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FREXIT – Is France Hurling toward Exiting the EU?
FREXIT – Is France Hurling toward Exiting the EU?
France is by no means calming down. There is a major underlying problem in France which is rising to the surface in direct confrontation with the government and Macron’s ambition to lead Europe. Macron’s confrontation with Trump over NATO is a reflection of a historical posture of the French government that has resented both Germany and the United States. Macron had said, “The Atlantic alliance can only be restored in one way, through restoring the unity of Europe.” The twelve founding members set up a headquarters together for the first time in London in 1950.
NATO Headquarters was located at 13, Belgrave Square. The last meeting to be held in London before the move to Paris was on April 1, 1952, which coincided with NATO’s third anniversary. NATO was forced to move its headquarters from Paris, France (the A building for Alliance) following the French withdrawal from NATO, which then moved to Brussels 1967.
Macron did not advocate that France should pull out of NATO as was the case under President de Gaulle. Indeed, de Gaulle did withdraw France from NATO’s military structure in 1966, yet it remained an Ally. Macron has been also pushing for a European Army. Clearly, Macron’s agenda has been to federalize Europe and that is clashing with the people. He is NOT a proponent in having the USA a major part of NATO according to reliable sources.
Macron has been pushing economic reforms to curtail the social benefits in France in his effort to federalize Europe. In protest of his planned reforms in the pension system, the unions have organized several general strikes, which are now being joined by the yellow vests. This has resulted in bringing in hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets. The problem which Macron faces is that France’s economic performance can no longer finance the generous welfare state which is far beyond international standards.
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French MPs Want To Ban Black Friday Because Of “Resource Waste” And “Overconsumption”
French MPs Want To Ban Black Friday Because Of “Resource Waste” And “Overconsumption”
Members of the French Parliament are now demanding the government prohibit Black Friday, reported The Independent.
French MPs passed an amendment Monday that could make the annual shopping holiday, widely popularized in the US, illegal, warning that a shopping frenzy causes “resources waste” and “overconsumption.”
The proposal, led by France’s former environment minister Delphine Batho, is expected to be debated next month in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament.
France’s ecological transition minister, Elisabeth Borne, told Europe 1 radio on Thursday that Black Friday creates “traffic jams, pollution, and gas emissions.”
“We cannot both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and call for a consumer frenzy,” Borne said. “Above all, we must consume better.”
The amendment prohibiting Black Friday has been condemned by France’s e-commerce union.
RetailMeNot estimates that French shoppers are expected to spend $6.5 billion this year between Black Friday and Dec. 1.
Climate change activists from the Extinction Rebellion group’s French chapter have been out in force protesting shoppers.
“Friday, Nov. 29, it’s Block Friday: a day when Extinction Rebellion joins the youth call for the climate,” the climate change group said on Facebook. “Together, we stand to occupy in a festive way or block ‘Temples’ of consumption in more than 20 cities in France.”
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UAE To Host European-Led Naval Mission To Secure Gulf Waters
UAE To Host European-Led Naval Mission To Secure Gulf Waters
France announced Sunday that a proposed European-led mission to patrol the Persian Gulf will be based out of a recently established French naval base in Abu Dhabi, and that the naval patrol will soon go “operational” amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington.
Paris has spearheaded efforts to get the European maritime security mission off the ground, in competition with US efforts at establishing an American-led mission, which Iran and some European allies fear could lead to war, given Iranian leaders have condemned any US efforts to “police” the vital Strait of Hormuz.
“This morning we formalized that the command post will be based on Emirati territory,” Defence Minister Florence Parly told reporters in the UAE capital.
“We hope … to contribute to a navigation that is as safe as possible in a zone which we know is disputed and where there has already been a certain number of serious incidents,” she explained of the French-led mission.
The maritime patrol is expected to start early next year and will involve some ten European and non-European nations.
Parly further condemned the latest Iranian announcements confirming that it is blowing past uranium enrichment limits previously agreed to under the 2015 nuclear deal.
The maritime initiative since being first proposed in July has received broad support in Europe, including the UK, following the summer-long ‘tanker wars’ which had resulted in the months-long capture of a British-flagged vessel, later released.
