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.

Then again, for those who believe that the threat to humanity of climate change is real, a carbon tax is rated by economists as the #1 means of doing something about it. The reasoning comes straight out of standard public economics theory: emitting greenhouses gases is an “externality,” i.e. a spillover effect imposing a cost on others that the emitter doesn’t have to take into account, meaning that he engages in more of that activity than is socially optimal. Putting a price on the externality – here, charging him for his emitted carbon – means in the first instance that he engages in it less and, ultimately, that he probably finds other ways to accomplish the same result without so many emissions. (A second-best answer is “cap and trade,” whereby everyone is given licenses to emit a certain amount which are tradable, so that those who can become more efficient in their emissions can make money by selling their licenses to those who cannot.)

Still, it would have been a new tax, and no one likes that. I guess even in supposedly cerebral France political and business leaders cannot be expected to think ahead to the longer-term – to realize how the carbon tax could ultimately work to strengthen the competitiveness of French businesses by weaning them away from emission-rich production methods into more environmentally-friendly ones in which they could build world-beating expertise; or to realize how the imposition of a carbon tax by such a leading industrial nation as France could have a powerful example-effect for convincing other countries to do something similar. (Like the United States – wait now, let’s not let our thoughts just run complete wild here!)

No, I guess that, if anyone, it has to be retired politicians with no more need to please the voters to whom we can look for such thinking, such as ex-premier (under François Mitterand) Michel Rocard, who the Nouvel Observateur reports as calling the French government’s withdrawal of plans for a carbon tax “a crime against humanity,” and one which it will take only about ten years for everyone to see as such. “But there will be [such a tax] some day anyway,” Rocard goes on, “we’re not going to let the planet gradually become a frying-vat [une poêle à frire] in which life becomes impossible.”

Climate Change: >Yawn<

Just to give the whole picture, it’s also true that the French government was having trouble with its proposed carbon tax even before it withdrew it this past week, namely from the Conseil constitutionnel, basically France’s Supreme Court. Late last year that body advised the government that the tax would probably turn out to be unconstitutional since it violated the principle of equal liability to taxation – but that was mainly due to the many exemptions to big, polluting industries that the government was planning to hand out for the early stages of its imposition, a spoonful of fiscal sugar to help the bitter tax pill go down better. It’s also true, as that Le Monde article reports, that the new EU Budget Commissioner (he’s Lithuanian, and his name is Algirdas Šemeta) has already announced to the European Parliament his intention to present in June new fiscal measures relating to energy, which could potentially include a EU-wide carbon tax. (That would address one important reason why the French businessmen so hated the idea of a French carbon tax: “It would make us uncompetitive against our foreign commercial rivals!”)

But, really, how can anyone have any confidence that a carbon tax could come into being via the EU? The EU itself does not have taxing authority; it gets its money in the form of quota-contributions from member-states, so that the maximal function it could have here is one of coordinating the actions of all member-state governments as they willingly worked to enact such a carbon tax. And how likely is that?

In reality, the French government’s latest retreat on this front fits cleanly into a pattern of recent events, one whose other main highlight was the failure of the COP15 Copenhagen climate-change conference last December to produce any meaningful results. What that pattern says is: Climate change? No one really cares enough to do something about it. The alarm has been sounded, to be sure: anyone looking at the scientific conclusions cannot help but be shocked at what the Earth’s population will likely be facing in a few decades. But humanity’s existing institutions are simply not up to the task of reacting to this threat. You can keep this sad fact in mind tonight, especially if you plan to extinguish your lights for Earth Hour.

                          

But wait . . . here’s maybe a better reason to talk about Iran: the Munich daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is now reporting that that country has a design ready for atomic warheads. The newspaper hints heavily that this revelation is its exclusive scoop; according to information it has managed to obtain, the key to Iran’s efforts was a certain Russian nuclear expert, present in that country from the mid-nineties to the year 2000 (or maybe all the way to 2002), and whose work in developing a certain high-speed camera process was crucial to the Iranians being able to fashion a so-called two-point implosion system for setting off the nuclear explosion. Now the Iranians have the blueprints they need to develop bombs that in fact would be small enough to fit comfortably on the medium-range Shahab-3 missiles they possess. Supposedly, inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency know about this new development and concede that the warhead design would certainly work. (It was in fact an IAEA document that was the source for the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s revelations.)

