To each his own.
The first is a real phoque job:
"Convicted trader resumes trek toward prison" by Angela Charlton | Associated Press May 19, 2014
PARIS —A Frenchman convicted of one of history’s biggest trading frauds returned home to serve prison time after a legal saga that captured the national imagination, a pilgrimage to the pope, and a plea for presidential clemency.
Former Societe Generale trader Jerome Kerviel was shown in footage broadcast on French television crossing the border from Italy to France by foot late Sunday night.
A police official in the French border town of Menton said Kerviel was in custody in a local precinct just after a midnight deadline to begin serving his sentence. It was not immediately clear when or where he would be taken to prison.
Kerviel cost Societe Generale $6.82 billion in losses in 2008, rocking the banking world just before the financial market meltdown.
He argued that the bank had quietly welcomed his unauthorized trades when it made money, but turned against him when his trades turned sour.
French judges found Kerviel guilty. He was sentenced to three years in prison in a 2010 verdict that was upheld recently by France’s highest court.
But he gained nationwide supporters and turned himself into a crusader against a corrupt financial world.
‘‘The fight will continue regardless of what happens,’’ he told journalists while walking toward the border Sunday night.
Before the deadline to begin serving his sentence, Kerviel traveled to Italy to meet the pope and on Saturday appealed to French President Francois Hollande to intervene.
Hollande’s office said it would consider a specific request for mercy ‘‘according to the usual procedure.’’
But Finance Minister Michel Sapin described Kerviel as a criminal.
‘‘The crook is caught, the crook is convicted, the crook should of course serve his sentence,’’ Sapin said Sunday on LCI television.
An internal report by Societe Generale found that managers failed to follow up on 74 different alarms about Kerviel’s activities. A few executives resigned, and Kerviel’s superiors were questioned, but none faced charges.
Too big to jail in France.
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Related: Kerviel's Confession
I confess I'm lacking enthusiasm for the blogging these days.
"French school carries out DNA dragnet in rape case | Associated Press April 15, 2014
PARIS — French investigators began taking DNA samples Monday from 527 male students and staff at a high school — including boys as young as 14 — as they searched for the assailant who allegedly raped a teenage girl on the closed campus.
Testing began Monday at Fenelon-Notre Dame high school in western France. All those who received summonses last week were warned that any refusal could land them in police custody, and no one rejected the sweeping request to test the high school’s male population.
The testing of students, faculty, and staff at the school is expected to last through Wednesday, with 40 DNA swabs recovered inside two large study halls. Prosecutor Isabelle Pagenelle said investigators had exhausted all other leads in the alleged Sept. 30 rape of the girl in a dark bathroom at the school.
‘‘The choice is simple for me,’’ she said. ‘‘Either I file it away and wait for a match in what could be several years, or I go looking for the match myself.’’
While there have been other situations in which DNA samples have been taken en masse, the case is complicated for France, where acceptance is widespread for DNA testing and a national database maintains profiles of people detained for even minor crimes. But children’s civil liberties are considered sacred, especially within schools.
France has stringent privacy protections. Questions of criminality are a different matter — the government’s DNA database has expanded radically since it was first created in 1998 and now encompasses 2 million profiles, or about 3 percent of the population.
Summonses went out last week to 475 teenage students, 31 teachers, and 21 others — either staff or males who were on campus at the time. Pagenelle’s office, which required parental permission for minors, promised to discard DNA results from people who were eliminated as suspects.
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Time to try and screw Syria:
"Suspect arrested in killings at Jewish museum in Belgium" by John-Thor Dahlburg | Associated Press June 02, 2014
PARIS — A suspected French jihadist who spent time in Syria is in custody over the shooting deaths of three people at a Jewish museum in Belgium, prosecutors said Sunday, raising fears that European radicals will parlay their experiences in Syria into terrorism back home.
