France on The Huffington Post

French Museum Strike Closes Louvre, Versailles

2009-12-03T11:23:49Z

PARIS — The Louvre Museum and the royal palace at Versailles were closed Thursday because of a French museum workers' strike that appears to be gathering steam.

Frustrated tourists gathered outside the landmark pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre, blocked off by workers. They are protesting government plans not to replace half of retiring public servants, which will affect the country's national museums.

Sarkozy Plans To Force Gender Equality On French Boardrooms

2009-12-03T09:24:00Z

Nicolas Sarkozy's centre-right party has put forward legislation that would see women make up half the figures in France's leading boardrooms by 2015, under a bold plan to impose gender equality on the male-dominated business world.

Europe Welcomes Obama Afghanistan Speech But Few Pledge Troops

2009-12-02T10:04:59Z

PARIS — European leaders and top diplomats hailed President Barack Obama's speech defining the new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, but few countries were forthcoming Wednesday with pledges of fresh troops.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy commended the speech as "courageous, determined and lucid" but stopped short of offering more soldiers from France, the fourth largest contributor to NATO's Afghan effort.

Beaver Creek: Downhill training begins today

2009-12-01T23:01:58Z

BEAVER CREEK, Colorado- France's David Poisson is on the clock.

The French racer will be the first of 91 racers out of the gate in today's first run of downhill training at 11 a.m. at Beaver Creek in preparation for racing which begins Friday with the Birds

Guantanamo prisoners transferred

2009-12-01T02:15:57Z

Two Tunisian men to be tried in Italy, while others released to France and Hungary.

Read more: Hungary, France, Italy, Home News

Eugene Hernandez: Paris, City of Cinema (or, In Bed with Agnes)

2009-11-30T12:30:17Z

New York, NY, November 30, 2009—Last week, Amsterdam. This week, Paris. A city of cinema like few others. The entertainment industry looks to Hollywood, but modern international cinema has Paris as its unofficial capital - the city’s status confirmed with the birth of the French New Wave fifty years ago. And the matriarch of that movement is certainly Agnes Varda. indieWIRE managing editor Brian Brooks and I spent some time with her on Friday in her …

An image from a scene in "The Beaches of Agnes," outside Agnes Varda's home and office on Rue Daguerre in Paris. Image courtesy cine-Tamaris.

Today: A tanker hijack and a Swiss vote to ban minarets

2009-11-30T12:00:04Z

Stories compiled by Gizem Yarbil, Connie Kargbo, Channtal Fleischfresser, Christine Kiernan, Ivette Feliciano, and Mohammad al-Kassim, and edited by Rebecca Haggerty and Ben Piven.

PHILIPPINES: Philippine journalists gathered in the hundreds Monday to protest the massacre of 57 people, including 30 journalists, last week.

BANGLADESH: In southern Bangladesh, 77 people have been reported dead after a ferry capsized.

SOMALIA: A Greek-owned tanker delivering oil from Saudi Arabia to the U.S. was seized by Somali pirates on Sunday. The tanker, which has 28 crew members on board, is believed to be o ne of the largest vessels seized by Somali pirates, weighing in at 300,000 tonnes.

MAURITANIA: Three Spanish aid volunteers went missing on Sunday in the West African nation of Mauritania. Spanish authorities fear the volunteers may have been kidnapped by Al-Qaeda operatives.

RWANDA: France and Rwanda have agreed to restore ties three years after severing relations over a dispute regarding the Rwandan genocide.

Swiss referendum poster. Photo: flickr user rytc

GERMANY: The trial of alleged Nazi John Demjanjuk got underway Monday in Munich. The 89-year-old retired Ohio auto worker is accused of being an accessory to the the murders of 27,900 people at Poland’s Sobibor camp.

NETHERLANDS: Radovan Karadzic, on trial in the Hague for allegedly masterminding atrocities against Serbians during the Bosnian war, has filed a motion questioning the legitimacy of the UN war crimes tribunal where he is being tried.