Alright. But we still have that Munich Conference; maybe the world leaders and experts there can take note of this dangerous new situation and start thinking about how to deal with it. Instead, the Conference seems to be the target of some sort of Iranian charm offensive, according to an account in the Financial Times Deutschland (Security conference: Iran causes turmoil in Munich). You see, we first had at the beginning of this week the surprise mention by Iranian President Ahmadi-nejad in an interview that it should be OK to actually take the West up on its standing offer to take Iranian uranium and process it on the Iranians’ behalf, but only to purity-levels consistent with power-generation and not weaponry, before returning it. Now the Munich Conference has received the pleasant surprise of an announced intention to attend it from Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki. (Apparently it has been difficult for quite a while to get any Iranian foreign minister to show up, or in fact even to decline the invitation without adding some gratuitous comment casting doubt on the Holocaust.)

This is important. Mere declarations from Ahmadi-nejad in some interview have long since lost their ability to inspire confidence in other world capitals, but now the officials attending the Munich conference (including many foreign ministers and even some heads of state, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel) will have a chance to collar Mottaki (in a nice, diplomatic way, of course) to see whether Iran really means what its President just said. Mottaki has already declared that it does – sort of, in that he does intend to negotiate for higher levels of enrichment for that Iranian uranium than what was envisioned in the original Western offer. In any case, all this conveniently can occur just as the UN Security Council is preparing a new resolution imposing tougher economic sanctions on Iran, and also as public statements from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov indicate that Russia is even ready to change its previous position and support the resolution. (Lavrov made these en route to Munich; also attending will be Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, although there’s no indication from him or any other Chinese official that they are likewise willing to reverse their previous position and accept such sanctions, and that’s a problem.)

In the meantime, away from Munich, the US Department of State announced today a conference-call, initiated by Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns, the Department’s #3 official, between officials at analogous level to Secretary Burns at the other countries of the “Group of Six” presenting a common front against Iran (namely the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China). This is reported in France’s Nouvel Observateur (The Group of Six discussed a nuclear Iran). Naturally, this event was likely prompted, not by the Munich conference, but at least by the sanctions resolution coming near completion in the Security Council, and probably also by a combination of Ahmadi-nejad’s pronouncement and the far more ominous news, uncovered by the Süddeutsche Zeitung, of Iran’s nuclear weapons progress. Again, the key country to bring around is China, which could simply veto the Security Council resolution, and the Nouvel Observateur reports that, this time, the Chinese at least did make available for this conference-call the counterpart in their Foreign Ministry to Secretary Burns. The last time there was a “Group of Six” meeting – last month in New York – they had only a lower-ranking official attend. (Those readers really on-the-ball will recall that this “send a lower-ranking guy to show disrespect” tactic was also one they used at various occasions during the COP15 climate-change conference in Copenhagen in December.) Such is progress.

                          

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.)

                          

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.

                          

And no Nicolas Sarkozy. What vital functions did he have on his official schedule yesterday, when that Prague “summit” was wound up and the Eastern Partnership agreement signed without his participation? Vincent Jauvert of the Nouvel Observateur gives us the details: merely officially taking delivery of a government report on diversity and attending a ceremony in honor of police killed-on-duty. Worthy affairs both, I suppose, especially the latter, but presumably also nothing that could not have been re-scheduled.

No, it’s plain that the French president had not the least intention of being there in Prague for the Eastern Partnership summit. And Jauvert helpfully supplies his list of five reasons for that:

1. Sarkozy already has his very own EU-sponsored outreach program to nations just outside European borders. It’s called the “Union for the Mediterranean,” it was launched about a year ago, and it’s largely Sarkozy’s (or rather France’s) own baby, although it’s headquartered in Barcelona. It’s quite understandable how unenthusiastic he would be for yet another initiative of this type that can only divert money and attention from his own.
   
