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!).

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.

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.

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…)

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…)

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!

As various forms of unrest continue to percolate throughout France – as always, the website of Humanité, the Communist Party newspaper is probably the best place to go for news about that – the fundamental fact remains true that the retirement reform at the center of contention is becoming law regardless. Yes, word is that it has to be formally approved a couple of times by the two houses of the French legislature and then signed by President Sarkozy, but there’s no indication that there will be any hitch in that process despite any strikes and demonstrations going on in the world outside.

The result: Even as the masses out on the streets shriek NO! the government goes ahead with “Yes” – and this in a liberal democracy. Of course, things are actually not quite so clear-cut as that. All the people out demonstrating often make an impressive sight, but do they really represent the political will of the majority of France’s citizens? And even if they do: France is not a direct democracy where the people vote directly on laws – no modern society is a direct democracy – but rather a representative democracy, where according to one section of the rules of the game (somewhere; I believe it’s in Aristotle) the elected law-makers do have the right to go against the will of their constituents if they believe doing so better serves the nation. And it would seem raising the retirement age from what is financially a completely unsustainable age to one slightly less unsustainable qualifies.

Ah, but even as the Assemblée Nationale and French Senate undertake to do so, they make a mess of it. For while they were passing this retirement reform, they chose not to pass amendment 249 – that’s the one that would have subjected their own even-more-generous lawmakers’ pension system to the same conditions they were about to impose on everyone else’s!

Pretty outrageous, no? (Then again, the US Congress also almost routinely exempts itself from the laws it passes for the rest of the country.) I heard about this little bit of chicanery in the first place from an editorial in today’s Le Monde: You’re making me take to the streets – me, a moderate! It’s written by one Gregory Kapustin, who calls himself an “entrepreneur” and “former moderate.” (Check out his public LinkedIn page!) His message is basically expressed in his title; the actual article fills in the details about how, yes, he understands why pensions must be reformed, and he wishes the French nation would grow up and face the real world of globalization – but really, in exempting themselves the legislators have simply gone too far with their cynicism and he’ll be off to join the nearest street-demonstration. (With gasoline, bottle, and rag-stuffing in hand? He doesn’t say; he still seems to be too much of a professional dude to go that far.)

One can gain a similar feel for what he is fed up with from another article, from Le Point: Sarkozy will take some time to reflect on the situation after retirement reform. The lede:

Nicolas Sarkozy declared on Friday that he will announce when “the time is ripe” for initiatives in response to the French people’s worries and that he first intends to “take some time” to reflect on them.

As becomes clear as the article goes on, however, don’t expect him to start that thinking anytime soon, he’s a busy man. The Chinese president will be visiting Paris soon, then it’s off to Seoul for the G20 summit. Sarkozy made it clear that, when it comes to addressing the concerns of his countrymen he won’t “confuse speed with haste” but will take “time to reflect serenely, calmly, profoundly.” Hey – merci bien, monsieur le président! I bet your own pension is rather more generous than that of the man-on-the-street as well!

Today is “Stress Day” – the day when the results of the “stress test” exercises performed on all major European banks will be released after the end of the European business day (but right in the middle of the American business day!). The Financial Times column Alphaville has a handy round-up of articles on the subject, compiled by Gwen Robinson. The most comprehensive guide – perfect if you’re still unsure of what these “stress tests” are all about and have some time – is by far the contribution from Anne Seith of Der Spiegel. (Rest assured: it’s in English. As for Alphaville itself, better enjoy that while it’s still free and available to all!)

Then there is the report by Anne Michel in Le Monde, also cited in the FT Alphaville round-up. Why is everyone so stressed about these “stress tests”? Mainly because banks can only “pass” them or “fail” them, and failure could carry a high price in terms of loss of investor confidence, for starters. Indeed, the impact is likely to be even greater than it was for the ten banks (out of nineteen tested) which “failed” during the American “stress test” exercise carried out back in May, 2009, for banks that fail by definition need recapitalization and there is a dwindling number of European governments still able to provide that. It’s notable, as Mme. Michel points out, that European authorities have staged such “stress tests” twice before, namely dry runs in August of 2009 and April of this year with a more limited selection of banks, whose results have never been made public.

