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France

  • NON TO FRENCH WINE, OUI TO FRENCH AD AGENCY
    22 February 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    14 comments

    When France refused to join in the "coalition of the willing," the right-wing propaganda machine rolled out the "Hate-Everything-French" campaign. Conservative media mouthpieces like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh led the Franco phobic charge, exhorting their benighted minions to boycott everything French. There was even an effort to change French fries to "freedom fries." French bashing could be heard and read, in varying degrees of ferocity, across the nation as the Bush (…)

  • Thousands March in Growing French Protests
    24 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)
    12 comments

    By Timothy Heritage
    PARIS - Some 210,000 public sector workers marched through French cities on Thursday in widening protests over pay, reforms and job cuts that have sent a sharp warning to President Jacques Chirac’s conservative government.
    On the third day of protests, some schools closed because of a one-day strike by teachers, and a stoppage by air traffic controllers grounded flights at Bordeaux in western France.
    The protests followed a warning strike by rail workers that (…)

  • Gaps in French Briat death report
    4 January 2005 par (Open-Publishing)

    by Diet Simon
    The French anti-nuclear movement Réseau Sortir du nucléaire charges that there are serious gaps in the state attorney’s report on how a young activist was killed in November by a nuclear waste train.
    Twenty-two-year-old Sébastien Briat died on 7 November near Avricourt in Lorraine when he tried to stop a train taking waste from a French plutonium plant for storage in Germany, where it had originated.
    He was one of a group of eight. Contrary to first reports, it is now (…)

  • France Passes Wide Reaching Anti-Homophobic and Sexist Law
    26 December 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    Paris, December 25 (RHC)-France has outlawed the use of sexist and homophobic insults in legislation that places such insults in the same category as racist or anti-Semitic hatred.
    On Friday, the French Parliament effectively made any public insult that attacks a person’s gender or sexual orientation a punishable offense with a maximum fine of €45,000 or one year in jail.
    The legislation is an attempt to curb what authorities see as increasing homophobia and verbal violence against (…)

  • France’s ’Watergate’ trial opens
    18 November 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    By Caroline Wyatt
    In France, 12 people have gone on trial for running a phone-tapping operation used by the late President Francois Mitterrand to monitor his opponents.
    The defendants were almost all civil servants and they include current Renault chief Louis Schweitzer.
    The case has taken 22 years to come to court, because of state secrecy orders that prevented the judge gaining access to key documents.
    It has been described as France’s own Watergate scandal.
    All the defendants in (…)

  • Fresh elections on agenda to avert strife in French Polynesia
    17 November 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    By ANGELA GREGORY
    France wants representatives on each side of the French Polynesian political impasse to meet in Paris and discuss calling fresh elections across the territory.
    Two leaders are both claiming to be the lawful head of government. France has officially recognised President Gaston Flosse, but his political foe, Oscar Temaru, and his supporters are occupying the presidential buildings in the capital, Papeete. There are fears of violence if the situation is not resolved soon. (…)

  • American Board of Rabbis blasts France over Arafat
    3 November 2004 par (Open-Publishing)
    4 comments

    by Big News Network
    In an unprecedented and extraordinary attack on France, the American Board of Rabbis has demanded a worldwide ban on French products.
    The New York-based association which promotes Jewish unity abroad voted unanimously to call on Jewish people around the world to boycott everything French: goods, services, and even the language.
    The board is outraged at France’s providing hospital treatment for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who it describes as a ’master (…)

  • The Hoax of Paris Marie and the Ghosts
    21 July 2004 par (Open-Publishing)

    By URI AVNERY
    Sometimes a trivial episode throws a revealing light on a grave public disease.
    A classic example: the Captain of Koepenick. On the face of it, it was a minor criminal incident: in 1906, a shoemaker named Wilhelm Voigt was released from prison, after serving a sentence for forgery. To get work he needed a passport, which, as a former convict, he could not get.
    So he went to a junk shop and bought the uniform of an army captain, commandeered some soldiers in the street, (…)