France: The Yellow Vests movement is gaining new momentum one year later. Students, Hospital Employees, Transportation Workers and more are also protesting. Much needed reforms are on hold. The economy staggers. Social cohesion is being torn at the seams. Could this be the beginning of a perfect storm?
In an interview with the Economist published November 7, French President Emanuel Macron said: “NATO is brain dead.” After nearly three years of attacks by President Trump and a rapprochement of NATO member Turkey with Russia, here yet is another nail in the coffin of an alliance that should have died with the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union in 1991.
Paris: They are getting too old, or too fat, to build barricades, their hands too soft to dig up cobblestones, but they still have the voice to sing to the glory of those who fought to defend the world’s first workers democracy, a two month long experiment in 1871 which ended in a blood bath: The Paris Commune.
Every September for the past 15 years, the Association “Friends of the Paris Commune 1871” organizes a block party at Place de La Commune de Paris – 1871 (where else?) in the 13th district of Paris. They drink blood red wine made deeper with cassis, curse the Versaillais and Adolphe Thiers who sent the French Army to massacre the people and generally enjoy a Fall afternoon.
Messkirch, Germany: If you have nothing planned between April and November over the next 40 years or so, and would like to live and work in the early Middle Ages, there is an association in the Schwäbische Alb (Schwabian Alps) that has a job for you. But they will take you as well if you only have a week to spare.
Forty-thousand French citizens could find themselves without a bank account at the end of the year because French banks are unable to meet the US tax information reporting law known as FACTA (1), according to Laurent Mignon, the head of the French Banking Federation, FFB. In all there could be more than 300 thousand people across Europe who will have no place to park their money and collect their salaries in 2020.
People who use the ‘Founding Fathers’ to argue their case against racism and white supremacy are using a double edged sword. Those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were in great part white supremacist slave owners. As a matter of fact, they enshrined slavery in the Constitution itself.
A trial in Rochefort, south-western France, which could literally cost Maurice his head, has been postponed until July 4. But Bruno Dionis du Séjour, the mayor of a tiny hamlet called Gajac en Gironde (400 inhabitants), is furious and is determined to save not only Maurice but the sounds of rural France. Maurice is a rooster.
The problem began a couple of years ago when a couple bought their secondary residence next door to Corinne Fesseau in Saint Pierre d’Oléron, an island off south western France. Little did they know Maurice would wake them every day at 6:30. The retirees want the rooster silenced.
This is just the latest case of urban elites trying to silence the countryside when they buy a secondary residence. Mayor Dionis du Séjour is counter-attacking by calling for the sounds of the countryside to be declared a “national heritage.”
It was one of the worst experiences of my life. The room in my Moscow student dorm was infested with bedbugs. After two painful and sleepless nights, I was taken to a Soviet hospital to face a doctor with a needle as big as her hat, and made for horses, full of something they said was supposed to calm my suffering.
“You are testing new weapons against us Americans!” I told them. They just shrugged their shoulders. For some societies, bedbugs are a given.
But not in France where Cimex Lectularius was driven out in the 1950s by chemicals that are now forbidden. “Invasion!” “The Plague!” “End of the world.” The French press compete in hyperbole to describe their return: “Bedbugs!”
I was asked by an international radio to answer a few questions on my reflections on the European elections May 26. I thought I’d share a slightly modified version with you here.
Freedom of the press is not free but people today refuse to pay and as a result are […]
