Paris: 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.
Author: Kazolias
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
There are hundreds of no-go zones in France where criminal gangs and Islamic Salafists impose their law, according to statements by leading politicians and police.
No, Nicolas, the Commune is not Dead!
They are closer to 70 than 50 but have all the dynamism of the French high school students who disrupted Paris this week. They came out of the workers’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and have not lost their determination to change the world, or at least a name.
KazoDaily 