Which weekend was that? The one back in May that ended with his arrest in New York City for allegedly sexually assaulting the Sofitel maid. (But I don’t think that she counts as one of the three – that incident is still “alleged.”) This information comes from a friend of Anne Sinclair, DSK’s current wife, to whom he is said to confessed it.

I now yield to M. Legge’s account:

It would seem that DSK had the idea of “profiting” from one last moment of pleasure before announcing his participation in the Socialist primaries [for next year's presidential election, which he was getting ready to fly back to France to do]. Two women were convened in the rented suite at the Sofitel. From surveillance-camera images, this information is confirmed. That same night the hotel’s receptionist supposedly refused the advances of the former IMF boss.

Wait, I’m keeping score here. If the receptionist was not concubine #3, nor the maid who went to the police, then who was? Well, at this rate that detail should turn up in public soon.

*Strangely, La Libre cites the French newsmagazine Le Point for all this information. I do prefer citing such an ultimate source above all, but in this case I could not find any mention on Le Point’s site. Maybe they’re reserving it for the (paying) print customers?

                          

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!

                          

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. One interesting piece in the newsmagazine Le Point makes clear how French Culture and Communication Minister Frédéric Mitterand (yes, nephew of the late French president) is now under fire after first springing to Polanski’s defense in the immediate wake of his arrest. Yesterday he was back in front of the press to try to defend his actions. “It’s the place of a Minister for Culture to defend artists in France – period,” he declared, and “Being a great cinema director or a celebrity does not place you above the law, but also doesn’t place you below the law.” Still, he had to add “On the basis of what occurred thirty years ago, I don’t pass judgment, notably because it has not been adjudicated.” (Only technically true, since a plea-bargain had been arranged in the case by early 1978, but Polanski fled the US because he feared the deal was breaking down.)

Meanwhile, over at Le Monde for now the editors are ceding the lead on this story to in-house blogger Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig, whose latest entry is entitled Justice for Roman Polanski. Of course, that title is itself ambiguous. Its meaning depends upon how you want to define “justice,” but also consider that Rosenczveig’s weblog is called “The rights of children viewed by a juvenile-court judge.” It’s no surprise, then, that he also favors Polanski being required to face the music for his deeds of thirty years ago. But Judge Rosenczveig does inject some sanity into the debate with his calm reasoning, emphasizing among other points that Polanski does seem to have committed a crime, recognized as such both in the US and in France, to which he has admitted; that the victim might have “moved on,” been compensated, and thus no longer wishes to keep the case open, but the victim does not control such things: it is always the State, in the form of the prosecutor, trying and punishing the perpetrator in the name of society, not the victim; and that allowing Polanski any further escape would indeed give the most-unwelcome impression that those who are rich and famous need not be subject to the law. Anyway, being returned to the US to face the music will at least draw a line under the affair once and for all, and Polanski probably doesn’t have much to fear: “The Americans aren’t going to cut his head off, and no one wants him to go to prison even if he committed an unpardonable crime in the eyes of the Americans: fleeing.”

With this last point, however, the Nouvel Observateur begs to differ, in an article (with no by-line) entitled In case of extradition, Roman Polanski runs grave risks. The reason is that, in the thirty years since the time of his crime/trial in Los Angeles, American law has become considerably more severe with regard to the sex-with-a-minor offense he is charged with. The piece quotes Stan Goldman, professor at the Loyola Law School (in Los Angeles): “He may not see the light of day again if he appears before a tribunal. In that epoch morals were a bit looser.” The piece goes on from there – again, it’s a shame no author is indicated – to mention that in the recent past some US states (but not including California) have even tried to apply the death penalty to the rape of children, but were only stopped by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision.

Finally let me mention one more article – Liberate Roman Polanski as he awaits his trial, by Daniel Salvatore Schiffer – even though it comes from the Belgian La Libre Belgique. Schiffer posits an interesting historical parallel here right from the beginning in his lede: “The Polanski affair makes one think of the Oscar Wilde trial of the very puritan and Victorian 19th century. With, on the part of the American judges, the same animosity and an identical partiality as the English magistrates [showed].” Obviously this is a pro-Polanski piece, but point is an intriguing one: it’s an attempt ruin Polanski on the basis of a sexual matter, just as the English judicial authorities ruined Wilde, the greatest literary genius of his day, as some sort of scapegoat. After two years imprisonment at hard labor, Wilde chose to leave England for Paris, where he died three years later in penury. Will Polanski be similarly affected? Schiffer wonders. He is at least definitely an artistic genius, and so deserves to be set free pending his trial, at the very minimum.