But this time it’s serious, and all results will be released publicly. Naturally, everyone would love to jump the gun and get word of at least some of the results before they’re released to the unwashed masses (there’s potentially money to be made, for one thing). Mme. Michel does her best to oblige. It looks like all the French banks involved – namely BNP Paribas, Société générale, Crédit agricole and BPCE – have passed the test. Indeed, the failures are expected to come only from the usual suspect nations: Spain, Greece, and Portugal. Oh, and Germany, too – but the one German laggard is likely to be the Hypo Real Estate Bank, which already got into so much trouble back in 2008 that the German government fully nationalized it. (Note that this last bit does not come from Mme. Michel’s article, but from another of my on-line sources.)

Going back to the star banking pupils from France, such seeming across-the-board success inevitably raises questions as to the stress tests’ legitimacy. The article does go into some detail about how the tests’ parameters have been toughened up to include some degree of sovereign debt default, placed on top of a posited recession of 3% negative economic growth lasting over a year-and-a-half. But will this go far enough to convince the markets that all this has been a worthwhile, bona fide exercise? That is probably what most EU officials and bank executives are stressed-out about most of all.

I’d like to expand a bit on the article from Le Monde that I linked to in one of my tweets today. I’d also like to try out the new facility Twitter has made available to embed tweets, thusly:

Oooooh, looks pretty good! (Feel free to write me to ask how to do it!)

Anyway, the immediate point of that piece is contained in its title: Israeli government announces that it wants to relaunch construction in East Jerusalem. The Netanyahu government had previously conceded a brief suspension of such construction, but only as a sort of fig-leaf measure in response to heavy pressure it was getting from the US – because, of course, any such construction in East Jerusalem, territory conquered in battle that the rest of the world will not concede is owned by Israel in any way, sounds the death-knell for what are supposed to be peace negotiations with Palestinian representatives. (more…)

Whoops, there’s another problem one sometimes is face with while trying to procure medical attention over in this continental “health care paradise” – at least in France, as Le Monde reminds us. You can probably guess it: your doctor can go out on strike, as it seems French GPs are doing this very day on a nationwide basis.

Closely related to that is that, again in France but likely elsewhere in Europe as well, your doctor is likely to belong to some sort of union. In fact, there are several French doctors’ unions, and they all have called for a strike today. Their grievance? They basically want the price doctors are allowed to charge for a consultation to rise to €23 (=$30.50); it seems the current price is €22. If that is all they’re getting angry about . . . citizens trapped in many other more privately-based health-care systems where a doctor’s visit tends to cost much more than €23 can only look on in envy.

Remember how, only a couple short months ago, the election for Edward Kennedy’s old Senate seat was lost by the Democrats, and suddenly nothing in politics that people had thought to be sure was so sure anymore in the face of that supposed voters’ anti-Establishment revolt? This particularly applied to health care reform, which up to that point had been laboring slowly through Congress, but had already been passed by both chambers, in two different versions that still needed to be reconciled. With the Massachusetts Senate result, though, even many of that legislation’s greatest supporters were nonetheless ready to throw that effort overboard entirely or at least drastically scale back its ambition.

A similar thing has just happened in France, following regional elections there last Sunday which resulted in heavy losses for the governing UMP party of President Nicolas Sarkozy. Two days afterwards, French premier François Fillon announced that his government was dropping the idea of a carbon tax, something it had previously been developing with a view towards putting it in the tax code on 1 July. And there is reason to believe that this concept is certainly more permanently dead than US health care reform turned out to be; for one thing, as Claire Guélaud reports in Le Monde, the main French organizations representing employers and entrepreneurs broke out in rejoicing at Premier Fillon’s announcement. (more…)

The Reverend Hans Küng is a Swiss Catholic priest, although of the renegade sort, who has been expressly forbidden by the Catholic Church to teach its theology. For more than forty years he has been somewhat of an outspoken radical on religious topics, most especially when it comes to the doctrine of papal infallibility, which he has repeatedly written to condemn.

These days, though, the Catholic Church has rather larger problems than the question of whether the Pope is ever able to make a mistake, most especially a raft of priest-pedophile scandals ranging from the USA to Ireland, and now in Germany as well. In an opinion piece appearing now in the authoritative French newspaper Le Monde (translated from German), Küng comes forward with a straightforward solution: To fight the pedophilia, let’s abolish priest celibacy.