   By the way, Jauvert cites this as also being the reason why the Italian and Spanish heads of government failed to show up in Prague. I rather think that the jury is still out on that; Berlusconi, for example, justified his absence by invoking his new divorce problems, and that could even be true!
   
2. Sarkozy and the Czech government don’t get along very well. This is clear. There were those quite explicity-stated doubts by French officials, faced with having to give up the EU presidency at the end of last year, as to whether the Czechs would be able to handle the task of taking over. (And were they, in the end?) There was that dispute about the French government allegedly urging French car companies to repatriate their manufacturing jobs from their factories in Eastern Europe – most prominently from the Czech Republic.
   
3. Sarkozy does get along rather well with the Russians. And of course the Russians don’t like this Eastern Partnership idea at all.
   
4. Sarkozy does not want any more EU enlargement – and participation at this summit could very well be falsely interpreted that he has softened that stand. (Think of the inevitable photo-ops that there would be, with him there having to smile for the cameras, like one big happy family, along with all those ex-Soviet country leaders.)
   
5. This blasted Eastern Partnership is going to gobble up €600 million in EU funds! (That’s just what has already been budgeted – more is sure to be spent in the future!) Another reason for Sarkozy to refuse to have anything to do with it publicly.

This is all very valuable analysis. As for myself, though, I still prefer my original reason why the summit flopped, namely that by that point no one could take the Czech presidency at all seriously anymore. Take a closer look: that Thursday and Friday when the summit took place was actually the very period of the transition from the Topolánek to the Fischer Czech governments! It was the period of maximum confusion, of maximum lack of preparedness by most Czech officials as that brand-new government’s personnel were busy in the first place simply finding and settling themselves into their new offices!

How could the Czechs ever have explicitly and deliberately scheduled such a summit for precisely such a period? “Because they are idiots?” you might suggest. No, the Czechs are certainly not idiots, let’s have none of that; the idea rather was that the summit would have to be run by that part of the government not in transition – i.e. by the office of the president, namely Václav Klaus. Yes, he was in charge at that summit, and not only that but everyone realized ahead of time that he would have to be. And Václav Klaus is a quite unpopular figure in most European Union circles, not only because of his often-rabid anti-EU views (e.g. he has been hinting that he won’t sign the Czech ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, even though that has now been passed by both houses of parliament), but also, unfortunately, because of his prickly and know-it-all personality. Why travel to Prague to have to put up with that? After all (as I reported previously in this space) Barack Obama might have had to travel to Prague about a month ago, but he made sure ahead of time that he wouldn’t have to put up with Klaus.

One final note: there was also a missing head of government on the side of those “Eastern” states for whose benefit this summit was organized, namely Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus. But that should have been no surprise to even short-term readers of this weblog; as “Europe’s last dictator” it was remarkable that he was invited in the first place, and I also reported in this space how he was assured of a rather cold reception if he did come, which apparently convinced him that it was better not to head off to Prague in the first place.

CORRECTION: I have been informed that, in fact, the Polish head of government – premier Donald Tusk – was present in Prague for the Eastern Partnership summit. This makes perfect sense since, as I mention, it was all originally a Polish initiative.

                          

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

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

                          

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.

Turning first to the newspaper of record, Le Monde gives Bush’s Baghdad shoe-in rather curious, even somewhat schizophrenic, coverage. The main article – Bush and Iraq: “The task has not been easy but has been necessary”, with by-line only to Le Monde and to the French news-agency AFP – takes the high road and only describes Bush’s Baghdad visit and his remarks there – that is, just the hightops of his stay – without mention of any untoward incident to otherwise clog up its account. But then in two separate paragraphs lower on the page, to the left and in their own grey-shaded area, it does give the basic details of the shoe-throwing episode: who the guy was, the accompanying insults, etc.