                          

It’s all very bad, but at least the devastation wasn’t as widespread as at the time of the last big tsunami emergency, that one that hit India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia shortly after Christmas back in 2004, right? Actually, there have been a number of other tsunamis since then, and a helpful article from the French newsmagazine Le Point provides a handy list (and reveals the interesting fact – interesting to me, anyway – that the French term for this disastrous phenomenon is raz-de-marée, which they also use for “landslide” in the political sense):

• Indonesia, 17 July 2006: An undersea earthquake creates a tsunami that hits the southern coast of Java and kills 654.
  
• Samoa (again!), 28 September 2006: Only a “light tsunami” this time, no word of any casualties.
  
• Russia, Japan, and USA, 15 November 2006: An underwater earthquake among the Kuril Islands (northeast of Japan, administered by Russia) causes a tsunami that hits the northernmost major Japanese island of Hokkaido. It’s a weak one, though, although apparently at the same time strong enough to go clear across the Pacific to cause some seaside damage at Crescent City, CA (just under the Oregon border).
  
• Solomon Islands, 2 April 2007: Three coastal villages devastated, 52 people killed when a tsunami hits the westernmost of the Solomon Islands.
  
• Japan, 11 August 2009 (just last month!): A tsunami hits “the center of Japan,” so presumably the main island of Honshu, but it’s a light one and only a few people are lightly hurt.

And then there’s yesterday’s serious incident around Samoa. I suppose the lesson is that, if you live anywhere near Southeast Asia (even in Crescent City, CA), you had better stay tuned in on-line to that Pacific Tsunami Warning Center website, but still keep your surfboard handy and/or your running-shoes on your feet for when the waves turn out to move faster than the warning.

                          

Well yes, the word now is that that cargo did indeed include weapons, specifically Russian-made S-300 anti-aircraft missiles – reportedly a very sophisticated defense system against invading enemy airplanes and even ballistic missiles – which were to be delivered to Iran on behalf, not of the Russian state, but rather certain Russia-based mafia interests. I was first alerted to this revelation by an on-line article in the French newsmagazine Le Point (The Arctic Sea supposedly carried S-300 ground-to-air missiles for Iran), but that piece in turn based all its reporting on an account from the Austrian newspaper Salzburger Nachrichten (The rocket-smugglers on the “Arctic Sea”).

The Salzburger Nachrichten, of all papers! It does seem a bit strange to learn of the secret details behind contraband cargo on an ocean-going ship from a journal based somewhere that is, oh, about 250 km from the nearest open water, eh? (And that BTW is to the South: Salzburg is closest to the sea if you proceed through NE Italy to the Adriatic.) The key variable enabling the scoop, however, seems to have had nothing to do with closeness to water, but rather closeness to Israeli intelligence sources, as the piece itself carries the by-line “Gil Yaron Jerusalem” [sic].

So here’s what Gil Yaron writes:

• Iran approached certain rather dodgy rogue elements of the Russian military in Kaliningrad – that’s the Russian enclave on the Baltic, northwest of Poland – to arrange for the S-300 rockets to be loaded onto the Arctic Sea two months ago, when it conveniently was due to be there to undergo some repairs. These were hidden under the ship’s ostensible cargo of wood.
  
• A “Western intelligence service” – no further details – let Moscow know what was going on. The Russian authorities immediately recognized the potential great embarrassment this could cause them, for if anyone is going to deliver S-300 missiles to Iran, it naturally has to be the Russian authorities, according to proper signed contracts, and not something like this out of left field.
  
• As a result, those “hijackers” who boarded and took control of the ship shortly after it set sail and was in international waters were actually agents from the FSB – basically the successor to the KGB. And the reason they then kept sailing the ship all the way to a spot off the West African coast was to put it in as inaccessible a spot to any Western journalists as possible before letting their navy “recapture” it and bring the episode to a close.
  
• Oh, and naturally NATO and most of the world’s intelligence services were perfectly aware of where the ship was at all times as it made its way out into the Atlantic, but they were willing to let the Russians set up their little cover-story as long as they made sure that the S-300′s never got anywhere near Iran.