Of course, the Roman Catholic establishment will have none of that. In his article, Küng carefully lists – and then controverts – three assertions coming from Rome in reaction to these pedophile scandals: 1) That they are not actually the result of the priestly vow of celibacy; 2) That the scandals represent no sort of truly systemic failure within the Church; and 3) That, in any case, bishops have taken adequate measures in response. America, Ireland (yes, even such a Catholic country of around 18 centuries of Church history as Ireland), now Germany: of course it is a systemic failure! And while, yes, celibacy cannot be the exclusive cause of this behavior on the part of so many priests, it is fairer to say that the twisted and strained Catholic attitude towards human sexuality of which celibacy is but one aspect surely plays a big part. (As for the bishops: their record of rather covering-up than dealing forthrightly with pedophile scandals cropping up under their jurisdictions is clear.)

Küng really goes after the whole concept of enforced celibacy for priests here; he examines both Scripture itself as well as Church history to shoot down the very idea, pointing out that nothing of the sort was actually required of priests until the tenth century, when celibacy was mandated by Pope Gregory VII while influenced by a certain circle of monks (who themselves were celibate, but by their own choice). Plus, even back then, when both the spiritual and temporal power of the Catholic Church had reached its height (and the First Crusade was about to be launched), this new measure still touched off major protests among priests in Italy and in Germany.

I’ve already mentioned the bishops and their “hush up” policies towards the pedophile incidents. But Küng also reminds us that, after a certain point in time, all pedophile cases were referred to the office within the Vatican known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where such centralized handling apparently helped them to be buried all the more effectively. A certain Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was in charge of that particular office starting in 1981 – until he was chosen as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005! It turns out that Küng and Ratzinger have something of a common personal history, as they were colleagues for a time back in the early 1960s when they both worked as advisors to the Second Vatican Council. But this latest article – in such a high-profile publication as Le Monde – is certain not to do much to improve their relations, nor to soften Küng’s official treatment from the Vatican.

UPDATE: Küng’s article has now made its way to the blog of The New York Review of Books in a proper English translation.

President Obama faced a hard challenge with his State of the Union address to Congress of yesterday evening, given his recent series of political setbacks. That his speech came off well nonetheless is not just the conclusion picked by post-speech polling, but also one shared by observers from the French press, despite the discourse’s inevitable emphasis on domestic affairs. (This US-focus did not stop the French on-line papers from uniformly offering embedded videos of the entire speech, some even dubbed into French, so their readers could take a look at it themselves.)

Noteworthy reaction flowed promptly in two articles from that pillar of the French journalistic establishment, Le Monde. One of them (Obama’s words: work, economy, and Americans; no byline) literally offers at its head a “word-cloud” of the speech’s most-frequent terms (actually, their French equivalents) and then, by way of analysis, a hyper-short summary of his essential message: “Don’t panic.” Yes, it’s true that the president’s emphasis was much more on the economy and creating jobs, rather than on that health care reform legislation that still sits tantalizingly close to final passage. But what was of far more interest to Le Monde’s writer here was those foreign policy topics to which Obama gave short shrift, as he only briefly discussed Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, skimmed China, Russia, Germany, India, the Koreas, and said nothing at all about Pakistan or the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process! (Nor about France, come to think of it.)

A companion Le Monde article (Obama like in the first days; also no explicit byline) notes how surprisingly sprightly Obama appeared before the assembled Congress (“with a rediscovered insolence and combativeness”), just like in the old days, oh so long ago, when he was eating John McCain’s lunch on the campaign trail. This writer also issues a fitting, if cynical summary of the president’s economic message: focus on jobs this year (an election year); focus on reducing the deficit only the year after that.

For its part, the conservative paper Le Figaro contributes a lengthy review of Obama’s SOTU speech from its Washington correspondent, Laure Mandeville (Employment, Obama’s priority for 2010). I’m pretty sure “Laure” is a French woman’s name, for Ms. Mandeville not only mentions Barack’s feistiness (“more resolute and offensive than ever”) but also gets in a reference to Michelle’s couture (she was wearing a jupe bouffant violine – some sort of fancy skirt). At the same time, she captures well the lecturing, lightly-scolding tone prevalent especially in his speech’s second half, and directed largely at the Republican opposition, reflecting his greater theme of “we [i.e. the country] just can’t go on like this!”

