Pardon moi!
"3 die, 14 hurt in French explosion" Associated Press, April 29, 2013
REIMS, France — A possible gas explosion ripped off the side of a five-story residential building in France’s champagne country on Sunday, killing at least three people and injuring 14 others, officials said.
More than 100 rescue workers, firefighters, search dogs, and bomb and gas experts were deployed to the gutted building in a subsidized housing complex in the city of Reims, east of Paris, officials said.
Michel Bernard, the top government official in Reims, said crews searching for survivors turned up the body of a woman under the rubble Sunday afternoon, raising the death toll to three. He said it was unlikely that the toll would rise any higher.
One person was hospitalized with serious, but not life-threatening injuries, and another 13 people had minor injuries, officials said. Authorities used backhoes to help clear away the rubble.
Bernard said the building dated to the 1960s. About 10 of the 40 or so apartments were affected on the end of the rectangular building, he said.
‘‘We don’t know the cause of the explosion. It was probably due to gas,’’ Adeline Hazan, the mayor, said at the scene.
An official investigation was under way to determine the cause, she said. Authorities say the three people known to have died were adults.
Witnesses described a powerful blast.
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Crumbling infrastructure while the parade marches on.
A louder pfft that made more of a fuss:
"French First Lady: My tweet was a ‘mistake’" by Jamey Keaten | Associated Press, October 04, 2012
PARIS — France’s first lady said in an interview published Wednesday that she regrets posting on Twitter a comment that many French read as a not-so-veiled dig against the mother of President Francois Hollande’s four children.
About four months after causing the stir dubbed ‘‘Tweetgate,” Valerie Trierweiler told regional newspaper Ouest-France that her comment on Twitter was a ‘‘mistake’’ and she’s learned from it.
During France’s legislative elections in June, Trierweiler sent tongues wagging by tweeting words of encouragement to a dissident Socialist running against Segolene Royal — Hollande’s former partner. Royal was vying to represent a region in western France, and ended up losing.
Trierweiler, a journalist who once had her own cable TV show, admitted she had been clumsy, and had not yet realized that after Hollande took office in May she was ‘‘no more just a simple citizen.’’
‘‘It won’t happen again,’’ she was quoted as saying of the tweet.
Trierweiler took the comment off her Twitter account weeks ago, but the fallout lives on: A leading satirical TV show continues to parody the alleged rivalry between Trierweiler and Royal, with Hollande depicted as uncomfortable — and essentially powerless to stop it — in the middle.
Do they fart in public, too?
A new poll released Wednesday suggests that most French do not have a positive opinion of Trierweiler. Hollande’s popularity, meanwhile, has been sliding in recent months — although that is probably because of a variety of factors including a sluggish French economy and high unemployment.
And the war occupations of Mali and Afghanistan in the age of austerity.
Asked whether her fellow journalists had been unfair over the tweet, Trierweiler told Ouest-France: ‘‘The handling [of it] especially seemed out of proportion to me.’’
Yeah, but that's the bu$ine$$ of media today: agenda-pushing distractions.
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Pfft! Sorry about the faux paus.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: France's Femme Fatales
And then there are other things that receive more limited focus:
"French rabbi in scandal takes leave" April 12, 2013
PARIS — France’s top rabbi announced Thursday he is taking leave from his post, hoping to end a scandal that has unsettled the Jewish community after he borrowed other people’s work and lied about his educational pedigree.
The Central Consistory of France accepted Rabbi Gilles Bernheim’s request for time away at an urgent meeting. Bernheim, 60, apologized, saying he could not do his job with the necessary “serenity.”
“He hopes that the serious events he is blamed for and which mark him don’t obscure all the actions carried out in the name of his various rabbinical functions,” the statement said. “He prays to be heard in his request for forgiveness.”
Richard Prasquier, the head of France’s largest umbrella group of Jewish organizations, CRIF, said by phone that two rabbis will temporarily fill the post of Grand Rabbi of France.
Bernheim faced accusations by a French academic that parts of his 2011 book “Forty Jewish Meditations” were lifted from others.
Bernheim had also claimed to have received an “aggregation” — or high-level certification — in philosophy. On Radio Shalom, he acknowledged he did not have one.
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Sacre bleu!
Also see: 18th-century French chateau razed ‘by mistake’
Ooops.
