Confounding pollsters, pundits and politicians alike, public opinion in France has swung back behind a no vote to the new European constitution, say three surveys published on Wednesday. Less than two weeks before France’s May 29 referendum on the treaty, newspaper polls showed support for the no camp, trailing since the end of April, had bounced back to between 51% and 53%.
More than 1 000 historians, writers and intellectuals have signed a petition demanding the repeal of a new law requiring school history teachers in France to stress the ”positive aspects” of French colonialism. ”In retaining only the positive aspects of colonialism, this law imposes an official lie on massacres that at times went as far as genocide, on the slave trade, and on the racism that France has inherited,” says the petition.
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/ 25 November 2004
For a chap with a few pounds in his pockets and a furtive fondness for forbidden fruit, it’s damned hard to beat Cannes. For well over 150 years, the British upper crust have been coming here to sin in the sun — and, it seems, they still are. French police say they have no clear idea of why or how Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury, should have vanished so completely from the Cote d’Azur early this month.
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/ 10 November 2004
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has called the prophet Muhammad a ”lecherous tyrant” and the Qur’an ”in part a licence for oppression”. Hirsi Ali says she is ”very much afraid”, suspecting that her film, Submission, was the direct cause of the death Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh last week. Jon Henley reports.
The Constitutional Court has rejected a landmark challenge by a black woman against a white colleague’s appointment to the Cape Town municipality’s top health job. However, the court did not rule on the substance of Lilian Dudley’s application. It ordered her to first exhaust other legal avenues, such as the Labour Appeal Court. This raises the possibility that she may press on with her claim.
France’s hugely popular Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, was handed the job this week of spearheading an immensely unpopular programme of reforms as President Jacques Chirac made sweeping changes to his Cabinet after the centre-right’s humiliating defeat in regional elections.
France’s Interior Ministry confirmed last week that the police and security services were on full alert after a series of threats by an unknown group to blow up railway tracks countrywide unless it was paid a multimillion-pound ransom. To prove its threats were serious the group directed police on February 21 to a time bomb under a railway line.
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/ 27 February 2004
France’s winemakers held emergency talks with Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin this week to demand urgent government action amid warnings that the country’s most emblematic industry is plunging into crisis. French wine exports are rumoured to have plummeted by nearly 10% last year, while domestic sales fell by almost 5%.
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/ 27 February 2004
France has called for an ”immediate” international civilian force to restore order in Haiti and help stem the poverty-stricken Caribbean state’s slide into chaos. ”This force would be charged with assuring the restoration of public order and support actions in the field of the international community,” said Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.
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/ 14 November 2003
France’s mammoth Elf corruption case, probably the biggest political and corporate sleaze scandal to hit a Western democracy since World War II, drew to a close this week as three key former executives of the oil giant were jailed for up to five years.