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France: More Death to Free Speech
France: More Death to Free Speech
- Defending someone who is accused of being a “racist” implies the risk of being accused of being a “racist” too. Intellectual terror reigns in France.
- France is moving from a “muzzled press to a muzzling press that destroys free speech”. — Alain Finkielkraut, writer and philosopher.
- Writers other than Éric Zemmour have been hauled into court and totally excluded from all media, simply for describing reality.
- In a society where freedom of speech exists, it would be possible to discuss the use of these statements, but in France today, freedom of speech has been almost completely destroyed.
- Soon in France, no one will dare to say that any attack openly inspired by Islam has any connection with Islam.
On September 28, a “Convention of the Right” took place in Paris, organized by Marion Marechal, a former member of French parliament and now director of France’s Institute of Social, Economic and Political Sciences. The purpose of the convention was to unite France’s right-wing political factions. In a keynote speech, the journalist Éric Zemmour harshly criticized Islam and the Islamization of France. He described the country’s “no-go zones” (Zones Urbaines Sensibles; Sensitive Urban Zones) as “foreign enclaves” in French territory and depicted, as a process of “colonization”, the growing presence in France of Muslims who do not integrate.
Zemmour quoted the Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, who said that the no-go zones are “small Islamic Republics in the making”. Zemmour said that a few decades ago, the French could talk freely about Islam but that today it is impossible, and he denounced the use of the “hazy concept of Islamophobia to make it impossible to criticize Islam, to reestablish the notion of blasphemy to the benefit of the Muslim religion alone…”
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“This Is A Major Risk”: France Rolls Out New Facial Recognition Technology
“This Is A Major Risk”: France Rolls Out New Facial Recognition Technology
Is this how French President Emmanuel Macron is choosing to celebrate 70 years of Communist rule?
In a plan that sounds eerily similar to China’s ‘social credit score’ system, Macron and the French Interior Ministry are pushing ahead plans to launch a national facial-recognition program, arguing that it “will make the state more efficient.”
According to Bloomberg, the ID program, known as “Alicem”, is set to be rolled out in November, after the launch was moved forward from an end-of-year timeline.
Despite objections from the rest of the European community, Macron appears dead-set on adopting the new system, ensuring that all French citizens will be incorporated into the project, whether they support it or not.
Even within the French government, there’s opposition to the new plan. France’s data regulator argued that the program breaches the European rule of consent, and a French privacy group is challenging the plan in France’s highest administrative court.
There’s also the question of security: It took a hacker just over an hour to break into a “secure” government messaging app earlier this year. Should a hacker break into this database, the repercussions would be much more serious.
But the government simply won’t be swayed…which isn’t all that surprising. Macron has shown strong Statist tendencies since shortly after he was sworn in.
“The government wants to funnel people to use Alicem and facial recognition,” said Martin Drago, a lawyer member of the privacy group La Quadrature du Net that filed the lawsuit against the state. “We’re heading into mass usage of facial recognition. (There’s) little interest in the importance of consent and choice.” The case, filed in July, won’t suspend Alicem.
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Burgundy’s Vineyards Haven’t Been This Hot And Dry Since “The Black Death” In The 14th Century
Burgundy’s Vineyards Haven’t Been This Hot And Dry Since “The Black Death” In The 14th Century
Vintners in France haven’t seen such a succession of hot weather and dry harvest since the 14th century, during a time called “the Black Death”, according to Bloomberg. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
Though these weather extremes may seem normal to those under the age of 30, they are unprecedented by historical standards, going all the way back to when Europe was recovering from the pandemic that trounced its population. This is the conclusion of researchers who examined temperature, grape harvest and wage data dating back to 1354.
In their paper, the authors led by Thomas Labbe conclude:
“Outstanding hot and dry years in the past were outliers, while they have become the norm since the transition to rapid warming in 1988. Hotter temperatures over the last three decades have resulted in Burgundy grapes being harvested on average 13 days earlier than they were over the last 664 years.”
The study underscores how the effects of climate change are forcing some populations to adapt to new cycles.
The hotter temperatures have an effect on Burgundy’s farmers tending to their vineyards, itinerant harvesters, merchants and consumers.
Through looking at about 300 documentary weather reports, the researchers looked at the legendary hot summer of 1540 that dried up the Rhine River. That year, workers harvested grapes that looked like “withered raisins” and “yielded a sweet sherry-like wine which made people rapidly drunk.”
