Life on the streets of the French town branded as ‘lost to Islam’

Hairdressers and their clients hit the headlines after local teacher Didier Lemaire claimed there were no mixed salons in Trappes – suggesting the town was in the stranglehold of Islamic radicalisation. He also claimed schoolchildren were banned from singing and some women barred from cafes. Lemaire has since been placed under police protection following alleged death threats. The accusations came on the eve French MPs voted on a controversial bill to combat Islamist extremism, put forward after the brutal murder of teacher Samuel Paty last October.

France: 76 mosques face closure, 66 migrants deported

The Grand Mosque of Pantin, in a low-income suburb on the capital’s northeastern outskirts, had shared a video on its Facebook page before the attack that vented hatred against Paty, who was beheaded in broad daylight near his school.

Francebeheading: weapons not tears!

The government is under pressure, with one senior opposition figure criticising Mr Macron's approach and calling for "armes et non des larmes" - weapons not tears.

Samuel Paty: a teacher at 'the very heart' of his profession

The father of the family, in his forties, was known for his commitment to his students. "He was very committed to his job," which he "loved very much," says Martial. "He really wanted to teach us things. From time to time, we would have debates, we would talk.”

A chechen refugee decapitated a teacher in Paris

The main suspect is alleged to be an 18-year-old born in Moscow and originating from Russia's southern region of Chechnya, the source said. The detainees reportedly include the parents of a pupil at the school where the murdered teacher was working.

"La France" at its worst

Mantovani in particular isn't just some conductor. He is the director of the Paris Conservatory (formally, the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique), and as such he possesses not just a very big soapbox, but a fair amount of power to help make or break emerging French talent.

“An anthropological rupture"

France’s national academy of medicine called the practice “an anthropological rupture,” using terminology straight out of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of kinship, in which he posited that one of the central human bonds is that between a husband and wife.

The dreadful Notre Dame Fire in Paris on Monday 15th April at 5.50pm local time, was predicted by Nostradamus

A quatrain written 500 years ago by the French astrologer anticipated it

Women speak out on France's harassment problem

“It’s not about harassment, it’s about women being treated as objects in society and the new law won’t change anything. The police don’t have the money to train officers effectively about what constitutes harassment and often they are part of the problem. “If you call them and say a guy behaved weirdly towards you, often the first reaction is they laugh. The answer is having more women in charge of the institutions, the police, the fire services, other bodies. Then we might have real changes.”

Portugal' State Corruption, Mr Barroso, the EU, etc

Would EU imagine that choosing Mr. Barroso (one of the main responsible for Portuguese huge institutional corruption, blatant inequalities, culture of the promiscuity, resilient brutality, general stupidity and inescapable decadence, whom may be embroiled in the not yellow submarine case)* as EC's president, for more than a decade, and Constâncio, who was the portuguese central bank governor (for more than 10 years...) and didn't see nothing on the portuguese bank system corruption, as ECB's vice-president, comes without any consequence?

* only the Submarine and Pandur cases had 40 million euros "under the table". Him (the fag who - with the other one - represents the worst of the Portuguese State Mafia) holds still Portugal's vice prime-ministery, after all... So, it was a terrific &(almost) complete parliamentary cleaning of the 40 millions "gloves" for the submarine and Pandur's deal. How... very... terrific... country... Glup...


In the framers’ view, corruption in the broader sense of using public office for private ends was essentially the opposite of public virtue, and was therefore a central threat to the life and health of the republic. 

The parties of the centre-left and the centre-right are allowing Europe to drift into the economic equivalent of a nuclear winter.

Islamic State insurgents in Iraq have carried out mass executions, abducted women and girls as sex slaves, and used child soldiers in what may amount to systematic war crimes that demand prosecution


Originating in Romania and eventually spreading to the U.S. and presumably other countries, the Romani had been around for years and years, killing families and abducting the young girls as wives for their sons, and possibly the inverse as well since at least 1909. 


GDP in Italy has declined by 9% since 2000. It’s unimaginable! I don’t think communist Czechoslovakia would have survived such a long-term decline. At the same time, industrial output declined in the same period by 25%! One quarter of the economy simply disappeared.’


Where Mario Draghi now wants to start buying up Greek and Cypriot junk loans, simply because that’s all they have left to sell. That’s where we stand today. We’re back to toilet paper as the only thing that represents any value.


The "liberal system": London property company is charging £255 a week for 'studio apartments' as small as three metres by three metres

"In areas of Syria under [Isis] control, particularly in the north and north-east of the country, Fridays are regularly marked by executions, amputations and lashings in public squares," 

"Despite Moscow's hollow denials, it is now clear that Russian troops and equipment have illegally crossed the border into eastern and south-eastern Ukraine,"

Despite the failures in financial regulation evident during the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis and calls for improvement of relevant regulatory structures, proponents of TISA aim to further deregulate global financial services markets. The draft Financial Services Annex sets rules which would assist the expansion of financial multi-nationals – mainly headquartered in New York, London, Paris and Frankfurt – into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. 