SWITZERLAND: The Swiss decision to ban the construction of minarets is, according to the Swiss Justice Minister, “directed against fundamentalist developments.” Moreover, the weekend vote has prompted right-wing representative of several other European nations, including Denmark and the Netherlands, to call for similar votes in their own countries.

PERU: The government of Peru issued a public apology this weekend for the first time ever to its Afro-Peruvian population for what it termed centuries of abuse, exclusion and discrimination.

URUGUAY: A former guerrilla leader has been elected President of Paraguay.

HONDURAS: Porfirio Lobo appears to have won the presidential election in Honduras, but what happens now, after the elections, is still up for debate.

DUBAI: Stocks continue to fall in the United Arab Emirates as trading reopened after a four-day holiday.

An official at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said that the organization is closely watching Dubai’s Government plan for restructuring Dubai World.

ISRAEL: Settlers say they won’t cooperate with Civil Administration officials as one of several planned protest gestures after the Cabinet decision to halt new construction projects.

IRAN: Iran says it will expand its nuclear program after last week’s rebuke by the UN nuclear watchdog agency.

Top stories from around the world as brought to you by the Worldfocus newsroom. Today: Somali pirates seize an oil tanker; Honduras holds a presidential election; and the Swiss vote to ban the construction of new minarets to accompany mosques.
http://worldfocus.org/files/2009/11/th_switzerland_flickruserry.jpg

How to Wear Stella McCartney for Gap Kids: Remember all that talk about whether...

2009-11-30T11:01:02Z

Remember all that talk about whether an adult woman could (or should) squeeze into Stella McCartney's Gap Kids collection? Last week, Carla Bruni wore the bandleader jacket while "performing a duet with Harry Connick Jr. on France's Canal Plus channel." There you have it, folks: The collection is totally appropriate...

Smokers' paradise: French turn to Belgium for cheap cigarettes

2009-11-29T19:15:30Z

Afew years ago, Adinkerke was a forgotten, dilapidated village of red-brick houses, just inside the Belgian border with France. In the past four years, however, it has been transformed into a glittering mini-Las Vegas: a village full of garish signs reading "Smokey River", "Eurobaccy", "Tobacco Alley", "Smugglers' Corner", and "Coronation Street Tobacco Shop".

Read more: Las Vegas-Nevada, Belgium, France, Home News

Commonwealth Leaders Call For Ambitious, "Legally Binding" Climate Change Deal

2009-11-29T15:07:49Z

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad — Leaders of the Commonwealth countries called Saturday for a legally binding international agreement on climate change and a global fund with billions of dollars to help poor countries meet its mandates.

The 53-nation meeting was the largest gathering of international leaders before next month's global climate summit in Copenhagen.

Ali A. Rizvi: Re-Creating Creation, Take 2: The Large Hadron Collider Fires Up Again

2009-11-24T15:37:10Z

On Friday, thousands of scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) -- where Tim Berners-Lee and a group of his students invented the World Wide Web -- embarked on their second attempt in 14 months to invent, or re-invent, something almost as significant: the universe.

Yes, at the heart of history's largest and most expensive experiment -- at over $7 billion -- is the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. (That's hadron with the d before the r, kids, not vice versa.) The 27 kilometer (17 mi.) long particle accelerator is buried over 150 meters underground near the French-Swiss border.

On September 10, 2008, over two thousand physicists who collaborated to varying degrees in the completion of the project watched as the first attempt to circulate a beam of protons in the LHC was successfully carried out. Nine days later, however, a glitch in the electrical connection between two of the over 9000 superconducting magnets used to guide the protons on their path resulted in a massive helium leak, causing the apparatus to lose its supercool temperature of -271 degrees Celsius (making it one of the coldest places in the universe), and effectively shutting it down.