Doesn’t sound that bad to us…
Regardless, Hugh Johnson, a well known wine critic, said tasting the 1540 vintage was “one of the most memorable moments of his career”.
High temperatures don’t necessarily guarantee quality harvests, according to the research, which notes that the duration of ripening and winemaker styles are also important inputs.
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Global Warming and U.S. National Security Diplomacy
Global Warming and U.S. National Security Diplomacy
Old power station, West Linn, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Control of oil has long been a key aim of U.S. foreign policy. The Paris climate agreements and any other Green programs to reduce the pace of global warming are viewed as threatening the aim of dominating world energy markets by keeping economies dependent on oil under U.S. control. Also blocking U.S. willingness to help stem global warming is the oil industry’s economic and hence political power. Its product is not only energy but also global warming, along with plastic pollution.
This fatal combination of the national security state’s mentality and oil industry lobbying threatens to destroy the planet’s climate. The prospect of raising temperatures and sea levels along the coasts while inland regions suffer drought is viewed simply as collateral damage to the geopolitics of oil. The State Department is reported to have driven out individuals warning about global warming’s negative impact.[1]
The only attempts to restrict oil imports are the new Cold War trade sanctions to isolate Russia, Iran and Venezuela. The aim is to increase foreign dependence on U.S., British and French oil, giving American strategists the power to make other countries “freeze in the dark” if they follow a path diverging from U.S. diplomatic aims.
It was the drive to control the world’s oil trade – and to keep it dollarized – that led the United States to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to invade Iraq in 2013, and most recently for Donald Trump to isolate Iran while backing Saudi Arabia and its Wahabi foreign legion in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Sixty years earlier, in 1953, the CIA and Britain joined to overthrow Iran’s elected President Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent him from nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. A similar strategy explains U.S. attempts at regime change in Venezuela and Russia.
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Macron’s French Police Openly Attacking the People Seriously Injuring if not Trying to Kill Them
Macron’s French Police Openly Attacking the People Seriously Injuring if not Trying to Kill Them
Unfortunately, as governments begin to collapse moving into 2021/2022 due to the complete failure of Socialism, they will not simply yield to the people and admit that their fiscal mismanagement is the cause of destroying everyone’s future. They will not go quietly into the light. Here we see French police acting no different than the police in Venezuela terrorizing and suppressing the people there as well.
Spain Battles Self-Combusting Manure As “Heat-Wave From Hell” Torments Europe
Spain Battles Self-Combusting Manure As “Heat-Wave From Hell” Torments Europe
Update (1240ET): Temperatures were even hotter than expected across Europe today and, as Accuweather reports, the extreme heat wave is suspected of killing several people as it set an all-time high in France.
The highest temperature ever measured across France in the entirety of record keeping was set on Friday afternoon. Temperatures soared to 45.8 C (114.4 F) at Gallargues-le-Montueux in southeastern France, exceeding the nation’s previous all-time record high of 44.1 C (111.4 F) at Conqueyrac on Aug. 12, 2003.
In neighboring Spain, the heat has been blamed on the deaths of several elderly people as hundreds of firefighters are battling a major wildfire near Tarragona in northeastern Spain. About 10,000 acres of forest and vegetation are being threatened by the blaze, which has been described by regional government officials as one of the worst in 20 years. More than 50 people have been evacuated.
CNN reports that the fire may have been started by an “improperly managed” pile of manure that self-combusted, similar to the threat that wet hay bales pose.
Sadly, Europeans will have to wait until Monday for the start of any relief…
* * *
Record-breaking heat scorches central Europe as many braced Thursday for temperatures above 100 F.
Wednesday was one of the most sizzling days on record across Europe with average June temperatures and all-time temperature records broken, reported AccuWeather.
Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic recorded its highest temperatures ever during June.
Temperatures were 100.8 F at Radzyń, Poland, on Wednesday, while Coschen station (Berlin-Brandenburg) printed 101.5 F in Germany. However, temperatures in Germany didn’t surpass the 104.5 F all-time high, set in Kitzingen on August 2015.
Czech Republic, Doksany recorded 102 F, hitting an all-time high for the country that was previously set at 100.8 F at Brno-Žabovřesky in June 2000.
