Is that what the French voted for?
"Macron tells French Parliament to prepare for change" by Adam Nossiter New York Times July 03, 2017
PARIS — Declaring that citizens had an “overwhelming thirst for renewal,” President Emmanuel Macron urged France’s legislators Monday to live up to the “gravity of the circumstances.”
The new president cast himself both as the agent of change France wanted and as his country’s rampart against a newly uncertain world order. He warned against fear and cynicism wrought by poverty, terrorism, new forms of labor, and ecological change.
There sphere with be northwest Africa.
Macron has said little since his election on May 7, cultivating something of an air of mystery about his exact intentions. He broke that semisilence on Monday in a speech lasting well over an hour to a rare joint session of the French Parliament at Versailles.
He proposed shrinking by a third the body that was listening to him, France’s Parliament of over 900 members. Then, he told the lawmakers that they had to legislate less.
He really is turning into a dictator!
“Let’s try to put an end to the proliferation of legislation,” he said — which was not consistent with the rapidly changing economy and society that confronts France.
Macron also vowed to lift a state of emergency that has been in place since 2015, but said he would harden permanent security measures to fight Islamic extremism and other threats. He said his government ‘‘will work to prevent any new attack, and we will work to fight [the assailants] without pity, without regrets, without weakness.’’
That's the inspiration for my title right there.
At the same time, he insisted on the need to ‘‘guarantee full respect for individual liberties’’ amid concerns that new measures would allow police too many powers.
In a separate development Monday, French authorities said a man is facing preliminary terrorism charges for plotting a possible attack on Macron or minority groups, the Associated Press reported.
Agnes Thibault-Lecuivre, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor’s office, said the 23-year-old suspect’s plans were vague and not yet finalized, and that he appeared to be acting alone. She said the man, who expressed nationalist views, was arrested in the Argenteuil suburb Thursday, and told police of a plan to attack Macron on Bastille Day on July 14.
(Blog editor just shakes head at the endless mind f***)
In his speech Monday, Macron gave a lofty outline of his five-year term.
He mostly reverted to campaign mode: a high-flown discourse centered largely on the ordinary citizen’s almost mystical relationship to political power. That relationship had been damaged, he suggested.
How Trumpian.
Along the way he ranged widely, with morale-boosting praise for France’s cultural heritage, a plea for “humane and just” treatment of refugees, demands for a less technocratic European Union, and a dig at the United States under President Trump when he warned against those “democracies, longtime allies, now menacing the established order.”
I thought Macron was a candidate of change?
Macron made the point that French citizens are demanding change after years of stagnation, change was needed and he was the man to bring it about.
“It’s about nothing less than reweaving, between French citizens and the republic, the relationship that has dissolved under the mechanical exercise of power,” Macron said.
“A contractual relationship,” he added. “From efficiency, representativity, and responsibility, I want the emergence of a contractual republic.”
Who is advising him, Gingrich?
“Our democracy can only be nourished in action, and in our ability to change what is everyday, and real,” he said. “It isn’t five years of adjustments and half-measures that we have in front of us,” Macron said. The French were “expecting a profound transformation.”
Macron’s call for less legislation was consistent with the disdain Macron has shown from the beginning for the world of conventional French politics.
He stunned the traditional parties on the right and the left, and he is now buoyed by the election last month of a big majority from his own political movement.
“The French people have shown their impatience with a political world made up of sterile quarrels and hollow ambitions in which we have lived up until now,” he said Monday.
Polls show the French are now more optimistic than they have been in some years. Macron called for France to become “the center of a new humanist project for the world,” telling citizens to beware “the cynicism that lies dormant in all of us.”
That is if you believe NYT polls, and I would have thought the 2016 U.S. presidential election would have learned you.
--more--"
Now for some nourishment:
"French dairy company Danone will sell Stonyfield, based in Londonderry, N.H., for $875 million to the French company Lactalis, the largest dairy products group in the world. Stonyfield was put up for sale in March after Danone’s $10 billion purchase of WhiteWave, the maker of Horizon Organic milk and Silk soy milk. The deal raised red flags for the US Justice Department, which worried about a monopoly in the organic milk market. Danone was forced to sell the company or face antitrust action. Stonyfield has played a key role in fueling Americans’ appetite for yogurt, and after three decades, it has become the top-selling organic yogurt in the country."
I thought they were selling to China, and it must mean war.
"Europeans vow more help to stem Libya-Italy migrant flow" Associated Press July 04, 2017
PARIS — France, Germany, and the European Union pledged more money Monday for Libya’s coast guard and more support for Italy to cope with a surge of migrant arrivals from Africa.
So Macron, who wants to roll back the social services sector while escalating the French presence in Africa, is also going to shell out for the refugees of those conflicts. Wow. And the French are optimistic? I'm surprised they are not furious.
The UN refugee agency, meanwhile, reported that more and more people lured to Libya with the hope of finding jobs there end up trying to reach Europe.
The intensified European effort comes after the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, on Saturday decried an ‘‘unfolding tragedy’’ in Italy over the weekend with 12,600 migrants and refugees pouring onto its shores.
Grandi noted that more than 2,000 people have lost their lives on the Libya-to-Italy sea route this year. Italy’s Interior Ministry said the number of migrant arrivals so far this year is nearly 20 percent higher than at the same time in 2016.
Officials are bracing for prospects of a greater flow of migrants as the Mediterranean weather warms, making often-perilous maritime journeys more attractive.....
--more--"
First time I've seen anything about Libya since I don't know when.
As for the Germans:
"Bus carrying seniors crashes on German highway, killing 18" Associated Press July 04, 2017
BERLIN — A bus carrying German seniors on holiday slammed into the back of a truck that had slowed for a traffic jam and burst into flames Monday, killing 18 people on a major highway in Bavaria, authorities said.
More than two dozen people who were hurt escaped the bus before it became fully engulfed in fire, police said. By the time the blaze was put out, only the vehicle’s charred, twisted frame remained.
The bus from the eastern state of Saxony rear-ended the trailer-truck on the A9 near Muenchberg, north of Nuremberg and not far from the Czech border. Of the 30 people injured, at least two were reported in life-threatening condition, authorities said.
‘‘After we got there, nobody else got off the bus,’’ Muenchberg firefighter Andreas Hentschel told the dpa news agency.
The accident occurred at around 7 a.m., when there was no rain and visibility was good. The investigation, which included prosecutors, was looking into what type of cargo the truck was hauling, police said.
When firefighters first arrived, the fire was so hot that they could not get anywhere close to the burning bus to rescue those stuck inside, Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt told reporters at the crash site.
‘‘All they could do was extinguish the fire,’’ he said. The heat was so intense that it destroyed the entire bus and everything inside except for the steel frame....
--more--"
