Take a look: is this really a face only a mother could love? (I mean the guy on the left.)

He’s not getting much love in France right now. In fact, he’s under arrest. His name is Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala; his occupation depends on whom you ask. Avant-garde comic – or dangerous rabble-rouser. One thing for sure is that he is rather anti-Semitic in his views, and that has led in the past to cancellation of some of his shows. To name but another of his misdeeds, shortly after the beheading of James Foley by ISIL he posted a video making light of that event. (His controversial opinions also meant that he was denied entry into the UK outright – yes, which once provided exile to the likes of Karl Marx, back when it was known as the British Empire.)

But right now we’re still lingering in the Charlie Hebdo afterglow, and Dieudonné had to put his two cents’ worth in. I want to rely on this report from Rzeczpospolita in the first instance to get a little distance, a little impartiality: from this, it seems that all he did was use his Facebook account to make fun of the “Je Suis Charlie!” slogan, writing instead “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly,” using there the surname of the slain hostage-taker at the Jewish supermarket in Paris. (more…)

President Obama just recently broke new ground in appearing on “Funny or Die’s” interview show “Between Two Ferns,” and extensive speculation in the domestic press duly followed as to whether that had really turned out to be such a good idea. That domestic press, however, does not exhaust the supply of available observers; many foreign news outlets can be counted upon to be interested in this sort of thing involving the American president as well.

Among these is Lorraine Millot, Washington correspondent of the French newspaper Libération, and she offered her observations on Obama’s encounter with comedian-interviewer Zach Galifianakis in her “Great America” blog, in an entry rather unimaginatively entitled Mr. Obama, what’s it like to be the last black president? (That was one of Galifianakis’ more notorious questions, you see, if you hadn’t heard already.)

No doubt as penance for the failed launching of his health reforms, the American President consented – unwillingly, as one can see on the video – to be interviewed by the rather unsavory comic Zach Galifianakis. The American President was bullied (with repeated “Hush!” from the very beginning), called a nerd and grilled about dispatching his “ambassador,” basketball-player Dennis Rodman to . . . “North Ikea.” Twice the humorist touched on the topic of racism. The annoyance was visible on Obama’s features, but the president took it all and got in some good come-backs.

So maybe not such a good idea, from the French perspective. More like an ordeal. Of course, Obama wasn’t doing this for nothing: he wanted to get out the message, especially to young people, to sign up for Obamacare before the oncoming March 31 deadline. At one point he remarked to Galifianakis “I wouldn’t be here with you if I didn’t have something to push” – saying this in the same “disagreeable tone,” Millot notes, as that generally wielded by his interviewer.

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

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

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

June 19, 2012 2:20 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@liberation_info

Libération

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow’s the Big Day! It’s mid-term election-day in the US, the occasion (as usually is the case) for the party-in-power in the White House to lose its dominance in Congress to some degree, in this case probably to the extent of seeing a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and possibly even in the Senate as well.

All that Congress stuff is not so often the focus of foreign coverage of American politics, however. Generally, it’s the President foreigners are interested in – the American executive in charge of the country’s relations with other governments, after all – and especially this one who broke once and for all the 200-year-plus color barrier to the office.

So we have, for example, a piece from France’s left-wing Libération (Midterm: Obama launches the final assault). There is a disappointed tone here even as journalist Fabrice Rousselot goes into detail about how Barack Obama (together with Michelle) has stepped up his campaigning in the last weeks before the election, using his electoral support organization Organizing for America to go after young voters especially aggressively and get them to the polls tomorrow. After all, Rousselot also notes how, this time, the President’s campaign is not about “Yes we can”; this time it’s more like “It’s hard, and we have to persevere.” That’s not quite so inspiring as a slogan, and so he doubts Obama will be able to do much to ward off a serious electoral defeat for his party.