Bonus: The judgment on Obama’s SOTU speech is also out from the foremost Danish expert on American affairs, Prof. Niels Bjerre-Poulsen of the Copenhagen Business School (as reported by Ritzau, so it’s pretty much the representative Danish journalistic view; actually published in this instance in the opinion newspaper Information). With this excellent speech, opines the good professor, Obama once again showed his strong side to the nation: that is, in speech-making, in this case in a tight situation and with many contradictory points to make. But the resulting goodwill will only last so long, and it takes much different political skills to translate such fancy words into concrete results. We still have to see if the president is similarly gifted with those latter.

“Cold enough for you?” I know: a trite thing to say. Everyone knows already that it’s cold: Europe, North America, Asia. Better if someone could tell us why, and what we can do about it!

Comes now Pierre Le Hir, writing in Le Monde, with a bit of explanation (Why the Northern Hemisphere suffers under cold waves). According to his account, this winter’s extraordinary cold is the product of one key variable, together with another aggravating factor. That variable is NAO, or North Atlantic oscillation, which is the weather-pattern determined by the intensities of the low-pressure center usually somewhere around Iceland and the high-pressure center usually around the Azores. If NAO is positive, then winds coming into Europe carrying warmth stored by the Atlantic are strong, resulting in a mild winter; if it’s negative, they are weak, resulting in cold.

Naturally, right now NAO is negative. Then there is that aggravating factor, of which you have heard before: El Niño, defined as abnormally-high surface-water temperatures in the Pacific. Starting from last summer the El Niño phenomenon has been elsewhere than where it usually is found (more mid-Pacific than near to the South American coast). This helps to make things yet colder in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in North America. In fact, author Le Hir reports that the weather establishment still does not regard the cold experienced so far this winter in Europe to be particularly outside of the realm of expectation – for all of the deaths (22 in the UK) and various disruptions to transport in France and some other countries that the article goes on to list.

Oh, and as to that second point: We can’t do anything about it.

Get ready for more trouble on the European Muslim-relations front: Le Monde reports today that one French legislator, Jean-François Copé, has expressed his intention to introduce legislation forbidding the wearing of a veil in “places open to the public,” to be punished by a hefty €750 fine, also applicable to people “who oblige a women to wear a full veil”. He proposes this in an interview to appear in the issue of the right-wing magazine Le Figaro to be published over the coming weekend; Le Monde has simply managed to blow the whistle early on what is presumably the most news-worthy component of that piece.

This matters because Copé is head of the group of parliamentarians in the French National Assembly that belong to the UMP (Union pour un Mouvement Populaire) which is also President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party – and because it would seem that the European political scene could use a break from this sort of measure in the wake of the referendum in Switzerland last November that forbade the building of minarets there. Strangely, in his interview Copé also mentions that his proposed law would incorporate “a period for dialogue of six months between the date of application of the law and the date of promulgation to permit a phase for discussion and mediation with the concerned persons.” That seems a strange way to proceed – legislate first, discuss later – and is unlikely to salve the feelings of the Muslim inhabitants of the country against whom this law clearly is aimed.

One noteworthy French media institution which I don’t deal with at all on this site is the Chained Duck, or Le Canard Enchaîné, a “satirical weekly” newspaper that comes out each Wednesday, and which has a long history going back to 1915. I don’t deal with it partly because its unique brand of journalism – similar to the late-lamented British magazine Punch, but with even more of a political bite – by its very nature is highly idiomatic, but mainly because its website indeed looks much like you would expect a website to have looked like in 1915, if there had been websites then.

To some extent that publication’s non-approachability is a shame, because its reporters do perform some serious journalism (before twisting it up in the house humor-style) and achieve scoops. Fortunately, no less than France’s own “grey lady” of journalism, Le Monde, considered Le Canard’s latest revelation to be worth taking up and passing along on its own pages (When the Elysée practices piracy).

First off, you need to know that the Elysée Palace is where the President of the French Republic lives, so that these days Elysée basically means “Nicolas Sarkozy” the way “White House” means “Barack Obama.” And it does seem that Président Sarkozy has engaging in a bit of piracy lately, or at least his people have. A documentary was shown on French television this past summer about him (actually, the evening before Bastille Day); it was part of a series called À visage découvert, or “With discovered face,” produced by Galaxie Presse. He must have liked it, because his office shortly thereafter asked Galaxie Presse to send along fifty DVD copies of the show for them to distribute further. It turned out, however, that they ended up distributing at least 400, and each such DVD carried the mark not of Galaxie Presse, but rather the seal of the President of the Republic along with the accompanying highly-ironic and minatory text “Audio-visual service of the president of the Republic – All rights reserved (photos and video).”

