Wacky French News Roundup

Visitors to Paris will have noticed the electronic signs placed at major intersections by the mayor's office. They often indicate pollution levels and sometimes issue warnings for the elderly to stay in doors and keep activity levels to a minimum. Now the French Agency for environmental health security (AFSSE) is reporting that auto-mobile air pollution kills five to six thousand people a year in France. That's about a third of the number of peopel that died in the space of two weeks during the heat wave last August; however, back then, authorities cited air-pollution as one of the major contributing factors in the death toll. ("...searing temperatures and a lack of wind left a cloud of smog hanging over Paris," say Reuters.) I was there. It was so hot you couldn't move, hotter than I've ever felt it here in NYC.) France is two years behind schedule in its plans to meet minimum requirements for biofuel ingredients in gasoline by 2005. View AFSSE's March '04 report here (PDF: 1.9 Mb; 147 pp).

That crazy, racist witch Brigitte Bardot is on trial for hate speech AGAIN. She's been dragged to court for passages in her book, "A Cry in the Silence," which is supposed to be about how much she loves animals but reportedly contains denunciations of interracial marriage, the unemployed, homosexuals, women in government, Muslims and Islam in general. She is reported to have broken down in tears to-day during testimony. Click here for a picture of her and Jean-Marie Le Pen comforting French soldiers during the Algerian war. In October '97, a court fined Bardot for saying France was being overrun by sheep slaughtering Muslims. In January 1998, she was again fined $3,250 for incitation to racial hatred in comments on civilian massacres in Algeria (you can all guess what the substance of racist remarks on the subject will be, no doubt). Let's hope they give her a meaningful punishment this time.

The Elysée Palace is announcing that Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac will meet with 400 French and British students at the Palace this Sunday at 11 am local time. They will all have a chat about European construction. (This has obvious echos of April's visit by the Queen in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the entente cordiale. Sunday is also Europe Day. ) Blair and Chirac will hold a working lunch with Raffarin.