Then again, that might be a good thing. Such, at least, is the speculation of Chritoph von Marschall writing in the (also left-wing) Berlin paper Der Tagesspiegel (Liberating defeat for Obama). The President’s lack of progress on the foreign affairs front, the author admits, is even more noticeable than his domestic performance (despite the Nobel Prize): Iran, the MidEast, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo still operating. Is he fated to do even worse in the second half of his term after these elections?

Actually, probably the opposite. Here Von Marschall either draws on his own rather sophisticated study of American presidential affairs or else has access to good academic advisors, as he brings forward the insight that, after all, presidents have much more freedom of action in foreign affairs, and so it has repeatedly been the case that they have devoted themselves to these whenever they have felt stifled on the home front. After all, every president must build his own “legacy” for the history books one way or the other; the presidency is not just a matter of warming some historic seat for four or eight years.

Furthering this line of argument, Van Marschall also points out how there is also greater scope to ignore the demands of his own party in the area of foreign affairs, because of that greater freedom there to do what he sees fit. Supposedly his positions on Afghanistan and Iraq in particular are even closer to what Republicans prefer. Then again, this does not guarantee any sort of cosier cooperation between the Executive and Legislative branches coming in with the new Congress; keep in mind the almost pathological determination by Republicans to oppose anything Obama might want to do, seemingly even if at some fundamental level they agree with it. And Obama will still need a 2/3 vote of the Senate to ratify treaties, including the update to the START nuclear weapons treaty he recently signed with Russia. It’s easy to imagine that that, too (and, with it, American-Russian relations generally), could fall victim to the new congressional intransigence likely to be elected tomorrow and installed at the beginning of next January.

UPDATE: Renowned MidEast expert Prof. Juan Cole of the University of Michigan weighs in with this closer examination (in English) of how a Republican-dominated Congress (even if it’s just the House of Representatives) could still hamper the President’s conduct of foreign policy, e.g. by calling hearings on the planned withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan (and even from Iraq) as a means to pressure him to slow them down.

Enough of the levity (see previous). It’s time to get serious – even “apocalyptic.” Specifically, The apocalyptic cost of the collapse of the Eurozone, a recent entry on the blog of Libération’s famed Brussels correspondent, Jean Quatremer.

That article basically calls attention to a recent, publicly-available and English-language study from ING Bank (main writer: Mark Cliffe) entitled “EMU Break-up: Quantifying the Unthinkable.” It’s quite an eye-opener, and Quatremer has performed quite a public service in calling his readers’ attention to it. For the “unthinkable” when it comes to the euro has become quite a bit less so this year, including the two “unthinkable” extremes between which Cliffe structures his report’s analysis: 1) The departure from the Eurozone of Greece (only), and 2) The collapse of the whole thing, with the current member countries simply reverting to their currencies of prior to 1999. Both developments, and various others in-between, have increasingly been raised as distinct real-world possibilities, and not just as horror-scenarios but also as measures to be induced deliberately (particularly the ejection of Greece) as punishment for the fiscal failings of various naughty governments. (more…)

They’re gone now, Les Bleus, the French national football team. Today they arrived back in Paris, and star attacker Thierry Henry even headed straight to L’Elysée Palace to give his own explanation to President Nicolas Sarkozy of what went on down there in South Africa that produced such a shambles.

Time now for the tournament to move on, which it has done already with, among other things, England’s narrow 1-0 victory over Slovenia and Landon Donovan’s last-minute goal for Team USA which sent them on to the sudden-death Round of 16 and sent the Slovenians packing for home. For any of those with a more morbid outlook, though – those who tend to linger long while passing the scene of a horrific accident by the side of the road, say – Grégory Schneider of the French paper Libération has some behind-the-scenes details of what happened with the French, including the precise wording of Nicolas Anelka’s to-his-face characterization of his coach during half-time of the France-Mexico game (Get ready: Va te faire enculer, sale fils de pute! It’s pretty bad.) that got him sent home and was the immediate cause of all the trouble. (more…)

. . . mainly to include the 500+ million European Union! That at least is the message of Libération Brussels correspondent Jean Quatremer in the lastest post on his Coulisses de Bruxelles, UE (=”Brussels Corridors”) weblog, entitled “Barack Obama, the president of the European Council (Potec).” The basic assertion Quatremer wants to make here is that Obama should get the main credit for the bold/desperate €750 billion emergency aid package that European leaders cobbled together last Sunday night – just after voting in the crucial Nordrhein-Westphalen German state election had closed but just before Asian markets started trading again on the Monday morning of a new week, you understand.

