Paris, France — The banker looked at me with a puzzled expression when I told her a recent poll shows 47% of the French fear they could one day be homeless.
“I’m surprised only 47% realize it,” she said.
Category Archive: Opinion
Paris – France : In 1997, a very stubborn French Doctor in a State run hospital did not give up looking. When endoscopies and ultra-sounds turned up no explanation for the severe pancreatitis I suffered from, he sent me to a ‘private’ clinic specialized in invasive procedures. There they found the tumor in my pancreas and four days later the doctor in the public hospital conducted the queen of all operations: a whipple. It did not cost me a penny to save my life!
Paris – France : Imagine Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, the great provocateur who offered to send election observers to Florida after the 2000 disaster, asking one of his aid agencies to come to France and bring back neglected children for care. They hire a private plane and fly into the country, round up 103 kids and set to fly them back to Zimbabwe to adoptive families and all this without going through the French authorities. This in a nutshell is what the Arche de Zoé, Zoé’s Ark, just did in Chad.
On Harry Truman’s desk was a sign which read “The Buck Stops Here”. Is it just an American thing to believe that those at the top are ultimately responsible for what their organizations and people do? In France, “passing the buck” seems to be the motto.
Everywhere Thierry Breton goes the little guys lose their shirts and his already rich friends get richer. The latest scandal concerns a massive insider trading conspiracy at the European Aeronautics and Defense giant EADS.
While teaching journalism in Cameroon last month, I was once again astonished at just how big our cultural divide can be when it comes to determining who the victims are in society.
“We don’t care if it all goes to Hell. Lets just get out of here!” That is what the Senate seems to be saying when it voted this week its non-binding bill to partition Iraq. The truth is Iraq is already partitioned and, as a result, has already gone to Hell. There is no viable sovereign central government in Iraq.
The worst thing Bill Clinton did was not receiving oral pleasure from Monica. It was not bombing a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum. Perhaps not even letting al-Qaeda and the Taliban grow, nor even maintaining an embargo on Iraq, which killed some 500 thousand people through lack of medicine and food. No, the worst thing he did may well be messing with the Balkans and backing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.
It occurred to me a while back that George W. Bush and his neo-con friends have a lot more in common with Marxism than they would like to think. The Communists always said that politics should be in control; that the base of society should mold the infrastructure or what they could call ‘perceptible reality’.
President Nicolas Sarkozy has been in power for 100 days and I still have not figured out how his economic policies are going to create jobs and spark economic growth.
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