media establishment as Le Monde.

For his blogpost for today it seems that El Hadj has been inspecting various Disney animation-films rather closely and has come up with something rather interesting. I’ll pass the word directly on to him here:

Like many animation-lovers, while watching Disney animated cartoons you have also felt a certain déjà vu. Here’s the explanation of this phenomenon. For many years the Disney enterprise has continued to duplicate animation segments from one cartoon to another. Creativity and industry don’t necessarily always go together.

Here’s the video that proves his point, from DailyMotion.com:

In the comments following the post you have contributions from various readers offering their own judgments as to whether this is really such a bad thing. Comment #3, from “Matthieu,” does cut Disney some slack, reminding us that back when these films were made there were no computers to assist so that everything had to be drawn by hand, and maybe in view of this the duplication made some sense in order to “gain time” and not have to re-do everything all the time. But El Hadj remains hard-core, sticking in his own blog-author’s comment-to-the-commend (Message du blogueur) saying, in effect, yeah they gain time, and so they gain more money, and where’s the innovation?

So today is the day: the G20 summit in London. I’m pleased to report delightfully sunny, warm, no-need-for-overcoats spring weather here in NW Europe to aid the assembled world leaders in their deliberations, even though we all realize that as a practical matter that will do little but boost the ranks of protestors out on London’s streets – for today, especially, the lives of a world leader and his/her staff are bounded by conference rooms and the climate-controlled cocoons of limousines.

Belgium’s La Libre Belgique has a good run-down (Re-start more, regulate better) of the task these leaders face. The lede:

The stakes of the “Twenty,” industrialized and developing countries, are at minimum double. Consolidate the chances of economic recovery and avoid new skidding from the financial markets. The G20 will have to convince in both registers.

As La Libre reporter Pierre-François Lovens notes, Barack Obama himself has gone on record as refusing to be satisfied with leaving London having achieved only “half measures.” Yet as Lovens also writes, “Four hours, maybe five . . . That’s the time – a priori derisory enough in view of the stakes – that the heads of state and of government of the G20 will devote on Thursday, in London, to the multiple dossiers” before them at the summit. Furthermore, the basic outlines of disagreement have not changed: the US wants greater spending on stimulus packages from other governments, especially those in Europe, while for their part the Europeans reject this idea while making it clear that they are after an expanded system of international financial regulation in which “no place, no financial product and no institution can exist anymore without supervision or transparency.” (more…)

The French newsmagazine Le Point today has some bad news for those French students who were looking forward to some extra time out in the bracing springtime air, away from the books: the site faismesdevoirs.fr announced yesterday that it was shutting down – one whole day after it first opened! The clue to what this site was supposed to do is in its very name: fais mes devoirs is French for “do my assignments,” and indeed this was a site set up to take care of the homework of lycéens et collégiens, thus high-school and university students, in exchange for payment of between €5 and €30. (Presumably per assignment; you also get a handy idea of the helpful attitude of this site from the tag-line on its logo, which translates to “You won’t get there . . . we are [already] there!”)

But no, Le Point reports that “the site had provoked criticism from the national Ministry of Education, teachers unions, and parents.” (I wonder why? Come on people, one doesn’t become a successful businessperson and get to own a McMansion without knowing how to delegate!) And then it basically passes on to readers the apologetic message now to be found on the faismesdevoirs.fr website, which we of course can just go inspect for ourselves. Posted at 18.00 hours yesterday evening (Fri., 6 MAR 2009), the brief note from a “Stéphane,” labeled as the “founder of faismesdevoirs.fr, is curious in its own right. The original idea of his team of collaborators was a noble one: “to make available an innovative pedagogical tool to Internautes.” (That’s a remarkable French term, perhaps cognate to “astronaut,” referring simply to “people who use the Internet.”) But then at some point – Stéphane does not specify when or how – they realized that “the site runs counter to our own values,” since it “can contribute nothing” to efforts to make “future generations better than present generations” (which, for example, think up schemes for things like earning money by doing students’ homework for them – Stéphane does not write that, that’s my own contribution). And then this: “New technologies should serve to better us and not to assist us.”