Sure, the President was nowhere near Brussels at the time. Still, in Quatremer’s view it was the key telephone calls he placed to the main decision-makers – mainly France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel, of course – that made sure something big and decisive would happen. And then it seems he also gave a call on Monday to the Spanish premier, Zapatero, to persuade him to buckle down with some serious government cost-saving measures (that included lowering public employees’ salaries and cutting pensions), and he may have similarly bent the ear of Portuguese premier Socrates as well. (more…)

Over on the financial blog Naked Capitalism today there are some very interesting links concerning the seemingly nefarious role Goldman Sachs has played in the recent past with the Greek government, that government’s attempts to both hide its debt and to find ways to fund it, and with the Eurozone in general.

The headline link is to a very revealing blogpost by Jean Quatremer, Brussels/European correspondent for the French newspaper Libération – but the link is only to the French original. Herewith my translation of that, after the jump, complete with the links Quatremer uses within his piece (other than when they go to Wikipedia or to general homepage sites): (more…)

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…)

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…)

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…)

“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…)

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 . . .

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…)

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…)

“Georgia – again?” Well, yes. What else would there be? The Republican National Convention? Coming up (we think). Sarah Palin? Not today, but definitely stay tuned on that one, it could turn spectacular. Hurricane Gustav? The European viewpoint there is probably not too interesting, even if we might be somewhat honored by the choice of that quintessentially (Central) European given name for bestowal on the storm. My best sense of the EU’s official position on Gustav – gathered from that extensive trawling through the various national presses that I do for you on a continual basis – is that it’s taken to be a bad thing, definitely.

Actually, developments on the Georgia story do keep on coming, especially if you take the unpleasantness there of last month (not at all unreasonably) as a proxy for the new Eurasian balance-of-power that conflict suddenly revealed to the world. Today is when the EU heads of government are due in Paris to meet on a European response (if any) to Russia’s recent behavior. Looking ahead last Friday, the Berlin correspondent for Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, Bartosz T. Wielinski, put forth a mostly pessimistic outlook on what could be accomplished (What the Union can do to Russia on Monday). (more…)

I generally don’t like to do two blog entries, in the same day, coming from one media source, since there’s truly a wide world of European on-line magazines, newspapers, and weblogs (that I can read and understand) out there. But oooh la la! – when I saw the link to this blog-entry – “The Women of Silicone”! – on the Libération website when researching my own Pervez Musharraf entry, I just thought you would want to know about it. As you can intuit already, it is definitely a change-of-pace!

The weblog itself, situated on the Libération servers, is called The 400 Asses: Planet Sex, Viewed and Recounted by Agnès Giard. (That’s “ass” as in “human rear end,” “bum” if you like,” not “horse-like beast of burden.” And that’s Agnès herself at the top-right, peering down into her web-camera – don’t you agree that she is trying to look as Japanese as she can?) And this entry that is entitled “The Women of Silicone” is a quite fascinating report – with pictures! but mostly just of faces – on the booming Japanese “love doll” industry. Yes, those life-sized, hyper-realistic feminine figures which, as Agnès relates, “millions of men buy, clothe, care for and . . . love.” (more…)

As Juan Cole of “Informed Comment” notes, an impeachment process has started against Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, he has decided he is going to fight it, and “[t]hus the stage is set for a major political crisis in the second most populous Muslim country in the world, the sixth largest country in the world, and the only Muslim nuclear power.” But one crucial aspect of this situation is the dog that isn’t barking: where at this stage is the American support for Musharraf, whom in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was suddenly embraced by the Bush administration and started having billions of dollars in military aid shoveled his way? Could it be that George W. Bush is simply too busy these days at the Olympics, blasting his Chinese hosts for their culinary abuses? (That last bit is but a joke, but I give you the link in the hope you’ll check it out – you’ll be amused!)