A Viral Video Already

Then, in an entirely separate on-line article, the newspaper treats the truly notable side-phenomenon in play here, namely how the video-clip has widely been exposed to a world very hungry for it (The Web seizes images of Bush dodging thrown shoes, by-line AFP). According to this piece, already 70 videos having to do with the incident have been submitted to YouTube, where they had already been viewed 600,000 times by noon on Monday, 15 DEC 08. Meanwhile, on another video site Dailymotion, about fifty videos had been submitted and viewed by that same time-point more than 200,000 times. Comments accompanying the videos have ranged from admiration at the President’s skill in dodging (“Bush should be good at playing Wii-Fit!” wrote one viewer on YouTube) to suggestions that al-Zeidi be awarded the Nobel Prize. And indeed, each of the on-line articles in the French press gathered for this round-up featured prominently-embedded videos of the shoe-throwing action. (I recommend as best the one on the Nouvel Observateur page, since it shows the action first at normal speed, with all accompanying audio, and then again in slow-motion like a sports-action replay.)

The article in Libération – Bush avoids the pump-hit; I suspect that this might be a French attempt at a clever pun-headline – does in fact have a super-sized version of the video at its top, with another just over to the right. But the editors of that rather left-wing French paper, like those of Le Monde, also seem afflicted here by a curious streak of even-handedness towards the American president. It’s true that the piece starts out, after the lede, with “The American president George W. Bush has known his last misadventure in Iraq, just avoiding receiving at full-face a pair of shoes thrown by an Iraqi journalist at the moment when he had just affirmed that ‘victory is near’.” (Actually, that’s not true, what the unnamed author claimed Bush to be saying. As you can clearly hear on the Nouvel Observateur video, Bush was merely saying “thank you” in Arabic to Nouri al-Maliki just before the wing-tips took flight.) But then this piece has for much of its second half rather extensive coverage of the praise lavished on Bush during this last visit by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. It also notes at the end that, of Bush’s handful of visits to the country, this one “is the first time that he comes to a country relatively pacified” – something that is really more a matter of opinion.

It’s not properly French, but do let me include here coverage on the incident from the Belgian French-language paper La Libre Belgique – An Iraqi journalist throws his shoes at Bush. La Libre adds some interesting details that I don’t find anywhere else, mainly about what did and did not happen at Bush’s follow-on destination after Baghdad, namely Kabul, Afghanistan. Naturally, some of the journalists there at the press conference Bush held with Afghan president Hamid Karzai were bracing themselves for some sort of repeat there of the shoe-throwing in Baghdad. (The ones who were not were simply those who had not yet heard about the Iraqi incident, which had at that point occurred only a couple of hours previously.) Perhaps their worries were heightened by the fact that the security-screening to which the journalists had to submit for access to that Afghan press conference had devoted no particular extra attention to their footwear. In fact, according to the article one Afghan newspaperman did try to goad a TV-reporter colleague to action, calling him a loafer and a sneaker (OK, so I made that last part up) and urging him to throw his own footgear into the anti-Bush cause. But that TV reporter, his instigator, and everyone else ended up behaving themselves in the end.

What Further for the Thrower?

Was that perhaps simply the prudent thing to do? Put another way, how will our Iraqi shoe-throwing ace, Muntadar al-Zeidi, be brought to heel? On that subject it’s that aforementioned Nouvel Observateur article that has the answers (Bush attacked: 200 lawyers to defend the show-thrower). One the one hand you have one Iraqi lawyer quoted in this piece that al-Zeidi is due for two years in jail for “having insulted a foreign head of state visiting Iraq,” and it’s also true that he is now in detention and has already been subject to repeated interrogations, mainly to ascertain whether any outside government or other agency sponsored what he did. (He also was tested for drug and alcohol intoxication.) On the other, al-Zeidi’s employer, the “Al-Baghdadiya” TV network, has appealed for his release, and he has picked up the support of one Khalil Doulaimi, a Jordan-based former lawyer for no less than Saddam Hussein. Doulaimi further maintains that he could easily recruit two hundred other legal colleagues – among them some Americans, he claims – to join him in al-Zeidi’s defense, all working for free. He adds: “For an Iraqi this is the least thing to do to Bush, a criminal tyrant who has killed two million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zeidi should be set free immediately.”