Further investigation by Canard reporters revealed that the Director of Galaxie Presse, Michel Rager, certainly had never been informed of the Elysée’s intentions to play a bit of a “loafs-and-fishes” game with the original fifty DVDs his company had provided – for free. The real point here, of course, is that France in recent years has taken the lead within Europe in instituting legal penalties against the illegal downloading and copying of digital materials; as the reaction from reader “Pirate” that Le Monde puts off to the right side of this piece points out, the illegal-copying action of the president’s office is supposed to bring criminal penalties of up to three years in jail and a €300,000 fine. The word “hypocrisy” in French, by the way, is easy enough for anyone to remember: hypocrisie.

We all know about surveillance cameras (a.k.a. CCTV, or closed-circuit television). They’re supposed to protect us against crime, but they have a big problem: no one is really watching them, most of the time. That means that, at best, such cameras may have value after-the-fact in providing recorded video evidence (for submission to a trial, say), but do little to alert people when a crime is being committed or to send immediate help – or indeed, some reports say, even to deter crime.

All this notwithstanding, the UK is the world’s CCTV paradise, with by some accounts 1.5 million cameras in operation in various public spaces there. The problem remains of monitoring all those cameras sufficiently to be able to fully draw on the technology’s supposed benefits. Doing that with computers is one technique that is coming along, one that supposedly is not the answer yet, although doubtless it will be soon. In the meantime, articles in both Le Monde (Yoyeurism rewarded in Great Britain) and in the Nouvel Observateur (One society proposes to reward informants) have now drawn their respective readerships’ attention to a new private initiative in the UK called Internet Eyes (“Catch a criminal online”; “Become a Viewer for FREE”), where the essential idea is to get volunteers to watch these cameras, through the Internet, in the hopes of spotting crime as it happens and alerting the authorities for a cash reward. Go on and click through to check out the site: just like that girl you see there, you could soon be sitting back in the evening on your coach, relaxing with your laptop as you scan for criminals! Note in particular that, listed just below the heading “Typical event notifications include:” is “Anti social [sic] behavior” – defined by whom?

Anyway, any of you who are interested can simply head to this piece in the (London) Times to read a more lengthy treatment, in English of course, with many more details (including the assertion in the picture-caption up top that Britain in fact has 4.2 million CCTV cameras operational). The French input to all this is simply that those two publications from the Continent tipped me off to this story to begin with. Indeed, I’m otherwise rather disappointed in them for what is really in both cases a spare, “just the facts” treatment of Internet Eyes – the only hint of opinion comes in each article’s title – when you really would expect more contemplation of what this all means from the mainstream press of such a philosophically-inclined and intellectual land.

(Gee, you’re right: I’m more-or-less guilty of the same offense, including saving my most intense opinionating for this post’s title. I can only respond that I still don’t know what to think about it all. I do really hate the CCTV cameras, but then again, examination of that Wikipedia page about them started me contemplating the 1993 murder of that two-year-old Liverpool boy by two ten-year-olds, a crime that leaned heavily on CCTV footage for its solution.)

After French/Polish director Roman Polanski’s arrest last Saturday night as he was trying to enter Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival where he would accept an award, the first public reactions from his countries of citizenship expressed outrage. More substantively, both the French and Polish foreign ministers issued a joint appeal to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to intervene, which she declined to do.

Now almost a week after the fact, however, attitudes seem to be changing about the case, to Polanski’s detriment. Jan Cienski of the Global Post has a pretty good summary of how that is occuring in Poland, while Doreen Carvajal and Michael Cieply of the New York Times posit the same development in France. (The NYT editors themselves take up the attitude to the case that seems to prevail throughout the American continent: Polanski must be returned to the US to face justice.)

A trip through the on-line French press does turn up indications that the tide has turned against the Oscar-winning director. (more…)

Readers of this weblog – a smallish, hard-core elite, to be sure, but we’re trying to do something about that – will have known the news already, but last Thursday President Obama came out in public to announce that his administration did not intend to proceed with the planned deployment of anti-ICBM missiles to Poland and supporting radar to the Czech Republic. Reaction to the decision was swift and vociferous, both for and against, domestically and internationally. Presseurop has a good survey of that reaction in the Eastern European press, although I feel that it tends a slight bit too much to the alarmist side. It seems many of those newspaper headline-writers have forgotten how fundamentally unpopular the American deployment was among ordinary Czechs and Poles; in this light, Obama’s cancellation of the program per se is not so regretable, but rather the considerable trouble both governments had to take to gain the political approval for their participation, now all achieved for nothing.