Chief among the intelligenge agencies monitoring the situation was of course the Mossad, Israel’s highly-regarded version – naturally, because any S-300′s deployed in Iran would immensely complicated Israel’s task should it decide it needed to strike with its air force to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. It wasn’t necessarily the Mossad which first discovered what was going on in Kaliningrad – or maybe it was; we don’t know – but Yaron does claim that the Israel authorities even canceled an arms deal they had arranged with Georgia as a further incentive to get Moscow to act to do something about the “Arctic Sea.” What’s more, Israeli president Shimon Peres paid an unscheduled visit to Moscow shortly after the Russian navy “recaptured” the ship. According to official word, while there he provided “concrete proof that Iran and Syria are providing weapons to Hamas and Hizbollah.”

By the way, to tie up some other loose ends here, the American government (as well as Israel, of course) has long urged Russia not to act on the contract it does have with Iran to deliver official S-300s. Assuring cooperation on this matter could very well be one of the main motivations for the apparent turn-around in the Obama administration’s decision to station an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, which I discussed here a few days ago.

                          

Yes, as Kessler reports in his new book for which he interviewed scads of Secret Service operatives, Barack Obama is on the receiving-end of about 30 death-threats per day, as opposed to the “only” nine per day that George W. Bush enjoyed. (Now, America is a country of some 300 million, but still . . . perhaps that is a tad much?) The main thrust of his message, as reported by Touchot, is fairly predictable: in these days of government cut-backs, the Secret Service also considers itself to be rather alarmingly starved of resources to be able to respond appropriately to this level of threat against the President’s person. They have only half the level of personnel that they consider necessary, and too often those agents who are on the job have to forego training in order to go investigate and/or guard against various new hazards. If they complain, then they are apparently met with a Marine-type, hoo-ha attitude from their superiors: “You can get it done, and with the resources you have, because you are a Secret Service Agent!” You are Clint Eastwood!

Touchot passes on something else that also isn’t very surprising, namely that Obama has stayed cool in the face of these threats, both on the campaign trail and as president. He then unfortunately feels the need to pad out his piece by reciting the Secret Service code-names for Obama and his brood: the President is “Renegade,” Michelle is “Renaissance,” and on down. Isn’t it obvious that, once revealed like this (and we all know that they were made public long ago), these “code-names” rather lose any functionality they ever had as tools to keep anyone eavesdropping on the Secret Service from knowing who they’re talking about? It’s clear that there must be some other reason for them, and for their repeated revelation, probably having to do with PR and Americans’ love for spy-thrillers and all appurtenances thereto. If the Ph.D. thesis about this phenomenon from some sociology student has not yet been written, I’m sure it will be forthcoming soon.

                          

Now The Valley has produced something else, something that has caught the attention of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO): a new strain of swine flu that is resistant to the main drug the world is relying on to counter its effects, Tamiflu. Reports about this come both from France’s Le Point and (perhaps somewhat strangely) Denmark’s leading business newspaper, Børsen, which cite PAHO spokeswoman Maria Teresa Cerqueira, attending a swine flu conference currently happening in La Jolla, California.

Granted, this same Tamiflu-resistant strain has already been spotted in Denmark, Japan, Hong Kong, and even once before in North America, namely in Canada. But how did it come about? Cerqueira: “In the USA Tamiflu is sold by prescription, but in Mexico and Canada they sell it over-the-counter and take it at the first sneeze. And now that it is really needed, it doesn’t work anymore.” In other words, if you grant the assumption that the swine flu we can expect in the autumn is likely to be deadlier than what we’ve encountered so far (although, to be fair, the past strain did kill 353 persons in the USA and 143 in Mexico, among others), then pill-popping Mexicans and Canadians have exhausted the world’s Tamiflu firepower on the earlier, safer version – which reportedly merely caused symptoms comparable to any common, garden-variety flu – and thus have left everyone vulnerable to the more dangerous strain.

There’s perhaps a glimmer of hope in the Le Point piece, namely that one patient found to have the Tamiflu-resistant virus was able to be cured with another drug, “Zanamivir,” made by GlaxoSmithKline. So maybe there’s still an alternative cure available – until the virus in short order develops resistance to that!

                          

Perhaps his mistake was that he visited the cemetery in broad summer daylight; he apparently figured that it was such a small town that no one would notice him anyway, but he didn’t take into account the effects of the heat. Truly, the shoplifter unexpectedly became a customer, so to speak – I wonder whether somewhere in the afterlife he immediately ran into those whose graves he had despoiled or had intended to despoil.

                          

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?