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 . '/' . substr('9781555976286',-6,3) . '/' . '9781555976286' . '.jpg'; ?>)
By Aatish Taseer
$16.00
By Steven Hill
$11.01
$24
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Wikimedia Commons
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After spending six years as a hostage in Colombia, politician Ingrid Betancourt, who was rescued from her rebel captors in 2008, has filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the Colombian state for “emotional stress and loss of earnings.”
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ESPN via YouTube
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This is perhaps just a highly undiplomatic way of saying nyah nyah, but Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has elected to hit the U.S., France and England where it counts (well, at least in England and France) ... (continued)
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Al-Qaida is to Bill O’Reilly what Nazis are to Glenn Beck. That is to say it’s his favorite smear for things he doesn’t like. In this instance, a heartwarming (warning) commercial for McDonald’s in France (danger) aimed at gays (RED ALERT!).
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By William Pfaff — Self-admittedly profligate Greece did not invent the world crisis, nor did Portugal, Spain or Italy. The guilt lies with the United States.
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Flickr / Ranoush. (CC-BY-SA)
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It isn’t an outright ban—yet—but the French parliament agreed unanimously (except for 30 protesters who walked out) to condemn the face veil worn by some Muslim women as “an affront to the nation’s values of dignity and equality.”
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Flickr / Miron Podgorean
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French voters are turning against the right-wing policies of President Nicolas Sarkozy in what many are calling the “pink tide,” a leftward shift in French politics that is putting Socialists and Greens in many legislative seats around the country.
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AP / Vincent Michel
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Even as the Basque separatist ETA signals a willingness to move toward peace, one of its top leaders—whom many are calling the “most senior”—has been arrested in France before a commando operation that allegedly was to be carried out in Spain.
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Wikimedia Commons/Musée du Louvre
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There’ve been a number of theories bandied about concerning the famously enigmatic masterpiece we know well as the Mona Lisa, but this latest one about Leonardo da Vinci’s mysterious muse is a doozy, and it definitely wins points for creativity and flair.
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dailymotion.com
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Televangelist Pat Robertson’s post-earthquake commentary about Haiti—more specifically concerning the island nation’s alleged pact with Satan—has drawn fire from multiple directions, and now the White House has weighed in via spokesman Robert Gibbs. Meanwhile, CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network), which ran “The 700 Club” clip featuring Robertson’s statement, is in backpedaling mode.
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In this episode of “Pat Robertson Explains It All,” our host takes to the Christian airwaves to help everyone make sense of Tuesday’s gigantic earthquake in Haiti. Needless to say, it’s news to us that the Prince of Darkness had a hand in the matter, but Robertson assures his nodding sidekick that it’s the truth.
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By William Pfaff — Will Christmas in America end up like Christmas in Japan, or Halloween in France? That is to say, a merchandising opportunity that eventually flopped.
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peopledaily.com.cn
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Iran has announced it will conduct a weeklong round of air defense war games centered on the country’s nuclear sites as Western powers, especially the U.S., turn up the heat over Tehran’s nuclear program.
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payvand.com
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President Barack Obama has signaled an escalation in the ongoing nuclear dispute with Iran, warning that punitive measures could come soon after Tehran rejected a proposal to send its enriched uranium to Russia or France for further processing.
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payvand.com
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Prodded by the U.S., Russia and France at talks in Vienna, Iranian negotiators have agreed to carry back to Tehran a proposed deal that would see Iran ship out most of its enriched uranium—the stuff of nuclear weapons—to Russia.
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By William Pfaff — While the Republican leadership in the United States would have people believe that the country is being remorselessly driven to the far left under Barack Obama, European voters are moving toward the right.
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By Eugene Robinson — Hasn’t Roman Polanski suffered enough? Didn’t he endure all those cool, gray, rainy Paris winters? Didn’t he also drug and rape a 13-year-old girl?
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guardian.co.uk
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A plan by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to slap a “carbon tax” on all forms of energy except electricity has met both popular resistance and activist snubbing. Two-thirds of French voters oppose such a tax, and environmentalists have chimed in to condemn it as halfhearted and wimpy.
Posted on Sep 13, 2009
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Newsday
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As some politicians in the U.S. continue to get their gender-respective panties/underwear in a bunch over government spending to help people, “conservative” Nicolas Sarkozy has vowed to “save the human race” from global warming with a carbon tax to help cut fossil fuel usage in France.
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Flickr / Michell Zappa
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The world’s second-largest economy is back in the black. Japan’s economic growth is positive for the first time in over a year, beating expectations. The good news comes as the economies of Germany and France are also growing and China is in full boom. Kanpai!
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Flickr / showbizsuperstar
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In this topsy-turvy world it seems one’s proximity to full-blown communism is directly proportional to one’s success in capitalism. Take Red China’s explosive economic growth, or the unexpected success of semi-socialist Germany and France, which just bid auf Wiedersehen and adieu to the recession.
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honkifyoureaknob.blogspot.com
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French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared that burqas worn by Muslim women are no longer welcome in France. The full-body veil, symbol of women’s “enslavement,” he said, is a threat to gender equality and to France’s long-standing secular democracy. Only a minority of women among the roughly 6 million Muslims in France wear such attire, but Sarkoz’s new hard line is sure to fan the debate.
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weblo.com
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It’s been a rough week for the Church of Scientology. First there was the opening of a trial that could lead to the banning of the organization in France, and on Thursday L. Ron Hubbard’s controversial religion was banned from revising articles in Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is edited by Internet users.
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By William Pfaff — Many in Britain and the United States are in mourning for what’s taken as the suicide of the American (or Thatcherite, or Chicago-school) model of capitalism, accompanied by the non-interventionist state that hands the national economy over to business and financial leaders to run.