When Mehdi Nemmouche was arrested in southern France on Friday, he was in possession of firearms, a large quantity of ammunition, and a video claiming responsibility for the May 24 attack, a Belgian prosecutor said.
Sigh!
In a one-minute rampage, a gunman opened fire at the Brussels museum. In addition to the fatalities, another person was seriously wounded.
Authorities raised terrorism alert levels as they searched for the attacker. But it was ultimately a customs inspection in the French port city of Marseille that turned up Nemmouche as he disembarked from a bus that had arrived from Amsterdam, Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said.
The suspect had a revolver and a retractable automatic weapon like those used in the Brussels attack; ballistics analyses were underway to determine if they were used in the attack, Molins said.
Nemmouche, 29, from northern France, had a criminal record, with seven convictions for crimes such as attempted robbery but nothing related to terrorism, Molins said.
He said the suspect became radicalized in prison and left for Syria three weeks after his last prison stay in late 2012, going to Syria via Brussels, London, and Istanbul. He said the suspect spent about a year in Syria, though it is unclear why he went and what he did there.
That there looks like he was an agent for French intelligence.
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"Alleged jihadists arrested in France" | Associated Press June 03, 2014
PARIS — Four people were arrested Monday in a sweep against French jihadist recruiters, the country’s top security official said a day after authorities announced the detention of a French suspect in the deadly shooting at a Jewish museum.
The arrests come as investigators question a suspected French jihadist who had spent time in Syria. Mehdi Nemmouche was arrested Friday in connection with the death of three people at the Belgian museum. He was carrying firearms, ammunition, and a video claiming responsibility for the May 24 attack, officials said.
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve of France said Nemmouche was arrested during a customs check.
Western governments are increasingly alarmed about fighters returning from Syria radicalized and with newfound knowledge and weapons.
They create them by sending them there, and this is all about setting up blame for the next false flag attack, which must be imminent judging by the propaganda in my paper.
The numbers shift constantly — people cross the border freely from Turkey and, with European passports, return home just as easily. Their journey to Syria itself is getting simpler, as networks of recruiters take care of travel arrangements and even training once potential fighters cross into the civil war-torn country.
The arrests Monday, which prosecutors said were not linked to the Jewish museum shootings, targeted a jihadi network that Cazeneuve said operated in the Paris region and the south of France.
‘‘We will not give terrorists a chance,’’ Cazeneuve told Europe 1 radio.
Between 1,000 and 1,500 Europeans may be currently fighting in Syria against President Bashar Assad, according to Charles Lister, an analyst with Brookings Doha Center.
It is not known whether the attack on the Jewish museum was ordered from within Syria or was an individual act.
OMG! Trying to implicate Syrian with this hoax! I know it's not a very sexy thing to say, but it is true nonetheless.
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Related: Monday Morning Hangover
Didn't get back up until Saturday, and it was slowly:
"Nationalists gain seats in EU: European disunion | May 31, 2014
The European Union is facing unprecedented challenges, starting with its structural inability to respond forcefully to serious foreign-policy crises like the one in Ukraine. There are also lingering tensions among those EU members who also are part of the eurozone, and fundamental disagreements about economic austerity programs across the continent. On Monday, European voters had a chance to address those issues — and opted for blunt expressions of anger rather than any particular policy fix. This seems more likely to perpetuate the union’s identity crisis than to resolve it.
In country after country, nationalist skeptics of the union on both
left and right outperformed expectations. Still, the gains were most
striking on the right, propelled in part by fears of immigration and
anger over a deeply uneven economic recovery. In Britain, the UK
Independence Party won 27 percent of the vote and 24 seats in the body. (The Conservatives, who are currently in power in London, came in third). In France and Denmark,
right-wing parties topped the ticket as well. Most worryingly, several
neo-fascist groups that have been accused of anti-immigrant violence and
anti-Semitism, such as the Golden Dawn in Greece and Jobbik in Hungary, won seats.
The fear of the right shows you the controlled opposition character of the "left."
