Or Mardi, si vous s'il vous plaît.
Related: Slow Saturday Special: French Briefs
Wasn't that long ago.
"Paris takes drastic measures to fight toxic smog" Associated Press March 18, 2014
PARIS — Paris imposed drastic measures Monday to combat its worst air pollution in years, banning around half of the city’s cars and trucks from its streets in an attempt to reduce the toxic smog that’s shrouded the City of Light for more than a week.
Coincided(?) with the arrival of John Kerry!
Cars with even-numbered license plates were prohibited from driving in Paris and its suburbs. Around 700 police manned 179 control points around the region, handing out tickets to offenders. Taxis and commercial vehicles weren’t included in the ban.
Police ticketed at least 4,000 people, and 27 drivers had their cars impounded.
France has seen exceptionally warm, dry weather this month with little wind, which has trapped car pollution and fumes from seasonal farming activity in the air. The country’s unusually high number of diesel vehicles is also contributing to the smog.
Environment Minister Philippe Martin said lower traffic and favorable weather patterns had an impact on pollution Monday. He said the alternate-plates measure would be lifted Tuesday. It was the first time since 1997 that the measure was used.
All public transport has been free for four straight days to help deal with the pollution — but that too is set to end Tuesday.
Paris’s antipollution efforts trail those of some other cities. Athens has had a similar alternate driving ban in place for many years that has reduced pollution and traffic.
Berlin has strict rules on what kind of cars can enter the city, and London makes drivers pay a ‘‘congestion charge’’ to drive in the center of town.
How long before that comes to AmeriKan cities?
--more--"
"Paris poised to elect first woman mayor" | Associated Press March 18, 2014
PARIS — Two women are vying to be the new face of Paris, the first time in this city’s long history that the mayor won’t be a monsieur.
The discreet, hard-working Socialist Anne Hidalgo is the favorite to win municipal elections that start Sunday, which would keep this leading tourist destination in leftist hands despite the deep unpopularity of President Francois Hollande’s Socialist national government.
‘‘A woman at the head of one of the most important cities of the world . . . will have of course a very, very important influence,’’ Hidalgo said.
It will also send an important message to leaders and voters in a country where women only got the vote at the end of World War II and where sexist attitudes persist toward women in power....
As long as they are not wearing a veil.
In recent polls, Hidalgo, 54, leads center-right opponent Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a 40-year-old rising star of former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s party.
The race for Paris mayor — one of the most coveted jobs in French politics — is one of several thousand underway across the country. Municipal elections will be held in two rounds, March 23 and 30.
Both candidates in the capital pledge to improve security and transportation and to build more public housing in one of the most expensive cities of the world.
Kosciusko-Morizet, a former environment minister during Sarkozy’s presidency, was at first considered to have a real chance to win Paris. But her campaign has been compromised by dissent in her party.
--more--"
I'm as interested in that campaign as I am our own over here, and that is too say not much at all.
Same here:
"Ex-Liberia president’s daughter appointed mayor" | Associated Press March 18, 2014
MONROVIA, Liberia — More than 30 years after Liberia’s President William Tolbert was slain in a bloody coup, his daughter has been sworn in as the mayor of Bentol, the family’s base and a town that has played an outsized role in the West African nation’s political history....
While Christine Tolbert Norman’s family ties evoke memories of a more stable period — before autocratic rule in the 1980s and then 14 years of civil conflict that killed more than 250,000 people — some said her appointment provided further evidence of Liberia’s continued dependence on the same families who have dominated the country’s politics for decades.
In other words, not much change.
Norman worked for her father as an assistant education minister. She still speaks admiringly of his efforts to develop the country and to bridge the divide between Americo-Liberians, who descended from freed American slaves, and the country’s indigenous population. Those efforts were cut short, however, on April 12, 1980, when a 28-year-old military officer, Samuel Doe, staged a coup, killing Tolbert in the executive mansion.
Related: CIA Agents Executed 1980 Coup
Somehow I knew they were involved.
Norman spent eight months under house arrest before fleeing to the United States and then moving to Ivory Coast, where she lived for 18 years.
Now I have to exhume that coup, too. Looks like the U.S. was playing both sides.
She returned not long before Ellen Johnson Sirleaf took office in 2006 as the first elected postwar president.
--more--"