We should eventually know what al-Zeidi’s fate will be, if he does not simply disappear into the maw of the Iraqi prison system. We truly owe the man something, for providing a simple but classic and very-physical metaphor for expressing the lingering feelings of so many Americans and other peoples of the world for George W. Bush. To be sure, far more serious legal and investigative measures are in order to call him to account, but I think that for Inauguration Day – mark my words! – we can definitely expect some sort of footgear theme to be introduced into the festivities.

                          

But now something in the way of resistance is popping up. As the Nouvel Observateur reports (no by-line), a French NGO has filed an official request to have that 22 September decree nullified. Specifically, that NGO is “The Network for Alert and Intervention for Human Rights,” known by its French initials as “RAIDH.” Now, RAIDH has already found itself dragged into a court case by the company “SMP Technologies – Taser France” for allegedly having financed the activities of one Olivier Besancenot, whose political position is that of spokesman for the extreme-leftist League of Communist Revolutionaries, and who is currently on trial before a French court for defaming SMP Technologies by claiming that the taser has already been responsible for 150 deaths in the US. (“Espionage” is another charge Besancenot is on trial for; that was presumably also directed against SMP Technologies, but I can’t find much in the way of further details.)

In any event, the grounds for RAIDH’s annulment petition, as enunciated by spokesman Fabrice Ferrier, seem straightforward enough: “This arm, which discharges 50,000 volts, had not been subject to any independent medical study in France and contravenes fundamental human rights such as the respect for human dignity and the prohibition of torture.” And indeed, Amnesty International is then quoted in the article to the effect that the taser has been responsible for not 150, but rather 290 deaths in the US since 2001. Spokesman Ferrier went on in his statement to urge France’s mayors to declare their jurisdictions “no-taser zones.”

On the other hand, France’s Service d’aide médicale urgente or SAMU – basically, the country’s ambulance corps – issued a study in September, 2007, which declared the taser to be safe “when usage precautions are strictly respected.” It’s further interesting that RAIDH is going after the government’s taser permission as granted to local governments, which has nothing to do with the national gendarmerie which already was so equipped. Are tasers in the hands of the gendarmes then to be construed as OK? Or will the RAIDH eventually have those in its sights, too, if successful with this legal move?

                          

I know: All that doesn’t matter a bit. America might get most of its oil from outside its borders; it might overwhelmingly be foreign money which funds the federal budget deficit, the debts (and therefore the continuing existence) of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and the countless other debt obligations of American private business and all levels of US government; but it doesn’t follow that there is any need for – as one colonial writer put it long ago – a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, or for any concern about improving America’s relations with the rest of the world.

(By the way, the maximum polling-difference between Obama and McCain that that BBC World Service recorded was 82% – in Kenya, of course. The minimum was 9%, in India.)

UPDATE: What’s more, opinion pieces like this one (in English, from The Guardian), which seem to bear the message “Elect Obama as your next president, or else!”, naturally can have no other effect (if indeed they are noticed at all) than to erode Obama’s support among American voters further. After all, as its writer Jonathan Freedland rightly points out, “that large Berlin crowd damaged Obama at home, branding him the ‘candidate of Europe’ and making him seem less of a patriotic American.” Still, it is a viewpoint well worth checking out.

                          

It seems not. As the Nouvel Observateur reports, the Paris city council yesterday made the Dalai Lama an honorary citizen, at the urging of mayor Bertrand Delanoë. What is more, as mayor Delanoë made clear in a public statement, “Paris desires as well, by this gesture, to assure its brotherly support to the people of Tibet, who are trying to defend the most elementary of their rights: their dignity, their liberty, and quite simply their lives.”