Putin, the African Queen
Putin, the African Queen
Luke Harding is a former journalist for the Guardian. I say former because while he is still writing for the paper, he lost his one remaining shred of credibility last November with an article about Paul Manafort visiting Julian Assange multiple times in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which soon was discredited as badly as an article can be, but has still not been retracted or corrected by the paper.
If you get caught in that kind of nonsense, you’re surely not a journalist. Of course that was just one in an endless list of blubber that Harding produced about the likes of Assange and Trump. And Putin of course. And now he’s back with more. About Putin.
Somewhere in this new article by Luke Harding and Jason Burke for the venerable publication, they say that Russia only became interested in Africa in 2014. And obviously you know you can stop reading right there. Russia’s been interested in Africa for decades. Because it’s laden with resources. Because everybody else is there to get to those resources.
But Harding manages to write up a piece that makes Russia’s interest terribly suspicious and menacing. Because, you know, Skripal. The Russians did it. He’s basing this on docs he claims to have seen, but doesn’t provide, given to him by an “investigative unit” based in London and funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin’s worst domestic enemy.
Leaked Documents Reveal Russian Effort To Exert Influence In Africa
Russia is seeking to bolster its presence in at least 13 countries across Africa by building relations with existing rulers, striking military deals, and grooming a new generation of “leaders” and undercover “agents”, leaked documents reveal.
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France threatens journalists with jail time for exposing use of French arms in Yemen
France threatens journalists with jail time for exposing use of French arms in Yemen
French journalists could face up to five years in prison and be fined up to $83,000
France is ranked 32nd out of 180 countries in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index (AFP)By MEE and agencies
France has threatened three French journalists with potential jail time for using secret documents to reveal the country’s involvement in the Yemen civil war.
In a series of reports published in April, investigative journalists from Disclose and Radio France revealed the number of French arms sold to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. REVEALED: The full extent of US arms deals with Saudi Arabia and UAERead More »
The documents, authored by France’s Directorate of Military Intelligence (DSGI), showed that senior French officials had lied about the role of French weapons in the Yemen War.
Following the publication of the reports in April, Disclose’s co-founders Geoffrey Livolsi and Mathias Destal and Radio France journalist Benoît Collombat were asked to attend a hearing at the DSGI headquarters in Paris.
The three journalists refused to reveal their sources after being questioned by the DSGI on the origin of the document, their work and posts on Facebook and Twitter.
The journalists used the hearing to defend press freedom and how it was in the public interest to publish details from the leaked DSGI document.
Press Freedom has been protected for more than 130 years under the Press Law of 1881, which gives journalists the right to keep sources confidential.
We are concerned that the sole aim of this hearing is to use the threat of prosecution to put pressure on these journalists to reveal their source
– Paul Coppin, Reporters Without Borders
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Chaos Erupts In Paris As “Armageddon” Protesters Riot During French Holiday
Chaos Erupts In Paris As “Armageddon” Protesters Riot During French Holiday
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of Paris and other French cities on Wednesday to mark International Workers’ Day (also known as Labor Day), only to clash with French riot police. The demonstrators included Yellow Vests, trade unionists, climate change protesters and Black Bloc (antifa) – which posted on social media that they wanted an “Armageddon” rally that would turn Paris into the “Riot Capital of Europe,” according to the Daily Mail.
More than 7,400 police, gendarmes and soldiers were on hand to quell the more violent protesters. Interior Minister Christophe Castaner said “‘There’s no question of dramatising anything, it is a question of being prepared,” adding that “1,000 to 2,000 extremists” were expected to join the protests.
Les Marianne Lilloises ont rejoint le cortège en silence #1erMai #Lille
Marching alongside labor unions, pensioners, students and others, the protesters were hit with large amounts of tear gas, baton strikes and other crowd control measures.
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Yellow Vest Movement Struggles to Reinvent Democracy as Macron Cranks Up Propaganda and Repression
Yellow Vest Movement Struggles to Reinvent Democracy as Macron Cranks Up Propaganda and Repression
Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
After five months of constant presence at traffic circles, toll-booths and hazardous Saturday marches, the massive, self-organized social movement known as the Yellow Vests has just held its second nationwide “Assembly of Assemblies.” Hundreds of autonomous Yellow Vest activist groups from all over France each chose two delegates (one woman, one man) to gather in the port city of St. Nazaire for weekend of deliberation (April 5-7).
