They are to be tried on various immorality charges that centre around sex parties at the Carlton Hotel in Lille, a most unlikely city setting for a big sex scandal. DSK has always said that the sex orgies that he took part in there were always consensual, among friends, but the prosecution case rests on the allegation that these parties were in fact part of a gigantic prostitution ring. The evidence that’s going to be presented should keep everyone suitably intrigued and diverted for quite a while.
Another big trial has already begun, of 10 people accused of taking financial advantage of 92 year old Liliane de Bettencourt, the L’ Oréal heiress. Among those on trial are a politician who was once close to Sarkozy, the former President. Already there has been drama; a former nurse of the heiress tried to commit suicide the other day just before the start of the trial.
These two trials will provide some much needed relief from the continuing awful headlines. One of the latest tragedies was the crash of the Greek F- 16D jet at a military base in south-eastern Spain at the start of this week, which killed the two Greek pilots as well as eight French military personnel on the ground. And as if that wasn’t enough, ISIS has now called on its supporters to stage more attacks in France similar to the Charlie Hebdo attacks just three weeks ago.
The funeral took place the other day of the forgotten victim of that attack. Frédéric Boisseau was a 42 year old maintenance man working for the Sodexo company. He had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was working on maintenance, together with his team, in the building that housed Charlie Hebdo, and despite the protestations of his total innocence by his colleagues, the two gunmen shot him. He left a partner and two sons; at his funeral, he was awarded the Legion d’ Honneur. President Hollande and PM Manuel Valls have also met the families of the victims of those recent attacks in the Paris area; the meeting took place in the Elysée Palace.
Even though Hollande’ s handling of the terrorism crisis has been adroit and exemplary, a recent poll shows that 72 per cent of French voters would still prefer Manuel Valls as president rather than Hollande. The current crisis has had the effect of diverting public attention away from the underlying problems with the French economy. The latest unemployment figures, for December, show an all- time record number of people out of work, 3, 496, 000 while the French economy is struggling along with almost non- existent growth.
The government is pressing ahead with many measures that it hopes will make it easier to do business in France, such as more Sunday trading for retailers. Last year saw a steep rise in road fatalities, so it has just brought in a raft of new measures to discourage motorists from drinking before they drive or using mobile phones while on the road.
The government has also announced that all motorway tolls, across the country, are going to be frozen.
On another note of light relief, a court ruled that Nutella and Fraise ( strawberry) aren’t suitable female names. However, Ella is OK!
An interesting property transaction came up in Toulon. A hardline Catholic group bought premises next to a church in the city; they had been used as a gay bar, but this group now wants to use the place for religious meetings. One of the leaders of the gay community in Toulon joked that a lot of exorcism will be needed.
Also in the news is Jean- Marie Le Pen, the founder of the Front National. He and his wife, Jany Pachos, live in some splendour at Rueil- Malmaison near Paris. They were having some work done on a chimney at their house, when the chimney caught fire, doing a lot of damage. The couple managed to escape the flames, but not before Jean-Marie Le Pen fell and gave himself a black eye, although he didn’t need hospital treatment. Someone else in France was also very lucky, a man living in north-east France who had bought a euro millions lottery ticket. He tucked it away in his wallet and forgot all about it, but three weeks before the deadline, checked his numbers and found he had won €73 million!
Not so lucky was a 64 year old woman who was taking her dog for a walk on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice last Saturday evening. When she was walking across a pedestrian crossing, she was struck and killed by one of two cars that were full of boy racers driving very fast and erratically along the promenade. Fortunately, they were all arrested soon afterwards and it turned out that none of them had ID or driver’s licences with them.
There was nearly a catastrophe with a TGV train near Cannes the other day. It struck a wild boar that had wandered onto the line, but luckily the train was only doing 80 kpm, escaped damage and was able to continue soon afterwards.
Meanwhile, commuters on the south- east coast are up in arms about the poor quality train services on the line that connects Grasse to Cannes and from Cannes goes to Antibes, Nice, Monaco, Menton and Ventimiglia. About 50,000 commuters use this route daily. But SNCF says they’ ll have to wait until work is completing on the Monaco tunnel in April before it can turn its attention to the rest of the line.
Some interesting news about property prices in this part of France; last year, there was scarcely any upward movement and the latest forecasts say that the next 12 months aren’t going to be any better.
But at least along the coast of the Var, temperatures have been quite warm, up to around 16 degrees C, although inland, there is still plenty of snow. And for a little theatrical entertainment in Antibes, on February 6 and 7, Irish actor Phelim Drew is going to perform George Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris at La Timonerie in Antibes. The admission price of €20 includes wine and canapés in the interval and the proceeds are going to help a schools’ project in Cambodia.
Most of the international news over the past few days has centred on the Greek elections, which brought Syriza to power. Its win seemed like a moment of national liberation for Greece over the dead heads of the German government, the European Central Bank and the IMF, who imposed such savage and ridiculous penalties on Greece without a thought for their social consequences. The first act by the new Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, after being sworn in, was to lay a wreath at the monument in Athens to the 200 Greek communists killed by the Nazis in 1944. Tsipras wants the Germans to pay war reparations of €200 billion; if he managed to get that, the Greek debt problem should be solved. Syriza is in coalition with the right wing Independent Greeks party, Anel, and its leader, Panos Kammenos, who is the new Greek defence minister, says that Greece is an occupied land under the austerity dictatorship of the Fourth Reich. He also says: “ We will never drop to our knees to beg from Angela Merkel” . The way things are going, it looks as if there’s going to be a head- on confrontation between Greece and its EU creditors over the next few weeks: interesting times lie ahead!
In France, the Syriza win was welcomed both by Marine Le Pen of the Front National and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the far left leader, who believes that the Greek election result is going to have a domino, anti-austerity effect right across Europe.
Last Sunday morning, the day of the Greek general election, that well- known Greek singer Demis Roussos died in an Athens hospital aged 68. He was so overweight that he couldn’t even get up from his chair in his final days and by the sound of it, was suffering from a bad case of diabetes. But many of his songs, especially from the 1970s, are memorable and inculcate happy memories of a fascinating country that has had had more than its fair share of bad history.
Back here in Ireland, newspapers have reported, with some glee, about the insults that were hurled by anti- water charge protesters when the President, Michael D. Higgins, attended a function at a school in north Dublin last Friday. All the protests were videod and put up on You Tube and one of the protests hurled at the diminutive president, who is little more than 1. 5 metres tall, was that he was a “midget parasite”. Much adverse comment is being generated in Ireland at the takeover bid for Aer Lingus being offered by IAG, the parent company of British Airways and Iberia. The thought of Aer Lingus passing into foreign control, especially British, has generated a phenomenal amount of negative comments here in Ireland.
At the same time, the ratings for the Irish health service continue to plunge. Last year, it was ranked 14th best in Europe; now it’ s down to 22nd and in some respects isn’t any better than the health service in Romania. It’s going to become a key issue in the forthcoming Irish general election, just as the NHS will be in the upcoming UK general election. It’s fascinating reading some of the predictions being made for that, like the Labour Party being virtually wiped out in Scotland and the Lib Dems getting just one MP.
The Chinese were right when they urged people to live in interesting times; the only snag is that 2015 is shaping up to be so unpredictable and so full of upheaval that predicting what’ s likely to happen has become an utterly impossible task.