“If instituted, the TPP’s IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you’re ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs.”

"France is a free country which shouldn't be aligning itself with the obsessions of the German right," he said, urging a "just and sane resistance".

From the moment it became clear that the anti-independence campaign had secured a modest win, people in the Yes camp started asking themselves : "Will we get another chance? If so, when?" Well my instinct is to advise the SNP to be cautious on this question, because we know from Quebec that there is indeed a public tolerance for a repeat referendum on independence, but only if the circumstances and timing are right.
...
After all, the (bogus) argument that a No vote was the only way to keep Scotland in the EU was a key part of the anti-independence campaign's pitch. The SNP would still have to be careful to ensure that it was not running ahead of what the public is willing to tolerate, but it's conceivable that in those circumstances there might be considerable sympathy for a much earlier repeat referendum to get an independent Scotland back into the EU (and out of a Tory/Ukip hell-hole) as soon as humanly possible. (if the EU still exists...)

Australia bans reporting of multi-nation corruption case involving Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam

A senior member of India’s Socialist Party, Abu Azmi, apparently said he wanted women who were forced to have sex against their will to be put to death at the same time as their attackers.

Rape victim’s 100 lashes sentence

A rape victim’s 100 lashes sentence in Maldives has caused international outcry, after the teen subject to the repeated rapes was accused of having consensual sex with another man aside from the rape.

The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought 2012 goes to Iranians Nasrin Sotoudeh, an imprisoned human rights defender and lawyer, and Jafar Panahi, a film director who with his work called attention to the hardships suffered by Iran's poor.

 (Spain) Central government's move to stop schools using Catalan is insulting.
...
There has even been wild talk about mobilising the army.

(The Times, 22.12.2012)

'Republicans and Gun Lobby Complicit' in Newtown

Another Gunman and the Gun Owners of America

The Pussy and Mafia-Putin

Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

The state’s leaders stand with saintly expressions in church, but their sins are far greater than ours. We’ve put on our political punk concerts because the Russian state system is dominated by rigidity, closedness and caste. Аnd the policies pursued serve only narrow corporate interests to the extent that even the air of Russia makes us ill.

Our protest has raised the issue of the fusion of the Russian Orthodox Church and the security services

Yet so far no senior French politician convicted of corruption has been jailed *

* the same as Portugal & Greece


poundzonliberalmarket (at least, in this case, they get a fine...)

Release Imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Winner Liu Xiaobo and Wife Liu Xi

A Two-Year Travelogue from Hell

before the senior Assad came into power in the wake of a military coup, the Alawites, about 10 percent of the population, were the poorest people in the country, only coming to Damascus as servants. But then Hafez Assad, after rising through the ranks of the military, finally came to power in another coup, in 1970. His son is now determined to hold on to that power at all costs -- or else, as his soldiers' slogan goes, "we will burn the country down!"

Assad's Elaborate Disinformation Campaign

Yemen constitutes another of the Saudi-Iranian battlegrounds in the region

  The real enemies of the Arab world

The Arab world has many enemies and Israel should have been at the bottom of the list. The real enemies of the Arab world are corruption, lack of good education, lack of good health care, lack of freedom, lack of respect for the human lives and finally, the Arab world had many dictators who used the Arab-Israeli conflict to suppress their own people. 

"Something has gone wrong inside the Muslim world," Rushdie continued. Just a few decades ago, he said, major cities in the Arab and Muslim world were outward-looking. But "in the last half century, these cultures seem to have slid backwards into medievalism and represssion. ... It is one of the great self-inflicted wounds."

Southern Arabia's holy warrior, Abraha, had taken control of large areas before long. He even attempted to free bishops being held prisoner by the Persian enemy in Nisibis (in modern-day Turkey), some 2,500 kilometers away.

Saudi celebrity preacher who 'raped and tortured' his five-year-old daughter to death is released after paying 'blood money'

The money is considered compensation under Islamic law

Information is power -  Aaron Swartz 

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

Strauss-Kahn case twist

Letter From District Attorney to Defense in Strauss-Kahn Case.


What's in a reputation?

Tristane Banon, 31, a French journalist and writer, said that she would take belated legal action against Mr Strauss-Kahn for what she described as a sexual attack on her in 2002.

At the time, she said, she was persuaded not to press charges by her mother, who had family and political links with him. DSK's own daughter was one of Ms Banon's best friends.

In 2007, the young woman told of her ordeal in an interview with a French TV chat show. The show made compellingly prurient TV but cowardly journalism and politics. Each reference to Mr Strauss-Kahn's name was bleeped out. independent

Note: "The French media and French justice systems have an extravagant definition of the extents of "privacy" for public figures. Consensual extramarital affairs are one thing. Sexual harassment, bordering on assault is another."


IMF chief charged with 'sex attack'

The leader of the International Monetary Fund and a possible candidate for president of France was arrested in New York on Sunday in connection with the violent sexual assault of a hotel maid after being yanked from a plane moments before it was to depart, police said. independent