After weeks of skirmishing with the municipal authorities, the local Yellow Vests were able to host 700 delegates at the St. Nazaire “House of the People,” and the three-day series of general meetings and working groups went off without a hitch in an atmosphere of good-fellowship. A sign on the wall proclaimed: “No one has the solution, but everybody has a piece of it.”
Their project: mobilize their “collective intelligence” to reorganize, strategize, and prolong their struggle. Their aim: achieve the immediate goals of livable wages and retirements, restoration of social benefits and public services like schools, transportation, post offices, hospitals, taxing the rich and ending fiscal fraud to pay for preserving the environment, and, most ambitious of all, reinventing democracy in the process. Their Declaration ends with the phrase “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” I often wonder if they know who coined it.
Yellow and Green Unite and Fight
Particular attention was paid to the issue of the environment, reaffirming the popular slogan: “End of the week. End of the world. Same logic, same struggle.” (It rhymes in French.) The Assembly went further and called on “All persons who wish to put an end to the expropriation of the living to take up a conflictual stance against the present system in order to create, together, a new ecological, popular social movement.”
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Firing on Protesters: Will Macron’s New Tactics Against the Yellow Vests Make Simmering Pot Boil Over?
Firing on Protesters: Will Macron’s New Tactics Against the Yellow Vests Make Simmering Pot Boil Over?
France stands at a crossroads, with the Macron government attempting to drag the country in a new direction and a disunited and leaderless movement attempting to reverse this change. The outcome of this battle will shape the course of Western Europe’s largest country for decades to come.
NICE, FRANCE — A 73-year-old activist is the latest casualty of French President Emmanuel Macron’s crackdown on the Gilets Jaunes protest movement. Geneviève Legay of the anti-globalization group Attac had her skull fractured by police in Nice as they charged at her during the nineteenth consecutive week of protests against the president’s unpopular austerity and tax policies. The feminist campaigner and grandmother was carrying a rainbow flag marked “peace” as she was attacked, in what her family calls “willful violence” in an official complaint.
The embattled president went after Legay, currently in serious condition in the hospital, lecturing her on her “irresponsibility” for being in a “prohibited” area, claiming that, “when one is fragile and risks being shoved, one does not go to places that are declared off-limits and one does not put oneself in that kind of situation,” adding that he wished her “a speedy recovery…and perhaps a kind of wisdom.”
Macron’s comments have been received by many as a calculated addition of insult to injury. Leftist presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon claimed Legay did not need his lessons in wisdom while Nicolas Dupont-Aignan of the right-wing Stand Up France group derided Macron’s “arrogance” and “inhumanity.”
The origins of the Gilet Jaunes
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Spectacular Violence as a Weapon of War Against the Yellow Vests
Spectacular Violence as a Weapon of War Against the Yellow Vests
Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
Violence is a spectacular weapon deployed by the ruling class to discredit movements from below and justify their repression. It is spectacular in the sense of being a great and powerful political tool for governing the masses, and keeping them in their place. In order to do this, however, the weapon of violence is spectacularin a second sense: it creates a carefully orchestrated mise en scène that seeks to render ruling class violence invisible, while simultaneously transforming acts of resistance into prodigious spectacles of criminal violence.
This is how Act 18 of the Yellow Vests is currently being presented by the mass media: at the precise moment at which the government was concluding its democratic consultation of the people via Emmanuel Macron’s “Grand Débat,” the Yellow Vests have unleashed an inordinate amount of violence that now needs to be repressed in the strongest possible terms. The president of the Champs-Elysées Committee, Jean-Noël Reinhardt, declared in an interview in which he is surrounded by the microphones of many of the major press outlets, that the movement is no longer one of the Yellow Vests, but rather of Black Vests that simply “express hatred and the will to destroy.” Proclaiming that this situation cannot be allowed to continue because of its impact on commercial and tourist activity, as well as its defamation of the global symbol of the Champs-Élysées, his statement bleeds seamlessly into the declaration made by the Prime Minster, Édouard Philippe: new measures will be put in place to prohibit protests in certain locations and allow for even more aggressive police crackdowns.
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