Even though Monday’s vote is unlikely to change policies right away,
it should still be seen as a wake-up call to European governments.
Politicians across the continent should move to address the
disproportionate impact of economic austerity programs, in particular,
before far-right parties get the chance to leverage their success in the
European Parliament into positions of actual power in national
governments.
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Globalists fear nationalists.
"European border agency reports surge in illegal migration" | New York Times May 31, 2014
LONDON — The number of migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean to enter Europe illegally this year is already close to the total for all of 2013 and is likely to rise as summer weather brings calmer seas, officials from the European Union’s border agency reported Friday.
The assessment fed into a debate on immigration that has led to a surge among right-wing populist parties in Britain, France, and elsewhere.
Frontex, a Warsaw-based agency, said in an annual report earlier this month that the number of asylum seekers arriving, mainly in Italy, from North Africa in 2013 was 40,000. Ewa Moncure, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in a telephone interview Friday that unofficial figures for 2014 indicated that 37,000 migrants had been detected crossing from Libya and Egypt, while reports in the Italian media suggested that the figure for the same period was closer to 40,000.
“Looking ahead, everything points to a heightened likelihood of large numbers of illegal border-crossings into the EU and an increased number of migrants in need of assistance from search and rescue operations but also in terms of provision of international protection,” the Frontex report said.
Overall in 2013, the number of people detected trying to enter the 28-nation European Union illegally had risen to 107,000 in 2013 from 75,000 in 2012, the report said. Syrians, Afghans, and Eritreans were “the most commonly detected nationalities,” it added. It was not clear how many migrants had escaped detection.
With the civil war in their home country now in its fourth year, Syrians accounted for almost a quarter of all arrivals in 2013, “and at 25,500 was almost three times the 2012 figure,” the report said. More than two-thirds of Syrian fugitives wound up seeking asylum in Sweden, Germany, or Bulgaria.
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You can thank the U.S.-sponsored overthrow attempts and upheavals for it all.
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
"EU urges France, Italy to accelerate economic reforms" by James Kanter | New York Times June 03, 2014
BRUSSELS — Top European Union officials on Monday warned France and Italy to do more to reform their economies to prevent a rerun of problems that fueled the region’s debt crisis and nearly destroyed the euro currency union.
The concern is that some large countries in the euro area are not moving fast enough to overhaul their economies and prune budget deficits. Officials in Brussels had already granted France extra time to meet the targets that all member countries have agreed to.
As part of an annual review, Olli Rehn, the EU’s commissioner for economic affairs, reserved his toughest warnings for France and Italy, the second- and third-largest countries in the euro bloc, after Germany.
“In France, the deterioration of the trade balance and competitiveness over the whole of the last decade calls for sustained political action,” Rehn said. The government needs to “go into greater detail about the measures which it intends to take to achieve” its previously agreed goal of reducing its deficit to 3 percent of gross domestic product by 2015.
Turning to Italy, Rehn warned that the government could still face the wrath of bond markets if it fails to lower its towering national debt.
I love a world run for and by bankers, don't you?
“Market confidence has been restored, and Italian bond yields are currently at a record low,” Rehn said. “But betting on continued benign financial market conditions may be risky. Market sentiment can change quite swiftly, as we know.”
The report covered 26 of the 28 EU member states, excluding Cyprus and Greece, which continue to receive rescue payments and are already under special, closer scrutiny.
The reviews come at a delicate moment for the leadership in Brussels. Officials are under pressure to reduce their intervention in member states’ national affairs, given the big gains that various anti-EU parties made in May’s elections to the European Parliament in a number countries — and in France, in particular.
José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, the executive arm of the union, sought to buck up governments that have been weakened by insurgent parties, saying at a news conference Monday that the “fundamental challenge for the EU now is political” to “keep up support for reform as the pressure of the crisis recedes.”
I didn't know they were laying roadside bombs and killing NATO troops, did you?
