Author: Kazolias

French Unions shut down Country to Protect Labor Aristocracy.

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Protesters have taken to the streets the pas four months.

Gas stations ran dry last week when unions blocked the refineries.  Other employees threatened to shut down nuclear reactors.  Public transport is expected to grind to a halt this week.  Police, teachers, prison guards and more are joining the movement. All of this to protest a mild labor reform law aimed at reducing unemployment.

President Hollande insists he will not back down even though violence in the streets, despite a state-of-emergency, has the government fearing tourists will stay away this summer.

It is truly a case of ‘The Cid‘ in which there is no honorable way out for all sides meaning the worst is possible.

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Gabon’s media landscape is a mess

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The state TV in Port Gentil where five high ranking civil servants work has not broadcast since 2007.

Libreville, Gabon: When President Ali Bongo celebrated Press Freedom Day on May 3, the vast majority of Gabon’s press boycotted the event and held their own meeting elsewhere in Libreville, the capital.  Speaking before a handful of pro-government media, Bongo complained that the opposition press demand subsidies but spend their time insulting him, once again demonstrating a 50 year Bongo family tradition of confusing state finances with private assets. “The press is against me,” he lamented. Bongo’s statement underlined the extent to which Gabon’s media landscape is polarized as we head to presidential elections in August.

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French Civil Servants, Students would rather sink than swim

images-3Paris: France is bankrupt. In terms of the Maastricht criteria, French public debt is 97% of GDP, or roughly two trillion euros. But add to this, the off-balance-sheet debt (estimated at over three trillion euros) such as pensions (19 billion euros a year deficit), unemployment insurance (over five billion/year deficit), health care system (15 billion/year deficit) and other social guaranties supposed to finance themselves and the real debt of France is an astronomical 242% of GDP. Yet, labor in France refuses to hear of reform. Students, who have never worked a day in their lives, are marching with public service employees and fighting police in the streets.

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Béziers Tired of the Crap – DNA Testing for Dogs.

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Béziers, Old City

Béziers, France: Anybody who has visited France’s beautiful old cities knows you must spend as much time looking where you step as you do admiring the sites, lest you trod in dog poop —- a walk  you could call the ‘dog-crap-shuffle.’

The mayor of the southern French city of Béziers is fed up with dog owners who don’t clean up after their pets have relieved themselves on the city’s sidewalks. He announced on Friday he is calling on science to find and fine the culprits’ owners.

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Islamic Veil:The Cloth of French Discord.

Paris, France: Muslim fundamentalists are challenging France’s ‘line in the sand’ and the battle is now in one of the most prestigious of French institutions founded by Napoleon.

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Hijab Day Facebook Page

The French ‘Grande Ecole’, Sciences Politiques, was Tuesday the scene of a very strange event which is creating quite a tempest in France: Hijab Day.  Muslim students at the school called on their fellow female students to wear the Islamic headscarf for a day in a bid to “demystify the cloth.”

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Swabian Media hype up local NFL Draft Pick.

Stuttgart, Germany. “All the scouts at the NFL Pro-Day were convinced,” wrote the Stuttgarter Zeitung. “The man from Aalen kindles NFL hype,” asserts Baden-Wurtenberg’s SWR radio. For the SüdWest Presse of Ulm, he is already in the NFL. “The German Wonder-Kid” the Swabian press is so excited about is 22 year-old wide-receiver Moritz Böhringer, whom they expect to be drafted into the NFL in Chicago on April 28.

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Don’t Insult the Turk! Merkel between a rock and hard place.

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Böhmermann deliberately insulted the Turkish president.

Tübingen, Germany: When German comedian, Jan Böhmermann, did a satirical sketch on state run ZDF TV this month, accusing the Turkish president of “repressing minorities, kicking Kurds and slapping Christians” as well as suggesting he has “sex with sheep and goats,” Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan went ballistic and called for the satirist to be prosecuted under a little known German defamation law. The row has opened a Pandora’s box of troubles for German Chancellor Angela Merkel: should the law be scrapped; how far does free speech and satire go; what grip does the Turkish president have around the Chancellor’s throat?

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French Premier Declares War on Radical Islamic Thought

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Prime Minister Valls says Salafism feeds Islamic terrorism.

Imams who tell young children they will turn into pigs and go to Hell if they listen to music; public bus drivers who refuse to drive a vehicle after a woman had driven it; airport baggage handlers who want to stop work several times a day to pray; project thugs who aggress girls not wearing a headscarf; men with several undeclared wives collecting generous family allotments for the children: just a few of the manifestations of Islamic fundamentalism those on both the left and the right claim is sweeping France.

Are hardline islamists, known as Salafists, promoting the recruitment of young French Muslims for terrorism through their preaching? The question is important because the debate in France this week could lead to the banning of a form of religious thought. Although “not all Salafists are Jihadists, all Jihadists are culturally Salafists,” said the French researcher on Islam, Gilles Kepel.

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Moroccans Beat, Jail Homosexuals

Stepping into the Breach: religion and sexual repression: Much is being said of intolerance in western societies, as if this somehow justifies the violent anger of young muslims against the countries they were born in. Self flagellation is not going to resolve a dilemma whose roots are also religious. Misogyny and homophobia have theological support and one is Sharia laws.
 
Moroccan courts have sentenced two homosexuals, who were beat to a pulp in the town of Beni Mallal, to prison for the crime of being homosexual. They actually got stiffer sentences than their aggressors. 
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No, Islamic Oppression of Women is not Good Business!

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Laurence Rossignol says Islamic fashion oppresses women.

France’s Minister for Family and Women’s Affairs this week lambasted fashion houses for proposing Islamic clothing for women.  Laurence Rossignol said it is “irresponsible” for major brands like Marks & Spencer’s to promote the “confining of women’s bodies.” At question is everything from the ‘burkini’ bathing suit to high-end head scarves.

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