A charm offensive – well, isn’t there always SOMEONE who’s offended?

From AFP via Expatica: French diplomats try to counter riot coverage

French diplomats have been asked to step up their contacts with the foreign media to counter the harm done to France's image by weeks of front-page coverage of riots in its suburbs, foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said on Monday.

"It is true there is an image problem," Douste-Blazy told Europe 1 radio, saying that "all ambassadors have been asked to be present on the airwaves, in newspapers and on television in their countries."

Sensationalist coverage of the violence in some foreign media -- with headlines such as 'France on fire' -- has raised fears of a knock-on effect on tourism and foreign investment.


Government spokesman Jean-François Copé was to meet later on Monday with foreign reporters in Paris to brief them on the situation.

Since the start of the unrest 2,764 arrests have been made and 375 people have been sent to prison.

How about greasing some bloggers’ palms too? Or at least getting US greased? Maybe send around bottles of Armagnac, Calvados, or GM, or do we get the moonshine?

The rate of arrests seems, more or less, like a kind of secret weapon when you think about just what it is that could get you. It ain’t your Pappy’s crowbar hotel anymore, cha-cha. According to Susan Bell writing in the Scotsman, douce France has something pleasant in store for the suburban brick-chuckers:

Rat-infested French jails likened to 'dungeons in Middle Ages’

France’s prisons are the worst in Europe and their cells are akin to dungeons in the Middle Ages, according to a watchdog's report yesterday.

It blamed the government's tougher sentencing polices for aggravating chronically bad prison conditions without solving the problem of delinquency.

The report said French jails suffered from overcrowding, bad hygiene, rising violence and suicide rates of more than six times the national average - France has Europe's highest suicide rate among prisoners.

"Fifteen months to treat a toothache - one is less well treated when one is in prison than when one is an animal in the zoo," the main lawyers' union in France said.

The report placed the blame squarely on policies championed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister who has stated his intention to run for president in 2007, saying France's conservative government was wrong to fight delinquency with a drive for longer sentences.

"The place remains an inhuman nightmare," she said, "an eternal shame to France."

Shame? These are the same sorts of people who will exhibit dismay when crime goes down IN SPITE OF rising incarceration rates. Besides, with a suicide rate that high, who needs a death penalty?

Prisoners certainly deserve decent medical care, but we’re still talking about prison. It still has to be worse than a welfare supported lifestyle to be unpleasant enough to make one think ‘Don’t do the crime if you won’t do the time.’ I believe that concept is completely lost on Baroness Kennedy, among others in the harem of the left. So if the dental care sucks if the state is running it in public, why should it be any better IN the hoosegow?