A curious postulate, that, Stéphane. So in science class it’s back to the slide rule? Or not even that? What about fingers? Frankly, this farewell note reminds me of the sort of defendants’ statements issued out of those Chinese “reeducation camps” of the 1960s, or the Communist show-trials of the 1930s and 1950s. Just how closely does that French Ministry of Education work together with, say, French military intelligence and their “special” interrogation methods?

Here’s a headline from the French daily Libération that jumped out at me: Barbie, 50 years of a bimbo.

Yes, we’re talking here about that Barbie, the famous doll from Mattel. (Has anyone really ever named their daughter “Barbie” within the past couple of decades, anyway?) And that “50 years” in the title refers to the fact that our little Barbie will soon mark that numbered anniversary of her existence! (Sans lifting, the text also notes, meaning that she has never resorted to a face-lift or any other sort of cosmetic surgery. Which is remarkable, because any modification, applied to any part of her body, would have qualified as “plastic surgery” by definition, I suppose.)

The point of this brief article is that Paris is getting ready to make a big, big deal out of Barbie’s fiftieth around the time when it occurs on 9 March. First, as you would actually expect, the Dolls Museum there will have an exhibition of the earliest models, while the luxury women’s-fashion store Colette will have an exhibition of Barbie accessories past and present, from MP3 player and box of bonbons all the way to “jewelry set with diamonds.” In April the Galeries Lafayette, that luxury shopping-complex in the heart of the city, will have a presentation of drawings of fifty dresses created for Barbie by prominent designers: Sonia Rykiel, Christian Lacroix, etc. Finally, Karl Lagerfeld (a fashion designer I have actually heard of before) will exhibit a series of high-fashion Barbie photos. (It’s possible the photo you see displayed on the Libération webpage is one of them; unfortunately, there aren’t any more, if you click on a number from that vast array you see over on the left side you’ll just be taken to other articles from within this “Next” fashion sub-section of the Libération site.)

All this is some serious commemoration for something/someone whom Libération is nonetheless willing to label in its headline a “bimbo.” Can someone help me out here – does that word in French lack the negative connotations with which we associate it in English? I wouldn’t really be surprised . . .

A recent headline-news story in the German press was the discovery that fugitive Nazi war-criminal Aribert Ferdinand Heim had been living under another name in Cairo, Egypt since shortly after fleeing Germany in 1962, and that he had died there back in the summer of 1992. Known as “Dr. Death” for the gruesome medical procedures and experiments he undertook while serving in the SS at a series of concentration camps, Heim had long been top-of-the-charts when it came to old Nazis that the German authorities – aided by among others the famous Simon Wiesenthal Center – believed to be still alive and were trying to locate to bring them back to Germany to face justice. In fact, the New York Times account reports that the current director of the Jerusalem branch of the Wiesenthal Center, Efraim Zuroff, “had been about to raise the reward for information leading to his arrest to $1.3 million from $400,000,” adding that “Mr. Zuroff expressed surprise when informed of Dr. Heim’s apparent fate.”

“Surprise,” indeed; from a brief interview with Marie Simon of the French news-magazine L’Express, it seems that Zuroff is not ready to accept that Heim is dead yet. “I have serious doubts on this subject. . . . There is no body, no tomb, no DNA test possible.” He calls it a “curious thing” that Heim’s son has not tried to claim Heim’s inheritance, said to amount to some €2 million, and that, while he is now claiming his father died in Egypt in 1992, as of two months ago he also declared he had never seen him. (But, as the NYT reports, he now says he was with him when he died. Whether that is true – i.e. whether he ever was there, although travel and passport-control records could show that, and, more importantly, whether Heim actually died when claimed – is another matter.)

Zuroff indicates to his French interviewer his definite intention to travel to Cairo to examine the documents attesting to Heim’s death himself. But for now he believes (“according to our latest information”) that Heim may well still be alive, having absconded at some point to that more-traditional Nazi refuge, South America – although Zuroff also points out that Egypt actually was an even better place to hide after the war for Nazis on the run, one endorsed by Franz Stangl, commandant of the Treblinka death camp, who made that country his first stop on the run.

