46% of Communes in Flood Risk Zones
A year after Storm Xynthia caused 53 deaths and 1.5 billion euros damage, much of it in Charente-Maritime, towns along both the Atlantic and Mediterranean coastlines remain vulnerable to further sea and river flooding. The SOeS-Service de l’Observation et des Statistiques de l’Environnement warned that 46% of French municipalities are today still at risk of [...]
Outdoor Poster Boys or Visual Polluters?
Few who visit or live in France can ignore JCDecaux, the name that is synonymous with outdoors or, in the view of some, grossly polluting it. For from the moment one drives or flies into France – home-base of JCDecaux, these days a powerful multinational business — it becomes very evident who owns every bus [...]
Has France Lost its Touch in North Africa?
Leftwing French commentators like Pierre Haski (founder of of Rue89.com) are critical of the way the French Foreign Ministry is reacting to the current upheaval sweeping North Africa and the Near-East. Haski told FranceInter that Paris, which has long touted its (colonial-era) expertise in and deep knowledge of the area, was making a total hash [...]
Is Skype Illegal in France?
Skype’s VOIP free telephony service used by millions around the world to make free business and personal calls via the Internet, appears to be illegal in France. The headline on a piece by Emmanuel Paquette, a technology writer with the weekly magazine l’Express February 22 says: “Skype the Internet telephony service, does not comply with [...]
France Accused of Hijacking the Internet
Le Monde calls it a “chest with many drawers.” Civil rights activists and the parliamentary opposition are outraged, but the government is giving no quarter on its widely contested LOPPSI 2 law. No matter that dubious Arab strongmen, now falling like dominoes around the southern shores of the Mediterranean, failed in their own recent Internet [...]
A Sarkozy Mix: Greens, Farmers and Muslims
As the latest opinion polls showed further swings to Marine le Pen in the 2012 presidential race, the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, chose to lecture farmers in Paris for the 48th Annual Agriculture Show on …. Muslim integration. More intriguingly his remarks, reported on the 20minutes.fr website, were prompted by a contested leftwing ecology campaign against [...]
Blame Beef (and GM) for Bee Slaughter
French meat and pork producers have taken umbrage at a set of shock posters plastered in some Paris metro stations blaming them for a range of eco-disasters from bee colony collapse to a swim-stopping poisonous green algae covering Brittany beaches. According to the environmental pressure group France Nature Environnement (FNE), French agriculture and agri-business is, [...]
Drôme Beware: Fracking Has a Record
Drilling Industry Says Diesel Use Was Legal by Abrahm Lustgarten ProPublica, Feb. 2, 2011, 6:14 p.m. Nicholas Kusnetz contributed to this report. After three members of Congress reported this week that drilling companies have been injecting large amounts of diesel fuel underground to hydraulically fracture oil and gas wells, the industry is fighting back — [...]
Failed, Politically Bankrupt, in a word Dead
German Chancellor Angela Merkel kicked off the offensive, British PM David Cameron threw it into the scrum and now President Nicolas Sarkozy has converted it, the match view is unanimous, multiculturalism in the EU is failed, politically bankrupt and dead. So what have the leaders of the EU’s three most populous states (212 million people) [...]
Is the Worm Turning?
At last there are signs of a focusing of minds in the chancelleries and cabinet offices of Europe as politicians slowly begin to acknowledge the damage they have caused by their post-World War II social engineering. First off the mark was Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany declaring unambiguously that ‘multi-kulti’ was a resounding failure. Then [...]
Jawbreaker! School lashes Lollipop Trafficker!
Flavien Roger is clearly a budding future French entrepreneur, but the business flair of this 12-year-old Vaucluse collégien is about to be crushed by a headmaster who is formally disciplining him …. for trafic de sucettes — trafficking lollipops! Flavien’s Dad you see has a bakery at Entraigues-sur-la-Sorgue (near Avignon) that does a [...]
French Week: Lost Your Shirt … Again?
Lost your shirt again? Sign up as a subscriber here and we’ll email you French News Online’s weekly newsletter FREE. You’ve absolutely nothing to lose, ever again! For the Full Flavour of France, join our growing readership. French Week, launched with much fanfare less than 6 months ago as France’s only weekly newspaper in English, [...]
HB-Henriot in receivership after 300 years
One of France’s best loved hand crafted specialist pottery makers – Quimper-based HB-Henriot Faiencerie – has gone into receivership hit by globalisation and the current global recession. HB-Henriot Faiencerie de Quimper founded in 1690 by Jean-Baptiste Bousquet, during the reign of Louis XIV, belongs to a long line of royal manufacturers Louis XIV created, including [...]
Variations on a Cellphone Theme
Cellphone ringtones are infamous for interrupting opera, concerts, the theatre and the movies. Nevertheless these Youtube Musicians show you can still turn a curse into a bit of fun: The”Nokia fugue, op. 31″ by Vincent Lo A chamber orchestra variation One for mouth-organ and piano by Jacob Venndt and here’s a jazz improvisation Next time [...]
Shale Gas threat to France’s Nougat Capital
The self-styled Nougat Capital of the world — Montélimar in the Drôme may soon find itself transformed into shale capital of France against the wishes of its inhabitants and others in the south eastern départements of Hérault, Aveyron, Lozère and Ardèche. Euro MEP José Bové is leading regional protest to stop shale gas drilling, in [...]
French, a 21st century language
Defending the study of French – “French is too important to be left to middle-class Francophiles” – Andrew Hussey writes in London’s The Observer newspaper: “What studying French has really done for me is to provide me with a new mental landscape. French writing, from Voltaire to Sartre to Houellebecq, has a hard, confrontational edge [...]
Turn Off The Lights
When Martine Passerieu, a single woman living alone in a small house in Bruguière (near Toulouse) opened her morning post over breakfast recently, she nearly dropped her croissant in consternation. The normally unassuming envelope from the power utility Electricité de France (EDF) showed no external hint of threat or alarm , however inside …..! Her [...]
The Power of the InterWebby
Here’s a warning to world governments — blocking the Internet will cost you very large sums in hard, cold cash. Preliminary OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) estimates released today in Paris claim the Egyptian government’s blocking of Internet services for 5 days is likely to have cost the country USD 90 million. “The [...]
Gallic gastronomy and the Airbus
Food rules in France as is clear from these statistical morsels Salient points about Gallic gastronomy: Total turn over by restaurants in France in 2009 was €50 billion; The industry is France’s fourth largest private employer Restaurants were the country’s top recruiter in 2009 The value of French wine sales abroad equals that of 180 [...]