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Frederick Deligne, Le Pelerin, France —
Posted on Apr 27, 2009
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Well, he actually meant piracy, but we get the picture: President Obama followed up on this weekend’s Somali pirate showdown with a salute to the crew of the Maersk Alabama and a pledge to crack down on the problem in the future. Looks like the pirate contingent is planning to take a similar tack toward American sailors.
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AP photo / Sang Tan
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Sacre bleu! Some conservative members of France’s parliament are probably regretting their decision to begin their Easter break a little early, as their absence allowed rival socialists to ambush an Internet piracy bill on Thursday.
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AP photo / Laurent Cipriani
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Four higher-ups at the Caterpillar construction equipment office in Grenoble, France, were taken hostage on Tuesday by hundreds of employees demanding negotiations after the company announced it would cut 700 jobs. Even more startling is that this latest episode was but one of three similar boss-blockading incidents in France this month.
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By William Pfaff — France’s president has lived up to the stereotype that his people, fond as they are of home vacationing and generally convinced of their own superiority, not infrequently fail to know what they are talking about when dealing with foreign countries.
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By William Pfaff — Except for the brief NATO intervention in Kosovo and Serbia, all of the significant U.S. military expeditions since the Cold War have been fought against Asians, and we have lost nearly all of them.
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AP pool photo / Alexei Druzhinin
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By Scott Ritter — Relations with Russia haven’t been this frosty since there was an East Berlin. President Obama may be distracted by other priorities, but getting reacquainted with Vladimir Putin and his nuclear arsenal should be at the top of the list.
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By William Pfaff — NATO has no coherent overall purpose and has not had one since the end of the Cold War. Any number of redefinitions and reorganizations have been proposed or tried and have proved unsatisfactory because no one can explain what it is that NATO really does or is for, other than to clean up behind the United States.
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The New York Times
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Following a three-hour pause in its aerial bombardment to allow those in the Gaza Strip to “get medical attention, get supplies ... whatever they need,” Israel has resumed its attack, although it promised additional halts amid reports that Hamas and Israel are working out details of a cease-fire. Overall, 660 Palestinians have been reported killed, including more than 200 children.
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By William Pfaff — What is the message of a terrorist attack that fails to deliver a message? Threats and warnings are being exchanged by India and Pakistan over the attack on Mumbai, carried out by presumed Muslim extremists. But acting to what purpose, and under whose instructions?
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AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Scott Ritter — Now that the presidential election has liberated Barack Obama from the need to play to the fickle whim of domestic politics, he should put away the saber and take a more enlightened approach to Iran.
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By William Pfaff — “What am I going to tell the public,” one French official asked, “when there are 3 million people marching in the streets of Paris? That ‘we all made mistakes’? That no one was really responsible?”
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In what will go down as one of the epic prank calls of all time, Canadian radio show jester Marc Antoine Audette got Sarah Palin on the phone Saturday by telling her French President Nicolas Sarkozy was calling. Oops.
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By William Pfaff — Military and economic disasters have caused Europeans and European governments to view the United States in a new, unflattering light.
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AP photo / Michel Euler
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French novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday. Le Clézio, whom the Swedish Academy fancifully described as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilisation,” has written more than 20 novels since the early age of 23.
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Newsday
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Leaders from France, Italy, Great Britain and Germany are planning to meet on Saturday in preparation for a European finance summit to be held in Washington next week. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who shot down reports on Thursday that France was proposing a hefty European bailout package, invited the other three heads of state to the pre-summit huddle in Paris.
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Frederick Deligne, Nice-Matin, France —
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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By William Pfaff — NATO has now been broken because it was used by the United States and the European NATO members as a tool for expanding Western power into the Russian “near abroad,” and after that, to make an inexplicably rash and dangerous effort to break into and split off portions of the Russian empire as it existed in the 19th century—long before the Soviet Union existed.
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By William Pfaff — History—not democracy—provides the explanation for the crisis in Georgia, in which the United States is recklessly involving itself.
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“Democracy Now!” reported Thursday on two separate stories that show being a Western democracy hardly makes you immune to serious allegations of war crimes. In one, the radio/TV show reports the conclusion by South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission that the U.S. military indiscriminately killed large groups of South Korean civilians during the Korean War. The other reviews the detailed new report by the Rwandan government that says the French military trained the murderous Interahamwe militia, key to the country’s 1994 genocide. [Transcripts & A/V]
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After two years of investigation, a Rwandan commission has accused France of facilitating the 1994 genocide by training Hutu militias and providing support to the Hutu government. The commission also says French forces murdered and raped Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The French government has consistently denied involvement in the genocide, in which 800,000 people were killed, but said it would look at the new report.
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By Robert Fisk — Without a shot being fired, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has ensured that anyone who wants anything in the Middle East has got to talk to Syria. He’s done nothing—and he’s won.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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During his quick jaunt to Paris on Friday, Barack Obama sent a direct message to Iran, cautioning it to stop enriching uranium or “the pressure ... is only going to build.” Obama had the chance to chat briefly with President Nicolas Sarkozy, who told him that the French would be “delighted” if he won in November’s election.
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By William Pfaff — France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy is often dismissed for his flamboyance, but he has quite remarkable accomplishments, including some reforms long sought by the left.
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By Robert Fisk — “You in the West have a moral duty in Europe to educate the United States more about the Middle East. If they don’t listen to you, they will not listen to us. They will continue with their mistakes.” I don’t think they’re going to listen, I mutter.
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Quelle Surprise! Haiti on the Mend
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