(Wikipedia note: Strangely, the Wikipedia entry on the Simon Wiesenthal Center records that “In November 2005, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Jerusalem Director, Dr. Efraim Zuroff, located Aribert Heim, who had been hiding in Spain for 20 years. Aribert Heim died in 1992 in Cairo, Egypt a free man.”)

UPDATE: An article in Le Monde now adds some further relevant details, mainly that German police now intend to travel to Egypt shortly to positively confirm Heim’s death by finding actual evidence, like the remains of a body.

It also recounts how the Austrian authorities submitted in 1950 a detailed request to arrest Heim to the (then West-) German Ministry of Justice, even listing his exact location of residence within Germany. Heim was originally Austrian, you see, plus the outrages for which he was most infamous occurred at the Mauthausen concentration camp located within Austria. But that request was ignored by the West German authorities.

Just as the Obama administration is getting prepared to ramp up US military strength in Afghanistan by about another 30,000 troops, a very real problem has arisen as to how to keep supplied the NATO troops already on the ground there, much less bring in brand new forces. The land supply-route from Pakistan via the Khyber Pass has lately become somewhat insecure and unreliable, but now the air route threatens to become much longer and more difficult due to the announced closure to NATO use, within six months, of the Manas airbase near the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek. The Washington Independent’s ace (US) national security reporter, Spencer Ackerman, now considers the Manas closing as inevitable, while Scott Horton over at Harper’s enlightens us as to the corrupt and high-handed (even deadly) American behavior there that caused relations with the Kyrgyz to sour to bring us to this point.

The world-renowned French daily Le Monde provides yet more context for that Kyrgyz government decision (Five countries of the ex-USSR create a fund for dealing with the crisis). Those five countries are Russia herself, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and, yes, Kyrgyzstan, and the article shows clearly how Russia has succeeded in re-extending it’s influence over the Central Asian countries both financially and militarily. Sure, there is that $2 billion loan and $150 million in an outright grant reported by the New York Times that Russia has offered to Kyrgyzstan. But that august newspaper failed to report that Kyrgyz president Kurmanbek Bakiev travelled to Moscow in the first place to take part in a summit with Russian president Medvedev and the presidents of five other ex-Soviet states. It was there that the subset named above established a collective $10 billion fund (with a disproportionate Russian contribution, one would expect) as an emergency and stabilization reserve for confronting the worldwide financial crisis.

But that same summit had an important military dimension as well. All seven of the presidents in attendance (i.e. the five listed above plus those of Armenia and Uzbekistan) agreed to create “collective armed forces” for responding to common external threats. And it was actually in connection with this summit meeting that Kyrgyz president Bakiev made his announcement that the Manas airbase would shortly be closed to the Americans.

Although it is true that “collective armed forces” is a vague phrase, and that one should wait and see what comes of it in operational practice (if anything – it’s highly unlikely to mean a fusion of all those nations’ armies, for example), it is nonetheless clear that Russia’s influence in Central Asia is waxing. But it’s also probably useful to remember that American access to airbases in the region, starting in 2001 (i.e. less than ten years after these states had gained a sort of “independence” from Soviet Russia) was extraordinary to begin with, and really only due to the world political climate in the wake of the 9-11 attacks, which among other effects brought about toleration for this extraordinary concept from the Russian government. If that attitude cooled soon thereafter, it did so somewhat less quickly in the states actually hosting American bases, namely Uzbekistan (with an airbase made available until 2005) and Kyrgyzstan, giving them for a while at least a veneer of policy “independence” from Moscow. The impending loss of the Manas base, however – although considerably helped along by American behavior, as Scott Horton reminds us – was in this geopolitical context something inevitable, so that one would rather hope and expect that contingency plans for what to do next are already in place at the Pentagon.

The leading French daily Le Monde today has a striking editorial, in the form of an open letter to Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, from the French writer Jean-Moïse Braitberg. That double first-name amounts to what in English would be “John-Moses,” so this is someone of the Jewish faith, in fact someone whose grandfather died in the gas chambers of Treblinka and of whom other relatives also perished during World War II in various other Nazi camps. The name of his late grandfather, Moshe Brajtberg, is even enshrined at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, but now M. Braitberg is publicly writing the Israeli president to have it removed. “I ask you to accede to my request, Mr. President, because what has happened in Gaza, and more generally the fate given to the Arab people of Palestine for sixty years, disqualifies Israel in my eyes as a center for the memory of the evil done to Jews and thereby to all of humanity.”