Yeah, I am sick of the war-promoting, whoreporate pre$$'s insults. How did you know?
Politicians, he said, must “summon the political will to see reform through, even if it is unpopular.”
Time to get out the guillotines.
But for the French members of the Socialist bloc at the European Parliament, Barroso’s approach was a sign Brussels was more out-of-touch than ever.
“Down deep, nothing has changed,” the lawmakers said in a statement, and “austerity and neo-liberalism remain the ideological pillars of an exhausted European Commission.”
And until that changes the people will be in the streets!
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Related: French bureaucracy plan met with anger
Also see: A New World Power
Phoque them!!!!
"France questions massive fine US wants for bank" AP June 04, 2014
PARIS — France’s foreign minister says a reported multibillion dollar fine that bank BNP Paribas is facing in the United States is unreasonable and could threaten a free trade agreement between Europe and the United States.
Good.
BNP Paribas, France’s largest bank, set aside $1.1 billion last year after the United States began investigating it for alleged sanctions violations, but this spring said the fines could be ‘‘far in excess.’’ Share prices slumped last week after The Wall Street Journal reported the fine could be $10 billion.
You have to remember, you have a bankrupt government grabbing for cash wherever they can get it.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told France 2 TV Tuesday: ‘‘The sanction has to be proportional and reasonable. These amounts are not reasonable.’’ He said the free trade deal ‘‘can only happen in a spirit of reciprocity.’’
Btw, NSA is still spying on you all.
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"Europe’s deflation threat may be growing" by Jack Ewing | New York Times May 27, 2014
SINTRA, Portugal — The European Central Bank was basically intended to do one thing: Keep inflation in a cage. But its mission has turned out to be a lot more complicated.
That was the challenge facing an elite group of policy makers and economists this week at a golf resort outside Lisbon to brainstorm about how the central bank can combat the eurozone’s continuing economic problems with only a limited arsenal and a dwindling supply of ammunition.
Since the central bank is the cause of the crisis how can they combat it?
The question has become more urgent in light of a growing recognition — acknowledged Monday in perhaps the frankest terms yet by Mario Draghi, the bank’s president — that the eurozone is at risk of sliding into deflation, a downward price spiral that could ultimately destroy corporate profits and businesses’ ability to hire.
I was told 5 years of recovery, and corporate profits are better than ever thanks to the record-setting stock market propped up by the Fed printing pre$$.
The deflation danger comes on top of a credit crisis, a persistent banking problem, and a citizenry angry at the slow pace of recovery....
All those trillions thrown into the banks and there is still a problem. No wonder Europeans are pi$$ed.
The conference, a first-time event modeled on a gathering organized annually in Jackson Hole, Wyo., by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, is partly an attempt to tap the collective wisdom of leading economists.
Who are always wrong (or worse, liars)!
The specter of deflation threatens to undermine the weak recovery in the eurozone. Although some crisis-plagued countries, like Spain, are growing again, unemployment remains at 11.8 percent in the eurozone. Many other countries, most notably Italy, are still in recession and have only begun the work of making their economies more competitive.
Despite its limitations, the central bank has the advantage of being the one eurozone institution able to move quickly.
Turn those printing pre$$es back on!
“We always look at central bankers and say, ‘Can you fix it?’ ” Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup organization of finance ministers, said during a panel discussion. “ ‘Put some cheap money out there.’ But when you look at the situation, there is no quick fix.”
Who is "we," because I sure as hell don't look to them to solve the problems and frauds that made them rich beyond belief!
Oh, right, I need to remember who this paper is being written for.
Speakers at the conference offered no immediate solutions. On the contrary, some fretted that additional powers already granted to the central bank are flawed. For example, they raised questions about its new role as a bank supervisor in the eurozone’s banking union, which gives it more tools to clean up the banking system.
The Globe obviou$ly is not because that is the end of the article.
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I'm sure the French recognize her.
