UnknownFrance does not know how many Muslims, Arabs or Blacks live in the country because there is no ethnic census.  For 25 years, government has put the number of Muslims at four million but demographics would suggest it is much higher. An ethnic census would show France has a ‘Muslim problem,’ the first step towards fixing it.

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Emmanuel Macron, Minister of Economy

Europe, and not just the Euro, will sink with France when it goes the way of Greece. Emmanuel Macron, the Economy Minister, wants to plug the holes but his government won’t let him.

The numbers are staggering:

thAbdullah Kurdi, the father of Aylan was not fleeing the war in Syria.  He was emigrating out of Turkey where he had been living and working for three years.

BRAZZAVILLE: Boris Iloy Ibara, the News Director of Télé Congo, the state run TV, has a spacious office in the heavily guarded and half empty five-story structure built by the Chinese and inaugurated just six years ago. Boris says if the opposition is absent from his programs, it is because they don’t have the money to pay for the slot. He admits his reporters will take anywhere from $100 to $2000 dollars from the politicians they cover to do the story. However, he denies he has orders to censor the opposition.

France wants to cajole its radical muslim youth, offer them special high school and technical education in free housing centers with case workers constantly at their sides as Denmark is trying to do.  In a country with over five million unemployed, a growing poverty rate and an income tax burden which weighs very heavily on the middle class, this is fodder for the National Front canons.

The tourist guide got off the bus and greeted the group of chubby British women with “Shopping in Playa Blanca ? Shopping in Playa Blanca?” He could have said “doggy wanna bone?” and it would have been the same. I knew I had to see this.

Playa Blanca, a sprawling resort on the southern coast of Lanzarote, is everything native born artist César Manrique did not want for his waterless, volcanic island. Thanks to Manrique, the farthest east and the most arid of the Canary Islands escaped the mega hotels which defaced La Palma, Tenerife and Gran Canaria.

Visas just seem to be a money making scheme for the Cambodians while for the Vietnamese it is an exercise in sadism.

The Hmong are a fiercely independent people who see Vietnamese profiteers moving in on their land as a threat.  But the biggest threat to their way of life is probably tourism.

In which the Vietnamese try to destroy my prejudice and I search for the war that, as a young soldier, I could not support.

Banjul, May 5, 2012 – When Europeans went to Berlin with their scissors in 1884 to cut up the map of Africa, they played a sick joke which is still felt today. The British wanted the Palm oil from the Gambia River so they took that out of French West Africa and today the place is called a country: 60 kilometers wide at the Atlantic it snakes 338 kilometers up river where it is just a dozen kilometers wide. French diplomats like to refer to it as the finger in the ass of Senegal. The metaphor is à propos this year as the country obsesses over all things anal.