This glitch was costly, but far from the only curse that has plagued the LHC in the last 14 months. In early October, a CERN physicist was arrested for suspected links to Al Qaeda. On November 3, a bit of baguette, likely dropped by a bird on an electrical substation above the machine, choked off part of the machine's power supply, causing it to overheat, and -- in strict theoretical physics jargon -- totally freaked out the scientists.

The terrorist arrest and the baguette fiasco were both subsequently resolved, and as of last week, the LHC is back in action. If all goes according to plan, high energy collisions between subatomic particles will finally be produced in the next few months and years to re-create and study the conditions that existed at the time of the Big Bang and right afterwards.

This means venturing into the interface between energy and matter and watching how subatomic particles gained mass as the universe cooled. It means potentially witnessing what led to the creation of time. It means possibly discovering new spatial dimensions that we've never seen before.

It means actually observing the Higgs boson, the elusive little thing that could help us get closer to the Grand Unified Theory -- the "theory of everything" -- that Albert Einstein died trying to find. Also called the God particle, the Higgs boson is almost like a subatomic stem cell -- a large, unstable primordial particle that existed for a mere fraction of a second after the Big Bang before breaking down into other smaller subatomic particles, including those we see today. Brilliant, right?

Well, not if you talk to nuclear safety officer Walter Wagner. Wagner is one of a few passionate LHC critics who, with a bunch of his worried fellow citizens, brought forth a lawsuit against CERN and others working on the project last year in an attempt to get them to delay the launch of the LHC until its safety had been adequately assessed. He even started an organization in protest against the LHC.

And as of Friday, November 20, another group, very cleverly called conCERNed International, has filed a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Committee, protesting the LHC's imminent restart.

So why are these critics so scared of colliding hadrons?

For one, they think that the experiment would lead to the creation of microscopic black holes, which have a nagging habit of showing up every time some idiot creates a universe somewhere. These tiny black holes would potentially get caught up in Earth's gravitational pull, unable to escape it, causing them to coalesce and become a much bigger black hole that swallows up all existing matter -- a cosmic killjoy that looks a little like this:

Other concerns include the creation of "strangelets" -- little things created when quarks, which make up protons and neutrons, are rearranged and remixed to make a certain type of negatively charged particle that will go around turning everything it touches into a negatively charged strangelet like itself. Kind of like a subatomic Dracula. We all know people like that at work.

So don't bother paying your credit card bill for the next few months. In fact, max it out.

The brains at CERN have countered these concerns in the past in a public report and said:

"Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments -- and the planet still exists ... Astronomers observe an enormous number of larger astronomical bodies throughout the universe, all of which are also struck by cosmic rays. The universe as a whole conducts more than 10 million LHC-like experiments per second. The possibility of any dangerous consequences contradicts what astronomers see -- stars and galaxies still exist."

Still, the decision is harrowing. Do I go all out and live it up in every way I want, assuming that there will be no consequences because of an impending Doomsday? What if I wake up the day after and find out everything's fine -- except for the hordes of people looking to kick my ass? Well, if this new Hadron hype turns out to be anything like that Y2K panicfest in 1999, I'm leaving the fucking country.

Still, in its most favored scenario, we'll know a little more about how everything came to be, and whether, as Einstein said, God really played dice with the universe.

That is, of course, unless the Higgs boson travels back in time to prevent its own existence. Yes, you read that right. Bear with me: this is actually a serious proposition put forward by Holger Bech Nielsen, a fairly established physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, who believes that the LHC mishaps aren't exactly coincidental. "You could explain it by saying that God rather hates Higgs particles and attempts to avoid them," he says. Um, okay.

"Bollocks!" responds Brian Cox, who works on the ATLAS project at the LHC, talking about Nielsen's theory on a recent episode of The Colbert Report. He has told The Times that if time travelers from the future did successfully come back here and achieve their anti-LHC motives, he would refer us to an article supporting Nielsen "that I wrote in 2025."

