Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
About 100 official documents concerning the “The Great Famine in China, 1958-1962” have been published by the historian Zhou Xunwrites Helmut Dahmer.
In her review of this work (“Uncovering a great leap into an abyss,” Sept. 6), Didi Kirsten Tatlow says that, compared with Hitler’s Holocaust or Stalin’s gulag, Mao Zedong’s organized famine has until now been one of the more or less forgotten crimes against humanity. I should add that the Chinese famine has been the biggest one in the history of mankind. This was the result of the second endeavor of a Stalinist party to enslave the peasant majority of a huge country to accelerate its industrialization. Karl Marx remarked that important historical events tend to be repeated: What happened the first time as a tragedy, in the second edition comes back as a farce. During the 20th century we have learned that the repetition of a tragedy may surpass all we can imagine. The enforced collectivization in Russia, especially in Ukraine, claimed about six million victims. The Chinese re-enactment of this tragedy surpassed the Russian death toll at least five times.
The Zeppelin-slayer; the 'wing-walker'; the helicopter pilot who thwarted the IRA... In this extract from his major new book, Lord Ashcroft salutes Britain's greatest airmen
Le camp des Milles, une ancienne tuilerie-briqueterie de 15 000 m2 désaffectée, ouvrit en septembre 1939, d'abord pour interner les "ressortissants de la puissance ennemie", autrement dit majoritairement des Allemands et des Autrichiens réfugiés dans le Midi pour... échapper au régime nazi. A l'été 1942, ils furent plus de 2 000, dont une centaine d'enfants, à être déportés à Auschwitz, via Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis).In Le Monde, Renaud Lavergne tells us the story of a woman whose family was taken
to a French concentration camp during World War II while Julia Holland recounts the story of her mother Rosemary, a former Telegraph journalist who was one of the first women to escape from internment in France.Les Milles est le seul camp français encore en l'état aujourd'hui. Son histoire est désormais reconstituée, ouverte au grand public qui découvrira, notamment, comment de nombreux artistes et intellectuels y furent internés, parmi lesquels le peintre Max Ernst ou l'écrivain Lion Feuchtwanger.
… Ce matin du 4 août [1942], donc, la police fait irruption au Terminus des ports. "On nous a donné une heure pour rassembler toutes nos affaires. On nous a dit qu'on nous conduisait dans un endroit d'où l'on nous enverrait en famille dans un autre lieu jusqu'à la fin de la guerre. Puis on nous a jetés dans un camion, et j'ai reconnu le camp des Milles, devant lequel nous retrouvions parfois mon père. Comment aurais-je pu penser cela ?...", dit Miriam Altman, toujours "estomaquée", soixante-dix ans plus tard que cette rafle ait été menée "par des policiers français ayant suivi les ordres des Allemands, alors que ceux-ci [qui n'occuperont la zone sud qu'en novembre] n'étaient pas encore là ".
She had become an au pair in France just months before the outbreak of the Second World War. Trapped in Paris, she watched the victorious German army parade down the Champs Elysees. Later imprisoned by the Germans, she was one of the first British women to escape from internment in Nazi-occupied France.Her arrival at Waterloo Station, determinedly clutching a pineapple, was front-page news.
… The journey to the prison camp at Besancon lasted for two days. Conditions onboard the trains were horrendous. There were no toilets or running water. One group of Irish nuns were so desperate for water that they “refreshed” themselves with eau de cologne until a little old nun managed to spill the lot.
In November 1941 my mother escaped through the barbed wire with her friend Frida. They had no false papers, very little money and no contacts beyond a possibly sympathetic dentist. With the help of ordinary people who put their own lives at risk, they slowly and secretly headed southwards on a train to Marseille and near disaster: “As we disembarked at the station we could see a group of officials ahead carefully checking the passengers’ papers. The beginning of a long queue was forming. We joined it, not looking at each other, knowing that this was the end. There was no way our papers were going to fool this sort of official check.” (You’ll have to read the book to see how they got out of that one...)
• Foreign Minister Fabius to the (sleeping) delegates of the UN:
I was interviewed by the M6 evening news program regarding 
Larry Flynt (in view of the Hustler honcho's million-dollar reward for any information on Mitt Romney's taxes), between 13:17 and 15:15. (If you are wondering about "1945", it refers to 19:45, i.e., the 7:45 pm show.)
• Plantu: We Need Another Churchill!
"God is dead." - Nietzche.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 5, 2012
"Nietzche is dead." - God.
"Let's take a vote." - DNC
New: Bill Clinton: Please don't judge Obama by the standard he [Obama himself] set. ow.ly/dvdtZ
— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 6, 2012
If you believe the French weekly Le Point, Thomas Hollande, the 27-year-old lawyerreport Steven Erlanger and Maïa de la Baume from Paris.and son of President François Hollande and his former partner, Ségolène Royal, blasted his father’s current partner in an interview for “putting private life in the public domain” by backing a political opponent of his mother
If you believe Thomas Hollande, on the other hand, there was no such interview, just a conversation with a young woman who twisted his words.
… According to Le Point, Thomas Hollande said his fatherwas “stupefied” by a Twitter posting from Valérie Trierweiler, his partner, publicly supporting Ms. Royal’s opponent in a legislative race. Ms. Trierweiler was said to have been angered when the president issued a public statement of support for Ms. Royal. Ms. Trierweiler’s action, highly criticized at the time, was seen as damaging to the elder Mr. Hollande’s effort to be a “normal president,” without the emotional swings and personal complications of his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Ms. Royal lost her race, but it was doubtful whether she could have beaten her popular local opponent in any case.
I was interviewed for 20 minutes by the M6 evening news program regarding the US presidential election (11:18-13:22), but I only appear for a dozen seconds. (If you are wondering about "1945", it refers to 19:45, i.e., the 7:45 pm show.)
A showdown over sharia is coming in Belgium because the high Muslim birth rate is changing the political landscapewrites CBN (shookhran to Fausta) in its 5- to 6-minute video report
The most common baby name in Brussels for four years running has been Mohammed … Muslims are still a minority in Belgium but in the capital of Brussels they are already the largest religious group — one quarter of the city's population — and are expected to be the majority less than 20 years
Serguei's cartoon is emblematic of the contrast in the treatment given the idolized Barack Obama and that given the caricatured Mitt Romney.
By contrast with their stereotypical treatment of Mitt Romney, the French media's approach to Barack Obama is stellar, as proven in the Le Monde article of the Democrat convention's openining, replete with the expressions "the Obama magic", "guaranteed success", "Michelle Obama's 'home run' ", "her husband's values and convictions", and said Obama values being the same "as very numerous Americans" — not to mention a batch of smiling photos in comparison with what what Radegunda calls "the most angry-looking pic they could find" of Mitt.
Le "home run" de Michelle Obama devant la convention démocrate
La première dame des États-Unis a fait l'éloge d'un président qui, a-t-elle dit, partage les valeurs de très nombreux Américains : travail, éducation, honnêteté, intégrité. Succès garanti.