Philippe Grangereau, Washington correspondent for the French newspaper Libération, sheds some valuable light on this question in his article The White House Is No Longer Kissy-Kissy with Musharraf, although he relies primarily on analysis coming from Arif Jamal, “an expert on Pakistan at NYU,” who has written a book about Pakistani jihadists. (more…)

The Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index is “the most widely recognized measure of global commodities markets” (if they do say so themselves on their Jefferies website) and last 2 July its measurement of the price of a bundle of 19 different raw-material commodities reached its all-time high. Since then, though, it has fallen by 10%, reports Christian Losson writing for the French newspaper Libération. (Raw Materials Deflate… A Little. Losson calls it the “Jefferie Reuters CRB,” FWIW.) Specifically: natural gas down 31%, corn down 19%, nickel down 18%, soya down 13%, gasoline down 11%. Even palm oil is affected (don’t laugh, it’s apparently important in the production of bio-lubricants), Malaysia is now finding it hard even to give the stuff away.

What’s happening here? Is it an up-and-down see-saw? The working-out of some cycle? A commodities crash? That CRB index hasn’t lost this much ground since 1980, when super-high interest rates drove America and then much of the rest of the world into recession. Losson tries his best to get some expert guidance, but the experts aren’t saying much. Maybe you can turn the causality around: if commodity prices are acting this way, that must mean that in effect America (and maybe much of the rest of the world) is in a recession now.

Then again, maybe not, because even more striking is the sheer volatility of commodities prices. The last week, he reports, both mineral and agricultural products (but he does not include oil/gasoline) have headed back up again in price. Beyond that, as one French professor he quotes reminds us, the potential for these prices to go higher – all it takes is some geopolitical or climate shock somewhere – is much larger than it is for them to continue to sink.

For all the fuss about Fidel Castro resigning his post as Cuba’s “president” in favor of his brother Raúl, it all signifies very little when it comes to the hard realities of everyday Cuban life. (Indeed, many outside observers are of the opinion that the switch means very little difference in who is running the state, but that’s another subject entirely – let’s see if I can manage to pass along some of that commentary.) The US embargo and restrictions on travel there make it difficult for American sources to gain much background on conditions on the island, but this is a journalistic gap that Europeans are able and willing to step in and fill. Éric Landal of Libération does that today with an article, Havana: Capital of System D, and sub-titled “Cuba. Despite derisory salaries, people try to provide for their needs.” (more…)

Has the on-going soap opera that is the personal life of the French president finally started rubbing you the wrong way, too? I mean, you can only gape at the stark contrast Nicolas Sarkozy presents to the conduct of his predecessor. I’m hardly trying to say that Jacques Chirac was any model of personal rectitude, but at least he tried to keep his own little transgressions (which apparently were of a financial nature) out of the public eye.

Now the French newspaper Libération reports that unease over the president’s conduct is starting to be reflected at high levels in the government. Specifically, Jean-Louis Debré, president of the Conseil constitutionnel (the Constitutional Council: an official body of “wise men” – and women – who advise the government on the constituionality of most laws before they can actually go in to effect) let slip the opinion last Sunday that “there was a certain behavior that was expected” of the French president, and that “one should take care not to desecrate official functions.” (more…)

Time for a quick “day-after” survey of French press coverage of the Iraqi elections.