If the doomsayers are right, then in the worst case scenario, we'll be floating around in a sea of Higgs bosons watching those guys from the Heaven's Gate cult glide through the universe on that Hale-Bopp comet, laughing at us. If I don't make it, please know that my large hadron was always hyperdense for your black hole.

See you all in a parallel universe.

Sarkozys On 'The Simpsons' (VIDEO): Clip Mocking French President And First Lady Becomes Internet Hit In France

2009-11-24T10:42:15Z

Though little noticed at the time that it aired, a brief bit mocking French President Nicolas Sarkozy and First Lady Carla Bruni in a recent episode of 'The Simpsons' has become an Internet sensation in France, the Telegraph reports.

The couples' appearance, in the November 15th episode entitled "The Devil Wears Nada," apparently flew under the radar until this weekend, when clips of the appearance became a viral sensation, according to the Independent.

Their cameos were unauthorized, perhaps because the parody of them was particularly mocking.

In the episode, Homer and his friend Carl Carlson visit Paris, where they bump into Bruni at a party. After some brief chit-chat she tells Carl, "I want to make love, right now."

Sarkozy's segment is more brief, and consists of him saying what may become the immortal line, "You're getting cozy with Sarkozy," when picking up the telephone.

WATCH:

Nicolas Sarkozy et Carla Bruni dans les Simpson !
Uploaded by lemondededemainTV. - News videos hot off the press.

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Foursquare Boasts More Than 100,000 Users

2009-11-24T07:46:44Z

Since Foursquare's launch, it has added more than 100 worldwide cities to its roster, recently launching in Berlin, Paris, and Madrid; the New-York based social-networking service now also has more than 100,000 users.

Associated Press

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Read more: New-York, Madrid, Berlin, Paris-France, France, Home News

Airbus A380 Completes First Commercial Europe-U.S. Flight

2009-11-23T12:31:32Z

Air France on Friday became the first European airline to operate the double-decker Airbus A380 in commercial service, completing its inaugural flight from Charles De Gaulle Airport in Paris to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.

Son Objects To Moving Albert Camus' Remains To Pantheon

2009-11-23T10:26:56Z

PARIS — Albert Camus' children are torn about whether to allow the Nobel Prize-winning author's remains to be moved from southern France to Paris' Pantheon, the final resting place of other French greats like Voltaire and Victor Hugo.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has said he wants to honor the author of "The Stranger" by moving his remains to the Pantheon for the 50th anniversary of his death in January, but that he needs the family's approval.

Joan Z. Shore: The Wages of Fear: Alibis and Lies

2009-11-23T05:39:30Z

Had it been a Christian or a Jew who slaughtered thirteen people in one mad frenzy, I doubt there would have been much psycho-analysis of the murderer and his motives. It was a ghastly criminal act, period.

But the murderer is a Muslim, and rather than examining his crime as a possible terrorist act, some of our home-grown gurus psychobabbled about Nidal Hasan's personal distress: unhappy, loveless, angry, afraid. (As if being unhappy gives you a license to kill.) Now we are discovering how much of Hasan's "unhappiness" was linked to his Islamic convictions.

There is a strong trend these days, particularly in America, to pussy-foot around ethnic and racial issues under the banner of political correctness. Yet it wasn't so many decades ago that minorities ("negroes" and Jews especially) were fiercely segregated and persecuted. Today, going to the other extreme, we are very careful not to insult or irritate Muslims. Is this a sign of tolerance, or fear?

Muslims living in America (and in Europe, too, for that matter) were not brought here as slaves or prisoners of war. It was their choice to come and to stay, so it is their responsibility to respect American laws and it is America's responsibility to expect that respect, no alibis provided. A Muslim who kills is still a killer; race and religion are not mitigating factors.

But they may be contributing factors. If Hasan's monstrous crime was truly motivated by fervent Islamic beliefs, as it appears, let's not pretend otherwise. For then there is a real problem facing America: radical Islam within our borders. That is not something that can be explained away by suave talk show pundits.