He goes on:

You see, since my childhood I have lived within an entourage of survivors from the death-camps. . . . It was necessary, they taught me, that these crimes never resume again; that never again could a man, due to his belonging to an ethnic group or religion despised by others, be scoffed at while trying to assert the most elementary rights such as a dignified life in safety, without being shackled but with the light, however distant, of a future of serenity and prosperity.

Nonetheless, all that M. Braitberg writes that he has seen from Israel over decades towards the Palestinians has been “violence, spilled blood, confinement, incessant controls, colonization, [and] despoiling.” But what about the rockets that Hamas incessantly launches at Israel? What about the suicide bombers? “What I will say to you is that my feelings of humanity do not vary according to the citizenship of the victims.”

Then further:

On the contrary, Mr. President, you guide the destinies of a country that claims not only to represent Jews collectively, but also the memory of those who were victims of Naziism. It’s that which concerns me, and which I find intolerable. By preserving at the memorial of Yad Vashem, at the heart of the Jewish State, the name of my nearest relatives, your State keeps my family-memory a prisoner behind the barbed-wire of Zionism to make it a hostage of a self-proclaimed moral authority that each day commits the abomination that is the denial of justice.

So he wants his grandfather’s name removed. It’s all fairly powerfully – and, of course, publicly – expressed, not that Israeli officials will bother to take any notice. Still, together with the new accusatory Internet meme – “The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany” – it is clear that Israel is harvesting the whirlwind that she sowed with her December attacks into Gaza.

Heard the latest? Barack Obama actually is descended from Dutch ancestors! And that word comes from a French source, namely Libération, which a few days ago, at the time of the inauguration, came out with Batavian rumor: Is Barack Obama of Netherlands origin? (“Batavian” is simply a historical adjective meaning “Dutch.”) However, that Libération article does make reference to an article from last November in the Dutch (tabloid-quality) newspaper De Telegraaf (The Dutch roots of Obama), which itself further references an even-earlier article in De Volkskrant (of February, 2008) as well as another investigation into the subject on a Dutch history website.

Fine, but what’s the point? The point is this: Barack Obama’s great-grandfather might have been a Dutchman resident in Kenya. The surname “Obama” is supposedly not really that common there in the land of origin of Barack Obama Sr. Indeed, it rather seems quite close to “Obbema,” a typical surname from Friesland, which is a section of the Netherlands along the North coast that still has its own language (Frisian), a different history, and even a slightly-different culture. This small detail prompted the family-lineage-researcher Koen Verhoeven to go discover records of a certain Jelle Obbema, from Friesland, who sometime around 1870 went to seek his fortune in Kenya, and in fact made it big there in the peppermint trade. While making all this money, Jelle still found time to chase the native women, but, as all these accounts make plain, “he took his responsibility,” i.e. to support those children he sired and to give them his last name. One of these was a son named Sjoerd-Bark, in the Frisian custom of giving children double names (as in “Geert-Jan”). The thought is that this Sjoerd-Jan was later connected to Barack Obama Sr. – the similarity of their given names (“Bark” – “Barack”) is supposed to make that connection.

To my mind, it is there that this tale loses its credibility, since “Barack” is well-known to be derived from the Arabic root for “to bless” or “to be blessed.” (Compare the president of Egypt: Mubarak. And remember that the transmission of Arabic influence into Kenya would have come via Swahili, that common East African language – an official language in Kenya, along with English – which gleaned much of its vocabulary from Arabic.) Still, as these Dutch articles point out, Jelle Obbema and the relatives he left behind in Friesland were all impressive athletes, although this in the field of ice-skating rather than basketball. And then there is inscription to be found under the Obbema family coat-of-arms: Ja, wy kinne!, which naturally means “Yes we can!”

Yes We Can! Barack Hussein Obama is now 44th president of the United States!