Not to worry, though, because French president Nicolas Sarkozy praised Obama’s move as an “excellent decision,” and the editors at Le Monde make it clear that they agree (Hand extended). Yes, the proposed deployment was going to be expensive, for a weapons system about which there remained significant doubts that it ever would actually be able to do what was designed for. But don’t forget the diplomatic dividends, either, Le Monde reminds us. These mainly involve Iran, which is supposed to start multilateral talks with a range of western countries starting on October 1; Obama’s action sends them a message of “good will and realism.” And Russia? Obama’s gesture was directed there to an even greater extent, but Le Monde’s editors unfortunately do not expect to see any corresponding gesture from the Kremlin anytime soon.

By the way, mention should also be made of the announcement by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, noted in Le Monde’s news coverage of the American announcement, that the “SM-3″ missiles which are now to be the replacement anti-missile system will be deployed in turn from 2015 in Poland and the Czech Republic. First of all, that is a bit over-determined: mainstream US news reports put it instead that deployment of those missiles to those countries is but a possibility. And that’s a good thing, too: recall that the original ten defensive rockets that were to be intalled in Poland were designed to counter Iranian missiles of intercontinental range. Poland presumably is a good spot to deploy those – just take a string to your globe to check out the great circle route from Iran to the USA – but that is probably not also the case for defense against the short- and medium-range missiles which are now assumed to be the only Iranian threat for many years to come. In light of this, these suggestions that Warsaw and Prague will eventually get their missiles after all have to be regarded as sheer political bull-headedness – “We won’t let anyone tell us we can’t station missiles in Eastern Europe!” – rather than anything based on considerations of military effectiveness.

Obama gave his big Health Care speech to a joint session of the US Congress early this morning (Central European Time). Let’s take a look at some material about that from the national press of France, the country which, it is widely admitted, has much to teach the Americans about how to run a national health care system.

We first need to consult the French paper-of-record, and that is still Le Monde, which provides initial coverage in a piece jointly credited to it, the AFP news agency, and Reuters (Obama’s big oral exam on health) and put on-line only a couple of hours after the event itself. Graphically, the article stands out due to the two YouTube videos embedded within it, which feature no dubbing or subtitles or any other concessions to French-only readers but which of course include that electric passage when the president was loudly heckled (Vous mentez!, he shouted – or would have, in French, if he had had any bit of class) by South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson. The main insights of note here come at the very beginning – Barack Obama joue le tout pour le tout, or “Barack Obama is going all-in,” in poker-speak – and at the end: the piece remarks that Obama knows he needs to achieve something this year, as it will be even harder to do so next year, an election year. (more…)

She’s known mainly for being ultra-polite and proper, God bless her, but even Queen Elizabeth II reached the point at the end of last year when she couldn’t restrain herself anymore from asking, while visiting the London School of Economics, “How could no one have foreseen it?” “It,” of course, was the catastrophic banking/financial breakdown that had come to its terrifying climax the previous September – almost one year ago now – and plunged most of the world into grave economic troubles, her own sovereign realm definitely not excepted.

Putting Her Majesty’s query in another form, How did economists get it so wrong? Or, if you like: What were they thinking? Whichever way it is stated, the issue is no doubt a complicated one, not to mention rather embarrassing for that profession of economists from which one might still assume that the best answers might ultimately come. And by now they are coming: the previous two hyper-links, in fact, take you directly to major pieces on the evident failure of modern economics by Paul Krugman (in the New York Times Magazine) and by Francis Fukuyama (together with Seth Colby).

But all of that is in English and so readily accessible. (Well, you’re going to have to subscribe to The American Interest if you want to read all of the Fukuyama/Colby piece, but the Krugman is all there and is really a “must-read.”) For our EuroSavant purposes, let’s consider instead an analysis piece just out in the French newspaper-of-record Le Monde by editor-in-chief Frédéric Lemaître: The crisis puts back into question economists’ knowledge and status. (more…)

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…)