Interestingly, a very different but very sensitive case erupted nine years ago in France, also involving Islam and the media. A seasoned French-Israeli journalist, Charles Enderlin, reported an incident in Gaza in which Israeli soldiers allegedly fired on a Palestinian and his son, killing the 12-year old boy and wounding the father. The story, first reported on France 2 (state television) went around the world, unchecked and unverified. Arab nations had a field day: posters, postage stamps, and even stone memorials were created in the boy's honor....yet his death was never actually proven.

An astute Frenchman, Philippe Karsenty, questioned the story, called on medical and ballistic experts to examine the scraps of film and photos, and claimed the story was fabricated, a complete hoax. Karsenty, in turn, was sued for defamation. Now, years later, after endless legal battles, Karsenty has won against the defamation charge. But France 2 has never issued an apology or rectification, and Enderlin was awarded the prestigious Légion d'Honneur last summer!

These two cases are years and continents apart, but they are evidence of a disturbing trend: the Western world is falling into an abyss of fear and confusion and disinformation. Our "War on Terror" should be directed against ourselves, for we are allowing ourselves to be manipulated and terrorized, subtly and surely.

Undeniably, much has happened since 9/11 to undermine our confidence as a nation. American democracy, under the recent Bush presidency, has been tarnished by injustice and deceit, trampled by corruption and greed. But unless we can take a fresh look at our values, our principles, our ideals, and our goals -- and assert them -- we will be sucked into this quicksand of ambivalence and compromise and equivocation. And worst of all -- devastating, debilitating fear.

The Breakdown: Ireland-France debacle brings up question of human error

2009-11-22T02:16:40Z

Controversy. That's one of the only things that could ever make me actually write a column that has to do with soccer. Although, I mus

Bernard-Henri Lévy: We Must Replay the Match

2009-11-21T16:35:55Z

No, American friends, France is not a country of "cheaters." And the affair of Thierry Henry's hand, the scandal of the France-Ireland game that we won, but should have lost, has outraged many in Paris. Today I am publishing on the website of my magazine "La Règle du Jeu" the point of view of one of France's greatest businessmen, Marc Ladreit de Lacharriere. He is the Chairman of Fimalac; the head of the Fitch rating agency; and he is also, most of all, the director of the oldest French review, La Revue des deux Mondes. All this to say that his opinion carries a lot of weight.

Here is his text. It is entitled: "We Must Replay the Match."

In accepting a win by cheating, France is permanently compromising its reputation and its image abroad. It will not be easy to soften the severity of the comments that we are currently hearing.
So much the more so because we have the reputation as "lesson givers" the world over. In the national context, how will parents, educators, and teachers be able to tell their students not to cheat when the captain and coach of the French national team do it?

Marc Ladreit de Lacharriere

Translated from the French by Sara Phenix.

Chavez lauds Carlos the Jackal as 'great' pro-Palestinian fighter

2009-11-21T12:16:04Z

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has defended the alleged terrorist mastermind Carlos the Jackal, saying the Venezuelan imprisoned in France was an important revolutionary fighter who supported the cause of the Palestinians.
...

Ireland: France Replay Request Has "Fallen On Deaf Ears"

2009-11-21T11:38:49Z

DUBLIN — Ireland has given up hope of a World Cup playoff replay against France because of Thierry Henry's hand ball.

Henry's deliberate handling set up a goal for William Gallas in Wednesday's 1-1 draw that sent France to next year's tournament and knocked out Ireland. The Irish appealed to the French federation to agree to a replay but were turned down Friday.

Video: McDonald's Goes Upscale

2009-11-20T15:00:06Z

A McDonald's in Manhattan's posh Chelsea neighborhood is the first in the nation to undergo a sleek, European-style makeover that has already debuted in London and Paris. CNBC.com's Brooke Sopelsa has the story. (CNBC)

Paris - London - Manhattan - McDonald's - France