Time to assess reactions to that historical event from over on this side of the Atlantic. I’m tempted just to see what the Netherlands press has to say, particularly because of the great cover on today’s editions of the local quality free paper, De Pers: The black Jesus has landed! (Careful with that link: it will download for you the PDF of the entire issue.) “And now Barack Obama, since yesterday the new boss of the world, must really get to work,” the headline continues. “He is being looked to for carrying out wonders for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

I like that sort of irreverent, tongue-in-cheek attitude (at least I think that’s what the De Pers editors intended there), but let’s briefly survey instead coverage from the French press, to which it seems I traditionally turn first in the wake of some significant global event. (more…)

This is a bit off of my normal beat – or not, if you count on me to point out the best of the European on-line press.

New tendencies in lingerie:

L’EXPRESS.fr Styles took its camera to the avant-première of the International Salon of Lingerie that will take place from 18 to 21 January at the porte de Versailles. How to wear the corset? Is the string dead? Responses to these crucial questions in pictures.

There then follows a two-minute video – no nudity, but definitely some beautiful women. (Foot-fetishists also get their moment of bliss.) And they often break out into some nice, feminine French!

Russia as a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC): how does that idea sound to you? What with the low oil price prevailing nowadays (lately just below $45 for a barrel of Brent crude), that seems just the ticket to Shakib Khelil, Algerian Minister for Energy and acting OPEC President, who recently declared that “Russia will provide a particular importance to OPEC if she re-joins it, that will augment OPEC’s power to control production, which would be around 50% instead of [the present] 40% of global production.” This was according to an article in the French daily Le Monde: Russia invited to rejoin OPEC. (more…)

You’ve heard by now of the remarkable welcome President Bush received at a press conference during his surprise visit to Baghdad yesterday, yes? Arab journalists may still be in the early stages of adjusting to the freer media environment in Iraq, but at least they don’t settle for flip-flops. No, what George W. Bush instead twice found coming in on a bee-line to his head were the formal dress-shoes of a certain Muntadar al-Zeidi, correspondent for the Cairo-based TV network “Al-Baghdadiya.”

Which of the many available European lenses to take up for review of this incident? Obviously it should be from a culture with a certain shoe-expertise; the Italian press thereby suggests itself, but long-time readers (Hi Mom!) will realize that Italian coverage is here on €S an exception rather than a rule, due mainly to considerations of linguistic familiarity. The French should be a perfectly-suitable substitute. (more…)

The CEOs of Detroit’s “Big Three” automakers (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) made their pilgrimage to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, to make a plea for their own bailout from the federal government. You’d have to say that their show was a flop; media coverage afterwards included accusations of “tone deafness”, together with particular scorn for the fact that the execs had each traveled to Washington to beg for public money on their company private jets.

The foreign press was watching this performance, too, and from the pages of France’s leading newspaper Le Monde, Dominique Dhombres did not even need any mention of the private jets to quite effectively skewer the auto-bosses with an article entitled Ask for pardon? Out of the question! (more…)

The ramifications of Obama’s electoral victory last Tuesday are still percolating through the European political consciousness, if the steady supply of commentary in the media there is any indication. We surely would not want to miss, for example, the just-issued commentary from L’Humanité, the organ of the PCF, the French Communist Party, which in its (web-)pages asks United States: Change of an Era? (more…)

One of the occupational hazards of having just won the presidency, I suppose, is the tidal wave of advice, from parties near and far, that immediately crashes over you. Here’s a counselor who might make Barack Obama sit up and take notice, if he could ever hear word of what he has to say: yes, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran. We learn about Mahmoud’s suggestions to Barack courtesy of the French press agency AFP, as published in an article in the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro: Iran: Obama should opt for pacifism.

These words of wisdom, obviously issued in reaction to Obama’s election, were actually conveyed through Ahmadinejad’s press spokesman, Ali-Akbar Javanfekr, speaking on al-Alam, an Iranian TV station. (Which is why Obama will never hear of them. By the way, in the article AFP incorrectly calls the TV station “Arabic”; if you’re curious, you can peruse its English-language website.) (more…)