As usual, “day-after” is sometimes too early when it comes to significant, multi-dimensioned world events, as journalists and editors get all caught up with the reporting and don’t yet have time to sit back and think about what it all really meant. If you want an example of what I’m talking about here, and can read French yourself, I refer you to Le Monde’s editorial this morning, The Iraqi Wager. Spotlight on young French-Iraqi student; for her and her mother, being able to vote for the first time is truly a moving experience. (And this in what Le Monde explicitly labels its “editorial,” written collectively by the editors.) Yes yes, and you know, Iraq has truly never had elections. These first were admittedly imperfect: Sunni underrepresentation, the threat of violence. Still, they were at least a relative success, and hopefully Iraqis can look forward to much less imperfect elections next December. Right, moving on . . .

Libération is a bit better in analyzing what author Jean-Pierre Perrin terms in his piece’s title The Lessons of a Confessionalized Election. (more…)

Last weekend’s regularly-scheduled European Council summit (the half-yearly meeting of European Union heads of government) was dominated by the prospect of Turkey as an EU member-state, and its most news-worthy result was the approval by the assembled leaders of the commencement of negotiations with Turkey to that end beginning in October of next year.

For me, the question of Turkey’s accession to the European Union brings with it two epiphenomena, one minor and one major. There is the way the question has already become entangled in the historic Turkey-Greece enmity, although at second-remove. Relations are now good between Turkey and Greece themselves, so that any veto of Turkish membership by the latter is hard to imagine (at least in the present situation). But there also remains the problem of the divided Turkish-Greek island of Cyprus, which Turkish armed forces invaded in 1974, and which more importantly is also an EU member-state. It seems that a lot of sweat and toil was expended at this just-concluded EU summit to find some compromise between Cypriot (and, actually, also Greek) insistence that Turkey recognize the Greek half of the island, and Turkish reluctance to do so. The compromise was that Turkey would not make such a recognition now, but would certainly do so before those entry negotiations start next October.

But that is the minor epiphenomenon, and so not of much interest to me. (Although it is nonetheless conceivable that future problems along this line could be enough ultimately to torpedo Turkish entry, thus rendering the following “major” epiphenomenon moot.) In my view, that “major” epiphenonemon is the gulf that has opened up between the negative attitudes of EU national electorates (not all of them, to be sure, but quite a number) towards Turkish accession and the continued behavior of their political leaders in keeping that accession process on-track. By the very nature of the way the EU works in important membership questions such as this, that behavior has to be well-nigh unanimous, as serious objections from any member-state can substantially slow down the process or even stop it. (Ultimately, of course, ratification of any Turkish EU-entry will have to be unanimous among all current member-states.) Meanwhile, the level of actual political support for Turkish membership is nowhere near unanimous across the continent. When will one reality catch up with the other? Or is that alleged EU “democratic deficit” for real, even to the extent that the epochal decision of admitting Turkey could be made even in the face of its rejection by the voters who actually make up the EU’s population?

In this light, the French press is the most appropriate prism to use to examine last weekend’s summit – and not only because an eventual referendum to enable French public opinion on the subject to find its political expression has been promised. (more…)

It’s September 11 again, three years from the day that has gone down in history. That’s a ready-made theme for commemorative newspaper articles, should editors desire to take advantage of it. Perhaps it’s a certain nostalgia for the “We are all Americans now” message from Le Monde back then immediately after the attacks – a sentiment which quickly disappeared at the hands of Bush administration indifference like dew on a sunny summer’s morning – that has me heading for the French press to see whether there’s anything to be said about the anniversary there. Surprisingly, Le Monde itself takes a pass (at least with what it publishes in its on-line edition). But Libération takes up the theme with a couple of articles, starting with the paean to hindsight written by Pascal Riche (that paper’s Washington correspondent): The Missed Signals of 11 September. (more…)

The great and the merely good – around 35,000 people in all – are now assembling for the Democratic National Convention in Boston, and among those who have arrived is the French politician Pierre Moscovici, whose last flight to the United States, on September 11, 2001, actually passed over a smoking New York City on its way to the nearest available airport. Now he has returned under what are obviously rather happier circumstances, with his purpose, as he puts it, “to bring the support of the Socialist Party” for John Kerry. (more…)